Blog
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Survival First things first: I’m grateful for surviving this difficult, weird and straight-up dystopian year. 2020 was the absolute worst; although the year will permanently leave its mark in our memories, we’re all ready to leave it behind, ready to move on. Who could have, apart from maybe Bill Gates during during 2014 Ted Talk,…
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While perusing Aaron’s Swartz’s blog, I stopped and read his post titled “Writing A Book: Part 2”. In this post, Aaron swoons over Ira Glass’s unparalleled storytelling skills. Wanting to learn more about Ira, I whipped out my iPhone, opened up my YouTube app, and loaded a (podcast) interview where Ira Glass shares his thoughts…
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Like almost everyone else working remotely due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, I struggled with adjusting to the work from home situation, more than I could’ve possibly anticipated. I found difficulty in my daily routines suddenly disappearing; my deeply ingrained habits vanished out of thin air: no more commuting to the office; no more breathing…
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Fred the dog beater Look at the above example, the four sentences. Now, take each of those sentences and imagine you poll an audience of 100 people, asking them the following question: “Does the author want you [the reader] to give Fred either a thumbs up or thumbs up?” How do you think the audience…
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Like many other aspiring authors, I’m always sharpening my writing skills, dozens of writing books (including one of my favorites: On Writing by Stephen King) lined up on my bookshelf. Almost all these books share the same stance when comparing the active and passive voices. They strongly prefer the active voice over the passive voice.…
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There are no shortcuts to becoming a great writer. As Stephen King says, great writers need to read a lot and write a lot. But that’s not enough. Nope. I’d argue you need to take writing one step further: imitate good writing. Imitating great tennis players When I was a young boy, about 8 or…
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One silver lining of COVID-19 is that I’m working remotely from home and despite the constant interruptions, I’ve grown to appreciate situation. I’m afforded experiences not normally available to me when working physically in the office. Among which is seeing my daughter grow up, right before my eyes. Every day, I catch these fleeting moments,…
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I serendipitously stumbled on another Zettelkasten desktop application called Zettlr. Perusing the online forum over at Zettelkasten.de, I had noticed that at least three of four members repping the app in their signatures. Naturally, I was curious so I followed the scent on the trail and loaded up the Zettlr website in my browser. After…
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I’m obsessed with personal information management (PIM) and as I learn more about the discipline, one concept continues to repeatedly crop up: Zettelkasten. I first learned about Zettelkasten after reading one of my favorite books “How to take smart notes”, and since then, I’m sold on the idea and continue to tweak my digital workflow…
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Generally speaking, there two ways people store their digital assets. Some file their digital assets— PDF documents, images, videos, bookmarks and so on — into neat, hierarchical structures. In the other camp are people who leverage tagging, assigning one or more key words to their files. When retrieving assets, these people tend to leverage their…
