Random Thoughts II
May 29, 2018

The early 20th-century Chinese writer Lu Xun created short essays that he called
Random Thoughts, which were similar to the suibi that had been written in China
for centuries. In honor of both Lu Xun and suibi here are a collection of short
thoughts on various topics:

I recently stumbled upon a talk that Neil Gaiman gave at Microsoft back in 2005.
While the entire talk is interesting, I was particularly attracted to his
discussion of his plotting and writing methods. Here's a link[1] to that section of the
talk. I started writing well before home computers were common and I've recently
become a re-convert to writing first drafts in longhand, so Gaiman's comments on
his pen-and-notebook method resonated with me.

Google will soon be marking all non-https websites as "Not Secure." As Dave
Winer points out[2] in this blog post, there are several downsides to Google 
wanting to make the web "safer." I, for one, don't plan on purchasing a https 
certificate just to win the approval of some corporation. As Winer notes in his 
post, "Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don't make the 
rules."

Pliny the Elder said "There is no book so bad that some good cannot be got out
of it." There are also good books in which a single sentence, passage or
paragraph makes the entire book worth the purchase and reading of it. I recently
read Cal Newport's "Deep Work," and for me the single passage that struck me
most forcefully came on page 161: "Schedule in advance when you'll use the
Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times." I'm most productive
in the morning, so even before I read "Deep Work," I'd quit checking my email
before noon so that I could write. But often in the process of writing, I'd stop
to do a bit of online research and discover, an hour later, that researching had
become recreation. So now I don't use the Internet before noon, either. If
there's something I want to research, I make a note on on a pad of paper on my
desk, then "batch" my research during the afternoon. This also helps me to
follow the advice contained in a single section heading on page 209: "Don't Use
the Internet to Entertain Yourself." Two sentences out of an entire book, and
yet my writing productivity has soared because of them.

[1] http://youtu.be/NXu917cxuF4?t=34m30s 
[2] http://this.how/googleAndHttp/

(c) 2018 by Andrew Gudgel 
email: contact [at] andrewgudgel.com