Writing, Digital Publishing, Web Technology, Apple, Getting Things Done, Video Games, Fountain Pens, Science Fiction and Fantasy
09 May 2012 - Note: This article has been updated from the original version written on 1 October 2009. For many years, Getting Things Done has helped me manage the chaos of everyday life. GTD has made me happier, ...
07 May 2012 - 30 second summary Though cyberpunk books like Ready Player One show us a world in which we all live in virtual reality, current trends suggest that physical immersion isn't important to us. Instead o...
26 April 2012 - 30 second summary Across the web, creative types have described Getting Things Done as too tweaky for the creative process and too regimented for simple peace of mind. Creative people spend too much t...
16 April 2012 - Three weeks ago I began playing Draw Something. Two weeks ago I quit. I quit for two reasons: First, I have enough inboxes. I don't need another app with a little red number in the corner demanding m...
16 March 2012 - 30 second summary It's really hard to find a good set of iPhone-compatible headphones. After much searching and testing, I found that the Sennheiser PX 100-II on-ear iPhone headset had the best mix of...
12 March 2012 - Tips from a 15 year vet Last Saturday, on 10 March, I hit my 15 year anniversary with my company. A co-worker, who probably didn't know what he was getting into, was kind enough to ask me for my "old ...
01 January 2012 - 30 second summary Though 70% typical self help bullshit, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People still contains a few tools that help focus and direct one's actions towards their most important goals. Whi...
26 December 2011 - 30 second summary If you're shopping for a Kindle, pick up the 4th generation non-touch Kindle for $80 from Amazon. With a small size, light weight, simple interface, and nearly disposable constructio...
15 December 2011 - 30 second summary I decided to formalize the script I use to generate this website and my other big website, Sly Flourish and release it. Pueblo is a single python script that generates a blog of stat...
05 September 2011 - 30 second summary There are a lot of talkers in the world. Everyone has an opinion and a voice and seems incapable of not using it all the time. There aren't, however, a lot of doers. There aren't a l...
18 August 2011 - 30 second summary I rebuilt Sly Flourish this week into a set of static HTML pages generated from articles written in Markdown processed by a small 100 line Python script. The site is complete HTML5 w...
31 July 2011 - 30 second summary Our creative work holds value and only one person decides what that value is -- you. When I decide to do a new project, it must meet one of the following criteria: I get pai...
22 July 2011 - For an in-depth review of Lion, read John Siracusa's massive OSX Lion review. It's worth at least skim reading and matches a lot of my thoughts. Instead, in this brief review, I'll focus on the things...
21 July 2011 - 30 Second Summary Having moved to a new iMac, my backup strategy has changed. Now I'm using Apple's Time Machine running on a 1TB Western Digital external disk. Every three months a task pops up on Om...
10 July 2011 - Pardon me for channeling some Seth Godin this evening. When it comes to focusing on our primary job, whatever job that happens to be, we could do a lot worse than mimicking the performance of a docto...
24 June 2011 - 30 second summary For some unknown reason, I'm jonsing to try Omnifocus, the online GTD system of choice for Mac users. That said, my own Moleskine-based GTD system works just fine already. There are ...
12 June 2011 - 30 Second Summary A lot of different organizational systems, business, and people love to plan things out. They have stacks and stacks of bullets of things that need to be done to get to an outcome. F...
26 May 2011 - 30 second summary There's no doubt in my mind that David Allen built a multi-million dollar company selling a book about a system that most people never actually use. That doesn't mean the system does...
22 May 2011 - 30 Second Summary A good "Getting Things Done" system, like a good user interface, can only get better when there is less of it. Getting Things Done captures so many people because it is a relatively ...
12 May 2011 - 30 Second Summary Almost overnight book publishing moved from shipping a limited quantity of physical books to locations all over the world to digital distribution of data across the internet with a m...
05 April 2011 - On 3 April 2011 I had the chance to discuss independent publishing at the SynDCon gaming convention in Maryland. It was co-hosted with Matt James of Loremaster, Dave "the Game" Chalker of Critical Hit...
25 March 2011 - 30 Second Summary Rebecca Black's video, Friday, is awesome for one big reason - she didn't have to ask anyone's permission to make it. This video required no intervention by an army of suits in some ...
08 March 2011 - 30 second summary Ultimately, each of us is responsible for dealing with the situations in which we find ourselves. We have a lot more control over our lives than we think. It's easy to assign respons...
02 March 2011 - Sometimes you just happen to be surfing around with Bing when you pull up a six month old review of your own ebook that, how shall we put it, is quite critical of your work. That's what I found today....
18 February 2011 - 30 Second Summary Don't worry that I don't follow you on Twitter. I'm weird. My my obsession about my attention results in strange archaic guidelines for those I follow and those I don't. Whether I fo...
14 February 2011 - 30 Second Summary I finished a new eBook, Running Epic Tier D&D Games, to go along with my previous D&D book, Sly Flourish's Dungeon Master Tips, and I learned a couple of new things this time...
28 January 2011 - 30 Second Summary I'm weaning myself off of Google Reader to use Twitter exclusively for discovering news. While removing Reader simplifies my typical online apps to just Gmail and Twitter, I worry ab...
27 December 2010 - 30 seconds on living in the cloud We're getting closer to being able to live in the cloud. Today we have excellent cloud-based services for email, online document storage, music subscription, and phot...
18 December 2010 - 30 second summary While the whole cloud isn't likely to disappear, never trust any single cloud with your data. Like any backup system, store your data in two places, either two clouds or, ideally, bo...