Hi Lovely Simplerista,

Yay for me. I passed the road test for my US driver license this Monday. Even though I've been driving for 22 years, the US doesn't honor any foreign driver licenses other than Canadian, so you have to take it all over again.

The inspector I had was, shall we say, not in a good mood. I get in the car, and I say "How's your day going". She just keeps staring down at her paper, then says, as dry as a desert that's tired of being spelled dessert: "You're about to take a test and you worry about how my day is going?"

No, as a matter of fact, I don't. I was just trying to be polite.

But NOW I AM actually worried about your day.

I spoke with my instructor (not the inspector) afterwards. Turns out she's been there for over 20 years. 19 years ago when my instructor's daughter took her road test, she had the same instructor. That time her response to roughly the same question had been: "It would be better if I weren't here." And then she failed her in 30 seconds.

Just think about that for a second. How sad is it that this person is in the same job and hating it for over 2 decades. And she's still there, ruining the day for both her clients and herself five days a week, year in and year out.

I believe there's a place for everyone. And if you're not happy, you haven't found it. And if you haven't, you better get out and find it. Don't stay in something you hate. Please.

But I know I'm preaching to the converted. You wonderful people are all pursuing your dreams and doing things you love, or at least things you think you'll love. Which is part of the journey. We can't know until we try, and it's a continual adjustment to find that sweet spot.

So good on you, and keep up the journey.

New features in Simplero

Kristine is down this week, so I'm taking care of the support. I always enjoy doing support now and again, because it lets me interact with all of you wonderful people, but also because it gives me inspiration and motivation for little things we can fix or improve. And so I've done a number of those, though I don't recall what they were right now.

Oh, one big-ish one was implementing a work-around for a bug in Safari that caused modal dialogs to sometimes not work after you'd navigated around a bit.

We're working on several projects, though, that should debut soonish.

Fun random stuff from around the interwebs

This music video for "I Won't Let you Down" by OK Go is absolutely incredimazing. All in one take, filmed with a drone, in Japan, with lots of Japanese schoolgirls in super tight choreography. Filmed at half speed, then sped up. Here's an article about how it was done. Humans are incredible in their ingenuity. Of course we can solve climate change and all the other challenges given this level of creativity and ingenuity. Just gotta get the structures in place.

I liked this quote by Malcolm Gladwell a lot: "The only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being corrected". To all you writers out there: Take it to heart.

These photos in the National Geographic Photo Contest are amazing. Check them out. 

That's it for this week.

Lots of love.

Talk next week!

-Calvin

PS. The second photo on the right is my home made breakfast taco: Fresh chorizo, scrambled eggs, heirloom cherry tomatoes, black bean salsa, red charred tomato salsa, fresh cilantro, and a pinch of salt. Good stuff, I'm telling ya.