In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

via Kurt Vonnegut – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

”
So in future, if I want to discover any certainty, I must withhold my assent from these former beliefs just as carefully as I withhold it from obvious falsehoods.

It isn’t enough merely to have noticed this, though; I must make an effort to remember it. My old familiar opinions keep coming back, and against my will they capture my belief. It is as though they had a right to a place in my belief-system as a result of long occupation and the law of custom. These habitual opinions of mine are indeed highly probable; although they are in a sense doubtful, as I have shown, it is more reasonable to believe than to deny them. But if I go on viewing them in that light I shall never get out of the habit of confidently assenting to them.

To conquer that habit, therefore, I had better switch right around and pretend (for a while) that these former opinions of mine are utterly false and imaginary. I shall do this until I have something to counter-balance the weight of old opinion, and the distorting influence of habit no longer prevents me from judging correctly.

However far I go in my distrustful attitude, no actual harm will come of it, because my project won’t affect how I act, but only how I go about acquiring knowledge.

…

Like a prisoner who dreams that he is free, starts to suspect that it is merely a dream, and wants to go on dreaming rather than waking up, so I am content to slide back into my old opinions;

I fear being shaken out of them because I am afraid that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake, and that I shall have to struggle not in the light but in the imprisoning darkness of the problems I have raised.”

• Meditations on First Philosophy: Meditation I: Concerning Those Things That Can Be Called into Doubt, René Descartes

A fellow grad student from the SIAT Masters program, Anna, locally-sent a postcard that she picked up during her stay in Montreal at the the 2012 Grand Conference.

For such a majestic and historic building, the architecture of the Notre Dame Basilica (1829) is very gloomy and creepy, isn’t it? Thank you for the lovely postcard, Anna!

What does Polyglot mean?

Polyglot: a person who speaks, writes, or reads a number of languages.

“For those of us in the software development business, polyglot refers to the practice of knowing and utilizing multiple languagues, frameworks and stacks to build software. In many ways, and particularly for web developers, we all seem have at least bit of polyglot going on these days.

The core idea of the Polyglot Conference is to celebrate this diversity and break us out of our typically language-specific user groups and conferences to come together to talk about the challenges and interests that we all have in common.”

via Welcome to Polyglot 2012 – Vancouver Polyglot Unconference.

You know there’s something to be said on predestination when.. one hands a business card with the above photograph, a superstitious number in western civilizations and european-influenced culture, to a thesis-working Ph. D. candidate whose research focuses on “the ‘how’ moral thought accords legitimacy to the distribution of life chances.”

To be entirely honest, I’m not sure what/if free will had anything to do with this experience.

Source: Staples eReader Department

SCORE: You read 605 words per minute.
That makes you 142% faster than the national average.

After reading the first paragraph I realized it was an excerpt from H.G. Wells’s ‘The War of the Worlds’!! one of the novels that I studied during a science-fiction lit. course back in college and much, much more open to meta-interpretation versus the film version from a few years ago. Other options for tests on speed reading include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — L. Frank Baum.

That being said, it was much easier to answer the little short questionnaire following the speed reading test based on my hazy memories of the overall story. I’m sure there’s also something to be said for speed readers who are familiar with reading text-online versus offline, and etcetera.

One of the favorite methods I choose to introduce and keep in touch with new acquaintances is sharing business cards.

Despite the fact that I haven’t attended many social, networking, conferences and events lately, my supply of these cards was diminished. These are a few of the latest addition to my collection, and also include photography from the Flickr account of the past year and a half, or so. I used a freebie offer from about.me where I ordered several designs with the moo-template embossed on front, (removed the QRcode) and which overall, only cost the price of shipping!