I had a coach in high school that would say things that sometimes seemed counter intuitive.  For instance, one saying that always made me laugh inside was, “If you want to run faster, then run faster.”  At first glance this statement seems to make no sense at all.  But upon further inspection, it seems Coach was smarter than I gave him credit for.

You see, the way you train your body to run fast is to continually push yourself to the limit of how fast you run.  You make yourself run as fast as you can.  Your muscles will soon become used to the new level of stress and you will be able to push yourself a little harder and a little faster.  Over time, your speed and strength will increase and you will be a “faster runner.”

I’ve been thinking about this little lesson Coach taught me about pushing yourself to the limit to see improvement and I think it is a principle that can be applied to more areas than athletic training.  It is a principle that can be used to see improvement in any area of your life.  If you want to write better, then push yourself and write better.  If you want to be a better programmer, then push yourself and program better.  If you want to be a better salesman, then push yourself and sell better.

What is it that you want to see improve in your life?  My challenge to you is to push yourself.  Find where you think your limit is and push past it.  If you continually push yourself to do better, soon you will find that what you thought was your ceiling might actually be your new floor.

Yesterday I saw a tweet from John Gruber about an iPhone bookmarklet that would let you post the current url you are viewing in your iPhone’s Safari browser to Twitter using Tweetie.

Here is the final destination of his tweet.

This sounded like a cool trick that I would like to use with Twitterrific. (I am too cheap to pay for Tweetie and Twitterrific is free.  I love me some free apps.) I decided to try and duplicate the trick to work with Twitterific.  After a few different variations of the javascript command, I was able to get it working.  I liked the idea so much I thought I would share it.

The first step is to open your iPhone’s browser and enter "About:blank" as the URL you want to navigate to.

Next, tap the "+" at the bottom of the screen to bring up the "Add Bookmark" popup.

Click "Add Bookmark" and then enter in "Post to Twitter" or what ever else you want the bookmarklet to be called.

The next step in the process will be done on your computer.  This will require you to have your bookmarks synced with Safari.  Once the bookmark shows up in your Safari bookmark list you will be able to complete the last step.

To complete this step, all you need to do is change the address from "About:blank" to

javascript:window.location=’twitterrific:///post?message=’+escape(window.location)

If you like, you can create a bookmark folder for your iPhone to keep your iPhone bookmarklets seperate from your desktop bookmarks. This bookmark will not work on your computer. It will only work on the iPhone.  Once the bookmark syncs back to your iPhone you are ready to go.

Now you can share webpages directly from your Safari browser on your iPhone with Twitter via Twitterrific.  All you need to do is navigate to the page you would like to share and pull up your bookmarks and select "Post to Twitter" or whatever you decided to name the bookmarklet.  Safari will close and Twitterrific will open with the url of the web page in the dialoge box ready for you to post to Twitter.  If the length of the url is over a certain amount, Twitterrific will automatically generate a tinyurl for the link.

Enjoy.

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Transition is the word of the day.  Logan and I are moving back to Texas.  We have been living in Washington, DC for the last 6 months, but we are moving back to Texas.

Right now we are at a hotel in Gadsden, AL on our way back to DC.  We have been in Texas for the last 3 weeks getting ready for the move.  We have worked out the details of our employment situation and have been looking for housing.  We are curently on our way back to DC to pack up our sutff and start the trip back to Texas.

I will be working with YWAM Tyler’s Communication department focusing on web design.  I am really excited about this move.  I am really looking forward to the full time “nerdery” that awaits me!!!  This will be my first full time position as a web/graphic designer.  I am ready for the challenge and the future development of my design skills.

We should be back in Texas around the 11th of November.  The next week or so will be spen mostly in the car.  We are travelling to DC, Ohio and Michigan and then back to Texas.

I took my new Nikon D40 to Capitol Hill tonight for a trial run. I arrived on Capitol Hill about 40 minutes before sunset. I am really pleased with the performance of the camera and how the pictures turned out.

Here are a few pictures for your viewing pleasure…Please excuse the smudges that are visible on a few of the pictures.  I will have to be more careful that my fingers don’t touch the lens on the next outing.

I recently purchased a new camera.  The steps in my decision making process where as follows:

1. Shopping around on the internet.
2. Probing the minds of my friends that have experience with photography.
3. Going to a few electronics stores to get my hands on some real cameras.
4. And, finally looking at my bank account to see where reality and desire were inevitably going to intersect,

I decided to purchase Nikon’s D40.

The Nikon D40 with 18-55mm lens kit.

I read several reviews about this camera and found nothing but praise from both novice and professional users. The clincher for me was the description of the camera as and entry level DSLR unit. Nikon marketed this camera to first time DSLR users. I fall into this category. This is my first purchase of a camera above the grade of a cheap point and shoot digital camera. I have toyed around with the controls on the camera and they seem to be pretty intuitive, even for a beginner like me. I am excited to take the camera out on the town and see what kind of pictures it is going to actually let me take.

Tonight will be the maiden voyage. My wife and I are heading to Capitol Hill this afternoon to see what she can do. I will post some of the photos from the adventure in the next day or so.

If you have logged on to kurthurst.com before, you will definitely notice the new look of the site. I recently switched hosting companies for my other website kurtandlogan.com because of the technical limitations of my previous host. I decided to go with Bluehost as my new provider. With the hosting package I chose I was able to host this site for absolutely nothing. I don’t care where your from, free is a good price.

I decided to switch kurthurst.com over to the new host and use Wordpress as my CMS. I previously used a free blogger blog and had my domain name mapped to Google’s servers. I am very pleased with how the new set up is going to free me up to make the modifications and customizations that I was not able to previously make.

I have decided not to import my previous post into this new blog. If you would like to browse through the old stuff you may do so here. I have decided to start fresh and see what happens.

I have redirected my RSS feed via feedburner, so if you were subscribed before you don’t need to do anything. (I am sure that is a relief to both of you.) If you are new to the site and would like to subscribe you can get the feed here.