Marc Andreessen, writing for the WSJ last week:

Today's stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies. Apple, for example, has a P/E ratio of around 15.2—about the same as the broader stock market, despite Apple's immense profitability and dominant market position. . .</p>

But it's clear that

. . .we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

I agree. It's an odd disconnect I've observed, too. It seems like the top stories run by most financial news sites revolve around software in some way, yet Wall Street hasn't come to terms with it.

Who knows where our increasingly imaginary economy will take us, but the upshot I take way today is: Teach your kids to make software. Their competitors will know how.

Compared to most people you read in the Apple realm, I’m a relative newcomer. I can’t say that I ever owned a Lisa, or an Apple II, or a Newton. Hell, I never even owned a PowerBook.

I can say that when I became captivated with Apple products a few years ago, it was the best decision I ever made. Sure I love the technology for reasons too numerous to list, but the best part was discovering the people.

There are no people like Apple people. I can’t think of anything even remotely close to the culture that exists around Apple products. No other “user base” is as passionate about what they use.

The most unanticipated and greatest benefit I’ve had of writing this site for the past year are the wonderful friendships I’ve made with other Apple people who share the same passion and enthusiasm as I.

I’m hopeful that people will always matter more than technology, and I think that as long as companies like Apple design technology to fit people, that will be the case.

The successful model of human-centric computing, I believe, is the greatest gift given us by the greatest Apple person of all.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, for your encore performance. Thank you for disrupting technology in the best way possible, when you did.

Thank you for making it about us.

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next. –Steve Jobs

It’s hard to believe that I was writing things like this last year:

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how much I enjoy reading books on the iPad. I was initially worried that eye strain or the loss of the traditional text reading experience would make it seem more like a gimmick than some revolution in reading. But those fears were quickly assuaged, and I’m now absolutely hooked on the iPad as an e-reader.

It feels like ten years ago. I guess that’s what happens when major disruption occurs: remembering how one lived before the disruption becomes difficult.

The iPad was a major disruptor in my reading workflow. It wasn’t an add-on or an enhancement. It fundamentally changed how I read.

I now expect books to be in some kind of e-form. When I open a book on my iPhone, it should be in the same place it was when I stopped reading on my iPad. The number of words a book has should not dictate whether I can carry it with me.

2010 was the year that, for me, books transcended relativity and grew new legs in the quantum world. Books are no longer bound by the conventions of space and time. They’re photonic manifestations of human ideas that can exist anywhere.

I don't think we're witnessing the death of paper though. At least, I hope not.

While I read paperbacks far less often today, when I do, it seems extra special. Sorta like those rare occasions I drink a Coke in a glass bottle, and I’m transported back in time to my early childhood, sitting in a frozen-in-the-1950s barber shop with my Dad.

A medium, itself, can contribute as much to an experience as the content it delivers. Touch screens have permanently and positively affected my overall reading experience, but they’ve also made printed books more special than ever.

So can I sue Samsung for already having the idea that Kubrick designed the iPad?

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OmniFocus is probably the best note-taking app I’ve ever found.

In fact, my OmniFocus inbox, not Simplenote, has become my preferred place for taking general notes, especially any circumstance where I’m likely to record a combination of thoughts and actions, which happens to be every circumstance these days.

The OmniFocus inbox just seems like the best “don’t think about where to put it, just get it down” place.

If a non-actionable thought is truly worth saving, you can always move it to a better saving place later. There should be no rules around what you write to your inbox, only rules about what stays in OmniFocus.

iOS quick entry FTW

Normally, my note taking happens on an iOS device because I’m more likely to have an iPhone or iPad in my hands during the day than my Mac.

The quick entry button on both the iPhone and iPad version of OmniFocus lets me get things down instantly in situations where I might only have seconds to capture a piece of information. The quick entry button is even faster than Simplenote (in my experience).

Some specific examples:

Constructive calendar procrastination. Sometimes I make notes to schedule something on my calendar when I don't have time to schedule it right away. "Call Joe tue 2p re project Qs" can be captured much faster than it can be entered onto a calendar—correctly with invitation, call-in number, full description, etc. And it doesn't have to be entered now; it just needs to be entered before Tuesday at 2:00 pm.

Capturing new contacts. I've never owned a mobile device, including the iPhone, that made it easy to create a new contact entry in a social situation. Getting into the Contacts app and navigating fields as someone dictates information to you is always an awkward, error-prone process. It's much easier to use the OmniFocus quick entry button to tap out "Sarah 555 555 1234 sarah@domain.com". You can easily add her to your address book later.

Conference call notes. When I'm on a conference call, I usually create a single action with a brief description of the call. During the call, I record notes in the note field. Now that the note field in the iPad version is ginormous, filling the entire screen, this is super practical. The entire call gets encapsulated in a single inbox item that I can process later.

"Distraction-free" mobile writing. I’ve even written full articles within the note field of OmniFocus tasks while they sat in my inbox—and I sat in a waiting room.

Forced filtering

The biggest advantage of putting note-ish things into a regularly-reviewed inbox of any kind is that the notes always get a second look. I process my inbox nearly every day.

As I process inbox notes, actionable items are parsed from note fields into true OmniFocus tasks, while reference material is sent to nvALT (Simplenote), mind maps, Google Docs, or other appropriate places. And honestly, a lot of it just gets deleted.

This kind of filtering leads to a higher ratio of information to trash in my searchable repositories (e.g. Simplenote). Repositories don't get reviewed; my inboxes do.

I normally do the heaviest inbox processing on my Mac at the end of the day, but given that my OmniFocus data file is in sync across all my iOS devices, I can just as easily do it there.

The practicality of unification

This is really a message about the power of inbox unification. I’ve always been a believer in minimizing the number of inboxes I have to juggle. The inbox in OmniFocus is one of the best all-purpose inboxes I’ve ever had the pleasure of juggling.

It’s become an efficient single point of entry for nearly everything in my electronic information ecosystem that doesn’t come from email. Even if you don’t use OmniFocus, you might want to think about how you can create a common funnel for the mixed bag of information you invite into your ecosystem.

As new parents, my wife and I had the less-than-joyful experience of shopping for day care this year. One day care director we interviewed kept stressing how difficult it can be to get in touch with her. She was just so busy.

Needless to say, we passed.

If you provide any form of client services, please don’t tell your clients that you’re busy. If you do, and your clients are like me, what they’ll hear is “I’m spread too thin, and my priorities are unclear.”

We’re all busy. No one wants to hear that you’re busy, too.

Think about it. Suppose one day I wrote “I didn’t publish anything today because I’ve been really busy.” Would you be impressed? Would you even care? Does knowing that I'm "busy" help you in anyway? I'm guessing no, no, and no, (dis)respectively.

You’re much better off assuming that no one cares that all of your spent energy can be wrapped up inside a generic four-letter word.

Your family, friends, and clients would rather evaluate your actions, and they would rather hear your forward-looking priorities, not your hindsight abstractions. And they especially need to see and hear that they’re near the top of your priority stack. So: Know your priorities, accept your priorities, and articulate those priorities in specific terms to people you care about.

Ricky Gervais:

. . . pitching [The Office] would have been difficult. If I’d sent off the script it would still be in an executive’s drawer. ‘Bloke who’s never written, directed or acted before plays a bloke who thinks he’s funny but isn’t, makes bad jokes, touches his tie and looks at the camera.’ Doesn’t exactly jump off the page, does it? So what we did was make our own pilot; we shot it in a day. I went back to my old office and shot it with mates who still worked there in the background. When you show that to an executive they suddenly know what you mean.</p>

Marked 1.2 is live in the Mac App Store. Brett has added a number of new features and some nice polish. If you write anything in Markdown, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want to pick up this handy little app for $3.

For years, being an Apple fan only meant being a user of Apple products. Bye, bye those years. Today, lots of Apple customers have become “investors.” It’s not enough to benefit from the use of Apple’s products; people want a piece of Apple’s capital appreciation, too. I mean, if the home team is the most valuable company in the world, its fans would be crazy not to buy in, right?

Home sweet home

Home bias is part of human nature. When it comes to investing, it feels natural put your money in companies that seem familiar or to which you have some sort of emotional attachment.

A classic example of home bias is the way employees tend to invest heavily in their employer’s stock. The typical 401(k) participant has twenty percent of their balance in their employer’s stock.

I’ve personally known people who had well over half their 401(k) in company stock—even in the wake of Enron and even during the recent financial crisis when even the most thought-to-be invincible companies were going poof in the ether of the after-hours.

US investors also buy a disproportionately high amount of domestic stock and tend to ignore foreign companies. I’m not just talking about amateurs either. Even pros are guilty of passing on foreign stock for no rational reason.

Staying home just feels good.

Apple-colored glasses

If you’re an Apple customer-turned-investor, you’re normal. But that’s all the more reason to think twice about putting all your apples in one basket. I’m not saying that we’ve seen peak Apple. No one can know such things in advance. Well, except maybe God and Warren Buffet (in order of increasing likelihood).

I am saying that if AAPL is the only stock in (or even the highest proportion of) your portfolio, you might want to call time out. Apple isn’t a sports team. It’s a company.

Most importantly, understand that you don’t have to own shares in Apple to continue benefiting from Apple’s success.

But first, why I don’t own a single individual share of Apple stock outside of a mutual fund. Two reasons:

First and foremost:

As a personal policy, I don’t buy individual company stock of any kind. It’s a form of disguised gambling that makes no sense to me. It's also completely unnecessary in a time when we have unprecedented choices for creating diverse, passive portfolios. Mutual funds, index funds, and ETFs are almost always better choices for people who work for a living and invest as a hobby.

Second:

I don’t like to invest in companies that I’m already living and dying by in some way. I’ve never invested in my employer’s stock because, the way I see it, if the company is doing well, I do well by being paid a salary and bonuses. If I own stock in my employer, and the company collapses, not only am I unemployed, my savings are shot to hell, too.

I don’t work for Apple, but I do work with their products. And that work does generate income for me. If Apple is doing well by making good products, I’m doing well as a user of those products. I’m quite content being the beneficiary of Apple’s success as an end user.

A little pessimism is a good thing

It’s not fun to think about Apple’s market cap taking a tumble. Any event that sours AAPL would probably also spell bad things for users of Apple products.

So don’t set yourself up to be doubly disappointed if and when this golden era sunsets. Build solid walls between your customer, employee, and investor personas. And understand that when you mix emotion and money, you usually just end up with emotion.

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I’ve been using LaunchBar for well over a year now, but I keep finding new things that make me excited about it. Like what?

Well, like Recent Items.

After invoking LaunchBar, start typing recent to bring up Recent Items, then right arrow to go to files, folders, and apps you’ve been in (recently).

Simple, but oh so powerful. The beauty of Recent Items is that it functions as a folder itself.  Once inside Recent Items, you can just start typing part of a file name to filter the list further. You can even enter folders and move/copy things to folders.

It’s also a great companion to item 3 in my list of methods for using LaunchBar to send email attachments. If you remember working on a file earlier in the day, you can bet it's in Recent Items. There's no telling how many keystrokes it's saved me since I found it.

One can arrive at success from a nearly infinite number of angles. For Yuvi Zalkow, it meant failing at being a failed writer. Congratulations to my friend for getting published at long last.

People who follow me on Twitter are no stranger to my <140 character rants about restaurant web sites that abuse Flash. Farhad Manjoo at The Slate nails it:

While lots of people have noted the general terribleness of restaurant sites, I haven’t ever seen an explanation for why this industry’s online presence is so singularly bruising. The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in 1999. The problem is getting worse in the age of the mobile Web—Flash doesn’t work on Apple’s devices, and while some of these sites do load on non-Apple smartphones, they take forever to do so, and their finicky navigation makes them impossible to use.

This isn’t about being pro-Apple or anti-Adobe. It’s about being pro-useful.

I don’t visit a restaurant’s web site for pleasure. I want the same thing I want at any site: information. Sadly, information just isn’t in the design spec for most restaurant web sites, and I often give up trying to find information within a couple of minutes of arriving—whether I have a device that runs Flash or not.

I can find menu and nutritional information far faster with a simple Google search. Thank God third party sites have filled the HTML void left by the restaurant industry, which still seems content spending small fortunes on Flash-drunk web designers who build web-based cartoons.

(H/t to Andy Howard)