Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Year: 2009

  • Google Image Swirl

    Similar to Google’s Wonder Wheel, there is an image search that links concepts. Click on Image Swirl, and start clicking on linked concepts.

    Image Swirl by Google
    Image Swirl by Google

  • Google Wonder Wheel

    Google has done it again. I really like all the neat things they come up with. This one is great for expanding your vocabulary and finding related concepts. It is called Wonder Wheel. On the regular search page, near the top, click on Options, and then choose Wheel in the left-hand menu. It works like the Visual Thesaurus, but is free.

    Wonder Wheel for linking concepts
    Wonder Wheel for linking concepts

  • Google Translate Update

    Google Translate has added new features making it a lot easier to use. For those of us in Japan, the best one is “romanization” which allows you to get the pronunciation through roman letters of the kanji in question. Read more about it at Mashable. Here is a video that shows the new features.

  • GTDInbox works…unless it really works

    I finally emptied by inbox, the holy grail of GTD (Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen). GTD is a system of organizing and dealing with incoming information. Most of that information for me is in the form of email. A great implementation of the system in software is the GTDInbox, a free Firefox add-on that really works well.

    It was, therefore, funny, today, to get an error message for GTD, presumably because my inbox was empty!

    UPDATE! A nice GTDInbox employee pointed out this was a problem with my web access, not with GTDInbox.

    Error message for GTDinbox
    Error message for GTDinbox

  • Vonnegut’s 8 Rules for writing fiction

    Kurt Vonnegut is in my top 3 writers. Here are 8 reasons why.

    From the entry in Wikipedia.

    In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

    1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

    2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

    3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

    4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

    5. Start as close to the end as possible.

    6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

    7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

    8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

      Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O’Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.