General – Page 19 – Chris Koerner

David Foster Wallace on the Humdrum of Life

learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master

This commencement speech from David Foster Wallace¹ is really interesting. The whole thing is worth a read, with many sections that made me let out an audible, “Ooof”. Especially the part about the boring routine of adult life.

As someone who’s many years from graduation, the whole thing really does ring true and is solid advice for anyone, not just graduates. Although, I assume a younger person would gain more value than those who are older.

I still struggle with the choice of where to put my mind.

(via kottke.org)

Ethan Hawke on Good Sci-Fi

And for that matter, look at the moral conundrums that GATTACA asked – which are right here. To what extent do we really want to homogenize ourselves, when it’s our uniqueness that makes us special – when so many of us, when given the option, would eliminate that? For example – if they can discover dyslexia in the embryo, and get rid of it, many people would choose to do that. And we’d lose Albert Einstein, John Lennon, and my daughter.

Actor Ethan Hawke always puts on a good AMA.

Tagging Semantic Articles Outside of the Factbox

One of my favorite Semantic MediaWiki features is the factbox. It’s a quick way to browse wiki content by property values.

What if you want a similar browsing interface within a wiki page? For example, let’s say you want a value for a property you use to ‘tag’ an article to provide a link to a list of all pages with that property/value pair. Here’s one way how. ²

For the past year one of the ways we’ve been using our wiki is to publish an internal monthly newsletter. Each newsletter article is a wiki page, with a template providing consistent navigation.

Screen Shot 2014-12-17 at 1.19.10 PM

Along the right hand column of every article are the tags for the audience and topic areas related to the article.

linked-list

Recently I made an addition to the list of Audience and Topic Area tags to provide dynamic links to all pages with that property value. I’m leveraging the SMW Special:SearchByPropertySpace special page.

In the article template, with the property “Facets Article Topic Areas” you’ll want to use an arraymaptemplate ³ to format the comma separated list of values. ⁴

'''Topic Areas''': {{#arraymaptemplate:{{{Facets Article Topic Areas|}}}|SearchByPropertySpace-FacetsArticleTopicAreas|,|, }}

What this will do is take every value for the property Facets Article Topic Areas and use the SearchByPropertySpace-FacetsArticleTopicAreas ⁵ template to format each value. Each value is separated by comma, and our final output will be separated by a comma and a space.

In the template “SearchByPropertySpace-FacetsTopicAreas” we have the following.

[[Special:SearchByProperty/Facets-20Article-20Topic-20Areas/{{#replace:{{{1}}}| |-20}}|{{{1}}}]]

This creates a link to Special:SearchByProperty where the property name is Facets Article Topic Areas and the value is each comma separated value from our arraymaptemplate.

The replace parser function converts values with spaces to URL encoded characters.

SearchByProperty

The result is that every topic area listed on the page becomes a link to Special:SearchByProperty that shows all pages with that value.

Screen Shot 2014-12-17 at 5.02.52 PM

When editors add a new article they only have to add a list of topic areas. ⁶ This makes in-article links to all other articles a click away without having to scroll to the bottom of the page to view the factbox.

Unreachable Time and a Rant Against Voicemail

I’ve been at my employer for over 3 years now.⁷ The entire time I’ve been here my voicemail message has said the following:

“Hello, you’ve reached Chris Koerner. I’m often away from my desk and don’t respond quickly to voice mail. The best way to contact me is to send me an email at me@work.net or if it’s urgent call me on my cell at 314-555-2456. Thanks!”

So, don’t leave me a VM, try my cell or email. I’ll answer my cell from a work-prefix number when I’m at work.⁸ I respond to email in a few hours at most.

My wife finds it amazing that I’m able to do this. That my boss doesn’t prevent this or that I haven’t gotten in trouble yet. Here’s my secret. I never asked my boss how I should make myself accessible and spend my attention. I decided that. He trusts me. I said, for me, the best way to get my attention is via email or cell call. Voicemail sucks.

Short of that. I’m unreachable. I think that’s important. Even with all the responsibilities I have and all the various ways to get in touch with me, sometimes I will not be available. I might be busy with a big project and a deadline. I might be in a meeting.⁹

I’m still accessible – even faster than voicemail! – and I’m polite about it. The important thing for me is making sure that the time I have allotted to get work done is as productive as possible. I use the tools I have – email, phone, IM – in the best way possible. To me, being accessible via voicemail is the same as being accessible via fax. Ancient, cumbersome, and a pain for all parties involved.

Voicemail is slow. Like most folks I read much faster that someone can talk. If I’m familiar with a topic I can quickly read an email and respond.

Voicemail also introduces ambiguity. Did they say ‘Six five seven two” or “Six five six two”? I’d have to play back the message if I missed a number, address, etc. ¹⁰

The tools we use should make us more productive and efficient. We should delight clients and co-workers with our responsiveness. Clunky, outmoded tools like voicemail don’t help us. I encourage you to look at how you’re using things like voicemail and see if there isn’t a better, more productive and friendly way to manage your attention and time.

Leave me a ~~voicemail~~ comment with your own ideas.

OS X Yosemite Notifications Preferences Don’t Stick

I’m really enjoying OS X 10.10¹¹ Yosemite and have only encountered one really pesky bug. Even the Citrix and VPN clients for work are running great. That hasn’t always been the case.

This bug manifests itself when you restart your computer after changing any of the Notification settings in System Preferences. They don’t stick!

I found this fix on this Apple Support Community thread. Here’s the steps in case that thread disappears into the ether.¹²

1. Open the Library folder in your Home folder. Easiest way to do this is in Finder go to the “Go” menu in the menubar. Select “Go to Folder”. Punch this in: ~/Library/Application Support
2. Locate the folder named NotificationCenter. Drag this folder to the desktop.
3. Next, open the Terminal application. It’s located in the Applications/Utilities folder. Or just search for it in Spotlight.
Copy and paste each line of these commands into the Terminal window, in order. Press return after each line:

cd `getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR`
 rm -rf com.apple.notificationcenter
 killall usernoted; killall NotificationCenter

4. Close the Terminal app.
5. Restart your computer.
6. Change a few notification settings and restart one more time to make sure they stick.
7. You can delete the NotificationCenter folder you dragged to your desktop.

—

As a side note, I’m going to try and compel you to turn off some of your notifications. I’m an anti-notification guy. I don’t need to know when every email comes in or every @ reply on Twitter. I’ve got other stuff to do. So do you.

The first thing I suggest you do with all your devices is turn off about half of the notifications. The computer should work for you, not the other way around.