Author Archives: lara

This morn­ing I read Dan Russell’s series of essays on sense­mak­ing. Dan is a sort of meta/mega sense­mak­er. He tries to make sense of how peo­ple try to make sense of things. These essays won’t take you long to read and they aren’t hard to grasp. But you may have on of those aha moments. I … 

Continue read­ing “Dan Russell on Sense Making”

I was cruis­ing the librar­i­an blogs this after­noon and came across Pam Berger’s essay on the skills that we need to learn in order to make good use of the infor­ma­tion resources on the web. In par­tic­u­lar her thought that “Hypermedia envi­ron­ment encour­age broad accu­mu­la­tion of infor­ma­tion, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly deep explo­ration.” struck a chord.  I’m looking … 

Continue read­ing “Challenges in the Webbed Information Skeins”

I have recent­ly wast­ed two days on a not-so-good book. It’s not the 5 or so hours that I spent read­ing the not-so-good book that I regret. It’s the time I spent try­ing to decide what to write about the not-so-good book, indeed whether to write about it at all. Time spent read­ing (almost?) anything … 

Continue read­ing “Wasting Time on a Book”

I will always be grate­ful to Annie Lamott for intro­duc­ing me to the con­cept of “Shitty First Drafts” in Bird by Bird. I am now begin­ning to under­stand that there is a sec­ond, equal­ly impor­tant, direc­tive: “Spell check it and pub­lish it.” Getting the draft out of my head is only a start­ing point. We perfectionists, … 

Continue read­ing “grat­i­tude for annie lamott’s SFD”

We all know that a lit­tle knowl­edge is a dan­ger­ous thing. It’s also often exact­ly what is need­ed for the occa­sion. So here I am with a new web­site, a cou­ple of blogs to look after, and a image port­fo­lio to build for the DH. Problem is… the in-the-house IT guy does­n’t do web. Networking … 

Continue read­ing “A Little HTML is a Dangerous Thing and I Know Where to Get It”