I have been struggling for a while with how to find and discover the daily news. I don’t read all of it in depth but every evening I like to flip through the headlines, read a few articles, and at least get a sense of what happened that day. Each day I like to see what is happening in world and US news, local Portland news, technology/business, and sports.

Local and tech news are pretty much taken care of. I get feeds of local news and tech news and follow along throughout the day. In the evening, then, I usually review Hacker News and Techmeme as well, which gives me plenty of long and short form technology information. For business insight, I read Bloomberg BusinessWeek. While this doesn’t give me the daily insight into what’s happening in the business world, it does give me some sense of topics.

Sports and world/US news have been a problem. I’ve tried a number of different solutions. For sports I currently peruse ESPN’s mobile app each day. The news there is lacking, though. Too much opinion and too little news. Furthermore, I can’t figure out how they decide the order of stories. I get a “timeline” with some times for today and some from days ago. I haven’t found anything else so far on this topic.

World/US news is more important to me then sports news and here I have failed multiple times. I have tried a few of the newspaper apps, including USA Today, NPR, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. I’ve stuck with the New York Times the longest even though I find its front page news often missing important stories in favor of New York news. I hate to break it to you, New York Times, but I could care less about your human interest stories about NYC and doubt many people outside of the city do either. It’s hard to consider you a national paper when you are so NYC-centric.

I’ve been using a few others recently that have promise. One is The Evening Edition. The stories are summarized and straight forward with lots of links for more depth. It has much more of an international flair than anything else I’ve been reading. It’s a great resource but just too short. Five stories and four links just isn’t enough to summarize the day.

Last night, though, I downloaded a new app that has promise. The app is named Circa. It starts with a list of headlines. When you click on any one, it gives you summarized information in small snippets, allowing the reader to dig deeper into the story, both as snippets and links to the original posts. It was just the first night but I found myself reading more stories then I have in a while, easily able to catch up on some multi-day old stories that no one else reported the aftermath of or new stories I hadn’t seen before.

Whether Circa is the answer or not I don’t know yet as it is too early. I accept the fact that my news may not come from a single source, just like it is for tech news, and that’s fine. But someone has to figure out how to present the news in a logical way for mobile. I hope someone does soon because I’m dying to be better informed but feel as ignorant as ever.

I’m smitten with the comics and writing of Randall Munroe. I read both his xkcd.com comic strip and his Tuesday What If? series with regularity. He is a very smart guy who uses his nerd humor to good effect. There’s a great interview with him in The Atlantic that is well worth a read, and even provides some interesting nuggets of insight for every company, including this one on why he chose to structure his site for one strip at a time reading:

One of the things I’ve learned with doing xkcd is that you sort of give people, “Here’s the thing, and here’s the button you can press to get another thing.” Sometimes that can be more easy to digest than “here’s a long page of things.” You can read through it, and you get to the end and think, “Wow, I just read a whole bunch. Do I really want another page like this?”

I hope you’ll take the time to read it.

My grandmother was in town this past week. At one point she asked me whether I wish my mom and dad didn’t separate and divorce when I was little. I told her on one hand I wish they hadn’t, but that 99% of me is so glad they did. If they hadn’t divorced, I would have been a different person and I like the person I’ve turned out to be.

Because they divorced, my mom met my stepdad and they had my brother. We moved to South Florida when I was in high school and I was so annoyed and convinced I wanted to go back to Ohio that I went there for school. I spent a few years making horrible decisions and then dropped out of school and moved back to Florida in an attempt to get my feet under me, figure out what I wanted to do, and stop the bad decisions. (Turns out you really can’t go back again.)

Dropping out was smart. I moved to Oregon with my mom and stepdad and brother, got lucky by enrolling at Pacific University where I had amazing teachers, got lucky again when I met my sole mate on the first day of class my second year there, who I married and had two amazing kids with. I started Infinity Softworks as a senior and have managed to keep it moving forward, mostly, for the past 16 years.

Everything about me stems from that divorce and to take it away erases 37 years of my history, all but my first two. Was it horrible and painful? Yes. Did I make some stupid decisions because of it? Yes. Did I have a hard time being comfortable in my own skin? Yes. And all of that was a bi-product of that divorce. But in retrospect I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I couldn’t. At least not if I wanted to end up where I am now, and that I wouldn’t trade for the world.

In an era when everything digital is ripe for theft, whether that’s apps, music, books, or movies, it is interesting to read a story about the crime of ideas: one magician stealing another magician’s tricks. The Honor System, an article in Esquire Magazine, is the story of Teller, as in the quiet, diminutive half of Penn & Teller. This profile is framed within a crime story, the story of how a Dutch magician named Gerard Bakardy stole one of Teller’s most famous tricks, demonstrated it on YouTube and sold the kit. When Teller caught up to him and even went so far as to sue him in court, Bakardy disappeared.

This is a great article, one of the best I have read in a long time.

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Some other long form articles you might find interesting this weekend:

The Gangster Princess of Beverly Hills: the story of Lisette Lee — heiress, actress, singer, and model — who had it all, including a jet full of pot.

Shattered Dreams: the story of a Russian mathematics genius, his disappearance, and one reporters attempt to find him.

17 Days In November: the story of brothers Jason and Gregory Halman, the latter of which played baseball for the Seattle Mariners, and their descent into death.

Marco Arment, founder of Instapaper, on Build and Analyze Episode 92, which is my favorite podcast:

I’ve lived under this constant stress for the last two years, since it’s been my full-time job, this constant stress that I’m going to wake up in the morning check Twitter and check my email and find that someone has launched and taken all my customers away. I literally dread checking my email every morning and dread checking Twitter every morning just a little bit because I think this might have happened.

I have never worried about all my customers going away, but I always wake up with a dread that yesterday’s sales are going to be 0, that I never have enough money in the bank, that I’m never going to realize the vision I set for this company.

I turn 39 today. I was 23 when I started Infinity Softworks. 16 years have passed with a blink of the eye, the ups and downs, the business growing and the business shrinking. Only twice in that time did I ever consider leaving to join another company, once Intel and once Nike. Both times I decided it wasn’t right for me and realized I probably wouldn’t survive a big company’s culture. I’m not very good at being a cog.

There’s days when everything seems to go well, every decision goes the right way, every dollar made is ten times what it was before. And then there are other days, when nothing seems to go right, where the task list is too high, when I look at my kids and realize they are growing up too fast and I have no time to figure out how to stop it.

I spent years trying to figure out how to stop this roller coaster. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no way to do it, enjoy the ride instead. Experience teaches me that the lows are never as low as I think and the highs are never as high as I think, and that the coaster always goes the other direction eventually.

And when it all gets overwhelming or I have big issues to think about, the best way to handle them is to go for a bike ride.

And that’s where I’m headed right now! See ya!