Periodically it is nice to get away. Last week was that time for my family and me as we drove 1200 miles across three states, saw lots of family and swam in some beautiful swimming holes in central Oregon’s Cascades.

Whenever I go on vacation, though, it seems like I work twice as hard before I leave and twice as hard when I return. Compounding this is that we spent four days of the past 10 in a place where there was no reception at all. A good thing? Maybe. It is weird to be out of touch for that long.

Whatever the case it is good to be back, trying to remember what I was doing before I left. I read two books while I was away, had a great time with my kids, and have memories that I will always remember.

Vacation is good. I’ve been back one day. When’s the next one?

Marco Arment wrote a great post on the camera you have with you:

As part of my 2012 computer-setup shuffle, I also replaced my laptop with a Retina MacBook Pro, and the first thing it screams for is a high-resolution desktop wallpaper. Great, I thought, I’ll just use one of my photos.

Almost nothing I’ve shot since 2010 is usable.

I have been looking through our photos the last few years and have found the same phenomena. Our primary cameras have been iPhones during this time frame.

The cameras on these devices are great for capturing the little moments but they are horrendously bad at really good photographs. There is no way to hold them still enough. This is the beauty of products like Instagram. Those filters cover up so much of that photo garbage.

I’m not in a position to start shooting digital SLRs again — I hope to be in the future — but I sure enjoyed photography a lot more when I got high quality results.

Just a couple of days ago I was lamenting the state of curated news:

The allure of web hits is a strong one and a self-reinforcing event. This is why most blogs post so much garbage: the more posts, the more page views; the more page views, the more revenue per ad.

The problem, though, is that I don’t want to see all this garbage. What I really want is someone to decide what the most important headlines of the day are and present them to me. Nothing more, nothing less.

The next day — THE NEXT DAY — I see a link to a new site called The Evening Edition that does exactly this. The folks who developed it, from Mule Design Studios, wrote this in a blog post:

Now, we’re all constantly awash in a torrent of news-like “updates”, in between fake celebrity death tweets, divorce notices on Facebook and new-puppy tumblrs. How is anyone supposed to sift through all of that to get to the important stuff?

To help answer that, we built Evening Edition. It’s a summary of the day’s news, written by an actual journalist, with links to the best reporting in the world, published once a day.

I’m so excited to have found this resource. It has become an evening stop over on my perusal of news around the web.

Once upon a time I wrote on this blog once per week. In January of this year, though, I decided to write five days a week. My readership has been pretty steady. Excluding people who read via RSS feed, I used to average about 30 hits on the blog per week. Now I am averaging about 300 per week.

What is interesting to me, though, is how easy it would be to turn that into 3000 hits per week. In short, it would take about two extra posts per day. And that includes zero marketing of my web site and assumes I attract no new readers.

Why do I bring this up? Because the allure of web hits is a strong one and a self-reinforcing event. This is why most blogs post so much garbage: the more posts, the more page views; the more page views, the more revenue per ad.

The problem, though, is that I don’t want to see all this garbage. What I really want is someone to decide what the most important headlines of the day are and present them to me. Nothing more, nothing less. And this is hard to find.

I have tried a number of apps and websites and been unsatisfied with the results. Even sites that advertise the top news of the day show it to me in time order. Guess what, folks? The most important news might have been at 8am this morning. It should still be the top headline.

I recognize how hard this is to solve. First, how much is too much and how much is too little? Is the New York Times too much while the BBC app is too little? Second it is impossible to get discovered. There must be three billion “news” apps all trying to do the same thing. Third is that elusive thing called ad revenue, which drives the bulk of the revenues in that business.

My desire to be informed conflicts all too often with the time I have to do it. In the evenings I like to sit with my iPad and catch up on the happenings outside of my little mobile and tech world. After three years, though, I’m still searching for the right app to do it.