magpie's shiny things

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 isn’t wast­ed. Even if all I learn from a book is what the not-so-good think­ing on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject looks like I have got­ten some val­ue for my time. The time I spent think­ing fur­ther about the not-so-good book, how­ev­er, is time that I could have spent think­ing about some­thing more interesting.

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, cow­ards, and pro­cras­ti­na­tors can use the shit­ty first draft to alle­vi­ate the sting of “not get­ting start­ed” and yet still not accom­plish the need­ful thing.

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 yes, Windows man­age­ment yes, hard­ware trou­bleshoot­ing, yes. Web — no.

I need a lit­tle knowl­edge. This week­end. Continue read­ing “A Little HTML is a Dangerous Thing and I Know Where to Get It”

Sometimes even the dullest of research projects brings a lit­tle snick­er. To wit, while cruis­ing the great gobi of amazon.com look­ing for chick­en cook­books (don’t ask) I found this lit­tle list. And now my day is all better.

-mag­pie

Odd to me that I should dis­cov­er the ClueTrain Manifesto (I pre­fer to think of myself as fash­ion­ably late to the par­ty) in the same week that the lat­est of Wired mag­a­zine final­ly makes it to the top of the ought­ta read pile with it’s arti­cles about on-line open­ness. Including Clive Thompson’s The See-Through CEO with it’s painful­ly time­ly con­clud­ing para­graph. (I won’t spoil it for you.) Continue read­ing “Wired Magazine, the Cluetrain, and Synchronicity”