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Hello World…Back on WordPress

mikecnicholson — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:27:22 +0000

It’s a good thing this is a personal site, because I continue to change and experiment with different things using my URL. If anyone happened to check in at this URL over the past year or so, it has been directed to a Facebook page, Tumblr account, Twitter and Google plus page at different points in time.

After an almost year-long reduction in social media work, I decided to jump back in and re-open my WordPress blog.

At one time I had a reasonable size audience coming to this site, but with all the virtual moving around and experimenting, and with choosing to reduce my social media work for a bit to concentrate on other things, I will have to do some more work to reengage. I also hope to post some topics that will hopefully be worthy of some discussion.

While I’ve done a little social media work, most of my time this last year has been spent working on studies at the School of Advanced Military Studies. I’ve also been taking some Masters courses through the University of Southern California and will be deploying to Afghanistan in January, so I have a number of things which are worthy of a post, but will save them for later once I have everything back online and updated.

Is G+ worth adding?

Mike Nicholson — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 01:57:41 +0000

I was interested in seeing what Google + was all about just like the rest of the techno-social-media-geek world was. After receiving an invite and working on it a day or two, my initial impression was that it was just GoogleBook. Yet another stream of information, links, funny photos and videos, people talking about Google +, people talking about other people talking about Google +, yadda yadda yadda.

I wanted something that made me more productive, something that helped me get things done rather than being yet another stream of information that I passively watch roll down the screen. I saw some potential if there was integration with all their other Google products, but it just reproduced the same features more or less that I already have on “the book” and didn’t really live up to my expectations (it is still in beta by the way, and still invite only).

But, I found some things that was more in line with what I was looking for in the Chrome browser extensions. I am normally a Safari user but have since migrated over. Here are some of the extensions I have added:

Voice search. With the built-in mic on my Macbook Air, I can now click the microphone icon and say what Im searching for instead of typing.
Google Translate via GTools+ extension. This extension gives you several things, but the one thing I really like is it allows me to follow people who post in languages other than English, and with the click of button, automatically translates it to my language of preference based on my settings.
Unlimited Picasa photos. This may cause me to move off of Flickr. Free is better than $25/yr for Flickr Pro.
Extended Share extension. Gives me access to Facebook and Twitter so I can monitor and post to all three sites, all from one screen.
Buttons. Nothing really new here, but have added buttons on the browser that links to several other sites now visible from the same screen (Safari extensions are very limited).
Video Conference. With ‘Hangouts,’ you can have up to 10 people online in a video chat room.

The business version of Google sounded even more promising as there was mention of better integration with Google Apps, Docs, Analytics, etc.

The drawback right now is that I have to be on my laptop and have to be using Chrome in order to get these features and the iPhone app is extremely limited. It would be nice if these features were available from any browser and on your phone and/or tablet.

No way to know if G+ will continue to grow or just fade out like Google Wave and Google Buzz did, but I am intrigued enough to spend time on it and see how it evolves. Most of my friends/family are on Facebook and G+ doesn’t have the numbers yet, but a little competition for “the book” might help both up their game.

How Designers Think

Mike Nicholson — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 01:00:07 +0000

We are starting the Design portion of the curriculum here at SAMS, and to kick things off we had an orientation to the topic of Design by some of the members of Populous, a global design practice with an office in Kansas City. Populous, among other things, was responsible for the LiveStrong Stadium here in Kansas City that is now home to the MLS team KC Sporting.

The intent of the brief was to explain the process of how they take a project from a vague concept to the delivery of an actual building. The process is no doubt different for every project – different owner personalities, different goals, conditions, timelines, budgets, etc. As has been mentioned before this year to us, there is no silver bullet solution that can be applied uniformly to every circumstance.

What I appreciated was their passion for the process. When starting a project, there are so many things which are unknown and the skill is in taking all your experience up to that point and establishing a common framework with which to proceed. They seemed to enjoy the challenge of the process.

Some takeaways:

Design is intellectually informed decision-making.
“Everything in the world must have design or the human mind rejects it. But in addition it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it.” John Steinbeck
“Form follows function” Louis Sullivan
On handing projects off to another member or team: it is important for the receiver to have the history and context, as much as possible, when taking over a project. The genesis of a project typically has an idea which all subsequent ideas are derived from. If the new team does not understand this context, the project can easily move away from its foundation.
Cast your intellectual net wide. If design is about connecting all the correct dots, you need to make sure you have a lot of potential dots with which to connect. If your education and experience is very narrow, your pool of ‘dots’ will be limited as will your solutions.

The title of this post is also the title of a book Im currently reading, “How Designers Think” by Bryan Lawson. Photo taken from www.livestrongsportingpark.com.

Vicksburg Staff Ride

Mike Nicholson — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:56:19 +0000

I spent the last week in Vicksburg, Mississippi on a staff ride with my SAMS class. We spent the week prior in preparation, looking at the history and context of the campaign, and studying one of the more prominent individuals on either the Confederate or Union side. I was assigned to be Gen William T. Sherman throughout the week in Vicksburg.

While it was good to look at the tactics and battles of the campaign, those were…as my instructor likes to say, “mildly interesting.” The real intent behind the staff ride was to see what lessons learned there were that apply today, see what is useful to me that I can take away as an operational planner, and to reveal more of what an operational planner is.

Prior to leaving on the trip, our instructor said that many SAMS students come to realize at some point during the week the reason for being in SAMS. The light bulb comes on, and it did for me.

There are a number of potential topics to write about, so at the moment I’m just trying to organize my thoughts. Some of these concepts were explained to us extremely well, so I’m in the middle of trying to write these down so that I am able to eventually articulate those same concepts to someone else, just as good as they were originally articulated to me.

Great week with lots of new things learned.

Why it’s good to write

Mike Nicholson — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:14:00 +0000

Whether your blog has an audience of one or one-thousand, here is a good way to look at your writing.

I always tried to explain to others that one of the reasons I maintain a blog is not because I really desire to have an audience, but that among other things it helps me gather my thoughts and ideas. It also forces me to work on my writing skills (or lack thereof), and keeps me up to date with some of the latest communication tactics and techniques. For me, it is my self-imposed forcing agent that makes me work on some of the things that I professionally want to work on.

I previously called this blog my ‘mental dumping ground,’ but I think Lynn Hunt does a better job of explaining the process of writing. Writing leads to thinking. (Link to the article on Historians.org is here)

How Writing Leads to Thinking (and not the other way around)
By Lynn Hunt

Writing is stressful. Sitting in my computer chair my neck and shoulder muscles almost immediately tense up as I dig around in my brain for the best phrase or even any coherent string of words, whether I am writing an essay like this one, a book chapter, a letter of recommendation, or an email message to a friend. Writing is time-consuming. It’s a great way to pass the time on a long airplane flight because you lose track of the passage of time altogether. It’s even better, from that point of view exclusively, than watching an episode of Mad Men on your laptop. Writing means many different things to me but one thing it is not: writing is not the transcription of thoughts already consciously present in my mind. Writing is a magical and mysterious process that makes it possible to think differently.

Because writing is an act that is far from completely accessible to our conscious minds, recommendations about how to write history may well be irrelevant. And yet they are not useless, if they can make writing seem less like scaling a Himalayan peak after having spent a lifetime as a couch potato. I know that is how I felt when I confronted the task of writing my dissertation. Doing research seemed so much easier, even those days in French archives when the archivist seemed not to comprehend a word I was saying, or those nights when I lay awake wondering which two French cities of 1789 I should compare out of what seemed an endless array of choices. Notecards with city names—Amiens, Blois, Caen, Dieppe and so on—turned over in my dreams, which is an awful waste of dreamscapes. But no, there is nothing quite like the terror of the blank page or the empty computer screen in front of you.

My first rule, in such a situation, is not to look at notes. In the era of digitized databases, digital photographs of manuscripts and archives, and digital copies of notes taken of books and archives, such a rule is yet more imperative. Even when I was preparing my dissertation, when my handwritten notes could fit into a carry-on suitcase (it was blue with a flowery pattern and more or less joined to me at the hip when traveling), the rereading of notes posed a serious menace. Some of my fellow dissertators spent months going over their notes hoping for manna from heaven, a eureka moment, or just enough inspiration to get started. Reorganizing your notes is a form of house cleaning; it might make you feel good about yourself as a tidy person, but it will not produce a chapter—or even a page. Only writing can do that.

I say this in part, I confess, because I have always been and will always be, I hope, a terrible note taker. Before the computer revolution—that is, for my dissertation and my first two books—I took notes longhand on yellow legal pads, had no filing system, and in any case, once I started writing, I discovered, as many do, that I had taken notes on the wrong parts of books or documents or had not written down something crucial such as the page number or the exact French wording.

Documents that have turned out to be vital to my argument, which I only discovered sometimes after writing the draft of a chapter, usually required multiple consultations, which makes having copies handy, to be sure, but it is usually impractical to copy everything, even if you knew what that everything was. Taking notes, and even more so, ordering microfilms, photocopying or digitally photographing documents, will not get you to the heart of the problem. At least while taking notes you have done some thinking, but in general, your thoughts will remain stalled in the fog of infinite possibilities until you start writing them, not as notes, but as prose arguments.

My second rule, when looking at the blank screen, is called the “radish rule” in honor of my grandmother, who never published anything but did produce many radishes in her garden. Every day in the summer she would call my mother and inform her of the number of radishes in her garden at that moment, a number that grew steadily over time until the end of the season. You want the number of your pages to increase steadily over time, culminating in the completion of a first draft. Whether you use an outline or not (I jot down bullet points in no particular order as a way of starting), what really counts is momentum, not momentum as in a jet racing forward to the completion of its route but rather momentum as in three steps forward, two steps back, two or three pages written (maybe even five!), then revised the next day while another one, two or three are added, and so on. If you are tearing up all your pages and throwing them away day after day, if you are changing your tack every day you sit down, if you are waiting for inspiration to come before writing the next page, your problem is not intellectual, it is most likely psychological, painfully so.

Admittedly, momentum requires a certain tunnel vision. This is one of the dirtiest of the dirty little secrets about writing. Everything about history and life itself is potentially infinite (except one’s life span, unfortunately). There is always another document that could have been consulted, just as there is always another fact about a friend or partner that if you knew would make you understand her or him better. But life is short and if you want to write more than a dissertation or one book or two books and so on, you have to limit yourself to what can be done in a certain time frame. You cannot accumulate pages if you constantly second guess yourself. You have to second guess yourself just enough to make constant revision productive and not debilitating. You have to believe that clarity is going to come, not all at once, and certainly not before you write, but eventually, if you work at it hard enough, it will come. Thought does emerge from writing. Something ineffable happens when you write down a thought. You think something you did not know you could or would think and it leads you to another thought almost unbidden.

What is that something ineffable and how do I know this? I do not belong to some kind of occult organization with special séances on the magic of writing, unless you want to so describe, with some reason, the guild of scholars more generally. Everyone who has written at any substantial length, whether prose or poetry, knows that the process of writing itself leads to previously unthought thoughts. Or to be more precise, writing crystallizes previously half-formulated or unformulated thoughts, gives them form, and extends chains of thoughts in new directions. Neuroscience has shown that 95 percent of brain activity is unconscious. My guess about what happens is that by physically writing—whether by hand, by computer, or by voice activation (though I have no experience of the latter)—you set a process literally into motion, a kind of shifting series of triangulations between fingers, blank pages or screens, letters and words, eyes, synapses or other “neural instantiations,” not to mention guts and bladders. By writing, in other words, you are literally firing up your brain and therefore stirring up your conscious thoughts and something new emerges. You are not, or at least not always, transcribing something already present in your conscious thoughts. Is it any wonder that your neck gets stiff?

Even as your pages proliferate like my grandmother’s radishes, they must be weeded and thinned out if they are to grow to an optimal size. Nothing is more important to writing than the weeding, thinning, mulching, and watering that is known as revision. Sometimes another eye provides the added sunlight needed for new growth. I have picked up countless tips about writing from the editors assigned the thankless task of improving my prose, whether in a scholarly book or a textbook. You can only really figure out what you think if you first put it on paper and then develop some distance from it. It has to be a part of yourself, but a part that you are willing to release from yourself. Most problems in writing come from the anxiety caused by the unconscious realization that what you write is you and has to be held out for others to see. You are naked and shivering out on that limb that seems likely to break off and bring you tumbling down into the ignominy of being accused of inadequate research, muddy unoriginal analysis, and clumsy writing. So you hide yourself behind jargon, opacity, circuitousness, the passive voice, and a seeming reluctance to get to the point. It is so much safer there in the foliage that blocks the reader’s comprehension, but in the end so unsatisfying. No one cares because they cannot figure out what you mean to say. How much better it is to stand up before the firing line and discover that no one ordered your execution. The most the critics want is an intense fencing match, and you are more than up to the challenge because you have honed the edges of your research and said forthrightly what you thought.

You do not need to believe me, because professional help is always around the corner. The best advice about writing that I ever got was many years ago from the poet and prose writer Donald Hall. His book Writing Well was then in an early, if not a first, edition (it is now in its ninth), but he also generously read the pages of those of us who were junior fellows in the Michigan Society of Fellows. He was a senior fellow, and I knew that my dissertation needed serious work. From him I learned that writing requires an unending effort at something resembling authenticity. Most mistakes come from not being yourself, not saying what you think, or being afraid to figure out what you really think. His approach was not at all solipsistic, for he also recommended a different kind of attention to others who write. When you are reading a book that grabs you, consider how the author accomplishes that effect. What is it that draws you in? What makes you think it beautiful or forceful or astute? Which quality do you cherish most? What can you learn about writing from it? Assistance is available close at hand but you have to know where to look for it.

In short, one is not born a writer but rather becomes one. Learning to write well is a lifelong endeavor. Graduate programs tend to assume that students come with already acquired writing skills that simply need to be polished. History instructors only rarely if ever give courses in writing; we assume that graduate students learn by osmosis, by imitation, and by correction of flagrant errors. We have begun to pay more attention to teaching as a learnable skill. We should do the same with writing. Even if there is no one way to do it well and no recipes to follow, we all might benefit from more attention to writing. I know I always can.

How to work for a S.O.B.

Mike Nicholson — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 22:12:33 +0000

My instructor has a 1963 version of the Army Officers Guide, and in it there is a section titled “How to Work for an S.O.B”

Given that this was published in 1963, many of the senior military leaders at the time were likely veterans of WWII and/or Korea. There was no recognition of PTSD for these individuals, and the assumption is that many of them handled their problems on their own through a variety of methods. I would dare say that if the publishers felt so inclined as to put a section like this in the Officers Guide, there probably were some challenging supervisors during this period.

I copied the section of the book, and below is the text. I think it is worth a read:

BEGINNING OF TRANSCRIPT

How to Work for an “S.O.B.” In times past there has been much conversation in the service about the difficulties of working under certain officers. An officer was invited to write his views. His answer is reproduced below.

Dear Sir:

You asked if I’d write a piece on how to work for an S.O.B. The mere thought raised wells of sympathy within me for those unfortunates, who as I did in times gone by, now suffer under a hair shirt boss who is intolerable. How to live with the Grouchy, the Unreasonably Impatient, the unfair, the Mean and Vicious – the summation of all the S.O.B’s I’ve ever served under? My enthusiasm was the more exalted by the thought that I might be able to help those who had fallen on such evil times as to inherit an S.O.B. as unit commander. Ah, the troubles I’ve known from S.O.B’s!

Well, I took pen in hand and began to cast about among the multitude of my S.O.B. supervisors to select the most horrendous one as my opening illustration, so as better to explain how I survived my painful ordeal while retaining my sanity. With elation upon discovering my perfect example, I began to describe old General Blank, the biggest S.O.B., surely in all the world. As I wrote, however, I began to recall how, after I grew to know General Blank, I learned of his nerve-shattering war experiences in Asia, of his being finally relieved of his command and sent home more or less in physical collapse. I recalled his singular touchiness about his wife, a nosey young lady who caused no end of trouble within the command, and I wondered if the great differential in ages between Blank and his young wife -25 years- made him thus sensitive. These and other things about Blank occurred to me. On second thought, I decided he was not my candidate for Senior S.O.B.

When I remembered Major Dumguard, though, I knew I had my prize S.O.B. Dumguard’s extreme impatience, his growled answers, his sudden violet angers over nothing, his indifference toward my problems-these and many other characteristics of a bonded 100 proof, aged in the wood S.O.B. came to my mind. Yet my resolve faded when I remembered Dumguard’s young son hanging so long between life and oblivion with spinal meningitis; the deep shock of his wife’s death; the fact that he lagged in promotion far behind his colleagues.

In fact, I must admit it, I can tell no one how to work for an S.O.B. because I’ve never worked for one. I have worked for men who were suffering from illness physical or mental, and who vented symptoms of these on me occasionally. I have worked for men who were bewildered, discouraged, tired, hurt, nervous, miserable, afraid. These too have made my life unpleasant. But I see now that these men were not true S.O.B’s. They were human beings in some sort of trouble, men in pain, whether from real or fancied ills. Therefore I must turn back to you unmarked the page on S.O.B’s. I can’t recall a one. Is it possible there aren’t any?

All the letter says, really, is that juniors and seniors alike are human beings with human frailties but each in his way doing the best he can for a purpose he believes worth while. We figure the letter deserves to live.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

Special thanks to Kathryn Fulton and Stackpole Books for allowing me to reprint the above excerpt.

Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army. Taken from an article by the U.S. Army Center for Military History on Operation BIG LIFT which occurred in 1963. Link to the article here.