dougist.com

Chameleon In Chief

Doug — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:37:07 +0000

How could I have said such bad things about President Obama? How could I have said he was the leader of the grow-the-government-at-all-costs liberal wing of the Democratic Party? How could I, like Charlie Kraauthimer use the term Social Democrat, even when others were using the more pejorative Socialist? How could I have ever suspected that by taking over the auto industry, trying to take over the banking industry, writing legislation to take over the medical industry that Obama was really the candidate of fiscal responsibility and small government? Federalization? Heck no, we’re all Republicans here, now. The Left must be in horror watching Obama Reagan, just as the rest of us were when we watched Obama Marx. Jon Stewart is just fit to be tied, brutalizing the once deified savior of activist government, the New York Times is on suicide watch. Lord knows what Jessie is thinking. But the chameleon in chief knows...

My policy on email

Doug — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:03:09 +0000

I get a lot of email, I mean a lot — not as much as I did when I was in commerce, but still what could justifiably be called a deluge. Some if it is of my own making, most is not. Almost all of it demands a thoughtful reply, and each reply takes, for me at least, emotional energy, if the response is going to be more than the web 2.0 version of a grunt. In addition to the volume of mail I get, emailers have increasingly imposed their own ever shortening version of response times on that torrent. Besides whatever they wrote, they implicitly say: I wrote you. I want, demand, will extort, a reply NOW. Here's what I do...

Justus Rosenberg on rescuing victims of the Nazis

Doug — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:46:18 +0000

Justus Rosenberg was the youngest member of the team led by Varian Fry that rescued some of Europe's most famous artists, writers, and intellectuals who had taken refuge in France prior to the Nazi occupation.
I studied linguistics under Dr. Rosenberg at The New School in the Fall of 2008. This video tell his story from the 1940's, and in the post I tell a little story shared between us that fall.

Notational Velocity – Show in Finder

Doug — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:56:45 +0000

Missing in Notational Velocity is an apparent command to “Show in Finder” but it's easy to use Spotlight to do the same thing. Here's how I do it...(and why it matters to interface architecture)

myMFA – A two year writer’s development program

Doug — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:18:57 +0000

A few months ago a writing pal passed along a link to Dennis Cass’ post discussing his version of an idealized MFA program, an alternative MFA. Cass’ point of view was that traditional MFA curriculums were filed with blanks, specifically outside of craft development, as done through workshops, and outside (perhaps) literary criticism, as done through massive reading work. This struck a cord with me, it sounded about right, so I went off and built one of my own, what I call myMFA, it’s outlined in detail, along with the schedule of how I implemented it in 2009 and 2010, after the jump…

WriteRoom and Notational Velocity

Doug — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:07:17 +0000

A modification to WriteRoom’s SimpleText application has me looking at Notational Velocity again. What I find is a near perfect minimalist integration and text management system that supports long term data storage. My description of the applications, and how I use them in my infobase system follows after the jump.

Library Lions 2009

Doug — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:08:02 +0000

Well, if this video doesn't get you jazzed about being a writer, then nothing will....

Mr. Obama: Decline the Peace Prize

Doug — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:05:06 +0000

I heard this morning about the President’s Nobel Peace Prize. It was followed by laughter, and the running joke of the morning: “I thought I was reading The Onion” people said. The incredulousness is deep on both the left and the right. Mr. Obama needs to think long and hard about accepting this award. The vapidity of the criteria used for his selection could ratify in the public mind the vapidity of his prior and current achievements.

BusyCal, an iCal Replacement, is not quite busy enough

Doug — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:04:51 +0000

Last week I installed and then de-installed BusyCal, a new and hotly touted iCal replacement. It was the product of the development team that created David Pogue’s favorite calendar, Now Up-to-Date, and I thought it promising since there really is not another iCal replacement package out there unless you adopt Entourage which means being outside the Apple suite of apps with all their interconnected goodness. Here's what I liked and didn't like about the application...

The Right March on Washington

Doug — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 20:59:57 +0000

When I was young, civil disobedience was the tool of choice of the left. Now it has become the tool of the right. In August conservatives filled town halls. Today they filled the Washington Mall. While the right is not really comfortable, yet, with the tactics of Gandhi - they stand stiffly, wear pastels and khakis, their signs have none of the humor of the old 1960’s banners, they look like they are going to overheat in the sun, and no one burns their bras or even takes off their cloths - the crowds are big and growing. This must be bitter sweet for President Obama, our community organizer in chief...

Health Care Reform: It is a Lie

Doug — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:16:22 +0000

Yep it’s a lie. After the summer of discontent, and the President’s speech last night (with its heckling) I’ve written up my thoughts on the current health care debate. I wish we were talking about the issues that would actually solve the problem and stop all the lies. But then again, it’s not really about health care, right?

File System Infobase Manager

Doug — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:47:42 +0000

I've posted a complete outline of my File System Based Info Manager. It's the tool I use to manage all my writing, notes, reference material, bibliographies, and records. It's based on Alex Payne's architecture ideas, Noguchi Yukio's organizational systems, and input from my pals over on the Scrivener Forums. So far it is one of the most popular posts on dougist.com.

Sharon Mesmer for Brooklyn Poet Laureate

Doug — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:42:37 +0000

Sharon Mesmer is on the short list for the next Brooklyn Poet Laureate to succeed Ken Siegelman. It really isn’t a contest is it? She has to get the nod. In a story Gene Kuntzman did for the The Brooklyn Paper he wrote: < blockquote>"Mesmer will get the vote of anyone who likes a randy dame who’s not afraid to write poems with titles like “Annoying Diabetic Bitch” and “Holy Mother of Monkey Poo.” “If anyone is suggesting me [as poet laureate], it must be because I slept around so much,” she said. But she’s being modest: Mesmer, who studied under Allen Ginsberg, teaches at the New School and, this fall, at Brooklyn College.

Email as ToDo List

Doug — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:06:32 +0000

David Pogue, the Technology Editor at the New York Times, has caused a stir with his last email update. In it he described a short list of his productivity secrets and to the gasps of GTD/David Allen proselytes the world over he declared that he uses his email inbox as his todo list. I thought I heard the followers of Merlin Mann and his 43 Folders InboxZero program clutch their collective chests. I joined in by posting... < blockquote>I love todo list so much I had dozens - Omnifocus, iGTD, iCal, Things, legal pads, 3x5 cards, all of it. Then I relized the wonder of the one inbox, and I have made my email that box. Like Pogue, anything that comes in is filed, replied to, or tossed a la basic GTD principles. What is left over are todo/project emails. The problem with using the inbox...

Writing Timers, Wasting Timers

Doug — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:15:28 +0000

A great way to waste time not writing is to set up your system for managing writing time during the time when you should be writing. I used to write non-stop, heads-down till my body collapsed, lost in the tunnel of creativity, absorbed with characters and stories. While exciting and vaguely mystical, this is not a long haul strategy for writing sucess. Eventually things (like, you) begin to break down. Somewhere along the way, I think from the Scrivener boards, I learned of a system for working in periods of forty-eight minutes followed by breaks of twelve minutes. The idea was to train the subconscious to visit during the twelve to help the creative process along. Easy to adopt, right? All you need is a great timer, because if it works you’re fully absorbed during the 48 and will/should/hope to loose track of time until the bell goes off. So I had to go find the right timer. Don’t laugh, this is a big deal and it can take dozens of hours of frittering to try them all and get just the right one....

Shifting Mediums

Doug — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:51:20 +0000

Of all the artists, we writers are uniquely beset with the chore of dealing with the piles of stuff we produce, and making sure it doesn’t get lost in some tornadoing swirl of trash papers, dog eared towers, or misnamed folders, never to be seen again. This is not to disparage my friends who are visual artists, they too have vast quantities of stuff, paints, easels, those funny little wooden figures with articulated joints, but their problems are different. A thirteen foot canvas is not likely to just up and disappear overnight, while a 10,000 word story can fall into some crevasse of a hard drive and go missing for years. I’m also not speaking ill of my friends the performing artists, who’s work is basically geographical. Their biggest organizational issue is making sure they show up at the right place, at the right time, on the right day, hopefully without forgetting their Strad, or Gibson in the cab on the way to the hall. But we writers, our burden is the crap load of words we have to wrangle. Even if you only do the Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird 300 words a day minimum quota (or the 3,500 I seem to average) a writer can easily develop a whole attic of text, mounds of little stories, herds of ideas, notes, quips and quotes from observation or reading, and it’s easy for stuff to slip off on the wind, which is a shame because that cloud of pages heading over the hill has good stuff in it. Ah, the trade offs of the different vocations… When I flip through the files in my writing folders I invariably trip over a little gem, something I forgot, something valualble. The other day I found a wonderful description of a feeble old man stumbling off down a hall, he was fragile and vulnerable like he was made of spun candy, along the way he had to stop and remember where he was going. He was a perfect model for a director in my book. The natural question is how to keep something like that from being lost...

What comes next?

Doug — Sat, 30 May 2009 18:46:29 +0000

In response to a question on another site... "Once you have written down the inspiration that comes to you, then what?" ...I replied... Outline, reorder, revise, wrestle with syntax, realize that there is no message or point, start over....Get to same place, cry, make coffee, read someone else's work, say "I can do better than that", start over, fail again, make choice between Martini or scotch, check facebook, read emails, call a friend, fritter, decide to give it another run...Find original point is not that bad, re-outline, like the way it looks, fill in gaps, change "its" to "it's", check spelling, publish, collapse exhausted and get another Martini... Or something like that.

No Armageddon, Not Yet

Doug — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:06:53 +0000

One of the things I’m surprised about is the resiliency of the economy. Things are flattening out, opportunists are making their moves on low prices in many industries. Business is starting up again, mostly because credit is beginning to flow out of the banks. I really thought it would have been much worse. Given the environment of the crisis, regime change in Washington being the largest and most disruptive, I would have thought by now the pavement would have been fracturing, buildings collapsing, that there would be revolution in the streets. I said this to Shannon yesterday as we walked cross town on the way to a meeting of one of her non-profit groups that works with disabled vets, and she stopped cold in the middle of Park Avenue. “You? I can’t believe it....

Big Heros Don’t Solve Small Problems

Doug — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:26:23 +0000

Back when I was in commerce we’d watch a young executive making a play for relevance and import and say, “Big heros don’t solve small problems.” It’s a version of the old “make a mountain out of a mole hill” idea, but much more dangerous if you let it get out of hand. On April 3 Eamon Javers at Politico reported on Obama’s meeting with the nation’s finance executives (Inside Obama’s bank CEOs meeting) One could call it a staff meeting since everyone in the room now works for Obama. The description of the meeting went...

“Dimon (JPMC CEO Jamie Dimon) also insisted that he’d like to give the government’s TARP money back as soon as practical, and asked the president to “streamline” that process. But Obama didn’t like that idea — arguing that the system still needs government capital. The president offered an analogy: “This is like a patient who’s on antibiotics,” he said. “Maybe the patient starts feeling better after a couple of days, but you don’t stop taking the medicine until you’ve finished the bottle.” Returning the money too early, the president argued could send a bad signal. Several CEOs disagreed, arguing instead that returning TARP money was their patriotic duty, that they didn’t need it anymore, and that publicity surrounding the return would send a positive signal of confidence to the markets.”

But you see all this isn’t about confidence in the economy, is it? The government has its hooks in the banks now and it is not going to let go.

Barack Orwell Obama

Doug — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:34:51 +0000

“Just don’t call it a surge”. From a policy perspective I guess I should be happy. The Obama administration is pursuing policies that look identical to those from the last administration, even if they are named differently. It’s become so blatant that even the New York (Obama is the messiah!) Times has begun to report it, and Jon Stewart is laughing at it. Tens of thousand of troops are pouring into terrorist enclaves. (We used to call that “the surge”) Know enemies of the state will be detained indefinitely (Close Guantanamo, but move the prisoners to an other secret facility, and keep some there, perhaps, forever) Pay cap restrictions are being circumvented (The administration is building loop holes into the Pay for Performance act and providing instruction to their employees at the banks on how to use them) We no longer are fighting a war on terror, now we have “overseas contingency operations” to prevent “man-caused catastrophes” (Listening to Hillary say these ridiculous phrases makes me think of the sweetness of political revenge. No woman from the Midwest can say those words without sounding churlish.) But somehow I am dishearten by the disingenuousness of it all...