Systems

picture of Cal Newport on YouTube

Thoughts on Cal Newport’s “Slow Productivity”

There’s a lot of talk about burnout these days. Workers are increasingly feeling exhausted. Anxiety levels are on the rise. Employee turnover jumped from an average of 45% in 2019 to 57% in 2020. The question is, what are we going to do about it? Computer science professor Cal Newport thinks that part of the

How to Publish to Substack from Ulysses

OK publishing from Ulysses to Substack is probably too easy to be worth a complete blog post. And yet I managed to mess it up on my first try – meaning that I had to go back and re-format all my text and re-do all my hyperlinks. I really wish that someone had written a

You Will Be a Newbie Forever – Mastering Technology

I’ve reached a place in my life where I don’t want to learn one more stoopidly designed interface. Take the Shoretel phone system…please. (Although it’s a big improvement over Rolm phones). Former Wired editor and technology guru Kevin Kelly explains that the technology we need most is not necessarily the technology that’s available today. Instead,

Tinderbox: Mapping the Interior

In his book The Size of Thoughts, Nicholson Baker talks about some of the unexpected advantages of library card catalogs over databases: fingerprints for instance. Dark smudges of body oil can tell you at a glance which topics in the catalog are the most popular, something that would take a complex structured query to achieve