Archive for the ‘housekeeping’ Category
What to expect on Jimmy Guterman’s blog in January 2013
I’ve spent much of the past year learning about editing and trying some new approaches in my editing work. Over the past month, I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned. Here’s what you’ll find this month on the revived blog:
January 4, Make it new again
January 9, On providing editorial services to noneditorial professionals
January 14, Business casual: an editorial manifesto
January 23, Editing as strategy (and why it’s not the same thing as editorial strategy)
Happy new year.
Second week at Boing Boing
It was a thrill contributing to BoingBoing, but now it’s time to return to real life. I’ve linked to my first week’s posts already. Here’s Week Two, in reverse chronological order:
Chuck Berry, “Tulane” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day
Son House, “Death Letter” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Richard Thompson, “For Shame of Doing Wrong” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Striking new Edgar Allan Poe collection
Free ebook download: Scott Kirsner’s “Fans, Friends & Followers”
Boyoyo Boys, “Back in Town” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Did Charley Patton play that way? (this one in particular had great comments)
Amy Rigby, “Balls” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Nina Simone, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Free download returns: Tribute to The Clash’s Sandinista!
Design thinking tips from the masters
Ida Maria, “Oh My God” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
First week at Boing Boing
For those of you who had better things to do the past week than follow my posts on Boing Boing, here they are, in reverse chronological order:
Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, “Wooly Bully” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Ennio Morricone, “Once Upon a Time in the West” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
Thomas Dolby and ETHEL: Music for the morning after
The physics behind flying sharks who can destroy airplanes
Jorge Ben, “Ponta de Lança Africano (Umbabarauma)” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
“Ten Dollar Cover,” an excerpt from a novel-in-progress/disarray
How did Garth Hudson defeat gravity?
Mekons, “Memphis, Egypt” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day
How to write about self-washing, self-flushing cat boxes? With passion!
Rod Stewart doesn’t play good Rod Stewart music anymore, but these guys do
A change of scenery (for two weeks)
For the next two weeks, I’ll be at BoingBoing. Please visit me there.
I’ll be on BoingBoing
I’m thrilled to report that I’ll be guestblogging on BoingBoing, one of my all-time favorite websites, during the first two weeks of March. In the guidelines, I’ve been told “We don’t allow nudity in the images, except under special circumstances.” Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Internet peoples, you have been warned.
And now, part of a conversation, guaranteed repeated verbatim:
Lydia: What’s BoingBoing?
Jimmy: A site where interesting people write about interesting things.
Lydia: But you’re not interesting.
We’ll see. I have a month to prepare.
Honey, did you miss me? Honey? Hello? Is anybody home?
Two questions for the proprieter:
Where ya been?
As promised, I took off a month from this blog and the assorted Twittering and Facebooking. I wasn’t quite tanned, rested, and ready after the month, but I think I may have learned a few things.
Repeat: where ya been? You said you were going to be gone for November and it’s halfway through December.
Oh, that. Well, right after I came back I got a kidney stone attack: intense pain, multiple trips to the emergency room, bad reactions to narcotics. I’m me again, but I’d like the past few weeks back. I’ll write more about that in the days to come.
Lots to write about in the days to come. The main point: I’m back here, for a while at least.
A November without social media
A writing pal and I are going on a blinders-on fiction sprint in November, so I won’t be blogging or tweeting or Facebooking (?) or anything that month. (I will continue blogging and tweeting and Facebooking (?) for work, though, for the obvious reason.) Email responses will be slower than usual, too.
Seeya December 1. I’ll tell you how it went.
Tweeting through October
Work is heating up (hence my presence in front of a computer on a Sunday afternoon) and one of the things that’s gotta give over the next month, until we get the new MIT Sloan Management Review website up and stable, is blogging. But don’t fear: I’m still going to deliver useless information to you. It’s just that for the next month I’ll be doing it in 140-character increments, i.e. via Twitter. In recent weeks I’ve found it to be a good vehicle for making one point quickly and then moving on. This is not one of those occasional hiatuses (hiati?) I pull here every few months. You’re welcome to follow me on Twitter. And I will be back here on a regular basis once work permits. And, face it, 140 characters at a time of me might be all you need most days.
(For those of you who follow my updates on Facebook, I use Ping.fm to update Facebook and Twitter simultaneously and identically. You don’t have to subscribe to both.)
Email policy
On a typical work day, I receive roughly 120 emails addressed to me. I also receive another 90 or so email on lists I subscribe to. And I get, on average, 930 pieces of spam per day. The “real” email is manageable; the spam isn’t. Until today, I’ve made time to go through the spam filters of my sundry inboxes. I’m stopping today for two reasons.
1. It’s too damn disheartening to see that the vast majority of email I receive pertains to such topics as debt refinancing, penis augmentation, and images of Angelina Jolie. But, more important …
2. In my past two weeks of spamsweeping, I found only one false positive among the 11,000 pieces of spam. It’s not worth reading the 10,999 to get the one.
So, keep sending me spam. I won’t be reading any of it from now on.
Progress report: how did last week end up?
Mixed. Here’s the final tally:
* get 24 things done at MIT (did 22, but of course the two that remain undone are the most important two)
* dentist’s appointment (done, but all I had to do was show up)
* write drafts of two scenes for the novel (none, but I did solve a crucial Act 3 problem, so I wasn’t a sloth)
* organize the office (home) (as good as it’s going to get)
* organize the office (MIT) (done, but it wasn’t a big undertaking)
* exercise five times (yup; this week isn’t as productive yet)
Friday morning progress report
The work week is nearly done. How am I doing?
* get 24 things done at MIT (21 down, 3 to go — but two of the remaining three are big projects)
* dentist’s appointment (done, but all I had to do was show up)
* write drafts of two scenes for the novel (none; looks like this isn’t going to get done)
* organize the office (home) (as good as it’s going to get)
* organize the office (MIT) (done, but it wasn’t a big undertaking)
* exercise five times (four down, one to go)
That’ll be it from me here for today. I’ve got to get (as many of) these things (as possible) done, plus the girls will be home this afternoon. Seeya next week.
Thursday morning progress report
The week’s more than halfway done. How am I doing?
* get 24 things done at MIT (14 down, 10 to go — two of those 10 are huge)
* dentist’s appointment (done, but all I had to do was show up)
* write drafts of two scenes for the novel (none; not looking good)
* organize the office (home) (as good as it’s going to get)
* organize the office (MIT) (done, but it wasn’t a big undertaking)
* exercise five times (three down, two to go)
Wednesday morning progress report
The week’s almost halfway done. How am I doing?
* get 24 things done at MIT (10 down, 14 to go)
* dentist’s appointment (today)
* write drafts of two scenes for the novel (nope)
* organize the office (home) (nope)
* organize the office (MIT) (done, but it wasn’t a big undertaking)
* exercise five times (two down, three to go)
Beginning-of-day progress report
I warned you. Will the fear of public humiliation motivate me to get everything done?
* get 24 things done at MIT (six down, 18 to go)
* dentist’s appointment (not yet)
* write drafts of two scenes for the novel (nope)
* organize the office (home) (nope)
* organize the office (MIT) (almost)
* exercise five times (one down, four to go)
The week ahead
Is it true that you were in a traffic jam that lasted for three states?
Yup. Started in Maine, ended in Massachusetts: all of New Hampshire was stop and go.
Why were you in Maine?
Dropping off Eli and his BFF at a photography workshop. I’ll get to spend 9-1/2 hours in a car again picking them up a week from Saturday.
Did you bring enough music to listen to in the car on the way back when you didn’t have to listen to two teenage boys blurt out whatever came to mind?
Depends on whether you think hearing the 57:19 version of “My Favorite Things” from John Coltrane’s Live in Japan is way beyond enough. I never want to hear a bass solo again (except by Eli).
Why do I hear an echo?
Because I’m alone in the house. Eli’s clicking pix in Maine, Jane and the girls are on the Cape for the coming week, and it’s just me in our modest-sized-but-enormous-feeling home.
What are you wearing?
Next question, please.
Will you blog more this week than last week?
Probably. It’s only Sunday night, the last time we can still feel optimistic about the work week ahead.
What else will you do?
I suspect I’ll veer wildly between GTD and GND. Here’s what I hope to accomplish between now and Friday:
* get 24 things done at MIT
* dentist’s appointment
* write drafts of two scenes for the novel
* organize the office (home)
* organize the office (MIT)
* exercise five times
I’ll update my progress daily. Perhaps tracking all this publicly will serve as a productivity tool: the threat of public humiliation works. Sometimes.
Do you have any photos of a turkey you saw recently saw on a highway divider?
Sure:
Questions for the proprietor
Where you been?
Canada, mostly. The five of us and a friend of Eli’s packed into the van: half a week in Montreal (good, and I was not responsible for this), half a week in Ottawa (great), and a one-night stopover in Burlington, Vt., on the way back. As of Tuesday, I’m three-quarters of the way to Inbox Zero. I need to learn French for the next trip to the Great White North.
Was everything the same when you returned?
Mostly. Manny is gone, and so is Scrabulous, but it looks as if the latter has returned in not-too-diminished form. I missed a particularly weird Carl Icahn hissy fit, and I’ll have to check in with Paczkowski for guidance on how to interpret that.
What did you learn about your newspaper-reading habits while you were gone?
As I’ve noted previously, I’m done with print newspapers. For the first half of the vacation, I did a reasonably good job of staying off the laptop (and we were in another country, so I didn’t want to turn on the iPhone unless absolutely necessary). If I wanted to know what was going on in the world I had to read the print versions of the Times and Journal, both of which were available in hotel gift shops at imminent-apocalypse prices. I imagined that reading newspapers this way would feel like a luxury. Instead, compared to their younger online siblings, they felt out of date and, well, short. Aside from the immediacy you get from following news via the net, chances are you see that news as part of a larger river of information. It’s always coming at you. In comparison, reading the news in a newspaper feels limited, finite. It ends. News on the net never ends (for better or worse).
Is there anything better than watching your girls swim in a hotel pool?
Not much.
Also worth looking at was the National Gallery in Ottawa. We spent two hours there. I bet we could have gone at least two days without running out of surprises. I was particularly taken by William Kurelek’s “Arriving on the Manitoba Farm,” which looks dark and formless in this image, but reveals more and more layers of detail and meaning when you have the pleasure of standing in front of it.
When you stopped in Burlington, Vt., on the way back, did you see any newspaper headlines you’d expect to see only in Burlington, Vt.?
Yes.
What did you read?
Parts of Francine Prose’s Read Like a Writer (mostly zzz, but it did introduce me to this guy) and Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and (several times) my favorite Chekhov story, “The Lady with the Dog.”
And you read them all on your…
Kindle, right. It’s a usability nightmare and the selection of Amazon-blessed-and-DRMed books is insufficient and random, but I found it convenient and comfortable under all but the most low-light situations.
Did you write?
Yes, especially early in the week when I was still keeping that off-the-net promise. It’s amazing how less depressed you can be about the quality of something if you’re actually working on it. And maybe I should consider a new business model.
What was Jane’s most memorable quote during the week?
There were so many candidates, but I’m going with “I’m trying to save the tattoo.”
How’s the new job going?
So far it seems like a very good fit. I’ll have a full report at the end of The First 90 Days.
Weren’t you going to tell us the point of this blog?
Comments from Doug, Owen, and Andrea — and a gift from Brian — showed me the limits of my thinking from a few posts ago. And Jane has suggested that I write about what I think about: namely, media and technology. So, unless you’re reading this via a newsreader, you’ll see that the blog now has a new tagline: “media, technology, and the rest of it.” I’ve got some ideas for making this more than a vanity blog; we’ll see if I can live up to them. Oh, and to warn you, I’m going to pay more attention to Twitter.
What’s next?
Gotta see how the WordPress app for the iPhone works.
On not raising your hand unless you have something to say (or, the opposite of blogging)
One of the unexpected side effects of moving this blog to WordPress was easy access to real-time statistics. I could tell, pretty quickly, whether a particular post or type of post was getting picked up or ignored. It’s seductive stuff — as anyone who has followed his or her book- or record-selling stats on Amazon knows so well. The bad part, aside from the time-wasting, is that the easy access to stats makes a blogger think too much about audience before posting. Blogs, I believe, are supposed to be about unvetted expression, capturing a moment, embracing the amateur and enthusiast in you even if you’re a professional writer in your real life. I intended to title one of my previous blogs “Quality over Quantity,” to celebrate that, but as old-timers know, I committed a typo and wound up titling that blog “Quantity over Quantity,” an unintentional joke too amusing to fix.
Now I’m not so sure. It’s 2008 and almost everyone has a blog (or has at least tried):
Is blogging getting old? Over the past two years, Twitter and Facebook status messages have emerged as media for distributing thoughts deemed too evanescent for a blog post. And now there are so many such services that aggregators such as FriendFeed and Ping.fm have emerged. More are coming. Nothing is so mundane that it can’t be shared immediately via many media. As Philip Greenspun’s blog puts it in its tagline: “A posting every day; an interesting idea every three month.”
I am a bit too enamored with my own ideas, as are many of us. As Jane said to me once and probably thought many more times, “Tell it to your blog.” The blogosphere is a wonderful place, but it’s one by definition full of noise. Although I value that noise and revel in it sometimes, I think too many of my posts are mostly noise, little signal.
Sometimes statistics reveal a truth. The two posts here that received, respectively, the most traffic and the most pointers in recent weeks were Barack Obama, Rolling Stone, and the secret of one great magazine cover and Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Twin “Hurricane”s in Rio. They’re two of the more substantive posts here from the past month. Neither post will change the world and both of ‘em featured pointers to more interesting content elsewhere. But they both sought to do a bit more than point to something and say, “Cool.” So, as this blog trudges forward, I’ll stop posting just to post. If I have something interesting to offer, I’ll try to communicate it in a substantial and entertaining way. If I don’t, I’ll try to shut up.
What is the point of Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars?
You may have your own opinion; I’ll tell you what I think on Monday.
Weirdness here
I finally figured out how to get the last six months or so of my Blogger posts into WordPress. The site will look weird for the next day or so while I make sure the transfers worked. Sorry for any inconvenience.
I have a new job
Starting Monday, I’ll be executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review.
I miss Jimmy’s old blog
No, you don’t. At some point, I’ll get the Blogger->WordPress translation tool to work. That hasn’t happened yet, so you can still find some of the old stuff here. But stick with the new.
Reminder: blog.guterman.com
Just a quick reminder that this blog, once again active, has moved to http://blog.guterman.com. Please change your links and feeds accordingly. So you don’t have to look it up, the new feed address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/JimmyGuterman.
And you can go there to find out what my new job is.
Onward…
Moving to blog.guterman.com
Jimmy Guterman’s “Jewels and Binoculars” is moving to http://blog.guterman.com.
I’ve had it with the Blogger blogging software. It feels like Google has abandoned it: no development and certainly no support. It has become too unreliable to use anymore. Also, after many years of the same structure, it’s time to try something new.
The new blog will be at http://blog.guterman.com and it will open some time in June. When that happens, I will note its both via Facebook status and whatever the kids are calling a Twitter transmission nowadays. Before I depart, I want to share with you a clip of a cat playing a theremin.
See you in June…
Coming soon: Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars
Jimmy Guterman’s “Jewels and Binoculars” is moving. To here.
I’ve had it with the Blogger blogging software. It feels like Google has abandoned it and it has become too unreliable to use anymore. Also, after many years of the same structure, it’s time to try something new.
The new blog will be here. It will open some time in June. When that happens, I will note it both via Facebook status and whatever the kids are calling a Twitter transmission nowadays. Before I depart, I want to share with you a clip of a cat playing a theremin.
See you in June…
The blogosphere rejoices!
No blogging this week. Too damn busy. Seeya next week. I hope.
Not breaking the chain on Jewels and Binoculars
You want me to blog every day (or, at least, every work day)? Fine, I won’t break the chain anymore.
Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars: new (and, perhaps, improved) 2008 edition
Hello to both of you who’ve waited for this humble weblog to return. I’m going to try something different this year. As those closest to me know, structure and I are not close friends. Everything reminds me of something else, which reminds me of something else, which … well, you get the idea. No structure. If I’m going to stick to blogging for more than a little while this time, I suspect it will be only if I create a structure that encourages me to post here almost every day. And a different topic every day keeps this blogger unbored.
So, here’s the structure that I’m going to attempt:
Every Monday, I will post about Cooking. [insert pause for laughter.] Yeah, I know, but hear me out. When I look at the things about myself that I want to improve, cooking keeps coming up at the top of the list. Partly it’s because I’m a lousy cook (married to an adventurous, imaginative one) and I want to become a better one. Partly it’s because my failure in the kitchen often feels like a metaphor for other failures in my life. Just as last year my cryptic decision to post sentences here from my novel-in-progress helped me focus on writing every day, I’m hoping that chronicling my disasters and occasional successes in the kitchen will keep me focused. The possibility of public embarrassment remains a powerful motivator.
Every Tuesday, I will post something Work-Related. The vast majority of my writing these days is for my work at O’Reilly (and, to a much lesser degree, Harvard). On Tuesdays, I’ll post something related to what I actually do for a living.
Every Wednesday, I will post the latest Greatest Song of All Time of the Week. No further explanation necessary.
Every Thursday, I will post something related to the Novel-in-Progress. They may be sentences from the work (currently, but tentatively, titled The Rock Star Next Door), they may be complaints about the process, they may be lessons I’ve learned.
Every Friday, I will post nothing, probably, because Man was not meant to blog with the weekend coming so soon.
Random Crap can appear any day, as it is, er, random.
I will also tag each post, to make searching by topic easier, and to help anyone coming here who wants to peruse, say, the music posts but none of the cooking posts.
Seeya Monday…
Lots to do before the end of the year, none of it bloggable
“Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars” will return some time in January. Ho ho ho, everybody.
An anonymous reader asks…
[Note: The following question is 100% legitimate.]
When do you write this blog? Don’t you have a job?
Indeed I do, and I like it a lot. “Jimmy Guterman’s Jewels and Binoculars” is strictly an evening-and-weekends operation, regardless of when the cranky Blogger software indicates that the posts were, uh, posted. I’d love to tell you more, but I have to get to work.
Happy Thanksgiving
“Jewels and Binoculars” will be sitting in traffic until Monday morning. Be back then.
Suggested publishing software
I’ve been using Blogger to publish my personal blog for 6-1/2 years. For a variety of reasons (mostly functionality and reliability), it might be time to change. If readers here have strong opinions over what system I should use, I’m all ears.
Going mobile (on a different number)
I have a new mobile phone number. Those of you who use my mobile number, please contact me and I’ll give you the new number.
Conference-bound…
I’m away this coming week at the Web 2.0 Summit. Dear “Jewels and Binoculars” readers, please let me know if you’ll be there, too.
Hiatus
To celebrate a recent hard disk crash, “Jewels and Binoculars” is on hiatus. It’ll be back, but not for a good long time. Please don’t remove us from your feed reader. We will return October 3. Really.
