John Leahy's blog

I’ve noticed something of late: I’ve been growing more intolerant to irrelevant advertising.

I remember years ago getting one of my favorite science magazines in the mail and eagerly diving into the brain candy inside.  The cards in the magazine offering subscriptions weren’t that big a deal – I’d just rip them out and continue with my reading.

Yet times have changed.  I can’t stand most marketing efforts.  When someone is watching TV nearby, I rarely can stand the shows themselves, let alone the advertising.  I’m beginning to hate Conde Nast with a passion, not because of Ars Technica, Reddit, and Wired – which I love – but their hopeless efforts to get me interested in GQ, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker.

Continue reading Growing Intolerance →

I love Apple’s products. Its hardware is beautifully designed and artfully crafted. Its software is some of the best designed in the industry. The products may not have all the bells and whistles of its competitors, but that is a result of aggressive pruning, not lack of development. Apple won’t release anything that isn’t outstanding.

For when you buy an Apple product, you’re not just buying the hardware or the software: You’re buying a fantastic user experience. You’re buying the parts and software that have been tested over and over again so that scrolling is smooth and a touch does exactly what you want. You’re buying a system where the software already installed on it is actually good. You’re buying something that just works.

So why, after switching multiple people over to Apple, don’t I own a Mac myself? And why won’t I ever likely own any of Apple’s products?

Continue reading Why I love Apple… from a safe distance →

Sorry for being MIA as of late. I think I need to trim down my ambitions a bit with this blog. If I’m going to make this a regular thing, perhaps I need to calm down on the length of these posts.

This past Friday night, I was up for a few hours in bed, unable to sleep, brainstorming about learning and technology.

I brainstormed about an implementation of using random noun generators and analogies to make questions that almost completely eliminate the chance of plagiarism. I brainstormed ways to show very impressive examples to challenge all students to rise to the top (similar to

I sat down in my room a few weeks ago, deciding that I needed to write something that wasn’t music in sonata form.  I got excited over the idea of writing a short story in sonata form – I could use an argument between two neighbors.  They would have the same trivial argument twice (for the repeated exposition), with a humorous development and a resolving argument at the end.  But as I worked out the details, things started to go awry, and I lost inspiration.  I put off finding that perfect argument for ‘later,’ but never came back.

I sat down in my room a week or so ago, and decided that I should write something else in sonata form.  I got excited over the idea of writing a sorting script in python – I could fashion a radix sort using cube roots.  I would sort through numbers starting with the greatest significant bits twice (for the repeated exposition), fixing rounding errors in the development and finishing the sort at the end.  But as I worked out the details, things started to go awry, and I lost inspiration.  I put off actually writing the code for ‘later,’ but never came back.

But even as I left the code, I kept coming back to the idea when I’d sit down and had a moment to think.  I’d get excited over these ideas, get excited with my projects, get excited with my writings, with interesting concepts and implementations.  I considered some details, but with distractions everything got pushed later, later, later…

So I sat down Monday night, and decided that I should write something in sonata form: I pondered what might be an interesting concept to write about.  I realized that my thoughts and actions on the topic was in sonata form: I had two significant false starts (being an repeated exposition), a development period of distracted brainstorming, and this completed text would bring the effort to an end.  This time, I started writing from the beginning, and from my excitement emerged the ‘A’ theme, my ideas became the ‘B’ theme and the concept became the closing.

And even though the abrupt end of each failed idea became the codetta, this coda is more than just the successful end.  The tension of having a fruitful idea has resolved back into the original key of excitement, not ideas.  And I am reminded once again that it’s actual work – not grand ideas – that is the most fun of all.