Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Don’t plan ahead

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On the one hand, this feels related to the idea that you shouldn’t make resolutions. But it also reminds me of a poster I used to see on the London Underground. It was an ad for something ostensibly philosophical but actually was more a promo for a religious thing. It went on and on about how we repeat our dreadful days over and over, we keep doing the same things again and again, and we needed this course of philosophy to make us do new things.

The last line said “Classes every Monday and Thursday”.

Anyway Steven Farquharson from a a blog called 2HelpfulGuys has this to say about planning:

When you are looking too far forward into the future the uncertainty can seem daunting.

But every marathon is finished step by step, every wall is built brick by brick and every life is lived day by day.

If you live your life trying to get as much out of each individual day as possible, you can rest assured that you have done all you can to achieve a life that makes you proud.

You have to design your days to design your life.

Design Your Days to Design Your Life – Steven Farquharson, 2HelpfulGuys (19 October 2014)

Read the full piece where you’ll see the final section says “As usual, I’ll see you next Sunday.”

Making a space to work in

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I did a thing on Saturday, running a little writing session for some children in Birmingham, and for the first part of it, I got us all hiding under the tables. “I don’t want Santa to hear this,” I said. And I was in full-on performance mode, loads of ideas, all ready to fire, when I realised that the tables reminded me of something.

When I was the age of these same children, Blue Peter used to have a regular feature about toy trains. Even then I used to wonder what could you say in episode 2. And I’m not into trains. All power to you if you are, or at least all steam power. But I loved the desk they had it on.

It was big and enclosed: you had to clamber underneath and pop up in the middle. That’s what I was minded of on Saturday.

And it made me realise that I have lived with how much I loved that idea for all these years. Because my office may not have this circular desk but it has half of one. The desk goes down one wall and curves around the side. I work mostly in that curve. And admittedly the rest of the desk is a mess. But that curve matters to me.

Mind you, so does the iMac.

But the space you work in matters. I used to believe I could write anywhere and in fact right now I’m writing to you from my living room when I really should be in my office on a deadline. So plainly it’s not so wonderful that I’m drawn back to it irresistibly. Still, at 5am tomorrow morning I will sit on my Captain’s Chair (it’s a thing, that’s a type of furniture, it’s not a Star Trek reference) and I’ll pop headphones on and I will feel like I’ve climbed into my writing space.

All of which comes up chiefly because of Saturday but also now because of two completely different podcasts that just happen to cover this topic. They cover it in completely different but interesting ways. First up, MacPowerUsers interviews ex-Macworld writer Jason Snell on how he set up his home office now that he is indeed ex-Macworld. Listen to MacPowerUsers.

But then there’s 99U which was devoted an entire edition to Building the Perfect Workspace.

In case Christmas dinner makes you very sleepy…

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Virgin Media has teamed with a couple of schoolboy inventors to come up with KipstR wristband, a 3D-printed device that will automatically set a Virgin Media TiVo box to record when the wearer falls asleep.

Designed as part of Virgin Media’s Switched on Futures initiative by 15-year-old Ryan Oliver and 14-year-old Jonathan Kingsley from Manchester, the KipstR uses a pulse sensor to tell when the user has fallen asleep. It then sends a signal to the TiVo box to pause or record a show automatically.

If the wearer wakes up, it can also tell the box to resume the programme from its paused state

Don’t worry if you nod off during Doctor Who Christmas special, this wristband will record it for you – Rik Henderson, Pocket-lint (19 December 2014)

Read the full piece.

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Google searching you

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The Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey writes:

According to Google, I am a woman between the ages of 25 and 34 who speaks English as her primary language and has accumulated an unwieldy 74,486 e-mails in her life. I like cooking, dictionaries and Washington, D.C. I own a Mac computer that I last accessed at 10:04 p.m. last night, at which time I had 46 open Chrome tabs. And of the thousands and thousands of YouTube videos I have watched in my lifetime, a truly embarrassing number of them concern (a) funny pets or (b) Taylor Swift.

I didn’t tell Google any of these things intentionally, of course — I didn’t fill out a profile or enter a form. But even as you search Google, it turns out, Google is also searching you.

Everything Google knows about you (and how it knows it) – Caitlin Dewey, The Washington Post (19 November 2014)

I just had a peek for myself and Google seems to know far less about me than it does Dewey. Also most of it was a bit rubbish. Apparently I boguht one thing via Google Walllet some time. I don’t ever remember doing that. But also my last Google group of any description was something related to the To Do app by Appigo. I haven’t touched that in three years.

Still, Dewey is interesting and raises points here that I’m pondering away about. Read the full piece.

Ulysses coming to iPad soon

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How soon is soon? Ulysses is a Scrivener-like app for Mac that, like the perhaps more famous Scrivener, is a kind of writing studio. The official site describes it thisaway:

Ulysses lets you focus when you need to concentrate. It keeps all your texts neatly stuffed in its intuitive library. With a few clicks, Ulysses can create beautiful documents from your manuscripts: PDFs, web pages, even iBooks-ready ePubs. With its simple, clutter-free interface, it will turn work hours into fun time. And mere thoughts into powerful stories. If you love to write, and write a lot, Ulysses is made for you.

Ulyssesapp.com

Now it’s coming to iPad and the company has begun a beta test. This could be enough to convert Scrivener fans because that app’s iPad version has been in the works for years. It may come out in 2015 but we’ve heard that before.

Take a look at the Ulysses iPad video and then check out the official site.

Ulysses for iPad – Coming Soon from The Soulmen on Vimeo.

App Santa is here

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Listen, I know you’ve dropped a few pennies on The Blank Screen book sale but there are other Christmas deals and I think the best is one called App Santa.

You’re used to deals where for a pretty good price you get one pretty good app and ten you’d never imagine using. But App Santa has genuinely excellent apps and you cherry pick the ones you want.

This year it includes several apps that I have recommended, most especially Drafts 4 for iOS, MindNode, TextExpander touch and Clear. Each of which is half price.

There are others and apparently some savings are up to 80% off so do take a look at the whole list.

I don’t care if you like it

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Read this from Tina Fey’s book Bossypants and then please go buy her book. I like it so much I might come with you to Amazon and buy another copy myself.

Amy Poehler was new to SNL [Saturday Night Live] and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers’ room waiting for the Wednesday read-through to start. There were always lots of noisy “comedy bits” going on in that room. Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table, and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can’t remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and loud and “unladylike”.

Jimmy Fallon, who was arguably the star of the show at the time, turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, “Stop that! It’s not cute! I don’t like it.”

Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit. (I should make it clear that Jimmy and Amy are very good friends and there was never any beef between them. Insert penis joke here.)

With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear she wasn’t there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys’ scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it.

I Don’t Care If You Like It – Tina Fey, Bossypants, Little, Brown and Company (2011)

Seriously. The book. Buy her book.

Productivity lessons from Strictly Come Dancing

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You’re thinking oh yes, really, there is productivity to be learnt from the UK’s version of Dancing with the Stars? Yes.

Such as this. Right now as we speak, it’s the gap between the two episodes making up this year’s final. It’s about an hour, just shy of an hour, and it’s short enough and the timing is awkward enough that there isn’t a whole lot you can usefully go do before the show’s back.

But you could write.

I would be writing if I weren’t talking to you. So this is definitely a case of very specifically do what I say rather than what I do.

And this is what put the idea in my head. But once it was there in my noggin, I realised that there are productivity lessons aplenty.

Maybe it’s not a shock. Strictly runs for, what, 16 weeks? Once it starts, it is a train and there must be hundreds of people working flat-out on it. Every person vital – this is the BBC, they ain’t paying for people they don’t need – and that means everything they each do is crucial. Vital, crucial and time-dependent. Tina Fey has a great line that I remember a lot when I’m vacillating over projects I’m writing:

“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”

Tina Fey, Bossypants

We spend a lot of time as writers going around in circles over whether something is ready and whether something is good. Sometimes that is exactly the right thing to do. Sometimes that is what makes us writers and makes our material sing. But sometimes: let it go. It is done, get it gone.

I believe in debating what needs to be debated and finishing what needs to be finished. And the deadline of a live show every week is like cement-lined evidence to me.

But do you follow Strictly? I don’t watch The X-Factor because it seems the same every week to me. Someone comes on and they can sing or they can’t. Next week, they can sing or they can’t. No difference. With Strictly, people are visibly transformed. They’re transformed by many things but one is confidence: facing up to dancing in front of millions changes them. And always, always, when a celebrity’s personality comes out, they dance better.

Drama writing requires us to dig deep. Dancing requires letting go. But both require us to listen to the music and that’s productivity to me. Hear the rhythm, the beat and get going.

Recommended: Snapselect for OS X

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This week I began writing software reviews for MacNN.com and as I was doing this one, I thought of you. While we’re writers, we do have to be so conscious of images and graphics now plus we can’t help but have a great camera in our pockets – because our phones all have them. I think one consequence from this is that we get eleventy-billion images.

I know I did.

Years ago I was enough into photography – I’ve had some published in US books – that I invested in Apple’s professional image application, Aperture. I’d have to check this, don’t make me swear to it, but when Aperture came out, it was so new and in such a new field that nobody quite knew what to make of it. They tried comparing it to Photoshop, where it failed because its image editing is much more basic. They tried comparing it to iPhoto and it failed because it isn’t as easy as iPhoto.

Yet I believe Adobe got it, they understood. Or maybe more likely they were eying up the same issues that Aperture was intended to solve. Adobe Lightroom became the other application in this new genre of serious photo management.

I was a bit fascinated by this because it reminded me of TV drama reviews where at first everyone is criticising a show and then later they’re adoring it. In this case they were poo-pooing an entire form of software and very quickly they were using it. But then I was also a lot fascinated by how they used it and how these two applications did the same thing in different ways.

Very broadly, very crudely, Aperture was a smash-and-grab do-anything kind of application where you bunged in your photos and then you worried about them later. Whereas Lightroom required you to add them in a certain way, process them in certain steps and really go through a particular workflow. I’m not that disciplined and Aperture just seemed to suit me better, so I bought Aperture.

Unfortunately maybe I needed a touch more discipline than I have. Or perhaps Aperture did. Because I added a lot of photos and then by mistake added them again. And again. Over time there are up to five duplicates of some shots and one thing Aperture is bad at is helping you spot those and delete them.

Flashforward a few years. I’ve pretty much stopped using Aperture because it was full brimwards with these duplicates and near-duplicates from when I would over-shoot events. Also, Apple abandoned Aperture. That was a big surprise to me and I think it was a big mistake. As ever with software, you can carry on using something. Nobody comes and switches off Aperture just because Apple doesn’t sell it any more. But there will come a time when they might as well have. There will be some moment in the future when you have to choose between getting some Apple OS X upgrade and sticking with an old one to keep Aperture alive.

I will upgrade. I say this not just because I know myself but because I know that I’ll upgrade before I notice that it kills Aperture.

So I have been mentally preparing to move my images out of it and I haven’t because I’m not mentally prepared to slog through all those bloody shots. Which is where Snapselect came in. Do you remember reading the word Snapselect about five miles up above this line? I reviewed Snapselect and it did – it is doing – the job I need. It’s taking me a time to work through everything because it is slow and I am busy but every few hours I take a minute to schlep through a few images and kill off the duplicates and the bad ones.

And my telling you that tells you the story behind this paragraph from my review:

We imported a fairly disastrous Aperture library that had over 30,000 images, and took up around 300Gb. It took Snapselect 11 minutes to load it, and then not far shy of 150 minutes to produce the thumbnails — which then took over two hours to analyze. Be smarter than us: bring in a few folders at a time. Snapselect makes that easy, but we just wanted to show off.

Hands On: Snapselect photo management app (OS X) – William Gallagher, MacNN (19 December 2014)

Read the full piece to get some screenshots – watch for my finger in frame in one – and details of how to get it. If you don’t need it, you may not even see the point. But if you do, go buy Snapselect because it solves the day.

Spoiler: it’s better to come in third

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Now watch an hour-long video about why. This is author Malcolm Gladwell on whether it’s best to be first or, you guessed it, third. I’m not actually convinced because it feels a bit lazy to wait for other people to do things before you bother standing on their shoulders. But Gladwell is a good speaker and makes both pointed and wide-ranging points. Watch the first ten minutes or so and see what you think. Then get a biscuit for the rest.