The three most important principles of note-taking
Category: writing
There are a bunch of complete build logs available for the Dactyl Manuform and similar mechanical keyboards, so I wanted to focus on the specific design choices I made and why. Huge hat-tip to Zack Freedman, in particular with this video, which served as inspiration that I could pull this off. Why a mechanical keyboard?…
Quick update here: if you are reading this, you’d probably like this short story, named in honor of Dennis Ritchie, FREE and currently burning up the charts for 30 minute reads in Mystery, Thriller, & Suspense. Doing pretty well in Science Fiction and Cyberpunk as well. (link fixed) Do a solid for readers everywhere and…
A cautionary tale of language from Ted Nelson: We might call a common or garden spade– A personalized earth-moving equipment module A mineralogical mini-transport A personalized strategic tellurian command and control module An air-to-ground interface contour adjustment probe A leveraged tactile-feedback geomass delivery system A man-machine energy-to-structure converter A one-to-one individualized geophysical restructurizer A portable…
The awesome thing about the internet is that you never know who’s reading your stuff. Case in point: during the depths of the hypertext linking standards discussions, after folks realized that XLink wasn’t going to work with HTML (not even with XML-flavored XHTML), all kinds of proposals flew around about what to do about it….
Thrilled, THRILLED to announce that I’ve been accepted to the 2010 Viable Paradise workshop. I sent in the first 8000 words of a manuscript that about half of the 7 readers of this blog have looked at. You know, the one that is Science Fiction–literally, fiction about science. So I’ll be spending some time in…
If you dig a bit, there’s all kinds of interesting background material about the terrible disaster ongoing in the Gulf of Mexico. For example, a map of the thousands of rigs and tens-of-thousands of miles of pipelines. Some of the best infographics are from BP itself. And for when you can no longer stand the…
I wish I could say I had something to do with the planning of this: part of Balisage 2010 is a contest to “encourage markup experts to review and to research the current state of wiki markup languages and to generate a proposal that serves to de-babelize the current state of affairs for the long…
I was lured in by a slick promotion, and decided to give a new writing tool a try. WhiteSmoke seems like it’s primarily aimed at folks for whom English is not a first language, but quotes like “Innovative technology for native and non–native English speakers” make it seem like it could help. When I wrote…
At first glance, this seems to be the Snow Leopard of Tinderbox releases–lots of behind-the-scenes technology updates and largely the same core features. If you’re looking for a way to get more organized, it’s worth a look. Link. -m
Celebrating 500 posts since I went to WordPress in May 2006. Prior to that, an additional 730 posts as I floated through a typical evolution of blogging platforms: Easy start: blogger (299 posts in 24 months) Succumbing to the desire to roll your own (259 posts in 12 months) Realizing that rolling your own is…
An editor’s view on the modern publishing market, how it’s changing, and challenges any book faces in running the gauntlet of publication. Worth a read. -m
Take something that’s done, no matter how crappy, and submit it. Right now, I’ll wait… Next time you have something ready, by comparison it will be ever so much better, and you’ll have no excuse to avoid submitting that as well. More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info.
This brilliant bit is almost a throwaway paragraph on page 304, near the end. [Two men in a satirical dialog] managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite sequence of “doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable when the ‘something doubted’ is still a preceding statement ‘unknowability’…
The universe is deeply, fundamentally weird. At the quantum level, all kinds of non-intuitive effects are the building blocks of, well everything. So what if not just observing, but believing in a particular outcome could influence the actual outcome of an experiment? Something like that could explain a lot: many of the claims of perpetual…
Hey readers, all seven of you, can you help me out? I’m perhaps finally switching to a Mac-native text editor, TextWrangler, or if I really like it, BBEdit. Within that app, what’s the easiest way to enter unusual characters not found on a keyboard, say Å¡ (Latin s with háÄek) or ḫ (h-breve below)? In…
Whoa. Check out this brutal takedown of the beloved The Elements of Style. Even though I generally have little patience for grammar nazis, I couldn’t stop reading things like The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to…
The 1980 BBC version with John Cleese. Available for instant watching, but will go away on April 01. Apparently lots of BBC stuff is supposedly going away soon. (I’ve never linked to a Netflix title before, let me know if it doesn’t work) -m
This is fantastic. Brian May (yes THAT Brian May) not only blogs, but talks about all kinds of challenging subjects. Like how and why space and time are linked. Worth a read. -m
I was on the panel with Bob DuCharme, Frank Miller, and Evan Lenz discussing content authoring, from DITA to DocBook with some WordML sprinkled in for good measure. It was a good discussion, nothing earth-shaking. This session was laptopless, so I don’t have any significant notes. -m
To celebrate the unlamented demise of Valleywag, use as many of the ten insulting words you should know (along with any other appropriate words) as you can in a single short paragraph. Post in the comments below. This site is for geeks of all ages, so keep things PG. All right, PG-13. My favorite will…
I’ve successfully completed the National Novel Writing Month challenge–to write 50,000 words during the month of November–for three years running, and now I have three draft novels sitting around. At some point, racking up mere drafts gets to be pathetic, so this November I’m picking one to dig into with a heavy editing pass. I’m…
Without any exception I can think of: every top-notch software developer I know is also a skilled technical writer. Technical writing requires skill in choosing words, constructing sentences and paragraphs, and putting together the pieces in the right order to most effectively present the material. In contrast, narrative writing requires an eye towards the bigger…
I’m working on a piece of software that, while not the answer to world peace, is still pretty neat and approaches a specific problem in a fresh way. The project is at the stage where it needs to get unveiled to early adopters in the target audience. So how does one introduce possibly unfamiliar concepts…
Going away for a week (so possibly minimal posting here). What am I bringing to read? The Watchmen Analog magazine (Nov 2008 issue featuring Robert Sawyer) Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive Make magazine (issue 15, DIY music) Check some of these out. What do you like to read when travelling? -m
Mur Lafferty’s new superhero novel is making the rounds. She’s encouraging everyone to buy a printed copy on August 25 (buy it here) to make a nice impression in the bestseller lists. I’m a sucker for these kinds of promotions. The full text also recently appeared on the Escape Pod feed, under a Creative Commons…
Lajos Egri’s book has some good content, but it’s hard to read. I mean, physically difficult. I don’t have the necessary copyright law ninja skills to be sure, but I think this 1946 book might be in the public domain, judging by the many editions available on Amazon. But stay away from this one, published…
From the observing-the-human-condition department. Seems I have a hard to pronounce name. For the record my first name has a long I; it’s MY-ka, not MEE-ka. When someone gets it wrong, I don’t hold anything against them. Afterall, how to pronounce any given name is pretty arbitrary. But there are a few names that are…
Andy King’s Website Optimization is now in print from O’Reilly. This book covers it all: performance, SEO, conversion rates, analytics, you name it. If you run a web site, you’ll find this useful. I tech edited and contributed a small portion, about the growing trend of metadata as site advantage. Go check it out. -m
All writing depends on conflict (without which there is no story), but there’s more than one kind. The obvious kind is steadily building tension with unknown outcome. The battle between good and evil in most stories is like this, though admittedly the good guys usually win. More subtle is “dramatic irony” where the reader knows…