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- November 30, 2005
Make Your Own Grad School
November 30, 2005Read moreI think I’ve had enough of formal schooling, but I have to admit I miss burning the midnight oil with fellow grad students. I miss talking to nutty people who have the fire inside, making the best use of available resources on borrowed funds and time. I’ve thought that becoming a professor could provide some of that missing energy, but I’m pretty sure that organizations and myself do not mix—especially bureaucratic ones. Because of this, I’ve been slowly learning to build my own institutions…going freelance, forming small creative groups, blogging…
And then I thought: why not apply the same thing to teaching, and build my own design school? It would be a combination of hands-on learning with hands-on insight, borrowing some of the methodology from the apprenticeship system, but capturing best practices as we built up a body of expertise. A “working school”, if you will. The foundation would be the person-to-person network of expertise, with all voluntarily contributing to the Program, and by extension the development of our professional practice. “Accreditation” would be by virtue of association with the program; its public reputation would rise or fall based on the quality of what we did and put out there for the world to see rather than some committee!
Apparently this idea is so last-month, as Joel Spolsky is already doing it with the “Fog Creek Software Management Training Program”.
- November 29, 2005
My 1955-era Pocket Warmer
November 29, 2005Read more
Too many days have gone by without pictures! Here’s something I picked up a few weeks ago at Restoration Hardware in Peabody: a 1955-style Pocket Warmer. I remember my Dad having one of these, probably from his days as a grad student in Chicago. He kept it in his “drawer of goodies”, which was always locked. I have always lusted after it…I had just forgotten that until I saw it again at the mall. Grabbed it for a mere 6 bucks. Booyah!
- November 28, 2005
I Hope I Kinda Might Perhaps Won’t Write Like This Anymore, Maybe.
November 28, 2005Read moreWhen I’m writing on a topic I’m not yet familiar with, I have a tendency to pepper my writing with wussy phrases like I have a tendency to and not yet familiar with. The passive voice…bleah!
I don’t know [where this comes from]… [it might] be [some] charming artifact of my upbringing, as I was raised by genuine missionaries in a [somewhat] academic household. [Sometimes I wish that] my writing sounded more deliberate and less cover-my-ass. I’m better now, [but] [it still] creeps in [from time to time]. There’s a fine line between being humble and sounding like a homesick puppy.
I was discussing this with another friend of mine, pointing out the I hopes and maybes that “swept the legs” out from under his otherwise fine prose. The solution: make use of a much-hated feature in Microsoft Word to retrain our writing reflexes!
How? Use AutoCorrect to replace wishy-washy expressions in your writing! Go to the AutoCorrect Options (under Tools) and enter phrase pairs like these:
- I HOPE becomes As the Lord is my witness, you can bet your SWEET ASS…
MAYBE becomes if I had a nickel for every FREAKING TIME this happened I’d be a FREAKING MILLIONAIRE…
A TENDENCY TO becomes abso-freaking-lutely kiss-my-ass and hope-to-die WILL…
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p>The shock and horror of seeing these phrases sprout unbidden in your Word document—in that letter to your sweet old grandmother, for example—will quickly train you against using those wimpy phrases ever again. You’ll find new ways to avoid them, because the probability of remembering how to turn off AutoCorrect is really low given the sheer number of “features” clogging up Microsoft Office these days.
Ah, the power of negative reinforcement! I love the smell of Microsoft in the morning! And there are other applications, like for the harried men on Match.com who must send out hundreds of “special” form emails every day:
- U R HOT becomes not only are you beautiful and intelligent, but in all my travels throughout this world I have NEVER come across a profile more delightful than yours. Come! FLY WITH ME!
Have fun! As the Lord is my witness, you can bet your SWEET ASS this is useful :-)
ASIDE: Maybe the hate is unwarranted on my part, but I can’t stand AutoCorrect fiddling with my sentences and bulleted list items. It wreaks havoc when you’re writing technical documentation with mixed-case capitalization. I’m also not a fan of automatic misspelling correction…how will you learn that you’re spelling things wrong if it’s doing it behind the scene? That’s just the way I feel, so I usually turn it off after the irritation builds to the boiling point.
- November 27, 2005
Separating Work from Passion
November 27, 2005Read moreWorking through the weekend, crunching through some Flash work for delivery on Monday. I’m sorta enjoying it, but at the same time it just feels like work. I’ve also been thinking a lot about Item #13 from Hugh McLeod’s How To Be Creative list:
13. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside. The more you practice your craft, the less you confuse worldly rewards with spiritual rewards, and vice versa.
- November 25, 2005
Building a Niche of One
November 25, 2005Read moreI recently read (via DIYPlanner):
Psychologists studying expert and exceptional performance found that it’s not really about talent; it’s about practice. The athletes and chess players we admire have practiced for around 10,000 hours over a span of 10 years.
As I followed the link trails through the article, I was reminded that there are three broad questions I apply over and over again in my day-to-day operation:
- Why do it?
- What to do?
- How to do it?
What’s new about this? I never made the connection between this style of inquiry and how to live, and that this is a way to flip common business wisdom backwards.
