#blogpostfriday - This fine Friday I am remembering the call to go beyond a 140 character post.  What triggered this recollection, I’m not sure–but I’m glad it’s here. 

The sun has just come out.  Greens dominate out the window here.  The blue is showing through the tops of the trees up the hill.  There’s a tranquility, a source of wonder.  A gentle breeze caresses the trees, butterflies flutter carelessly.  It is a picture to behold.  The recently cut grass (if you want to call it grass–it’s more clover and assorted weeds) stands, a pleasant still carpet.  A very handsome, tidy area.  The view is great from here, the music/writing room.  Deep breath and thanks.

The weekend in all its recreational glory.  Ahh, relief, let the stress roll off.  It is most welcome.  I’ll get some work done, make calls, visits.  We’ve got exercise machines in the house, so it is tempting to keep the doors shut and get workouts done here.  The house is so darned comfortable, it’s sometimes hard to get out anywhere.  And there is the tendency to remain sedentary.  Gotta fix that one…

What a challenge to get a grounding in this ever-changing, ever-growing information age.  I vascillate between computerized and manual systems.  A constant is that handwriting cannot go away.  There’s an ancient connection that must remain in me.  The technology is nanofast, efficient, superior in many respects, yes.  However, this connection is increasingly more important–it’s core identity, uniqueness.  It must stay, it must always be a part of my life.

The grounding comes from calm, perpetuates calm.  Managing self-talk, managing the noise, it’s a full time job, especially in this technomatrix.  The power to turn off the noise is invaluable.  There’s power, no pun intended, in finding that switch and knowing how to use it.  In my mind’s eye I analyze the switch, wondering how difficult it is to use, wondering how often to use it, instead of just flipping the damned thing!

A late breakfast with Lori.  Standard fare, GoLean Crunch, All Bran, skim milk.  We introduced Mom to GoLean, and now she can’t get enough of it.  It’s high-fiber, multi-grain, crunchy perfection.  It’s filling too.

I saw Lori gaze down at a magazine, saw her chuckle a bit.  A drawing on the cover of the University of Virginia alumni magazine.  A view of a campus lawn, with a young student wipping a frisbee at a professor, a squirrel on the head of another young student, all sorts of humorous little scenarios in the busy scene.  Lots of personality.  The headline was “Drawing on Cartoons”.  Nice pun.

A short while later, she chuckled and said “Exposure to cuteness increases fine motor skills”.  I thought she was putting me on.  Nope.  She was reading an actual study asserting this.  It was one of the articles in the magazine.  Subjects who had exposure to cute pictures of puppies and kittens performed better in the game Operation versus a group of people exposed to adult dogs and cats.

Just what I need, and excuse for more cuteness in this house. :0

Bring on the weekend, bring on the recreation!

First U.S. Rehab Center for
Internet Addiction
Opens Its Doors.

Excellent post and the video that inspired it.  How much time have you spent on the internet?  Probably too much.  See the list of 10 signs of addiction–you might be surprised at how many you can answer yes to.

The young man featured in the CNN video on the Mashable page was pretty matter-of-fact about his issue.  It was a somber sight though, this young man with such talent–it appears that he’s getting back to what he loved in “real life”.

It reminds me that there’s other important stuff off of this grid.  Much of my work is on computer and on line, so it’s difficult to flat out break away sometimes.  All the more harder to do so anyway.  Hard or not, it’s necessary.  At issue is balance.  You do the work here that’s needed.  The internet has sucked so much attention away from television and more traditional media outlets, but big media’s getting into the fray to provide more content here.  So it’s more tempting to stick around and find the gossip, the tv shows, the sensationalism.

Recovery starts when you know you need it.  Sometimes others let you know.  Regardless of how you found out, take the path.  Prioritize and establish–or re-establish–that balance.

UberBeyond Information Overload

OMG, I need filters and need ‘em fast, at least if any attention will be paid to real time web or anything similar.  And tell me it’s going to get any slower or more manageable from here on out.

Organization is crucial.  It starts with deep breaths, quiet, and patience.  Understanding too.  Just a few questions occurring:

• What are you looking for?
• What to buy?
• How to enhance skills?
• Looking for a job?  Tips on how to get them?
• Where do you get the information?
• Who do you trust to tell you any of this?
• Who are reliable sources?
• What are those sources’ motivations?

I am going to drown without a level of trust, a real idea of what actionability is, a time limit, a goal.  Set that goal, get in, get out, if ya can…. everyone in the world is clamoring for attention, has a story to tell, has a product to sell; the noise is UberBeyond Info Overload, at least in terms of this dynamic, real time paradigm.

Step Away From The Internet.

GReactions

I am going through the motions with gReactions right now.  Put it on FireFox 3.5.2, MBP OS x.

The install was smooth.  Mozilla provided precautionary words before download.  Did due diligence.   I do not see any customization capability yet.  That would be nice.  The font is so small it’s just about impossible to read.  Getting a size option on that would be welcome, or at least a bit larger font.  The timeliness of the responses, the dialogue, appears to be instantaneous–the scraping process would be a hoot to check out.  I’m going to get to know that a bit better.

Tracking the sources of the comments is klugy.  These days as well, it seems difficult to find the real source of items–you might need to navigate through a couple of third party syndications before you get to the original post/reaction.  A very high order would be real time refreshing, i.e., a FriendFeed within the results.  I didn’t see how that could be done here–a refresh within Google Reader would either make the item you’re looking at disappear, and or the entire feed would refresh to the most recent item.  The topic gets drowned in all the updated content.

You can filter the responses by the syndication source, this is a useful feature.

Overall it’s a great.  Hey, it’s viewed as Alpha, version 0.1.c.  I’m keeping it in GR.  Can’t wait to see and install updates.

Have you ever talked to your own brain?  “Good morning, brain.  How are you today?  Are your synapses firing off well?  Have you lost many cells today?”  My brain and I had a decent conversation this morning.  Of course our own self-talk is endless.  Some are better at ignoring it than others, and some are better at leveraging it than others.  In that big bell curve of brain utilization, I’m not sure where I’d be–average I guess.  Smack down the middle.

Not long after waking, I put pen to paper.  My goal is to do this daily, out of principle, out of desire to maintain sanity of some sort.  Years ago my friend Ron told me about The Artist’s Way, a Julia Cameron book which has guided many to more fruitful creative lives.  Cameron wrote about Morning Pages–it’s non-negotiable.  Get up and write three pages of long hand.  Not computer.  Your hand to the paper.  It’s a different kind of connection.  Back in ‘97 or so, I did this every day for a year.  I now do them sporadically–but when I do get in the groove, things become clearer.  I feel calmer, more creative, more accomplished.

Brainstorming is a factor in The Artist’s Way and so many other endeavors and disciplines, it’s a factor in all areas of our lives.  As I do with many things, I subconsciously grab onto the idea of brainstorming and how to improve it–it’s part of my fabric.  So how, where and why? 

How To Brainstorm — simple, isn’t it?  I believe it is.  The hardest part about is simply doing it.  We do brainstorm all the time, we just don’t stop and realize it.  It’s what your brain does.  OK, you can just let your brain wander all day and let its work entirely pass you by.  Or you can capture it.  Capturing it and using it can make all the difference.  It can be your starting a poem, a love letter, a song, a web site, an invention, or a business.

Start with a letter, a word, a number, and emotion, anything.  Start with or without a goal.  Nothing is wrong.  No judgment, no critic.  You are free, let your mind wander freely.  Circle a thought or concept, then branch out from it, move as quickly as you can.  Let the thoughts spread out, blossom, grow.  It is easy.  Create now, and quickly.  Review later.

Here are some quick & nasty ideas on where to brainstorm:

• Got a napkin?  Start drawing, writing, and so on.  Hopefully you’ve got a pen with you.  If you don’t, borrow one, steal one, beg for one.  If you don’t, well, you can prick your finger and write it in red…
• Notebooks, loose paper, calendars,
• WALLS.  My friend Lisa wrote song ideas on walls.  Shoot, I wrote on the wall when I was a kid.  Big trouble there. 
• Your Fridge.  Use Magnetic Poetry.  You can get some killer word collisions here.  It’s fun too.
• Mind Mapping software.  Freemind is a great one.  More on that later.
•  In the car – ok, be safe with this one.  There are laws against texting
• In any room, chatroom, anyplace–in a collaborative manner
• Your PDA, digital recorder – go ahead, shout it out, or use the notes feature or better yet, even FreeMind has some pda apps.  And who knows what the iPhone’s got.

So why brainstorm?  Because you can!  It can be the launching point toward somewhere marvelous.  It can take you from where you are.  Stagnant?  Brainstorm on how the hell to get moving.  Get down your dreams, wishes, shopping lists, gripes, anything.  Use it to ultimately get better orgainzed–you generate ideas, then later you order them.  Use it to better connect with yourself and others.  It’s a guaranteed move forward. 

We are so much in receive mode, or in such an automatic response mode.  How great it is to capture what our mind creates , shake things up and interact with it differently, and have a way to look at what you create through different eyes.  This is priceless.  It’s entertaining as well.

So let it bloom!

As part of my journey into the day, and after I wrote some longhand in a very handsome journal my wife bought me, I went to review one of my FreeMind maps.  It’s on songwriting.  The map is growing rapidly.  Within that map, you can move around ideas, up or down in the structure.  I moved something around having to do with audience, and soon enough, the map got so large it was next to impossible to navigate. 

Frustration.  Ever get that?  FreeMind Freaking, in abundance, in my face.  I hit help, I tried moving round, reviewing documentation, going online, calling a medium, anything and everything–even looking at exporting and reimporting.  I didn’t see the famous “repair” button or menu item anyplace.  But no luck.  Pulled some hair out because I couldn’t find the trick.  Some of the documentation is in a MindMap itself!

But then, it appeared before my eyes in problem resolution glory: Format / Reset Position.  I didn’t know quite how to phrase it–I was looking for auto arrange or the sort.  But once I hit that menu item, poof.  Back in business.

My FreeMind song map is one that I’m using to further my understanding of songwriting–by analyzing structure, charts, techniques.  I visit it as often as I can.  Links are embedded–both to web and local directories.  Within this map I can brainstorm as well as organize and adjust later.  A perfect way to get into whole brain thinking.

It’s all part of a desire to stay active, to have a better life, to look back on more accomplishments, dreams built.  And I will say maybe a bit of it came from brainstorming and branching from there–with plans, follow up, execution, persistence.

It is and will be joyful.

Enjoying xml pruning for IMG Thumbnail Gallery. Hope to check out the RSS capability soon.

Making great use of the ScreenGrab Firefox plugin.  This one’s might convenient, with a very unobtrusive icon at the bottom right and handy options for cut/paste or save to folder.

It’s a quick download then smack into WP media library.  Working well in FireFox 3.x on both Mac and Windows.

Getting Things Done, otherwise known as GTD–this is a tool which, hopefully, will help me restore order in my life. As each day comes, as each new piece of information surrounds and drowns, more and more it’s essential to learn how to deal with it, process it. I’ve got the book and am going head first in to making the program work.

GTD seems to be a movement–but is that all social media hype? I first found it on the web. Someone blogged it. Maybe it was a blink, or a digg. Wherever the post was, it proved intriguing, and I researched the program further. The reports and dialogue convinced me to grab the book and the Outlook plugin. The plugin is by no means perfect, but I moved to this after the Franklin Covey PlanPlus Outlook plugin completely bombed for me.

Using the Covey nomenclature, a paradigm shift is definitely in progress. GTD’s author, David Allen, developed a Workflow Diagram, which is on my wall. I refer to it often and will have it memorized soon enough. It helps you deal with overwhelm and develop a trusted system for retrieving the information you need, when you need it. More on this soon. Quite busy building files–and despite the assertion that all of our “stuff” will be electronic, there’s still an abundance of paper in my world. Off to conquer it.