If everything seems under control,” said auto racer Mario Andretti, “you’re probably not moving fast enough.
Libra Horoscope for week of August 16, 2012 The Hubble Space Telescope has taken 700,000 photos of deep space. Because it’s able to record details that are impossible to capture from the earth’s surface, it has dramatically enhanced astronomers’ understanding of stars and galaxies. This miraculous technology got off to a rough start, however. Soon after its launch, scientists realized that there was a major flaw in its main mirror. Fortunately, astronauts were eventually able to correct the problem in a series of complex repair jobs. It’s quite possible, Libra, that you will benefit from a Hubble-like augmentation of your vision in the next nine months. Right from the beginning, make sure there are no significant defects in the fundamentals of your big expansion.
My event planning template
In 2009, I was recruited by The Ineluctable Cassidy to be an event planner for the local ASIS&T group she was leading. We had a pretty punishing schedule of four events per academic year, and planning involved mailing lists, searching out event locales, creating a flyer, sending out emails, arranging refreshments, etc. These were a lot of separate tasks that needed to be planned, managed, and tracked. Continue reading “My event planning template”
“I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist [shit], no matter how much the demos love it.” —Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know
On being an information packrat — Part IV
One of the great things about a good productivity system is that it contains decision points where you can decide to keep or dismiss outdated tasks. If “buy Christmas cards” is on your list, and it’s April, then you can probably safely delete that task and not miss it.
Not so with information. Dismissing old or outdated information is not often a step in casual information management. We tend to keep stuffing it into our storage systems because there are no obvious temporal or physical limits. So we invoke the “just in case” clause and the information debris silts up on the hard drive.
So what are some good, simple ways for managing the information I’ve decided to keep in my life? Continue reading “On being an information packrat — Part IV”
Depression frequently occurs as resistance to the flow. Anxiety can come from focusing too much on the unknowns of the future and feeling unsupported. A lack of movement in your life indicates a lack of gratitude for that area of your life. Dear Ones, yet again we tell you that the key to empowered living is surrender (which allows your guides to assist), flow, staying in the Now and gratitude. If you simply focus on those aspects you can save yourselves a lot of unnecessary discomfort. So, the next time you feel out of sorts, ask yourself, Am I embracing the flow? Am I in gratitude? What are the blessings of this Now moment? Have I asked for assistance from my team of helpers? This will help you pinpoint where you need to self adjust and bring very quick relief as well as empowered movement back to your life. ~Archangel Gabriel
Robertson Davies on Useful Knowledge
On my 1998 “sabbatical,” I read about 25 or so books. Among them were the collected works of the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, one of that country’s great literary lions whose rather old-world style and eccentric areas of expertise led to some fascinating novels — What’s Bred in the Bone being a particular favorite of mine — and some interesting failures. One doesn’t hear much of Davies since his death, and that’s a shame.
In one of his early novels, Tempest-Tost, he has the music master deliver a little speech that impressed me so much at the time that I’ve delightedly trotted it out whenever the subject of information management rears its tedious head.
Up to the time I read the book, I admired and attempted to emulate the Sherlock Holmes idea of the mind as a limited container for information that needed to be categorized for convenient retrieval:
I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
A Study in Scarlet
But on reading the following passage by Davies, I saw there was another way one could organize one’s mind — mainly by not attempting to do so. It seemed to me then, and to me now, as so much more natural and relaxing. And in this age of structured information and rigid databases, it’s a quote I find very inspiring because it’s so human:
“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge…. Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.”
Isn’t that marvelous? As I think about how I wish to manage my information stores, I think about that shaking the machine vs shaking the dustbin. Which is more robust? Which is more fun to maintain?
On being an information packrat – Part III
The first post in this series looked at information hoarding, and the second looked at mindsets that could help me reframe the problem.
So, with those things in mind, what can I do in the heat of battle to help me stem the information flowing from my web browser and onto my computer? Continue reading “On being an information packrat – Part III”
An improv principle and event planning
In the winter of aught-six, I took a beginning improv class at DSI Comedy Theatre and learned a lesson that I pass along almost as holy writ to others. Continue reading “An improv principle and event planning”
National Night Out
I am taking a break from blog posts of ghastly length and inordinate self-absorption because today is National Night Out (NNO) and I’m my neighborhood’s NNO organizer this year.
Continue reading “National Night Out”
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