Until about six months ago, I had a tenuous relationship with Evernote. I had a few niche use cases for it—mostly storing reference photos that didn't belong anywhere else. My biggest worry with developing a dependence on Evernote was that, in its early days, there was no practical way to get groups of files back out.

But last year when Evernote added a feature to easily save note attachments (e.g. PDF) to system folders, I decided it was time to start using Evernote as a full-blown mixed-media content management system.

Evernote's cloud-based OCR and fast search were always really attractive features for me, but the "TypeAhead" search in Evernote 5 was game changing for someone (me) who goes to Evernote multiple times a day to retrieve information.

Being able to throw hundreds and hundreds of PDF pages into a single hole, walk away, and have them indexed so that I can get to anything from a single search field is almost too good to be true.

The iOS apps associated with Evernote 5's release deserve as much praise. They are faster than ever and make it extremely practical to get information in and out.

My coworkers and I are also sharing notebooks through Evernote Business. I've never seen a more effective tool for pooling information. It hit me the other day that this is what we were chasing last decade during the wiki craze: a repository of information that users can search quickly. The problem with wikis was that only geeks cared to learn the syntax. Evernote works because putting information in is as easy as getting information out—for everyone.

For what it's worth, I still don't use Evernote for any kind of technical, web, or creative writing. That's all in plain text. Word processing documents, spreadsheets, and other working files still live in Dropbox. My Evernote "objects" tend to be static, mixed-media reference items that would melt away in a conventional file system.

I have no affiliation with Evernote, and they don't sponsor anything I do. I guess I'm just writing this for anyone who might still be on the outside of Evernote looking in. It's worth the dive.

Dan Benjamin's latest podcast, Quit!, wasn't really created for me. At least, I'm pretty sure it wasn't. But that hasn't stopped me from listening to every episode so far.

I was reflecting today on why I listen to this show. I'm not interested in quitting what I do. In fact, I sorta already did that back in September when I left my corporate actuarial position to work full-time on my previously part-time role in online actuarial education.

So in a sense, I guess, I represent what a lot of the listeners of Quit! want to be—someone who had the stones to stop doing something they weren't fully emotionally invested in to do something they were.

But I think the real reason I listen is because I have this insatiable urge to be around people who have any kind of entrepreneurial spirit. Quit! fills a void in my ears. It's a form of entrepreneurial entertainment that doesn't exist, at all, in mainstream American culture.

In 2013, mainstream cable television remains obsessed with archetypal twentieth century careers. How many shows about doctors and lawyers can you fit between the hours of 8:00 PM and 11:00 PM? Maybe it's not a coincidence that two of the most bemoaned and expense-bloated industries of modern America also boast the most romanticized career paths.

Which leads me to an aspect of Quit! that really troubles me. . .

A lot of people who call into the show are 18 to 25, and they sound trapped. Truly trapped. These are people with no kids. They aren't married. They really have no responsibility to anyone but themselves—and they have the voice of a burned-out 45-year-old with four kids, a resetting mortgage on an upside-down home, two car payments, and a deck of maxed-out credit cards.

Why are these people, barely out of childhood, already so afraid of change and so unable to take any kind of risk?

As Cameron Herold said in his 2010 TED Talk, kids just don't grow up around entrepreneurial role models. Instead, they're groomed to conform to traditional career paths. And when they get too close to the electric fence that guards socialized education, they're shocked back inside. Many of the behaviors of highly successful entrepreneurs, even CEOs, are punished in school.

And so when someone, even early in life, gets an itch to do something that doesn't conform to social stereotypes, it's met with a paralyzing mental dissonance. If America was a polytheist society, Risk would surely play a Satanic role.

This is a serious modern economic problem—one that no one seems to be talking about.

For every kid that wants to grow up to be a doctor or lawyer, we really need a thousand kids that want to go out into the world and solve other business and social problems.

I truly believe that job creation will happen naturally as more entrepreneurs enter this century. As I said recently, it's ironic that we're so short on jobs in a time of problem surplus. The boilerplate careers from the last century just aren't solving today's problems, and no amount of government stimulus is going to grow jobs in the infertile soil of last century's fields.

So parents, I guess this is for you:

If you have kids, understand that they are not going to learn to make their own success and their own rules in grade school. They are not going to learn it in college, and they are most certainly not going to learn it in a cubicle. That leaves you. Cameron's talk has some great tips for fostering the entrepreneurial spirit in young kids.

Good luck to you, and God help me and his teachers when my son enters grade school.

As you may have seen Brett Terpstra announce, the latest nvALT beta is out. I sincerely appreciate all of the work David Halter and Brett have put into nvALT, which remains the starting point for virtually everything I write—from meeting notes to blog posts to large writing projects.

If you enjoy nvALT as much as me, I strongly encourage you to follow my lead and click the donate button at the bottom of Brett's nvALT page.

Lately I've been reading a lot about the supposed manipulation of Apple's stock price leading up to its Q1 2013 earnings call. I've also seen the theory that markets are interpreting Apple's cut of component orders as weak iPhone 5 demand.

The fact that there's so much chatter on otherwise technology-related sites leads me to believe that a lot of Apple customers have become Apple investors. I've written before about why I think this can be a very bad idea. But that aside, I thought I would attempt to debunk the stock manipulation theory a bit and, along the way, do a little Stock Options 101.

Marco Arment recently linked to an article theorizing that large volume call writers might have a strong incentive to manipulate Apple's share price downward.

Before I offer an alternative explanation, let's review what a call option is by example:

• Johnny thinks AAPL is going to rise above $500 in a month
• Billy isn't so bullish on AAPL and wants to make a little money right now off of Johnny
• Billy sells Johnny a call option with a strike price of $500
• If AAPL is higher than $500 in a month, Johnny gets to purchase AAPL from Billy for only $500; Johnny can then immediately sell AAPL at its actual market value and pocket the difference
• If AAPL is less than $500 in a month, nothing happens, and Billy keeps the AAPL stock
• In either event, Billy gets to keep the money Johnny paid for the call option (the premium)

Johnny is willing to risk the cost of the call for the possibility of making a gain in the future, while Billy is willing to risk losing out on future gain for the immediate gratification of receiving the call price.

Now.

Suppose Billy isn't like you and me. Suppose Billy is a ruthless manager of a massive hedge fund. And suppose Billy has written (sold) a lot of call options with a $500 strike. If Billy could figure out a way to make the price of AAPL go below $500, Billy would be assured not only of making a profit (the income from the call options he sold), but he would also be poised to reap any rewards of a price rebound after the call expiration date.

This is the call-option-stock-price-manipulation theory in a nutshell. Is it possible? In theory, yes. Very large investors, by virtue of controlling such a large share of the total market, can manipulate the price of stocks by buying and selling them in huge quantities.

A very entertaining example of such manipulation was carried out by Russell Crowe's character, a London-based bond trader, in the movie A Good Year.

However, such shenanigans are typically only possible over very short periods of time. Markets (or rather, the other big boys) get wise quickly and collapse the gaps. Moreover, such manipulations will probably only move the price slightly, but razor thin movements can translate into million-dollar gains for high volume traders.

Million dollar masochists

If anything is manipulating Apple's share price by way of option trading, simple Econ 101 forces are the most likely culprit. Maximum Pain Theory (MPT), defined by Investopedia, is one possibility:

. . . most traders who buy and hold options contracts until expiration will lose money. According to the theory, this is due to the tendency for the price of a underlying stock to gravitate towards its "maximum pain strike price" - the price where the greatest number of options (in dollar value) will expire worthless.

There are different views as to why MPT occurs, and there are certainly those that don't even believe it's real. But the tendency of stock prices to move toward "high interest" strike prices is too evident in empirical data to ignore.

One explanation for MPT stems from the simple supply and demand forces around call and put options. Puts are, in a sense, the opposite of calls. If an investor buys an AAPL put at a $500 strike, they're purchasing the option to sell AAPL for no less than $500. A put buyer clearly believes the price of a stock will fall below the strike.

Calls, puts, and the underlying stocks on which they are written are inextricably linked in liquid trading markets. Direct investors in stocks use option activity to gauge investor sentiment about the future. Think of them as financial weather forecasts. If calls are in high demand, that means a lot of people think the stock will rise. The opposite is true if put demand is high. And clearly, as the price of a stock moves up and down, so too does the value of call and put options. It's a big ole circle of pain.

Further complicating the path to an option expiration date is the fact that options can be bought and sold themselves. The prices of calls and puts change right up to their expiration dates as more information becomes available and as investors place their respective bets.

If a stock price is well above the strike ("in-the-money" as they say), call holders are likely to sell their positions and cash out. If, on the other hand, the stock price is well below the strike, put holders will take their profits. This selling pressure from both sides will push the stock price itself toward the strike.

Clearly, the closer to the strike the final stock price, the less money put and call holders will make—this is the tendency toward maximum pain. The empirical fact that few people actually make money on long options supports this.

Of course, the sellers don't lose money. As in the example above, they keep the option premium.

The most important part of this post

If the above is confusing, or if you had to read it two or three times and still don't get it, or if you think that MPT is "unfair," you really don't have any business investing in individual stocks. I'm not saying you're stupid. I'm just saying you're better at making money doing things other than playing stocks.

The examples above are as vanilla as it gets on Wall Street. Calls and puts aren't simple concepts, but they are as trivial as learning to count to ten in the world of high finance.

Whether true stock price manipulation is at play or not, there's not much chance you're going to beat the people who do this kind thing for a living. Would you enter a surfing contest where your opponents were not only better at surfing but could also create and calm the very waves on which you're competing?

If you love Apple, buy Apple, not AAPL. Use the technology to get paid for making things yourself.

From Steven Greenhouse's recent piece in The New York Times:

“Some people think it’s a law that when productivity goes up, everybody benefits,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There is no economic law that says technological progress has to benefit everybody or even most people. It’s possible that productivity can go up and the economic pie gets bigger, but the majority of people don’t share in that gain.”

This sums up one plausible dystopian scenario I see for this century. While I want to believe technology will enable individual economic prosperity by enabling individuals to do things that were previously difficult or impossible to do on their own, I wonder how many individuals we have left.

Ours is a society raised on entitlements. Not just governments, but large companies have become paternalistic entities—deities almost. "Society" has become a kind of endowed insurance through which we transfer the risk of all individual failure at the cost of all individual gain.

In truth, you are entitled to nothing. It really wasn't that long ago on the timescale of humanity that hunger ruled the day. Literal hunger. Survival was an individual's sole responsibility to himself—and to those in his immediate circle of care. Members of groups had well-defined roles, and they acted out those roles with a clear purpose: to solve the problem of survival today so that they may solve it again tomorrow.

Now things are ominously opposite. We think work should just exist for the sake of getting paid. We think that a job should "be there" for someone who followed steps one, two, and three.

The connection between work and problem solving seems to be all but completely severed. Perhaps the greatest folly of our time is the apparent absence of work in an era when so many problems exist.

The purest form of problem solving starts with individual curiosity. For those that still have that daily hunger, technology will be an accelerant for prosperity. The future is less bright for those that have lost the fire to help themselves.

I joined Rob Agcaoili and Gabe Weatherhead on episode 17 of Generational to talk about some GTD basics: defining tasks and projects. We wanted to make this a sort of "GTD for real people" chat. But the more I think about it, the less I'm sure I represent real people. I'm glad Gabe and Rob were there.

At the start of each day, I’ve been writing down three to five goals that I want to accomplish that day. I’m using Day One since it’s with me everywhere,[1] but you could just as easily use a sticky note.

A few times a day, I look at the list and ask, “Am I working toward at least one of the items?”

I’m quite sure this isn’t a novel concept, but I’ve been having great results with it lately. It’s not a replacement for OmniFocus or any other project-planning system either. The goals on the list usually originate from my OmniFocus perspectives at the start of the day, and they aren’t of the “next action” nature. They’re simply destinations I want to reach by the end of the day.

I’ve been surprised at how much more focused I feel using this simple approach than working out of OmniFocus perspectives. Here’s what I think is happening:

1. Working out of perspectives can, at times, feel like smushing ants with my thumb. There’s always another task waiting to appear. A shrinking list is more visually satisfying.

2. My daily list spans all of my perspectives and contexts. “Run three miles” isn’t likely to appear in the same OmniFocus perspective as “Make screencast on mortgage-backed security interest rate risk”. A simple goal list shows what I care about doing, not where I need to be.

3. A short goal list is realistic with respect to time. There’s only so much time in the day, and if I can knock out even two or three quality goals a day, that’s a good day.

4. It encourages honesty with myself. I’m much more likely to put things on my daily goal list that truly matter. It’s hard to physically write down things that I don’t care about.

5. It makes every day count. Building a daily goal list helps me squeeze more out of days when deadlines are distant. It’s as if I’m making the day itself a de facto deadline for getting the goals done.

Perhaps best of all, it can be reviewed at the end of the day retrospectively. My biggest complaint with most GTD systems is that they are heavily biased toward prospective reviewing. Little emphasis is placed on where you’ve been and what you did. Sometimes, to me, GTD feels like a car with no rearview mirrors.

I think if you try tracking simple goals for even a few days, you will begin to notice previously hidden patterns in your behavior. If you routinely reach the end of the day without doing the things you wanted to do at the beginning of the day, the way you work isn’t working.

It may not even be your fault. It could be your work environment. But whatever the cause, getting sidetracked from goals is an awful kind of stress for people who care about getting the right things done. It’s a problem well worth fixing.

Rachel Emma Silverman, WSJ:

Even though digital technology has led to significant productivity increases, the modern workday seems custom-built to destroy individual focus. Open-plan offices and an emphasis on collaborative work leave workers with little insulation from colleagues' chatter. A ceaseless tide of meetings and internal emails means that workers increasingly scramble to get their "real work" done on the margins, early in the morning or late in the evening.

Forced collaboration is arguably the most celebrated-on-paper but degenerative-in-practice organizational scheme to date. Read Susan Cain's book Quiet to understand why.

Priscilla Gilman in “Don’t Blame Autism for Newtown”:

This country needs to develop a better understanding of the complexities of various conditions and respect for the profound individuality of its children. We need to emphasize that being introverted doesn’t mean one has a developmental disorder, that a developmental disorder is not the same thing as a mental illness, and that most mental illnesses do not increase a person’s tendency toward outward-directed violence.

As I said yesterday, read Susan Cain’s book Quiet.[1] Here in the west, we’re roughly a hundred years into a romance with extroversion. The economic and social virtues of introversion, even autism, are only now audible for a society that’s been too loquacious to care since the late 19th century.

But the world is changing. Today, we desperately need people who not only want to turn away from stimulation to think deeply about problems, but have an innate passion to do so. We need noise-cancelers, not more noise.

As any species’ environment changes, certain genetic attributes can shift from liability to asset. That’s even true of autism, though the typical workplace—filled with incessant distractions and attention-needy coworkers—poses a significant barrier:

[The] emerging understanding of autism may change attitudes toward autistic workers. But intelligence, even superior intelligence, isn’t enough to get or keep a job. Modern office culture — with its unwritten rules of behavior, its fluid and socially demanding work spaces — can be hostile territory for autistic people, who do better in predictable environments and who tend to be clumsy at shaping their priorities around other people’s requirements.

This morning was hard. A lot harder than Friday. Maybe it was the noticeable look of grief on the faces of other parents as I walked into my son’s day care. Maybe it was his teacher telling me that they’re going to start locking the classroom doors from now on.

Maybe it was how I suddenly became aware of this invisible but intensely palpable collective grief, fear, and sadness being felt by a million other parents at that very moment in time as they dropped their kids off at school.

This is the part of parenting they don’t tell you about. And they shouldn’t.

It was almost too perfect hearing John Lennon on the radio as I drove away from my son this morning:

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear
And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong

It is, but line four is the one to hang on. As are your memories. No terrorist can rob you of those. Act today in a way that creates as many positive experiences as you can.

1Password 4 is as gorgeous as it is indispensable. The UI is more polished than ever, and the new built-in browser is going to fundamentally change how I access secure sites from my iPhone. Being able to fill-in passwords the same way I can on my Mac is sublime.

Google Maps is back on the iPhone.[1] While I’ve been more than satisfied with Apple’s Maps, I’m a bit of a navigation nerd. The new Google Maps app strikes me as very well designed. It’s fluid and fast. I’m also happy to have transit directions back on my iPhone—something that Apple’s Maps app lacks for now. I prefer Google’s presentation of traffic data, too. Bottom line: mobile and GPS technology are a match made in heaven, and we’re just at the front gates. It’s sorta ridiculous that we’ve had so much drama with maps, but I can’t complain about where we’ve landed.

Calendar Paste solves a recurring problem I wasn’t even conscious of. It’s basically an event template builder. You can predefine events, complete with name, duration, alert, and notes. You can also specify the calendar you want the event to be added to. When you’re ready to schedule, all you have to do is select the date, and tap Paste. It’s perfect for irregularly recurring events, especially those that don’t belong on your default calendar. While Siri, for me, has largely obviated the need for calendar add-ons, this is one I know I’ll use.

Flickr just woke up and realized they needed a good iPhone app. Shawn Blanc has a nice review. 2.0 is worlds better than its predecessor, which I deleted from my phone a few months ago in favor of FlickrStackr, an app whose UI I don’t love, but has some really nice batch upload features. I’ve immediately re-adopted the Flickr app thanks to 2.0, though. Tip: press and hold the camera icon to bypass the camera and go straight to your Camera Roll.

OK, I'm going to stop pinching myself now and just accept that this thing exists.

Gabe wrote about Checkvist back in October of this year, and I'm sorry I'm just now checking it out. Usually the phrase "web app" makes me cringe a little, but Checkvist gets web-based outlining right. Really right.

Eons ago in internet time (a few months ago on the Gregorian calendar), a lot of people got really excited about Sublime Text 2. Now I'm giving it a spin.

I'm in the middle of an experiment to see if Sublime Text 2 can replace TextMate 1 for the LaTeX work that I do. So far, it's going extremely well.

I just put together a screencast for some folks that I work with, but I since there's bound to be two or three of you out there in RSS land that might be interested, I've made it public (watch on Vimeo).

Topics covered:

• How to install the LaTeXTools plugin for Sublime Text 2
• Setting up LaTeX projects in Sublime Text 2
• Configuring Skim to sync with Sublime Text 2 so that you can switch from PDF to code at any place in the document
• Miscellaneous tips from the perspective of a Sublime Text 2 beginner switching from TextMate

By the way, I also highly recommend Jeffrey Way's free Sublime Text 2 course if you're hungry for more Sublime Text 2 screencasts.

The Verge has a remarkable multimedia piece on rebuilding "Manhattan's drowned internet" after Hurricane Sandy.

Events like Sandy put a spotlight on how fragile and physical our "internet" is. For a more global perspective on the physicality of the internet, see Andrew Blum's TED talk, recorded in June 2012.

(Verge link via DF)

When something bad happens, people usually offer a common consolation: "Things happen for a reason." I don't believe that.

I believe that you are the multiplicative product of all of your past experiences. You are your experiences and you are what you do with those experiences. I also believe the most difficult experiences in your past account for your best qualities today.

Things don't happen for a reason. They happen for you.