I have this terrible propensity to build up systems because the systems offered off-the-shelf seem inadequate for my needs. When I used Evernote, I couldn’t just use it “off-the-shelf” so to speak, I had to build systems around it. When I started using Obsidian, I did the same. In the days when I wrote in Google Docs, I…
There are some tools that I use that are so seamlessly integrated with my workflow that they are almost invisible. They work so well that I simply don’t think about them. That really isn’t fair since tools like these do far more than they get credit for. And since I had a particular tool in…
Today is the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I wanted to acknowledge this here. Each year, on the morning of 9/11, I pull out my diary from the days immediately before and after and read through it. I still can’t watch the footage on TV. I don’t have anything original to add to all…
I just completed a demo1 for software that me and my team have been working on for nearly a year. It isn’t quite done yet—we still have a few months of work left, but it feels good to get to the point where you have something to show. Indeed, it’s not that different from getting…
Earlier this week, I completed a work project that I had been managing for more than two years. 937 days from my first meeting to rollout to be precise. Any software project like this has a tail, but it felt good to actually have the thing completed and out in the world. The good feeling…
I am beginning to play around with Evernote as a tool to store all of my notes and to-do lists in the cloud and have everything easily searchable and at my fingertips no matter where I am. So far, I’m pretty impressed, and it’s no surprise, since Evernote was one of the 25 best applications…
I have a ton of documents to work on today in preparation for a design review this afternoon. Most of the documents are Visio documents (for those not familiar with Visio, it’s a Microsoft tool for creating specific types of drawings, database diagrams, flowcharts, UML, etc.). Several documents are in Word and a few are…
Microsoft Outlook has had, for several versions now, a feature whereby it will remove “extra” line breaks when displaying messages. I have no idea why it does this. It seems to serve no purpose. Here we are at a point in the history of our planet when forests are disappearing, when ice caps are shrinking,…
For several years, I have managed my book collection using Booxter for the Macintosh. It has been a great program, but there were also a few limitations that bothered me: (1) a lack of more advanced but common fields (such as awards); (2) no custom fields for tracking information not captured by the system; (3)…
I came across this cool writing program called Scrivner, which I am trying for 30 days to see how well it really works. I was interested in it because it has the index card “story-boarding” feature built in. (I use index cards extensively for my stories.) It focuses on content and it exports to various…
Working in the computer world, as I have for the last 13 years, and specifically within the world of software development, one becomes familiar with a subculture of people whose notoriety is limited to hardened geeks. These people have affected (usually for the better) the world of computer science in positive ways, sometimes revolutionizing entire…
I finally got around to buying the upgrade to BBEdit 8.5.1 this afternoon. For owners of BBEdit 8.2.x, the upgrade was only $30. I’ve skimmed it since downloading it and I have to say that it is the best upgrade I’ve seen since I’ve owned BBEdit. In fact… It is now at the point where…