I learned of MyTextFile from the TakingNote web site. The design metaphor for this web app comes from the old days when geek-like people collected and managed their writings in one large ASCI file. MyTextFile is one large ASCI file in the sky. There are advantages to the single text file structure: Full search is [...]
Author Archives: Doug
Making a Reading Notebook From a Private Web Site
Sometimes we just get away from ourselves. I wrote up the post below, built the web site discussed, actually got the whole thing up and functioning nicely. That was before I saw that InstaPaper already had an excellent clipping function built in, out of the box, already there and waiting for me, and that it would do the exact same thing as the system I designed.
So let the attached be a memorial to all those poorly thought out development projects, the ones best deliberated more deeply before begun, the one’s best killed when they are young, at the initiation stage, before we do the palm-to-the-forehead-slap of realization, the cruel knowledge arriving of just how much time we just wasted…
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Modifying the InfoBase for the iPad
A comment on another post asked, “how’s it going with PlanText?” And the short answer is, not so well. Not that the application is not wonderful. I find PlainText to be the best of the iPad/iPhone note taking and writing applications available. It’s better than Elements (which I find aesthetically unattractive) iAWriter (which I find [...]
Bob Benmosche’s Cancer
On hearing of Bob’s illness, I picture him yelling at Death, and I see Death stalking away, defeated. And I remember Virgil… Mors aurem vellens, “Vivite” ait, “venio.”
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FCS, Choirmaster at Grace Died on Tuesday.
I received an email last night saying that Frank Cedric Smith, choirmaster at Grace Church from 1960 to 1992 died on Tuesday at his home in Cape Cod.
It’s given me pause, the email, more so than most of these types of messages. We all stop for a moment at an obituary listing. An obligatory reflection on mortality surfaces, always a bit selfishly because the thought ends up circling back around to our own situation; then we push those “me” thoughts away, and with forced reflection a memory stirs, we move back in time.
Frank Smith made me Head Chorister at Grace in 1975. (My name is up on the wall in the church lest I forget)
My Org-Fu System
I’ve updated the notations I use for note taking during meetings and conversation. Others have named these systems Org-Fu, or Meeting Ninja systems, and they can get elaborate — I assume to overcome the static nature of physical notebooks. Mine is simple and vestigial, the remainder of my days when I used paper notebooks, a lot, and went to meetings, a lot.
Ogame and Web 2.0