The Column

Motto: This Turned Out to be a Monster I'd like to thank my local library and the various apps ( one ,  two ,  three ) that connect with it for increasing my reading throughput by roughly 95%.  Gillespedia  has 9 book reports now... sooner or later I'll figure out a way to make them  look  good. Right now Gillespedia is basically a link to the public-facing portion of my Notion notes. This Column has been dogging me for weeks. I'm sure it will feel good when it's finished. Mindfulness.  Being present. Intentionality.  Buzzwords. What do they actually  mean ? The concept of "mindfulness"  has been getting more and more popular . I've seen tons  books aimed at mindfulness , telling you it's the solution to all of life's biggest problems - depression, anxiety, dissatisfaction. The use of the term in marketing drove a Buddhist teacher to coin the term "McMindfulness", describing the commercialization ...

Motto: Okay Google... what's your goal here? Intro This post is going to be an expansion on something I wrote about in Column #354 . It will (hopefully) complete the series of posts I've written lately about productivity software, Google, Getting Things Done, and all that.  Specifically today I'm writing about Google products, and my growing disillusionment with them. This post will be thorough, longer than most, and generally more well put together. Setting the Googley Stage I'll caveat this up front by saying they are great on the whole, most of my quibbles are just that, quibbles, and that I have them because I'm a power user. I am in deep with Google. Google Products I Still Use Google Search Gmail YouTube Chrome ChromeOS Chromecast Chrome Remote Desktop Google Assistant Google Home Google Photos Google Maps Google Drive Google One Google News Google Sheets Google Docs Google Slides Google Drawings Google Forms Google Keep Google ...

Motto: A Place for Every Datum, and Every Datum in its Place Last Column I briefly mentioned a blog I found called "Minding the Borderlands". That site, in addition to its value as a primary resource, was a valuable kicking off point for expanded research into some topics I'm going to write about today. I read the book "Getting Things Done". I read about a notetaking system called the "slip-box method", or "Zettelkasten" (it's German). I'm thinking about lot the information that we come across in life, how I've been managing it, and how I may want to tweak or further define those practices. Some of those tweaks may have implications to this blog. For example, I've been tagging these posts all wrong. My entire approach to tagging was backwards. Tagging and sorting are not the same thing. I read a wonderful article about why tagging against a topic is ultimately much less useful than tagging against and object. The Labels...

Motto: You can probably just stop reading here, too. Today is day 30 of our Whole30. If you don't know about Whole30, it can be summarized pretty simply as a (fad) elimination diet in which you do not consume added sugars, grains, dairy, and legumes for a full 30 days. The idea being foods from these groups may be affecting your health in your day-to-day life, and you may not even realize it. By removing these items for 30 days your body can get used to not having them and you can see how that feels. Then you may begin re-introducing foods from these categories slowly, to see how those foods affect you. The sales pitch for the diet says it may help with: Cutting cravings Consistently high energy levels  Better sleep Better focus Being "strangely happy" (their words, not mine) Potentially abating symptoms of all sorts of medical conditions (allergies, headaches, joint pains, GI troubles, and lots of other stuff) Whole30 is like a 30 Day Cleanse, except ins...

Motto: Google is God There's a Google product you should know about; it's called Google Takeout . It  is not a food service, so don't get excited. Don't make the same joke that literally 5 people I've told about this have made. Google Takeout is a service that allows you to take out  your data from Google - in theory so that you could go to some other service and keep your data. In reality, it's probably best just for seeing an aggregate list of everything they have of yours and about you. I requested an archive of everything they had associated with my account, leaving out Google Drive (because I have 500GB+ in the cloud & don't need them to send me my own files back to me) . Then I spent a week's worth of free time going through it all & taking 5 full pages of notes about what I found. This post is primarily the contents of those notes. Now, before we get into that. I am pro-Google. I use or have used almost every one of their publ...