A nice Saturday morning to all, or whatever the appropriate time of day to name when you are reading this. Just an hour after noon here in continental Europe at a cool 1C.
Makings notes hardly ever lets me down.
And if it does, it is most likely because I failed to do them in writing. And if I get this first sentence wrong, then it is indeed because the making notes part of it went fine, but I don't have my notes at hand when I want them. Interestingly, besides the obvious
making part, when electronics began dominated I started to send emails to myself. A
[email protected] or similarly used email address would do in 1997 or so, and later over
years I was extraordinarily happy with using the originally 'Straya-made app and website rememberthemilk that provided a email2todo-list service: send a semi-structured mail to your own private rtm address, and you can set reminders with due date, tagging and all to yourself as fast as you can think and type it. Got me
gorgerous results for years. Had I gone the PhD route and remained in academia I would likely have continued to use it that way and kept paying for the Pro version until this day. Rtm was a godsend. Now I shrug it off. (However not without referencing Hans-Georg Gadamer's essay
On Taking Notes or wherever that was hidden.)
In a cheap way, Slack has caught part of it (set a reminder as fast as you think it up), and e.g. Signal offers a send note to self channel. Professionally, ticket systems are just right for that, especially when coupled with Slack, turning them into a
highly effective timesaver.
I heard there are people using Alexa and Siri and all these newschool ways to handle their everyday reminders needing a full ecosystem even. Meanwhile I reverted to using paper notes again and tend to ignore some - as I do with many notes put into diigo. It's fine. They patiently sit where they're put, can't become pesky, an advantage that is appreciated. Maybe I just sifted the
musts from the
nice to have someday by hairsplitting the very
method of collecting notes. Lifes change, so do priorities. @
Nigel Taujess's offline tool is also precious to me.
Unsure how I deserve the honourable mention @
Gaffer however even should no misunderstanding exist, I do appreciate the chat we have here in #
checkin, or over at @
Muse glasswings's weekly. And I must say that
is a good thing. Folk music though, I am unsure how much contact I ever actually had or helped you with that, but as often in life the people behind the music may turn out to be more interesting than the facade. Cue a link to the punk rock concert experience I had described in some detail to @
pianomad sometime in 2018 or so here.
An anecdote for distraction: in primary school years I once walked home and found a cassette tape with "A feast of Irish folk" handwritten on its label on the sidewalk. That was in the mid-1980s. Having not a single clue what that music would be like I took it home and some 30 minutes of bouncy sounds and a fiddle and whatnot engulfed me - but only after I had to learn from my dad that you can take apart a tape shell with a tiny screwdriver and could rewind manually the actual tape using a pencil. And I had to do all that because on first attempt to play the Folk music on my portable children's mono cassette player (you know, one with that three digit mechanical counters that would mark how far playing had progressed in a somewhat imprecise manner) had made very odd sounds, both from the speaker and from its interior, before I pressed the stop button and tried to untangle innards that hadn't been there before.
Part of said tape was lost in the process and consequently never became part of the collection of "Found Tapes" that I never started, never assembled and never documented and never displayed.
With all that I learned though, unexpectedly, that taking things apart carefully enabled you to repair them and restore the ordinary functions. Possibly also to add, alter, and enhance their functions. Or break them to never recover. Not that my parents we all too happy with me discovering the world that way at all times, but my first electronics kit came not too long after those first steps resulting in a happy kid. This way "playing a tape recording" quite turned into "now what can you do with these computers" later.
Though I feel @
Cass M's pain - several times I have started to type a diigo/pluspora/blog post about a specific BBC podcast episode, and each and every time it vanished on pressing publish.
Re electronic devices.. some aspect of family life is aligned along related experiences. The UI and UX is one thing, but I cannot enumerate how many times I have corrected expectations of how this or that would behave with e.g. my mom's husband. Explaining the lessons that paper of early Lucy Suchman
Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication of 1987 provides is
tedious, in reallife situations I'd rather just grab your mobile and tap around on its touchscreen until everything works again. Again, priorities count.
Boy, am I in a chatty mood. Thank you Cass for triggering these ideas and memories.
Now I should do some useful things today. In the meantime, help yourself to a pixel cupcake if you want. :) Maybe someone can hand out coffee? :)
