Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Kevin putting it out there

  • 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.

    1. Banned Books Week

      Last week was banned books week. All over the world, books are continually banned for their content. At this Interactive map of banned books, you can find out which books were challenged at school and in libraries all over the US and Canada. It would be great to do a version of this for Japan.

      Banned Books Interactive
      Banned Books Interactive

    2. MLA: Bibliographies: Books no longer standard

      Modern Language Association
      Modern Language Association

      From Ars Technica. Seems that even the conservative MLA sees the writing on the wall. No longer are books the standard for making a bibliography entry. Now you have to say which kind of media. Also, other arguments about how to quote a web page.

      The changes are part of MLA’s seventh edition of the Handbook, published last month, whose predictably soporific cover design belies the radical citation changes within. As Inside Higher Ed describes the changes, “print is the default no more” and the new edition suggests “that the medium of publication should be included in each works cited entry.”

    3. Did you know?

      David Wiley thinks that the university as it stands will be irrelevant by 2020. He suggested we take a look at a couple of videos. Here is one of them.