JUDY

Filed under personal

View all posts on posterous with this tag »

Fan Email

Writing fan mail used to be a huge measure of dedication. You took out a chunk of your day to handwrite or type a letter on a sheet of paper, fold it, stick in an envelope, figure out the address of the artist you admire, stick on a postage stamp (or buy more stamps at the post office if you ran out), and send it. If the artist received it, they would have to take time out of their day to write/type a response letter, and go through the same process to send it back to you.

Now that we have email, I don't know if we write more fan mail than we used to for its convenience factor. There is a lot more media coming at you all at once. Being bigger consumers of media, we don't think as much about the people who create the art in the mediums we enjoy. There simply isn't enough time.

So with every new podcast or artist I listen to, or book I read that I really enjoy, I try to pound out an email in 5 minutes about my appreciation for their craft. The hardest part is usually finding out what email address to send it to. (Tip: if all they have available is a booking email address, send it there anyway, they'll make sure it gets to the artist. And don't bother trying to contact them through facebook or twitter, since those websites take far less effort for people to send messages through, and the signal-to-noise ratio sucks. Writing an email takes more time, and is considered to be more "serious".)

I've sent out a handful of fan emails in the past month, and I've received a response for every one without exception. It's a lot of fun, both parties benefit from the good feelings being passed around, and it only takes a few minutes. Give it a shot.
Posted
Views
and 0 Comments

I'm excited for autumn.

I doubt there are many people who are as eager for fall as I am. But it's not hard to explain.

Summer is the season of high temperatures, and I can't stand the heat. I hate stepping out of the shower on a supposedly "cool" morning, and sweating so much five minutes later that I need another shower. I'm not a fan of shorts or baring my legs; I would wear jeans and a t-shirt everyday for life if my family let me get away with it.

Autumn is the more comfortable season, to me. Longer and thicker clothes, pumpkin pie, apple pie/juice/sauce/cider, fall festivals, Thanksgiving, hay rides, school's back in session, and my birthday. It starts with the Grange Fair (a local county fair that I grew up going to), and ends with Christmas.

So excuse me if I smell what I think is burning leaves, and get frustrated that we're "only halfway through July", and I grumble away. It's because we're two months away from the best time of the year. And summer can't end soon enough.

Posted
Views
and 0 Comments

Ross Graduated!

Img_0002

Posted
Views
and 0 Comments

Do iPads Destroy the Innovative Spirit?

NO!

A lot of hackers my age grew up messing around on Apple ][s or DOS boxes with QBasic. People slightly before my time might have done similar on Commodores, TRS80s or VX Spectrums. Those things don't exist now, but there are more equivalents.

Trs80_2

Kids today know how to Google before they learn how to ride a bike. Some of them may have Googled how to ride a bike before they actually got one to ride. We're living in the information age, and to say it changes everything is an understatement. Anything you want to do, regardless of its proximity to you, you can find information on how to do it.

I'm a little crushed when I hear people describe the iPad, with its "closed box" mentality, as signaling a massive move away from the hacker mentality. That if you can't open it, you don't really own it.

Apple-ipad-001

That's silly. The iPad wasn't meant to be easy to mess with the hardware. But it has a really strong API for writing whatever you want on it. People complain about the App Store, but you don't have to use it to mess around on your own. (And I personally prefer the streamlined interface that the App Store gives you to downloading individual programs from different websites by hand.)

Arduino1

If you want to hack on hardware, get an Arduino. I plan on getting one, with an electronics kit, to spur on my daughters' imaginations when they get older. The spirit of the young programmer is alive and well.

Posted
Views
and 0 Comments

Notational Velocity

In the future, I'll talk about an article I've been reading that's making me re-evaluate my tools. But I thought I'd jump ahead a bit and bring up my current note-taking preferences.

I'm currently using Evernote (www.evernote.com) as a way of collecting notes on everything. EVERYTHING. Receipts, project notes, documentation, legal papers, whiteboard photos, you name it. It has awesome clients for Mac OSX and Windows, and our mobile devices. (iPhone right now, Android later?) And it seamlessly synchronizes all of my notes on all devices.

But because of the aforementioned article about re-evaluating tools, I've been looking for alternatives. One fascinating program that's picking up users is called Notational Velocity (www.notational.net). It's being touted as a lightweight application that streamlines the note-taking process. Searching for existing notes and creating new notes is the same action. And to reiterate the "lightweight" description, it opens immediately, syncs quickly, and you don't worry about any other functionality other than typing plain text.

I like this instant-on approach to note taking; it would reduce the barrier to getting stuff out of my head and into digits. Evernote takes a full 30 seconds to open, so unless you leave it running all the time (taking up computer resources), it's starting to become self-defeating. But I would miss having things like document scans and whiteboard snapshots being OCR'd and searchable immediately upon saving them with Evernote.

Does anyone have experience with both, and can elaborate? Is there something I'm missing that would totally sway me towards NV?

Thank you for your time.

Posted
Views
and 0 Comments