Have you ever talked to your own brain?  “Good morning, brain.  How are you today?  Are your synapses firing off well?  Have you lost many cells today?”  My brain and I had a decent conversation this morning.  Of course our own self-talk is endless.  Some are better at ignoring it than others, and some are better at leveraging it than others.  In that big bell curve of brain utilization, I’m not sure where I’d be–average I guess.  Smack down the middle.

Not long after waking, I put pen to paper.  My goal is to do this daily, out of principle, out of desire to maintain sanity of some sort.  Years ago my friend Ron told me about The Artist’s Way, a Julia Cameron book which has guided many to more fruitful creative lives.  Cameron wrote about Morning Pages–it’s non-negotiable.  Get up and write three pages of long hand.  Not computer.  Your hand to the paper.  It’s a different kind of connection.  Back in ‘97 or so, I did this every day for a year.  I now do them sporadically–but when I do get in the groove, things become clearer.  I feel calmer, more creative, more accomplished.

Brainstorming is a factor in The Artist’s Way and so many other endeavors and disciplines, it’s a factor in all areas of our lives.  As I do with many things, I subconsciously grab onto the idea of brainstorming and how to improve it–it’s part of my fabric.  So how, where and why? 

How To Brainstorm — simple, isn’t it?  I believe it is.  The hardest part about is simply doing it.  We do brainstorm all the time, we just don’t stop and realize it.  It’s what your brain does.  OK, you can just let your brain wander all day and let its work entirely pass you by.  Or you can capture it.  Capturing it and using it can make all the difference.  It can be your starting a poem, a love letter, a song, a web site, an invention, or a business.

Start with a letter, a word, a number, and emotion, anything.  Start with or without a goal.  Nothing is wrong.  No judgment, no critic.  You are free, let your mind wander freely.  Circle a thought or concept, then branch out from it, move as quickly as you can.  Let the thoughts spread out, blossom, grow.  It is easy.  Create now, and quickly.  Review later.

Here are some quick & nasty ideas on where to brainstorm:

• Got a napkin?  Start drawing, writing, and so on.  Hopefully you’ve got a pen with you.  If you don’t, borrow one, steal one, beg for one.  If you don’t, well, you can prick your finger and write it in red…
• Notebooks, loose paper, calendars,
• WALLS.  My friend Lisa wrote song ideas on walls.  Shoot, I wrote on the wall when I was a kid.  Big trouble there. 
• Your Fridge.  Use Magnetic Poetry.  You can get some killer word collisions here.  It’s fun too.
• Mind Mapping software.  Freemind is a great one.  More on that later.
•  In the car – ok, be safe with this one.  There are laws against texting
• In any room, chatroom, anyplace–in a collaborative manner
• Your PDA, digital recorder – go ahead, shout it out, or use the notes feature or better yet, even FreeMind has some pda apps.  And who knows what the iPhone’s got.

So why brainstorm?  Because you can!  It can be the launching point toward somewhere marvelous.  It can take you from where you are.  Stagnant?  Brainstorm on how the hell to get moving.  Get down your dreams, wishes, shopping lists, gripes, anything.  Use it to ultimately get better orgainzed–you generate ideas, then later you order them.  Use it to better connect with yourself and others.  It’s a guaranteed move forward. 

We are so much in receive mode, or in such an automatic response mode.  How great it is to capture what our mind creates , shake things up and interact with it differently, and have a way to look at what you create through different eyes.  This is priceless.  It’s entertaining as well.

So let it bloom!

As part of my journey into the day, and after I wrote some longhand in a very handsome journal my wife bought me, I went to review one of my FreeMind maps.  It’s on songwriting.  The map is growing rapidly.  Within that map, you can move around ideas, up or down in the structure.  I moved something around having to do with audience, and soon enough, the map got so large it was next to impossible to navigate. 

Frustration.  Ever get that?  FreeMind Freaking, in abundance, in my face.  I hit help, I tried moving round, reviewing documentation, going online, calling a medium, anything and everything–even looking at exporting and reimporting.  I didn’t see the famous “repair” button or menu item anyplace.  But no luck.  Pulled some hair out because I couldn’t find the trick.  Some of the documentation is in a MindMap itself!

But then, it appeared before my eyes in problem resolution glory: Format / Reset Position.  I didn’t know quite how to phrase it–I was looking for auto arrange or the sort.  But once I hit that menu item, poof.  Back in business.

My FreeMind song map is one that I’m using to further my understanding of songwriting–by analyzing structure, charts, techniques.  I visit it as often as I can.  Links are embedded–both to web and local directories.  Within this map I can brainstorm as well as organize and adjust later.  A perfect way to get into whole brain thinking.

It’s all part of a desire to stay active, to have a better life, to look back on more accomplishments, dreams built.  And I will say maybe a bit of it came from brainstorming and branching from there–with plans, follow up, execution, persistence.

It is and will be joyful.

Enjoying xml pruning for IMG Thumbnail Gallery. Hope to check out the RSS capability soon.

Making great use of the ScreenGrab Firefox plugin.  This one’s might convenient, with a very unobtrusive icon at the bottom right and handy options for cut/paste or save to folder.

It’s a quick download then smack into WP media library.  Working well in FireFox 3.x on both Mac and Windows.

Dynamic Drive DHTML(dynamic html) & JavaScript code library

It’s been a while since I took Dynamic Drive for a spin.  Their FavIcon Generator is the best I’ve seen.

The breadth of freely available scripts is impressive.  There’s a Creative Commons of sorts–keep the attributions on the code, and the bulk of it’s ok to grab.  What a fantastic way to grab something to spice up an experience, without stealing it.  No DRM here I guess–but there’s every opportunity to remain honest.

This site is too cool. GoogleDuelsUltra lets you take google search terms and graph their comparative popularity. And it provides some sweet statistics as well. It employs the Google API with aplomb. A rockin’ web page to make your day a little Googlier.

I compared John Belushi and Bill Murray for kicks on intelligence, silly and funny.

The page uses PHP to work with the API.  Thanks to Geoff Peters, indeed a talented individual.

One can look at the world pre- or post- google.  Maybe you wouldn’t necessarily want to do that, but you still could.  I know for sure it has made research a lot easier, and it has saved my tail more than once.  I for one do not have such an encyclopedic mind as to immediately know exactly what to do when some obscure error comes up in html, xml, visual basic, or any other app–or for that matter, any other matter of life!

In short, google has exceled.  Sure other search engines have been existent for a longer period of time, but none has been so simple and elegant as the king of white background and understatement.

This same less is more philosophy seems to have come to Google Chrome, the company’s new internet browser.  This morning I finally decided to take the plunge.  Just about the first thing I did when I installed was to make Chrome the default browser.  What came over me?  I haven’t seen the reviews, but here are my impressions:

• Would love to see toolbars/plugins – being a firefox/ie user for a good number of years, i miss the plugins such as Web Developer, Compete stats, blinklist, and more.  The developer community certainly has had a great deal of time with these other browsers vs. chrome, but they’d still be nice to see out of the box.  I’m sure the volume of plugins will mushroom in the coming months.
• Open source code – solid, great to see this, it should ease plugin development!  And yes, should I care to do some spare bathroom reading, it would be nice to print out a section or two.
• Memory footprint – Chrome does well here.  Less than 50% of my firefox memory usage–but with Chrome at no plugins, this is a big advantage.
• Ease of installation – There was no issue here, it downloaded quickly even on a (gasp) gprs connection to my laptop.  Not necessarily a distinguishing factor, but it’s nice to have.
• GUI Impressions:  Lives up to simple and elegant.  Here’s where an absence of toolbars is of benefit.  Chrome just lets you get to your web pages.  There’s solid storage/thumbnails of visited sites, as well as integration with your google account.  Big convenience here, but I have not necessarily been big on storing my browsing history on my google account.
• Performance – no true technical benchmarking here, just impressions, which are that this is average, and a page or two typically working perfectly in other browsers crash in Chrome.

__________

I see Chrome as a 3 out of 5 for the moment.  It’s no longer the default browser (that lasted about 5 minutes).  I might use it as an outlyer for now, to see if pages rendering well elsewhere will work well here.

Of course, Google overall as always blows me away with innovation, convenience, pertinent results, endless capabilities.

The Free Software Foundation is a solid place to check for legally free software.  The free software movement aims to provide these tools to help each other learn and benefit.  The programs in this list are free to use, study, share and modify.  You’re bound to find something useful on this list!

Might you have an appetite for a fancy, dynamic menu for your site, but you’re not willing to pay for those bells and whistles? A good solution might be freewebmenus.com. The site has a slick on-line menu builder. Just choose your styles and page links and get the embed code when you’re done. You need give them props by letting them put their name at the bottom of the menu you build. But it’s still pretty darned cool.

In working with clients, I’ve done my best to cover as many browser combinations as possible.  IE, Firefox, Safari grab the bulk of the space.  Although both Mac & Windows are in my arsenal, I’ve been checking now and then for Safari for Windows.  I installed it a while back, and it failed quite miserably–I saw fellow users’ complaints about nothing happening on an install.  But give up I did not.  Is that a form of insanity?  :O

Recently I gave it another shot.  Happiness abounds.  Excellent feel to the interface, plus there’s now a handy web developer plugin by default.  Way to go, Apple!!

This Flickr Related Tag Browser by Felix Turner is a masterpiece. You can simply spend time using this multimedia search tool to check out all the photos and the brilliant manner in which results are presented; but as far as I can see, it’s as close as you can get to a living, breathing thesaurus, complete with related photo albums generated on the fly. Enter a word and see related terms and photos come right back at you, in an animated and compelling presentation.

Back when I was working at a Fortune 500 IT company, a colleague with industrial-strength geek credentials told me about a great program that had a ton of Photoshop style functionality.  The product, GIMP (which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program — more about GNU in a later installment) is free software, available for many operating systems, that lets you create layered graphics and save them in popular file formats like .jpg, .bmp, and .gif.  You can even save as a Photoshop file (.psd).  Get creating…. : )