Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

What does your Dock look like? -- Comment()
A few months back I posted a screen capture of my Dock. Well, here is my Dock again (on the right), to be compared with the previous version on the left.

My Dock includes: Finder, System Prefecences, Terminal, Mail, Safari, Preview, Firefox, X11, Address Book, SubEthaEdit, BBEdit, TextEdit, TeXShop, Watson, Word 2004, Excel, PowerPoint, OmniGraffle, Acrobat 6.0.2 Professional, Acrobat Distiller, Acrobat Reader 6.0, Illustrator, Photoshop, GraphicConverter, iPhoto, iTunes, iChat, Console, Printer Setup, Process Viewer, Keychain, CopyPaste, MT-Newswatcher, shortcut to ICA settings, shortcut to RDC settings, shortcut to MT-Newswatcher settings, Trash.

-- Comment()
Searching for The New York Times: "How can the mighty New York Times [...] be the paper of record in cyberspace when its articles barely show up on Google? [...] The New York Times requires that its users register, which makes it difficult for search engines to spider its content." [Wired News]

-- Comment()
Repeat After Me: A Book is a Book: "The idea that the copyright owner should get a cut every time a book changes hands is a Pandora's box. It's also just what copyright industry would like to see happen, and that's what the entertainment industry is trying to create with its various digital restrictions technologies. The industry wants a pay-per-use world of arts and letters. Resist." [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Write to practice, not to publish -- Comment()
I'm currently re-reading (for the third time) Natalie Goldberg's book Writing down the Bones. Her advice is to do a lot of writing practice, just write. She fills up a 80-page spiral notebook each month with writing practice. It is like going through the compost of your mind, preparing it so that the fertility of your mind is preserved.

I used to do such a thing in school and high-school, before reading Natalie's book (or any other book on being a writer). I wrote a few pages each day, trying to make my thoughts coherent. I emulated the writing styles of Hemingway and Dostojevski, among others. My aim was to become a writer just like them. But instead I went to study physics and applied mathematics. However, that early writing practice was useful, and since then writing comes naturally most of the times. It is a pity that all of those early notebooks were destroyed when I moved to Helsinki to study.

Now I'm a bit worried about neglecting my writing practice. Most of my writings are used for some purpose: lots of mails to colleagues and friends, memos, project plans, articles, manuals, book reviews, columns etc. Plus this weblog, which is not practice writing either, especially as I'm writing this in English, not my native Finnish.

Perhaps I'm slowly eroding my writing capability by allowing the compost in my head languish. Of course, much of the writing I do is routine, and not very creative, but on the other hand I write also to generate feelings and action, and in this kind of writing you need the touch of the living personality, not the decay of the dead compost.

So, I'm thinking about starting my writing practice once again. Should I write by hand, as I usually have done, or should I write on the keyboard? And how to do the writing? Perhaps as e-mails to myself, then all of the writings would be easy to archive as well.

Update: I changed the title of this posting, because it didn't reflect what I was trying to say. I'm worried that I'm writing too much to publish and too little to practice.