Ash Wednesday, and the PC as a distraction machine February 21, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Church, Life, Work, Writing.add a comment
Cory Doctorow says it when he’s talking about e-books: It’s hard to read anything long form on a computer screen, not necessarily because it bugs our eyes, but because computers demand that you use them as computers and not as books. They’re there for reading, yes, but also for e-mail, games, Web browsing, writing, chatting, video watching, sound editing, music making, music listening, and on
and on
and on.
It’s hard to do any single thing on a computer, because all the while the device is dangling the opportunity to do something else in front of your eyes.
This is why, when I need to buckle down and get moving on a stalled piece, I print out the materials that I need, walk to the other side of the building, and hole up in an empty office. Within a half an hour of being unplugged I’ve gotten my act together.
…there’s an inherent problem with always being online: you’re too connected. You wind up in the role of passive observer. Things come to you. You react instead of act. You can easily spend too much time “marking things as read,” reading RSS feeds, watching YouTube clips, or whatever else.
When you go offline, that equation changes. You have to be active. Since you can’t input, you output. If you don’t do something, nothing happens.
Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users:
Worst of all, this onslaught is keeping us from doing the one thing that makes most of us the happiest… being in flow. Flow requires a depth of thinking and a focus of attention that all that context-switching prevents. Flow requires a challenging use of our knowledge and skills, and that’s quite different from mindless tasks we can multitask (eating and watching tv, etc.) Flow means we need a certain amount of time to load our knowledge and skills into our brain RAM. And the more big or small interruptions we have, the less likely we are to ever get there.
And not only are we stopping ourselves from ever getting in flow, we’re stopping ourselves from ever getting really good at something. From becoming experts. The brain scientists now tell us that becoming an expert is not a matter of being a prodigy, it’s a matter of being able to focus.
Being offline. Focusing. Simplifying. And you know, today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent: the season in which we adopt spiritual disciplines that help us focus as we prepare for Easter.
It’s a small step toward cutting through all of the noise in my life, but I think I’m going to begin Lent by deleting all of my RSS feeds and starting from scratch.
Art Buchwald, my role model January 19, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Writing.1 comment so far
When I took on my first ever steady writing gig - as a columnist for my high school paper - my role model was humorist Art Buchwald, whose own column ran in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Buchwald was a weird role model for a 17-year old writer to have. And not always the best role model: my pieces sometimes took this weird curmudgeonly stance, as if I couldn’t believe all the nonsense folks were up to these days with their craziness and whatnot.
But he was the first writer whose work I studied from a writer’s perspective. I read his columns carefully, noting how he’d introduce his topic, then set up a scene that he could use to make jokes (usually a dialogue between himself and some crazy character). I saw how he set up each joke, knocked it out, and then moved on as he built up to the final, deadpan punchline. I copied this format when I wrote my own columns, gradually finding my own voice as I worked within his tried and true framework.
Kids started coming up to me in the hall and shyly telling me that they thought my stuff was really funny. They were shy around me, the King Dork of the Universe.
Thanks, Art.
1925-2007
What do you do with a Webcast? January 17, 2007
Posted by Wade Rockett in Work, Writing.add a comment
An editor e-mailed me today asking,
Which of these words is preferred with “webcast”? Does one join a webcast? Attend a webcast? Watch a webcast?
I replied,
I would say that you watch or view a webcast. (Unless it’s audio only, of course.)
You might attend a Web seminar or meeting. The word “attend” implies some degree of presence and maybe interactivity, whereas a webcast is more often something that you passively consume.
To me, join is best used to describe the specific act of logging in or connecting to a Web event.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think so.
Midnight vulture September 22, 2006
Posted by Wade Rockett in Work, Writing.Tags: food and drink, meem
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It’s a quarter to midnight, and I’ve just uploaded craploads of revised Web pages to an online workspace for the client to review.
I really hope they like them.
Special thanks to my wife for being patient, to our cats for being distractingly cute, and to Sobe for making this delicious cold green tea drink that probably isn’t any better healthwise than a soda, but WHATEVER MAN IT’S TEA.
Also to Dylan for hepping me to Kimya Dawson. I’m listening to “I Like Giants” right this very now.
Jon Silk tagged me with a meem again! This time from the Lewis 360 PR blog, not Clogger; so maybe when I act on it I’ll post it on the New Marketing blog and invite my co-bloggers to play. It’s “what are your five favorite YouTube videos?” I’m mentally winnowing through my Favorites in order to come up with the the ones that have real staying power in my head. Not sure yet if “A minute of screaming” will make the final cut.
Okay, time for bed. Goodnight, moon.
Hard work and a detour to Palo Alto September 18, 2006
Posted by Wade Rockett in Microsoft, Work, Writing.Tags: california, exchange, intuit, palo alto
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Man, I am so busy. I’m working furiously on two vast and concurrent projects, one for the upcoming Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 launch, and another for Intuit.
The Intuit job has taken me down to San Jose twice for project meetings. I’d never been to Silicon Valley before. As we drove down 101 from the airport, I got a nerdy kick out of seeing Intel, Yahoo, and other heavyweights from the highway. Its as if Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Eddie Bauer, and Starbucks were all within a mile of each other up here in Seattle.
By an astonishing coincidence, my second trip down to San Jose happened the day my mom and stepdad drove up to central California for a vacation. They decided to keep heading north and meet me in San Jose - we got to hang out a little on Thursday night, then have breakfast on Friday morning before my meeting.
That evening our team from Write Image had dinner in downtown Palo Alto before our flight home. Holy Ned, is downtown Palo Alto swell. It has many ethnic restaurants (we ate at a fantastic Greek place), cool yet geeky sculpture,
a high-tech pay toilet,
and two art house/revival movie theaters.
I truly love it up here, but seeing the Spanish-style architecture and the bungalows sitting along tree-lined boulevards gave me a pang of homesickness for California.
Fiction February 13, 2006
Posted by Wade Rockett in Fiction, Writing.Tags: my writing
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Ararat
The mountain on which Noah landed tells what he recalls of the great Flood. A liturgical piece, written for the Easter Vigil.
Philosophus Stone Against the Cult of Terror!
Philosophus Stone, occult investigator, clashes with diabolical cultists in the desert outside Las Vegas! Can he prevent the resurrection of the demon god X’tloktl?
The stories that I upload to ourmedia.org and link to on this site are free for you to read, and are available for various uses under Creative Commons licenses. I’ve placed the PayPal equivalent of an open guitar case in each post if you feel like throwing in some change.
