Procrastinate and use up essential work time in order to find out what is essential work.
Archive for November, 2009
Use lines when you need more structure in brainstorming.
Use no-lines when you’re feeling like you’re doing an all-out brain dump.
This is a recipe, but essentially a system for creating the ideal meal.
Get egg noodles, carrots, celery, cabbage, and cubed tofu.
Get sriracha sauce, soy sauce, olive oil, and sesame oil.
Start a pan with the olive oil, and fry the tofu with the sesame oil, sriracha, and soy sauce.
Boil the noodles, carrots, cabbage, and celery.
Once they’re boiled throw them in the stirfry pan and add more soy sauce, sesame oil, and sriracha.
Put in a few teaspoons of sugar and serve.
It’s very very close to the #86 at Da Lat.
Subscribe to lots of RSS feeds. But how to organize?
Right now, I’m attempting a three folder system
Folder 1. Actual Reading
This is a folder you could diligently and even addictively read on a daily basis and not feel guilty about, or feel like you were wasting anytime. In fact, as some new media people might have us believing soon, this kind of reading may be a perfectly valid …um, substitution (?)…um, yeah, for actually reading books, you know … that old 15th century hardware, and 18th century software.
Folder 2. Feed Candy (aka Crack, aka Time-Waste Central)
This is anything you’d tag #humor, #awesome, #funny, #tech, #cool, #fail, etc. This is the raison d’etre of the web, but it doesn’t have to be yours. Limit time in this section.
Folder 3. Infrequent Check-Ins (aka Stuff either you think you should be reading but don’t have in Folder 1 or Stuff you use to get your fix when your Crack folder runs out)
Be very careful with this stuff. It might mean you need to go out and exercise, or at least turn the computer off. Or the guilt of how little you’ve accomplished in your intellectual career is growing. And for the stuff that’s just sitting in there? Why isn’t it gone for good? Now there might actually be a good reason for that…It would be great if Google Reader had a hide or archive like feature where you could recall at a later date what your subscriptions were in case you want to resurrect them.
Re: Periodic Infrequent Check-Ins. For example, I might want to read something on the Mozilla Firefox blog every once in a while, so instead of visiting the website and looking for the blog I can just keep that feed in the Reader and check it occasionally
I have had other systems where I go by subject (politics, tech, funnies, etc.) but I think a priority system is better. Also, I recommend never reading from the “All Items” folder because it is way too distracting to switch back and forth between politics, fail, tech, etc.
This is a tough one. I’ve been criticized before for praising someone unworthy of praise, but I generally feel that applause is the balm that heals pretty much just about anything. You can easily applaud for mistakes in a humorous way (like if someone spills something), and it makes someone feel better, or you can applaud for someone who did a bad job (like a kid at a piano recital who screwed up the Entertainer), or you can genuinely applaud for someone who performed well (Barack Obama giving a speech). I’m not putting a whole lot of energy into this, but I can’t really think of a time that applauding would be bad other than applauding at the wrong time.
The system:
Applaud when someone has made a mistake and you know them well enough.
Applaud when someone feels self-conscious about their less than stellar performance.
Applaud when someone does a great job and you want them to know it.
Don’t eat at Friendly’s unless:
You want a tuna melt with french fries and really good pickles and you are in a good enough mood that you don’t mind spending a ton of money on what would cost way less anywhere else with that kind of quality and you want to feel warm and cozy like all those years when everything was ok in life and your mom took you to Friendly’s.
Or ice cream, from the outside counter, on a date, in July.
Recent Comments