Author: William Gallagher

That was September 2014…

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Excuse me? That was September? Are we not halfway or more through October? We are and if you feel this is a bit late for my confession and atonement for what I did or didn’t do in September, you are right. If you are suspecting that this delay has been an avoiding tactic because I didn’t want to admit to you that September was poor, well, I don’t want to admit it to you.

I just looked up August’s entry and it warns that September is dire. Warnings are true.

Writing (total approximately 53,880)
Wrote 8,500 words in Droitwich. Blogging book.
500 words short story Time Gentlemen Please
Time and the Conway Twitty Appreciation Society pitch (400 words) Wrote, illustrated and delivered guest blog to Coffee Birmingham (500 words)
Theatre programme copywriting for the Birmingham Rep (2 pieces, total 2,000 words) 4 The Blank Screen newsletters (3,800 words)
132 The Blank Screen blog posts (35,580 words)
4 Self Distract blog posts (2,600 words)

Room 204 Buddying
Took over the running of this and doubled the number of writers in it Produced buddying list and teased it out releasing news in episodes Organised a social event for Room 204 Buddies (7 people)
Facebook chats, emails and meetings

Events and meetings
Write On! Young Writers session in Burton (10 kids
The Blank Screen day-long workshop in Newcastle (13 people)
Depped for Polly Wright leading a reader/writer group (first of two) (7 people)
Produced Erica Whyman event at the Courtyard Theatre for Writers’ Guild (16 people) Chaired my last Screenwriters’ Forum meeting
Chaired my first Writers’ Guild meeting
Royal Television Society committee meeting
Ran one official mental health writing session and one unofficial (7 people) Ava/Soundscapes day meeting
Discussing Arts Council Funding application process with James Urquhart Discussing Arts Council Funding application with Jonathan Davidson Jeff Phelps River Passage and Room 204 Buddying system planning meeting Author visit to Bewdley school: (100 kids)
Met with Nick Fogg of Room 204

Attended
Kate Bush concert (called it a delicate shotgun)
Na Kingsley’s e x p a n d i n g
Birmingham Literature Festival Creative Launch preview
Peaky Blinders launch
Snippets

Pitches
2 (2 successful)

Other
Took over Mailchimp duties for Writers’ Guild
Set up Mailchimp and sent promos for Screenwriters’ Forum
Wrote Young Writers’ exercises for other groups
Paperback edition of Filling the Blank Screen published
One copy of The Blank Screen book on sale secondhand for over £4,000

Video: Forbes on the best productivity apps

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There’s a pile in here that I hadn’t heard of. I think the format of having two blokes stand there talking to each other is as irritating in this as it is on television – what, no, really, I am so surprised to learn of this app you’ve only mentioned in every rehearsal and while we were writing the script – but what they’ve got to say is useful.

What You Eat Affects Your Productivity

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So grab a bottle of whisky, put your feet up with a burger and read this:

Think back to your most productive workday in the past week. Now ask yourself: On that afternoon, what did you have for lunch?

When we think about the factors that contribute to workplace performance, we rarely give much consideration to food. For those of us battling to stay on top of emails, meetings, and deadlines, food is simply fuel.

But as it turns out, this analogy is misleading. The foods we eat affect us more than we realize. With fuel, you can reliably expect the same performance from your car no matter what brand of unleaded you put in your tank. Food is different. Imagine a world where filling up at Mobil meant avoiding all traffic and using BP meant driving no faster than 20 miles an hour. Would you then be so cavalier about where you purchased your gas?

Food has a direct impact on our cognitive performance, which is why a poor decision at lunch can derail an entire afternoon.

What You Eat Affects Your Productivity – Ron Friedman, Harvard Business Review (17 October 2014

Read the full piece.

Priorities for people who disagree with me

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I think sorting things into priority order is a way of prevarication and it’s a stupid way, too: the time you spend doing that, you could be doing the stuff. And when you’ve got your rinky-dinky perfectly-prioritised list done just so, something else will come up.

But I stand alone on this, or at least in very little company. And others make much more of the issue. Much more:

But most of the time we can simply choose to not be busy. Yes, this means less important things won’t get done, gasp! But… if they’re less important, who cares? This isn’t lazy, this is smart.

Problems with busyness arise when we feel like victims. “Gawd, if only I wasn’t so busy I would do xyz instead.” But, if it’s actually more important, why not do that instead. And if it’s not as important, stop stressing over not doing it!

Would you rather complete less important things and be busy and stressed all the time, or would you rather focus on what’s important, not caring for the unimportant, and having a more relaxing and less stressed life?

A Lack of Time is a Lack of Priorities – ALex Vermeer, alexvermeer.com (April 2013)

Read the full piece if you want to think about urgent versus important – which is a fair point – and not a gigantic amount else.

My favourite OS X Yosemite feature… yet to be

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It’s not fair to say this to you yet because I’m only tried it exactly once and exactly one minute ago. But it didn’t entirely work and I can’t see why, so I want to explore it. And also, frankly, tease you.

This is the feature and this is the bit that is working: I can now make phone calls from my Mac. It uses my iPhone but that’s the thing, it uses it, I don’t. Scroll through my Contacts list and click or right click on any phone number anywhere – in an email, on a website, in an OmniFocus task – and I can dial it from there. It may ring using my phone but you don’t care and I don’t notice: the sound comes out of my Mac’s speakers and my voice is sent via the Mac’s microphone.

I found the call quality to be a bit crackly and the person I called – okay, it was my mother – had trouble hearing me but it did work and it was useful.

Except.

I realise now that I will use this for all my calls when I’m in my office because it’s just so handy but I did originally want to use it for recording interviews. And that’s the bit I can’t get to work yet. I use Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro a lot and it’s the obvious choice for this kind of thing but it isn’t working for me yet. I tried grabbing the audio from FaceTime, the application that the Mac uses to do these calls and got exactly nothing recorded. I tried switching to have Audio Hijack Pro grab my system audio – so every little bleep and whistle my Mac makes – and that did work except it audibly dropped the volume on the call so that now I was having trouble hearing my mother.

I wonder what we’ve both just agreed to.

So let’s consider the interview-recording to be a work in progress but, blimey, calling from your Mac. As with so many things, this is the way it should always have been – and so this is the way it will be. If you’re on a PC then thank you for reading this far but you’re going to get this Mac feature as soon as Microsoft finishes its cycle. That would be stage 1) deriding Apple, stage 2) claiming you could always do that anyway with a PC, stage 3) announcing it as a new feature and hoping you don’t notice Apple’s already done it, stage 4) eventually shipping the new feature and stage 5) eventually shipping a version that works.

Jony Ive on design, theft and tomatoes

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It’s clearly an edited video and you’ll want them to have posted the full thing but Vanity Fair has done an interesting interview with Apple’s Jony Ive:

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and Apple’s senior vice president of design, Jonathan Ive, sat down for a wide-ranging discussion at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco.

Ive spoke candidly about what he learned from late Apple founder and C.E.O. Steve Jobs, how he feels about competitors whose products border on “theft,” and his own development as a designer. He also shared the specifics of his daily routine, and offered an in-depth look at the creative process of Apple’s core design team.

Apple’s Jonathan Ive in Conversation with Vanity Fair’s Graydon – Kia Makarechi, Vanity Fair (16 October 2014)

Here’s the video.

When you’ve seen it, you’ll like Ive. And if you do, let me recommend the book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products by Leander Kahney. I don’t tend to read many biographies, I’m less interested in people’s childhoods than I am in what they’ve done to make me hear of them. But I bought this quite gingerly and then had a really good time with it.

Dear Sir or Madam, you don’t know me, but…

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That headline sounds like I’m sending you a poison pen letter. Which is interesting, because the crux of this is how you can and how you should give someone a certain impression within a very few words. Just hopefully a good one. Hopefully a good impression that leads to work. For this is about those times when you approach a company or a person cold. I want you to see an article from Contently that talks about how you do this approach.

But first, note that it is an American article. That shouldn’t matter except that it does have certain assumptions about freelance life that I think are particular to the States. Even its central tenet has a term, “letter of introduction or LOI” which I’ve not heard before today. That could be me being thick. But then it could also be me being the person who hasn’t written an actual letter to a company in over twenty years.

I think all this still applies to emails of introduction, or I wouldn’t be suggesting you read it, but just take a look and see what you think. Here’s how the article starts:

The letter of introduction, or LOI as it’s known among freelancers, is our written equivalent of an elevator speech, the 20-second blast job-seekers use when shaking hands at interviews. Instead of pitching a new story idea—the classic way freelancers seek work—a written intro describes a story you already know by heart: your professional experience.

LOIs can be vital assets to freelancers because they initiate a relationship instead of a single assignment. And to get results, they should be precise, not flowery or filled with your life story.

Freelance Formal: How to Write an Intro Letter That Maximizes Your Chances of Scoring Work – Holly Ocasio Rizzo, Contently (17 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Bless

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Microsoft is launching a smart watch that will help with your fitness, according to Forbes. Maybe it’s just the cheesy photo but I want to look at Microsoft and give them a friendly tilt of my head, a warm moment’s crinkling of my nose. Microsoft is a gigantic, astonishingly gigantic corporation yet it acts like a little kid, “we can do that, we can do it too, in fact we did it first, yeah, no comebacks, to infinity”.

Apple tends to roll up late to a category of product and then just totally change how everybody ever makes that stuff again. (Look at mobile phones before the iPhone and then look at mobile phones after it. It’s equal parts impressive, laughable and a bit depressing how you can spot a massive seachange and pin it down to the single hour when Steve Jobs unveiled that iPhone.)

Whereas Microsoft, not so much. I didn’t know that Microsoft would bring out a smart watch but I should’ve bet. I did read the top of the Forbes article and know this much for certain, for absolute certain: whether it was a leaked report or a formal Microsoft press release, it would still end with information that the company isn’t saying when it will be released or what it will cost. And to think I wasn’t impressed that Apple said “early 2015” for its watch. At least they gave a starting price.

Here’s Forbes, doing its thing:

Microsoft MSFT +2.08% is gearing up to launch a wearable device within the next few weeks, Forbes has learned. The gadget is a smart watch that will passively track a wearer’s heart rate and work across different mobile platforms. It will also boast a battery life of more than two days of regular use, sources close to the project say.

That could put it ahead of Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smart watch and Moto 360 which both need to be charged around once a day. The wearable will hit stores soon after launch in a bid to capture the lucrative holiday season, a timeline Apple AAPL +1.46% was reportedly targeting before it delayed its own Watch to early 2015.

Forbes first reported in May that Microsoft was working on a smart watch that drew on optical engineering expertise from its Kinect division, and which would sync with iPhones, Android devices and Windows Phones. It is unclear what Microsoft will name the device, or what it will cost at retail

Microsoft Plans To Launch A Wearable Device Within Weeks – Parmy Olson, Forbes (10 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

RTFM – but what a beautiful manual to read

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I got my start writing computer manuals. Wait. I got my start in BBC local radio. I got a lot of starts. I’m still starting. But one of them was that I was employed writing computer manuals. It’s called being a technical author and I’m afraid there was a big part of me that always heard that as only technically being an author.

There was a woman – sorry, I’ve forgotten her name, this was a very long time ago – who I felt was a kind of technical author groupie. It’s probably good that I’ve forgotten her name, then. But I don’t mean she threw her FiloFax at me, she wasn’t a groupie of mine, she was of the industry. I remember a group of us talking about our writing ambitions and she was really clear about hers: she wanted to be a technical author. Yes, I said, and then? No. Technical Author. That’s it.

I’m afraid I felt that was a pretty severe lack of ambition. But I think I was also wrong. Computer manuals to me were, yes, a way to help people use these preposterously complex tools but there was an element of me feeling they shouldn’t be that preposterously complex. One local government official phoned in to the office to say thanks: finally he understood how a particular key feature worked. Do you feel good when you get that call or not?

But.

Hopefully for this woman and certainly for some technical authors, manuals have turned into something more. Something I think you would say is art.

When you invest seven figures in securing one of the most exotic, exclusive vehicles ever made, perhaps you just expect that the owner’s manual is going to be a work of art. I don’t know, I’ve never been in that position. Every owner’s manual I’ve ever had has ended up stuffed in a glovebox, pages greasy, creased, and torn.

With the McLaren F1, mishandling the owner’s manual would be a crime — doubly so after you hear the amount of thought and effort that went into it. Mark Roberts, the man who hand-sketched the artwork for the manual leading up to the supercar’s release over 20 years ago, describes the process in a video released by McLaren this week. “We were actively encouraged to make it more and more special,” he says.

This is the most beautiful owner’s manual you’ve ever seen – Chris Ziegler, The Verge (18 October 2014)

Read more about the video and the manual in full piece on The Verge.

Ironically, we miscounted and missed Spreadsheet Day

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Well, certainly I did. If you had a party and spent last Friday dancing on pivot tables, you are a far better spreadsheety kind of person than I am. But where it seems as if every day of the year is now a Day of Something, the fact is that you probably just thought yes, there’s bound to be a spreadsheet listing all those days.

Spreadsheets are used for lists, they are used for sorting, they are are used to create the most almighty huge cockups in history. But they are also used for numbers. There isn’t a company in the world that doesn’t have a spreadsheet. Microsoft used to run adverts for its spreadsheet with a strapline that went something like this: “Excel is used in 99% of companies. What are we doing wrong?”

Microsoft Excel is a weird one. Even though it has similar issues to Microsoft Word, it’s also clearly got different DNA. I think that it’s typical Microsoft that the company doesn’t care how one of its major apps works in a different way to another one – look at how you change size of the displayed page on screen – but it’s also a sign that the teams are different. Somehow I like that even as I don’t like it, it’s simultaneously sloppy and individual.

If you think that it’s ridiculous to project individuality and sloppiness onto a piece of software, well, there is nothing I can say to change your mind. Equally, if you’d told me 35 years ago that spreadsheets would become the power they are, it would’ve helped. I’d have invested in VisiCalc.

Sorry? Never heard of VisiCalc? You’ve seen its influence. You’ve felt its influence, both for good and bad.

On this day in 1979, a computer program called VisiCalc first shipped for the Apple II platform, marking the birth of the spreadsheet, a now-ubiquitous tool used to compile everything from grocery lists to Fortune-500 company accounts. And that’s why October 17th is Spreadsheet Day, celebrated by fans of the form.

Behold the awesome power of the spreadsheet, destroyer of worlds – Jason Karaian, Quartz (October 17, 2014)

As I say, before you celebrate by taking the rest of the day off, this 35th anniversary was last Friday. Look at the title of that piece celebrating it, though. Celebrating. With the words ‘destroyer of worlds’ in the title. It’s not as if Karaian is kidding, either. Read the full piece.