Links, backlinks, tags, atomicity…what’s the most important part of your note-taking system? People. Denham Grey believes that any knowledge system that isn’t driving toward sharing and collaboration is pointed in the wrong direction. In fact, Grey is fairly skeptical about the PKM movement in general, with its focus on information organization at the expense of…
Alternative (Alt) text provides a textual description of your image. It is an HTML attribute that was initially intended to provide information about an element if the page did not render correctly. In the days when websites were accessed over slow dial-up modems, images were often very slow to load. Today Alt text is an…
Mike Caulfield makes a distinction between online posts that are “gardens” and posts that are “streams.” Streams are posts that you read, and then they move on, disappearing into history. They are utterances, meaning that they can only be correctly understood by what was said before. You can follow the chain of utterance back, thanks…
In a post titled The Memex Method Cory Doctorow notes that he thinks of his blog as a kind of commonplace book. It is a sort of digital journal where he collects whatever captures his attention and saves it for future use. The benefit that his blog gives him over a notebook or a PKM…
We recently packed up everything and moved to a smaller place. This means that anything truly important to me, that I need to get stuff done, is most likely packed up in a box in storage. It’s not chaos exactly, or disorder. It’s just that everything is ten times harder than it needs to be.…
In order to make something that feels truly “alive” at the deepest level it can help to imagine that you are “making a gift to God.” At each step of the making process you evaluate which option is the most authentic or “true” by evaluating how well it brings out the spirit of the thing…
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with gold. The repair doesn’t hide the damage – it accentuates the fractures and makes them a focal point, creating a more interesting and potentially more valuable object than the original. Part of the aesthetic of kintsugi is to acknowledge the damage and…
An act of creation is not just about making something new, something that never existed before. It’s also about the impact that the created object has on its surroundings. Think about public sculpture that is placed on a highway median simply because the space is available and the city council believes that art will “class…
To me maintenance feels like a chore. It’s something you have to do, but it detracts from all the things you could be doing. But there’s another way of looking at maintenance. You are keeping something alive. In this sense you aren’t simply maintaining. You are gardening. The Garden and Desire A garden is a…
There seems to be something in the human heart that longs for a garden. Perhaps a garden is an analogy for wholeness. Maybe it’s something more. We are stardustBillion year old carbonWe are goldenCaught in the devil’s bargainAnd we’ve got to get ourselvesback to the garden Joni Mitchell – Woodstock This devil’s bargain, at least…
In this fictionalized account of a real two-week motorcycle trip that Robert Pirsig took with his son Christopher and two friends, Pirsig explores a number of philosophical themes through informal observations that he calls “Chautauquas.” At the start of the story Pirsig sets up a conflict between two mindsets, the Romantic and the Classical. The…
In Zen Buddhsim there is an idea of “just sitting”. One is not trying to attain enlightenment or achieve any goal other than sitting. One aspires to sit completely. Robert Pirsig makes an connection with motorcycle repair, that it can be “just fixing.” One is completely absorbed in the work of repair, to the point…
Wild Rye has gone through a couple of phases, including a stint as a sort of adventure blog. There were trail notes, gear reviews, and survival tips. Well, Wild Rye isn’t really an adventure blog now. But some of these posts are still informative and if you’ve gotten this far, by all means take a…
Early in his career as an architect Christopher Alexander began to notice that certain buildings, plazas, and parks had a transcendent quality. They were more interesting to look at, and felt better to be a part of, than many other buildings. There was a vibrancy and presence to this structures that set them apart. But…
This is the fourth part of an extensive four part essay by Christopher Alexander, exploring the deep fundamentals of architecture, especially what gives a building a transcendent feeling of being “alive.” In this fourth book introduces a second aspect of living structure, and that’s the essence of the “Self.” When a building or a work…
