Just a quick note. My last post was written using OneNote 2007 which has a great feature to make blogging easier. To turn a page into a blog-post, just right-click on it and chose “Blog This” to launch a super-lean, easy to use blog-editor to polish and publish. Super-easy, which is great because One-Note is perfect for storing the types of snippets or ideas that turn into great blog posts.
One-Note was my killer-app in graduate school, allowing me to keep my whole life organized from classes to extracurriculars to work. I had all my readings in there and highlighted on top of them, printed slides to it and annotated them during lectures, and used it to outline papers. The features in the new version - allowing me to put a notebook on a shared drive and use it between computers, the in-line calculator, and especially text-recognition in pictures are straight out of my wish list. I highly recommend it to anyone who can pick up a copy.
Loyal readers will notice that I haven’t blogged much over the past year and a half. It’s not because I have nothing to say, or I’ve wanted to neglect personal marketing. It’s because blogging takes a lot of time and I’ve been busy actually doing things.
Good blog posts don’t just flow from the brain onto the keyboard. They start with a well thought out idea, which turns into an outline or a structure that becomes paragraphs and sentences. Then, the language is edited and tightened until you’ve got something that’s both interesting and fun to read. If you don’t believe blogging takes time, just go take a look at livejournal - around for years before blogs took off - and you’ll see what I mean. At least, if you can understand what they’re saying.
The amount of time it takes to blog well is one of the reasons that most bloggers fall into two categories: professional writers and the unemployed. Professional writers are practiced enough that they don’t take as long to write good prose, and usually have flexible enough careers that they can use the blog as part of their professional activities. In this category, I include not only journalist-bloggers, but also authors pimping a book and academics.
The unemployed also make good bloggers. Even if they take longer to write good posts, it doesn’t matter. They’ve got plenty of time. For those between jobs, it’s a great way to occupy their time and build a professional reputation on the interwebs. Students are underworked and not really learning anything, so they’ve got plenty of time. And finally bored millionaires who recently cashed out from a tech stock now have plenty of time to blog and a firm belief that their opinion now matters.
For those of us who actually do stuff, blogging isn’t so easy. That’s why only a handful of executives blog, and those who do blog infrequently. (Joel Spolsky is an exception here, Jonathan Schwartz’s blog is more of a marketing piece). They’re busy running companies. Same with investment bankers, corporate lawyers, management consultants, and other people whose high-intensity jobs have sucked away not only their time, but also their desire to spend time playing on the internet.
I definitely wish I could blog more. I want to review the last 8 books I’ve read. I have tons of advice for product-based companies trying to launch a services group. I’ve given some serious thought to hard problems in engaging employees. As part of my work, I come up with code snippets that would be great to share. And every time I read something on Employee Evolution or from Penelope Trunk, I want to write a post about it from the perspective of a millennial who actually works in the real world, does workplace research, and has actually coached and conducted job searches.
I’d love to get the time to cross-post from Slashdot, Marginal Revolution, and Arts and Letters Daily again. And maybe one day I’ll write “16 Reasons Penelope Trunk is Full Of It and 8 Reasons Why She’s Probably Crazy,” followed shortly by “The 6 Things Penelope Trunk Actually Gets Right.” But it’s 11:30PM, I’m exhausted after working a full day, I’m going to be in five cities this week, and people are depending on me to be sharp tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, blogging is a luxury that I sacrifice to actually get things done.
Spanish authorities have released an American privateer treasure ship captain from custody:
The Spanish Navy blocked the salvage ship after it left Gibraltar on Tuesday and threatened to open fire when the captain refused to let police aboard.
In May, Odyssey found shipwreck booty estimated to be worth $500m (£245m).
After a tense standoff when it left the British port of Gibraltar, Spanish civil guards boarded and searched the vessel.
The Odyssey was then escorted to Algeciras, where the captain was arrested.
Let’s try a little experiment. I want you to think of one successful person. It can be anyone, famous or family member. Make sure you have just the one successful person in mind. Now concentrate on the first letter of that person’s last name.
Good. I’ll do the rest.
I will now wrinkle my brow and focus all my powers of ESP, trying to discern whether the letter in your mind is in the first half of the alphabet or the second half. Excuse me while I chant…ooom…oooom…okay.
Your letter is in the first half of the alphabet.
How’d I do? Leave a comment with the last name of the person you had in mind.
Seems like a cool trick - my random guess was in the first half. Ben Casnocha notes it jibes with his own name. Except as cool as this seems, I’m not convinced. Names aren’t distributed evenly across all 26 letters. I took some handy-dandy census data with the most common last names, loaded up the 20% that account for abut 75% of the people in the country, and checked out how they broke out by first letter. The first half of the alphabet - what Adams is looking for - accounts for 65% of the names in the list. In other words, it’s not evenly distributed. And the psychological affect of the trick is greater because the first three letters in the alphabet (11.5% of letters) account for the names of about 20% of the people in the list.
Want to check out more? The graph below plots the cumulative percent of those in the list against and what it would look like if letters were evenly distributed. Or you can take a peek at the data yourself and run some even better tests.
The Winter of Dave is officially over. While I’ve got no stories from my time in Florida - I just laid by the pool - there are a few more Winter of Dave posts coming up, some cool articles, the last Reading Recap, and maybe a final rundown. Now that I’m back to work full time, normal posting will resume. Or slow down. We’ll see.
The article isn’t that interesting (police providing anecdotal evidence about increases in female crime, and an enlarged female cell at the ELPD), but I love the lede:
Beer-drenched heels, slurred speech and tear-streaked mascara paths.
Searching around, my little brother found out that my favorite restaurant in DC may be shutting down:
Though the restaurant has been allowed to go a bit to seed — there’s dirt everywhere, the ceiling is a mess, and the facade’s original plate glass is patched and seamed — its great bones survive unchanged. With not much more than a splash of paint, some elbow grease and a modestly tweaked menu, one of the city’s more artistic restaurateurs could restore the Waffle Shop to its former glory.
DC has a strong waffle culture, but not much in the way of pancakes (I’m yet to find any outside of a chain). Luckily, the Waffle Shop makes waffles good enough that I don’t mind. I introduced my siblings to it during Dworins4Darfur, and now they’re hooked on the place too. If you’re in DC, get over yourself and visit one of the city’s best hole-in-the wall eateries before the last vestige of good breakfast disappears from the city forever.
Is the Central Time Zone now the coolest one on the planet? My move to Chicago, completed today, would seem to indicate so. Some advantages of Central time:
The Daily Show is now on at 10:00, rather than 11, allowing for earlier bedtimes or trips to the bar.
I live in it.
It looks like I’m going to bed later to people in Eastern time.
Less Jet Lag when traveling to Vegas, not that sleep schedules really matter in vegas anyways.
Those interested in Chicago-style hangouts should get in touch, david@dworin.net, especially people I’ve lost touch with who stumble onto this blog.
Blogging will be light for the next few weeks as I move to Chicago (this weekend) and then take a week and a half in Florida. I should still be checking e-mail for those who want to reach me. Chicago-ites (?) interested in meeting up once i move should feel free to contact me, I’m always interested in a new audience.
This is a little late in posting, but in December, I went to Nebraska and Minnesota, which means that I’ve now been to over half the states in the union. See the map below for details:
(visited state map courtesy of this tool) I have a CorelDRAW script that I will post one day that also generates visited state maps.
Seymour Martin Lipset, acclaimed political scientist, is dead at 84 (NYTimes, WaPo).
I was introduced to Lipset in my first semester as an undergraduate, studying his work on the relationship between democracy and economic development in multiple classes. I used his pamphlet “The Socialism of Fools—The Left, the Jews and Israel” in a few papers I wrote as an undergrad on the strange Antisemitism and authoritarianism of the radical left (most cite it for his anecdote about Martin Luther King refuting anti-Zionism as Antisemitism). My interests often coincided with his, and I kept re-discovering his works (which, I admit, I’ve only read a small fraction of). I admired Lipset’s political independence (nobody could pin him down), and his continued affiliation to the Jewish community. He continued to research and publish well into old age, and he will certainly be missed.
When I first started this blog, I didn’t want to pass along the obits, because I felt most of the other blogs I read could do a better job, but I didn’t see this on any of them.
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