Author Archives: Doug

The Whitney Biennial – The End In Sight?

Spending Friday at the Whitney Museum of Art’s Biennial was like spending an afternoon watching YouTube, except the Whitney’s installations were of a lower production quality and were vastly less meaningful — even when shouting their relevance at full volume. Room after room showed video after video in the show billed as the art world’s statement of what’s happening now, a statement, the Whitney will tell you, it has been making for over 75 years.

But this version of the Beinnial’s statement is about …

Posted in Art, Best Of | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Responses

SimpleText, TaskPaper, WriteRoom, Notational Velocity – Going minimalist with my notes

Going minimalist with my note taking tools has been a fantastic boon to my work flow. Using applications and tools that let me access my data set of files, without taking them over and making my work flow conform to the needs of those applications, has removed a whole set of steps, perhaps most importantly the one between capturing ideas and processing them to finished work.

Before, there was always the PITA process of transiting from flaneur to writer, now they are one and the same act; in other words the technology is doing what it is supposed to do.

Posted in Best Of, Productivity | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Responses

Chameleon In Chief

How could I have said such bad things about President Obama? How could I have said he was the leader of the grow-the-government-at-all-costs liberal wing of the Democratic Party? How could I, like Charlie Kraauthimer use the term Social Democrat, even when others were using the more pejorative Socialist? How could I have ever suspected that by taking over the auto industry, trying to take over the banking industry, writing legislation to take over the medical industry that Obama was really the candidate of fiscal responsibility and small government? Federalization? Heck no, we’re all Republicans here, now.

The Left must be in horror watching Obama Reagan, just as the rest of us were when we watched Obama Marx. Jon Stewart is just fit to be tied, brutalizing the once deified savior of activist government, the New York Times is on suicide watch. Lord knows what Jessie is thinking.

But the chameleon in chief knows…

Posted in The Annals of Protest | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

My policy on email

I get a lot of email, I mean a lot — not as much as I did when I was in commerce, but still what could justifiably be called a deluge. Some if it is of my own making, most is not. Almost all of it demands a thoughtful reply, and each reply takes, for me at least, emotional energy, if the response is going to be more than the web 2.0 version of a grunt.

In addition to the volume of mail I get, emailers have increasingly imposed their own ever shortening version of response times on that torrent. Besides whatever they wrote, they implicitly say: I wrote you. I want, demand, will extort, a reply NOW.

Here’s what I do…

Posted in Best Of, Productivity | Tagged , , | 2 Responses

Justus Rosenberg on rescuing victims of the Nazis

Justus Rosenberg was the youngest member of the team led by Varian Fry that rescued some of Europe’s most famous artists, writers, and intellectuals who had taken refuge in France prior to the Nazi occupation.
I studied linguistics under Dr. Rosenberg at The New School in the Fall of 2008. This video tell his story from the 1940’s, and in the post I tell a little story shared between us that fall.

Posted in Best Of, Visionaries | Tagged , , , | 4 Responses

Notational Velocity – Show in Finder

Missing in Notational Velocity is an apparent command to “Show in Finder” but it’s easy to use Spotlight to do the same thing.

Here’s how I do it…(and why it matters to interface architecture)

Posted in Productivity | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 6 Responses