After taking a much needed nap this afternoon, I was grateful that I ended up honoring a commitment I had made earlier in the day to venture out, to do something new, to show a kindness to strangers. I could easily have fallen back on the excuse of being too tired. And sometimes I am actually too tired to do new things. Instead, I was rewarded by the warmth of new friends.
One of the reasons I have favored CNN's State of the Union (SOTU) (with Jake Tapper) from among the "Big Five" Sunday morning talk shows is the ready availability of transcripts. Even though I often gobble down an episode as a podcast played at 2x normal speed, I have aspired to return to a closer study of the arguments from the morning; transcripts would clearly help in such a study.
I'm glad to report that I have been wrong in believing in that CNN was alone in providing transcripts. In fact, all the other four Sunday talk shows also have them:
I rather enjoy Facebook. Perhaps too much, thus leading me to act against my own interests by trading away my privacy to a voracious entity whose CEO had a long history of not respecting our privacy. I've not yet left FB but have taken little steps to pare back its place in my life. For example, I deleted the FB and Messenger apps on my devices and use FB through the web browser on my laptop and phones now. Baby steps for sure. Those apps are notorious for sucking up lots of data into Facebook from right under my fingers.
Maybe an upside to cutting back on Facebook is returning more earnestly to blogging: both writing and reading them. It's been a while since I regularly used a RSS/feed reader to track the news; it's telling how much I have abandoned reading my feeds to Twitter and Facebook instead. But I took a tiny step in the other direction a couple of weeks ago by installing ViennaRSS/vienna-rss: Vienna is a free and open-source RSS/Atom newsreader for macOS.
[Work in Progress]
As I start to organize my block for disaster preparation, I'm wondering about good software we can use to organize ourselves. Are there any existing services that could be useful?
Some things I'd like to look at:
[Work in Progress]
In this post, I will outline how I plan to learn the ins and outs of the iPhone and the iPad. I believe that these two devices, which both run iOS, are especially important devices for many of my prospective clients, including seniors.
What are the important tasks to learn? How do I keep up with the latest developments? How do I teach people systematically how to use these devices?
[Work in progress]
Because I took a lot of photos with friends this Thanksgiving weekend, I figured that it would be a good time to take some next steps on what I wrote in Managing and sharing your photos:
One of the most emotionally resonant digital tasks that many of us, including seniors, love to do is taking, managing, and sharing photos. There is a lot to say about this topic. I have my own workflow involving my Android phones for taking photos, Flickr (and now Google Photos) for storage, and Facebook (primarily) for sharing. I've not been totally happy with this workflow and am working to change it. I'm looking for workflows that will work for a wide range of people using many different devices, software wanting to satisfy many different needs.
One of the most emotionally resonant digital tasks that many of us, including seniors, love to do is taking, managing, and sharing photos. There is a lot to say about this topic. I have my own workflow involving my Android phones for taking photos, Flickr (and now Google Photos) for storage, and Facebook (primarily) for sharing. I've not been totally happy with this workflow and am working to change it. I'm looking for workflows that will work for a wide range of people using many different devices, software wanting to satisfy many different needs.
I am learning a lot from friends on Facebook about what they do with digital photos, including using Nixplay photo frames, sharing photos on iOS using iOS - Photos - Apple, broadcasting photos to a TV using Chromecast. I'm working on distilling those ideas. Just as I was about to buy a Nixplay frame, I see that from the comment section for The Best Digital Photo Frame: Wirecutter Reviews how complicated the various technical solutions can actually be. What's new there?
Do you struggle with having more projects than you can productively work on simulatenously? I certainly do. That's why I have been attracted to the Personal Kanban productivity system, which puts a lot of emphasis on visualizing, pruning, and limiting one's "Work in Progress" (WIP). I've not been sufficiently serious about setting realistic limits on my WIP: witness my overflowing list of projects started but essentially zombified. How many projects survive on my list when I have neither the energy to advance them nor the will to kill them?
Face it: I'm not going to cure my deep rooted habit of being WIPed overnight. Yesterday, I took tiny steps in the right direction by forcing myself to schedule dedicated times for the next steps for some of my projects. Theoretically, a rigorously maintained and enforced calendar is a good visualization of WIP and of incipient (rampant?) overcommitment. There's probably something to learn from articles like How To: Setting Your Personal WIP Limit | Personal Kanban. The start of the article is to the point:
There are only two rules in Personal Kanban.
Visualize Your Work
and
Limit Your Work in Progress
But I need to find the time to read the rest of the article first!
Masha Gessen ends on a somewhat positive note in her Nov 2016 essay Autocracy: Rules for Survival | The New York Review of Books:
Rule #6: Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump’s persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump’s all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform—like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won with the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance—stubborn, uncompromising, outraged—should be.
This morning, after a long break from writing journalistically in the black Moleskine I carry around in my backpack, I scrawled:
Stand back to see where my handwriting hand leads me right now. Early morning writing can sometimes be downright magical, illuminating hitherto dark spaces of the mind and heart.
What followed was a trance of fluidity that I rarely have when writing on my computer. What do we know about the difference between writing in a paper journal and on a computer?