Edward Vielmetti is inviting you to A2B3 lunch on Thursday at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

on the virtue of cheap paper

At various times I've carried beautiful little notebooks in my pocket - fancy little bound volumes of paper designed to capture big thoughts and clever notions.  So fancy (and expensive), in fact, that I felt bad about writing in them unless there was something so clever that it deserved being saved into perpetuity.

It was thus reassuring and helpful to go into a big box office supply store and get a modest supply of cheap disposable spiral bound pads, with paper so cheap that it is clear that they are designed to be used and then tossed when you are done with them.  That plus a supply of cheap pens means that I can have something in my pocket to write things down on and not have to worry that I have to be profound at all.

Pretending to be on an airplane

I was on a trip to Rhode Island last week for a conference(RILA09).  That gave me a chance to enter "airplane mode", that rare time in my life when I have lots of time to spend in contemplation but very little network connectivity. And I have to say, I enjoy that time immensely, perhaps more than I enjoy any individual hour trying to be engaged with the net.

Airplane mode is a very distinctive time and place to be in.  You are typically either in an airplane terminal with time to wait for your flight, or sitting buckled into a seat.  Each experience is essentially the same each time you go, with little meaningful distinction between individual flights; the seat might be a bit noisier or more comfortable, and the terminal a bit more or less dingy, but it's all of a piece.

The result then is that I am transported into a new place with this effort, a place where I can write a postcard, read a long-forgotten book, or work within the confines
of my laptop without the infinite global distraction of the Internet.  Frankly, the infinite global distraction  of the Internet is not conducive to reasonable thought - it demands attention, reply, responsiveness, and engagement, 24/7, whether you want it or not.

It's hard, but not impossible, to reconstruct airplane mode in the rest of the day.  The appropriate cafe can be a part of it, at least for the ritual coffee experience. It helps a lot to have a tool like Freedom (Mac OS X) that enforces a bit of network downtime for you by shutting down all Internet links for a period of time.  The telephone is
harder, but almost every call can be made to wait if you plan carefully enough to create a signal for what is actually urgent.

When I'm offline, I write with different tools, and thus my thinking is different.  Entering text into "vim", my old standby favorite text mode editor, triggers different brainwaves that does keying things carefully into a web form.  Not feeling like I have to hyperlink every third word frees up the brain for internal connections instead of external
connections.  There's rarely a need to hide from flashing distracting advertising or to spend time deleting spam.

Once upon a time, being online was the exception rather than the rule - some part of my far away brain remembers that and wants to get back to that earlier, simpler day.

--

notes afterwards.

Freedom: previously described here.

a possible answer for using vim as an alternative text editor in firefox

"once upon a time" is roughly the UUCP era, when there was email and netnews but no web and hardly ever any real time communications unless you were all logged into the same machine.

Distraction, scatter, gather, focus, discardia: a five part cycle

Herein a recipe for producing what looks like some kind of careful long term reasonable insight into a question, but what is really a coping strategy for the complete inability to be attentive to anything for very long.

Be distracted away from the thing you are supposed to be doing; that part is pretty easy.  Wander off randomly into the wilderness of recent changes to the Internet or a random page in your personal knowledge management heap or some long-dusty book in Google Books.  Note some small fragment of something that isn't at all relevant to what everyone else seems to be looking at right now but that somehow temporarily holds your interest long enough to compose a few paragraphs with a few links.  Write about it here; try with desperation to find a category it should already belong to so that it has some illusion of continuity with what you have been doing all along.  Hit "save", hit "publish", and return to the task at hand.

Scatter your attention all over the Internet to a range of places where recent changes seem to be more predominant.  Post to Twitter, or Facebook, or your favorite online newspaper's best reader comments section, or to some seasonally or topically appropriate blog where you know that the author welcomes your readership.  Be outwardly visible and pay attention to someone else, something else, some place other than yourself.  Make the rounds of the usual places and hit a few new ones.  Stop before everyone is asleep.

Gather up things you have written on a topic, things captured during previous distractions or scattered to the four winds.  If there is a search engine, search for your own long-forgotten commentary on something, and collect it back to somewhere central.  If all you have is paper, leaf through it steadily and methodically until inevitably that journal yields a relevant fragment.   Pile up the fragments, enumerate them, list them out carefully as though they were bits of papyrus needing careful reassembly.  See what you might have known in the past and re-know it, relearn it.

Then, when all of the distract-scatter-gather process has all been put into motion, can you focus on that one thing you have been getting ready to do all this time.  Come back to what you have gathered up and re-assess the work as a whole.  Allow yourself to work methodically through the work you have gathered together, to pull it apart, to see what the whole set looks like and not just little bits of it.   Pull through everything that is relevant and stitch it all together into something new, something that lasts longer than a simple short distraction but that hold and sustain a concentrated narrative with examples and ideas and themes and notions pulled out from a long time.

The whole process should run on some cycle appropriate for the task or the season.  As I write, I think about the quarterly holiday of Discardia, where you celebrate letting go, and of all of the distracted and scattered thinking I have about that event that culminates in an every three months deliberate effort to tidy things up.  The collected effort of pulling things together means not only that you have everything in mind but also that you can free yourself of the distractions that eventually got you here - and that you get, periodically, a chance to edit out some randomness and make it look like you are more organized and orderly than your easily-distracted nature would allow.

This season's Discardia holiday is coming up on June 20-22, 2009.

Blog more, twitter less

Here's an easy recipe for keeping your habits for writing longer format pieces than the 140 character limits of Twitter will allow.

1.  Write the pithy 140 character Twitter piece, though limit it for a few other technical reasons to 120 or so, better for others to copy.

2.  Use the headline as a key part of a longer piece that you've always wanted to write.  It might be a punch line inside, it might be a jumping off point for an essay on something completely different, or it might simply be a straightforward summary.  In any case, write around the start of your post.

3.  Go into your favorite blog editing tool and write enough in the input box for your post so that you fill it completely.  You aren't constrained by 140 characters there, but there's still some reasonable limit, and you don't want to go over.

Blogging is good for when you have more to say; twitter helps you say it in less words.  Use both.

How to write for the web -

Writing for the Internet is not the same as writing for print.  Here are ten rules of thumb that will help you shape your writing that's designed for the screen and to help you adapt and reform words that were first printed out in ways that make them easier to manage.

1. The paragraph is the unit of composition.  Keep your paragraphs together, making it possible to have any one of them pulled out and quoted in some other part of the internet without losing too much in the process.  If your narrative has complicated paragraphs, be aware that someone might pull out only a sentence from it.
2. Write where it's easy to find what you said.  

Credits: (1) Strunk and White "Elements of Style" (2) Morville "Findability" (3) Nancy White "community_indicators" (4) "because that's where the money is"

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac - grandfather of the Leopold Bros.

This 1948 collection of essays about the changing of the seasons in Wisconsin was on my parents bookshelf, and sits on mine in the dining room where various bits of natural history live.

There is an essay or three for each month.  Here's some part of November captured in words as "If I Were The Wind"

The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry.  The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playful whirls, and the wind hurries on.

In the marsh, long windy waves surge across the grassy sloughs, beat against the far willows.  A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.

On the sandbar there is only wind, and the river sliding seaward.  Every wisp of grass is drawing circles on the sand.  I wander over the bar to a driftwood log, where I sit and listen to the universal roar, and to the tinkle of wavelets on the shore.  The river is lifeless: not a duck, heron, marsh-hawk, or gull but has sought refuge from wind.

The Aldo Leopold Foundation carries on his conservation work:

Leopold defined conservation as a way of life in which land does well for its inhabitants, citizens do well by their land, and both end up better by reason of partnership. Aldo Leopold recognized that no matter how sophisticated we become, people will always depend on the land—“the land” being shorthand for the community that not only includes and values people but also plants, animals, soils, and waters, from the highest strata of the atmosphere to the depths of the ocean. We often take natural resources and ecosystems for granted, but, ultimately, the planet’s natural communities and natural functions are what sustain our economy and enrich our lives. “That land is a community,” Leopold wrote, “is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”

Aldo is the grandfather of Scott and Todd Leopold, who ran the Leopold Bros brewpub and distillery from a converted brake factory on Main Street in Ann Arbor.  (Here's an interview of Todd Leopold on Teeter Talk.) Scott and Todd have relocated to Colorado, where they have focused on their small batch, hand distilled spirits.

the blogger's secret: how to write a great weblog

"Write well, write often, and write with passion." (Jack Shedd)

Jack has more in a rant that's making the rounds; the opposite of the great weblog is the "cheese food manufacturing" that Merlin Mann observes as dominating the world of "pro bloggers".

In some sense, this triple of {well, often, with passion} echoes the computer systems lament of {better, faster, cheaper} - "pick any two" is the easiest answer. It's possible to write often and well, but what you get is a wire service, with a style guide that homogenizes the passion right out of the system. Writing well and with passion and not often gives you an occasional lovely essay but not enough page views to get ads worth anything. And writing often and with passion generally is all about passion for attention and for the ad-fueled money that goes with it.

threequel === threequal - of movies, code, and the l33t

A few definitions for you, with citations from the wild; spelling is as in the original with Google counts of occurences, if possible.

In short: threequel and 3quel are about movies; threequal is the "===" operator; 3qual is hacker speak. More or less.

threequel (33,900):

When I was a kid, I assumed all third installments in a horror series had to capitalize on the ability to turn the “3″ in the title into “3-D.” Now, looking back, I only really remember (and can only find proof of) Jaws 3-D, Friday the 13th 3-D and Amityville 3-D. But that isn’t stopping me from assuming Hollywood will once again abuse the gimmick.

"Hollywood steps up to the 3-D Threequel", SpoutBlog 2008

Spider-Man 3. Shrek 3. Pirates of the Caribbean 3. When did third-installment movies make a comeback? There's already a special multiplex in Hell that shows only Lethal Weapon 3, Beverly Hills Cop 3, and Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies Go to College. Below, we evaluate the lasting contributions of other classically bad "threequels."

"Attack of the Threequel", New York Magazine, 2007

threequal (1,540):

The operator === is unique to Ruby (as far as I am aware). The common name for it is the case equality operator because it is used implicitly by case statements. But this is slightly misleading, as I said earlier, because it is not really "equality" at all. In this book, I often use the term relationship operator. I did not invent this term, but I can't find its origin, and it is not in common use today. The "hip and trendy" name for this is the threequal operator ("three equals").

_The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming_, Second Edition.

Every class typically has a "threequal" operator === defined. The expression class === instance will be true if the instance belongs to the class. The relationship operator is usually known as the case equality operator because it is used implicitly in a case statement. This is therefore a way to act on the class of an expression.

_The Ruby Way_

So (1..5) === 3 is true because 3 is in that range, but 3 isn't equal to that range, so 3 === (1..5) doesn't return true. Logical enough. If you're wondering how you're supposed to remember all this, you aren't. You don't really even need to know it. The === method exists for controlling how a case/when block will evaluate an object. It should never be used by humans. It is code written to be consumed by other code, specifically, by case and when.

Giles Bowkett, What is Threequals?, 2007

3qual: (2,590)

AR3 M3N AND WOMAN 3QUAL....
"DO YOU THINK W3R3 3QUAL DO TH3 POLLZ..?.."

Bebo member EQUALZ-,

Helo im keia liev on one world wit u and i si one p3rson at wants 2 haev a busiens r blong 2 onaself but 2rn stay onley money wil 2 apley 2 inv3st onley i th3n want u or whoev3r who r3ad emale thes help s3nd mon3y gievs me for uess in da inv3stment do3s a busiens naither wil 3qual a farm no mat3r whan i has wil 3nough money 2 wil can pay bak u i promiess taht wil return it gievs u until si finish3d onley u s3nd monay comes 2 giev me

a deactivated account on help.com

WE!!!!11!1 OMG WTF HOLD TH3SE TRUTHS 2 B SELF-EVIEDNT TAHT AL MAN R CREAETD 3QUAL TAHT TH3Y R 3NDOWED BY THEYRE CR3A2R WIT CERTANE UNALEINABLA RIGHTS TAHT MONG THASA R LIEF LIEBRTY AND TEH PURSUIT OF HAPIENS

Operation Overlord, Official Game Forums: Historical Quotes Done Right

3quel (1,200):

In its pre-TV glory days, Hollywood made a few series--Andy Hardy, The Thin Man, the Bob Hope-- Bing Crosby Road comedies, and horror films with the whole Frankenstein family. But these were middling fare. The big-ticket items were singular sensations. Nobody made a sequel to Gone With the Wind, Casablanca or Ben-Hur. The industry didn't think in roman numerals until The Godfather, Part II in 1974. But with the triumph of special-effects fantasies like Star Wars, sequels became a smart way to print money. Now they are needed to turn bad years into good ones. The difference between the box-office slump of 2005 and the rebound last year can be attributed to one film: Pirates 2. That's why the trifecta of threequels is crucial to Hollywood's health.

Time Magazine, "The Year of the 3quel" Jan 4, 2007

=== (7,220,000 in Google Code Search; unsearchable in Google)

Suppose though that we don't want to allow a string containing a three to match with a number three. Let's add another equals.

if (x === y + z) {alert('true');}

This still does a comparison between x and the result of adding y and z but now no conversion of numbers into strings (in fact no type conversions at all) is permitted when doing the actual comparison. Now the values being compared must be of the same data type as well as have the same value. A string containing a three is not of the same type as a number containing a three and so the comparison evaluates as false.

About.com: Javascript - Equals, Equals Equals, or Equals Equals Equals

The blogger's secret: how to be an expert about anything

You can be an expert with the blogger's secret:

1. Pick a topic.
2. Write about it twice a day.
3. At the end of six months, you will be an expert.

Note well: choose carefully what you want to be an expert about! It's mighty hard to be an expert about more than one thing this way, just because it consumes so much time.

The power of the hand-written note

I used to send a lot more postcards, back in the day when I was on airplanes all the time.

Jason Womack sends this out in his newsletter recently, about holiday cards and card writing in general:

Chances are however you celebrate the closing of one year and the opening of another, you will connect with more people in your network during the holiday season.

People wonder how I have time for it all. They ask me, "You REALLY write handwritten cards weekly?" My answer is yes...and I love it.

Here's how I do it:

* I buy a 5-10 cards at a time. I write my return address and put a first class stamp on it, so it's ready to go. I put those cards into an "action" folder that goes into my briefcase.

* Whenever I have some down time like when I'm early to a meeting, sitting at an airport, waiting for a seminar to begin, or on a break while coaching, I simply open that folder. Really, all I need is 4 minutes, and I can get it done quickly and easily!

* For the holidays, I prefer to write a personal note, rather than just sign my name. If you're going to make the effort to reach out, say something!

I learned to write postcards from my grandfather Marshall Kay, a geologist who would send appropriate ones from his field trips. Perhaps the solution is more field trips to exotic locations (or more locations that provide postcards as handy self-promotional materials).

Technorati Tags: postcard, writing