Handwritten notes and never-ending paper notebooks

Even I like having a new, empty paper notebook. I just can’t read my handwriting. Also, I know I’ll lose it and that irritates me when everything I ever type is saved safely all over the place. Plus, how do people use paper notebooks? How fast do they fill them and then what happens? Have they shelves of these things?

Rocketbook says hang on there, William, enough. Rocketbook is a paper notebook that you scribble away on and its pages are saved to the cloud. Dropbox. Evernote. Google Docs. You snap a photograph of the page with your phone and what is written on the page determines where it’s saved. So handwrite during a meeting, then take a mo to photograph the page and before you’ve put your phone away, the Rocketbook has saved that note to, say, an email that it is even now sending someone.

That covers my problem with potentially losing the book but there is also that business of filling up all the pages. Honestly, this sounds like a joke but it’s serious: put your Rocketbook in the microwave oven and wait for a bit. Every note on every page is erased and you have a crisp, new notebook.

I read that and think you must need special paper: yes, but that’s what the Rocketbook is made of. I read this and think you must need special pens: sort-of. The have to be FriXion pens by Pilot which I’ve never heard of but apparently are common.

There is nothing here to help with my handwriting but that’s my problem. Your pen work is much better than mine, you might love this.

One thing. This is an Indiegogo crowd-funded idea except it’s no longer an idea: it’s achieved its target by more than 3,500%.

Rash Recommendation: Sleep Cycle Power Nap

Okay, yesterday I got up to work at 5am; around 6pm I had to sleep. At about 7:15pm I was back up, the went to bed at 11pm, got up this morning at 4:45am, contributed to the MacNN podcast that’s recorded at that time of the morning, then back to bed at 7:10am until 8am.

This is typical and this is a bit stupid. But during the podcast, my colleagues Charles Martin and Michelle Hermark both happened to recommend an iPhone app that helps with sleep. They rate Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock and Power Nap – actually two apps that I bought before they’d finished speaking.

I’ve tried the Power Nap one twice now, starting with that 07:10 nap. You leave the phone on the bed near you and it does some monitoring, I’m not sure how much, and around 45 minutes later it wakes you up quite softly. Each time it’s a curious surprise to find myself awake and each time I’ve benefited from it.

Whereas when I’ve given in and napped before, I’ve struggled because it’s hard to wake up promptly or anywhere approaching an actual nap time. It’s been more a couple of hours or so. Which is a problem and contributes to how napping makes me feel like an old man.

If I can do this 45 minute lark, that will help me and I hope I can get beyond feeling ancient. Go take a look at the app for yourself, will you?

Weekend Read – but not on laptops

Last week, at the Aspen Ideas festival, there came an interesting little moment between Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist, and Jim Steyer, a lawyer and entrepreneur. Both declared that they’d banned laptops and other electronic devices in their lecture halls.

“Many of the students actually appreciate that,” said Toyama, who teaches at the University of Michigan, “because it encourages real discussion, and they know that as soon as there’s a laptop in front of them, they’re going to start Facebooking each other, and that means that they’re not present for the class.”

Steyer jumped right in. “You should know that in my Stanford classes five years ago, I started banning laptops,” he said. “There was no way they were paying attention. They all whined about it constantly for the first three weeks.” He added that his colleague, with whom he co-taught the course, was terrified they’d made the wrong choice. “She was like, They’re gonna just kill us on the reviews!” he said. But by the end, their students, too, expressed gratitude.

The Case Against Laptops in the Classroom — Science of Us

Read the full piece but please print it out first. Concentrate. There will be questions.

Weekend Read: Don’t Use Beta Software

BETA stands for Doesn’t Work, Will Break, Might Delete Everything. It’s become a more familiar term since Google labelled Gmail as a beta for years and Apple did the same with Siri. It’s familiar enough a term that people don’t understand it and that’s more than just a shame when it means you can end up losing your work.

The current iOS 9 and OS X betas from Apple are causing problems. The beta for watchOS 2.0 which drives Apple Watches is apparently driving those watches back to Apple as they become useless.

You can and I do think Apple shouldn’t have put out software in this state but that is what beta software is. When you’re first making an application, you clobber together bits and pieces until it sort of, kinda, a bit looks like one day it may work. That’s an alpha release and it’s where you see if the thing has any point and it’s the place you think, do you know, it’d be much better in yellow. Or blue. Purple and orange with spots.

Eventually you reach a point where someone says enough. You can’t change the colour any more. It’s time to get this out into the hands of people to try it.

That’s a beta. It’s software of a set colour being put out to be tried. It will break. It cannot fail but to break. The issue is over how badly. If you’re a developer, the intended audience for a beta, these crashing failures are just your day to day life. They are why there is a beta. A bit breaks, you fix it, next day you move on.

If you’re a user, it’s different. You’re using your computer or your phone to ring people up or to compute, you can’t afford to have a problem. Hence the warnings every software company gives you about how you shouldn’t try this beta on your main or primary computing device and how you should have a backup. It’s a warning to us but it’s not. It’s really a note to future litigators that the company did warn people.

Few folk pay attention to that warning and today that means some people are having to return their watches to Apple.

It’s bad and worse than it should’ve been, worse than it would’ve been if Apple hadn’t made this beta public. But betas are there to be tested and for the problems to be found. There is no better way of testing software that will be relied on by millions of people than to try it with millions. Hence the public beta and for all the problems current ones are causing people, we’re seeing more of it and we’re going to see still more.

It’s important to beta test. You just haven’t signed on to be the one who gets problems so don’t be the one who installs and runs this pre-release stuff.

By the way, alpha releases are followed by beta releases but betas are not followed by gammas. The one after a beta is known as the GM or Gold Master, it’s the version of the software that is ready to ship. It used to be that software was sold on shiny discs so the Gold Master would be sent to the pressing plant. Funny how terms continue long after what they describe is gone.

Those damn Annual Performance Reviews

You and your managers pretend these are about developing you and recognising your achievements but all that’s really clear is that are they bollocks. What are they for? Who are they for? It’s not for you and it’s not for getting you more money. Annual performance reviews are about making some token nod toward remembering your name and then ignoring everything when it comes to deciding money.

There’s that thing where a third of your colleagues will fail, a third will do okay and there’s a top third that have to get by on some contrived glory ’cause they sure as hell aren’t getting paid more either.

Now, it’s easy for me to be cynical about these because I’m freelance and don’t have to have them. But for a decade or more I was freelance in the BBC where it was a requirement. I hated every single one – up to the moment I would have them, because they invariably went well. Nonetheless, I hated them more than dental appointments because of one review and one man from before my time at the Corporation.

He was an out-of-his-depth sort who managed a group of fairly awkward writers and me. Not awkward. I was glad to be there, I was doing what I wanted, I got that the job was to get what needed done and I got that the company didn’t owe me anything but the generous salary I had. I was fine. Others were not. So when he had to grade people, he gave the awkward ones good marks and in several cases promotions, and he stuck me with the bad marks because he knew I’d be fine about it.

Frankly, was I fuck. Every other review for every other person that year took about 30 minutes and I made mine take the day. Every single point on every single ridiculous metric, he low-balled it and I argued until I got each one up. Fight, fight, fight – and he won. While I got that review to be far better than he wanted it to be, it was the worst review of the set and I got no raise.

So, he didn’t managed to get the one easy ride he’d planned but he could do the tick that said he’d saved some money.

But of course he saved that yet he lost me. I never worked late again, never came in early again. Didn’t contribute to meetings, didn’t write as well as I had done. I do have trouble assessing the quality of my writing but I thought then that there was a fair chance I was his best writer or at least if there were better I can only think of one person it would be. Actually, thinking about it, yes, she was better than I was. But I’d stake a claim to second best and if you do a Google search now on the names I can remember you won’t find them. None had a writing career after that.

And I didn’t have another review with that guy because by the next year, I was long gone. I was off to an infinitely better job that led directly to my BBC career soon after. He could argue, I suppose, that he helped me there but he did some damage. There was not one single review I ever had anywhere else again that I didn’t go in ready for a fight. Never got one, not one single time: every other review ever was at least great and sometimes superb.

I don’t want to count how many years it is since this boiled me but I can tell you it’s a fair few minutes since I found a funny video about performance reviews and thought I’d point you at it. I think I might take a deep breath and do that next.

Don’t snipe at your boss, swipe instead

Oh, come on, can we not just get a drink and talk about this? Apparently not. Instead, you can now just swipe right on an app called Niko Niko if you’re not happy. Equally you can swipe left if you’re chipper. Swipe down to use a touch-and-drag happiness meter and seriously, for god’s sake, SAY SOMETHING ALOUD.

I’m into technology and even I’m twitching at this idea of turning office teamwork into something like Community’s Meow Meow Beenz. If you can bear it more than I can, take a read of Fast Company’s article.

What do you give people?

I was asked this recently: if someone hires you, what exactly do they get? With my British writer self-deprecating depressive-paralysis brain, I immediately replied 120 words per minute typing.

The person asking looked at me pretty much exactly the same way you are now. And she pressed. You’re freelance, you’re a business, tell me exactly why anyone should hire you and what it is that they get from you.

As you read this, I am off in a coffee shop giving her my answer. I may or may not let you know if she looks at me like that again, but here’s what I concluded after soul- and testimonial-searching:

Lively, engaging, inspiring action. Complex issues made not just simple but something you can act on. Very sparky writing with life and verve. Enthusiasm and practical, real-world experience with a newsy approach.

It kills me saying that to you and I’ve got to stop finding it so hard. In between the knife wounds, though, it has helped me vocalising what I do. Trying to vocalise it concisely. Trying to find an actual value for other people in all these things I do that I so love doing. Frankly also searching through testimonials and paraphrasing.

Maybe it’s that last bit that has helped me and that I think it will help you: when what you do works, when what you do helps people, I do think that’s the second best feeling in the world. Understanding, comprehending, accepting that your work has helped people, that’s probably the best. I’ll let you know when I get there.

One writer on a date, one nearby

Why did he have to say he’s a writer? A real one, Anne Thériault, was sitting next to – well, here’s what she tweeted first:

Watching a couple on what appears to be a terrible first coffee date at the table next to me. Dude is [a very] precious self-involved writer.

A Woman Live-Tweeted the Worst First Date in the World and it was Brilliant – David Elkin, TheJournal.ie (7 July 2015)

They’re in Toronto, it’s 3:12pm and the whole shebang is reported in TheJournal.ie (via Yahoo Tech). Now read on, if you can bear it.