2024
- Read to get ideas.
- Books
- Articles
- Give yourself plenty of time to write.
- Make an outline to start.
- Shoot for 10ish bullets. Any bigger and it is hard to see the flow of the argument.
- Write a bad draft - remember producing and editing are different activities.
- Produce, produce, produce.
- Write more than you think you need, then chop it down.
- Edit it.
- Rewrite every sentence.
- Reorder until it makes sense.
- Reread the whole thing.
- Refine, refine, refine.
- Create a new outline - Try reconstructing your argument from memory. What you remember is the good stuff. The rest might be crap. Ponder that.
- Cut and paste from your old outline into the new one.
- Make sure you have hyperlinks in the text for citations.
“Children need to be used under adult supervision”
This made me laugh.
A while back I posted about Fed Meetup, the app I built that won an internal NASA challenge. Today I received my prize, a NASA@WORK sticker that flew on a SpaceX Dragon capsule that splashed down back in April! I have now committed myself to using this water bottle for life… 😅
Do you ever say something and then the gravity of what you just said hits you hard? I was chatting with a coworker preparing for retirement and casually mentioned that I have 30+ years left. 30+ years! What!? That’s a lot of time to make meaningful and good things. That’s the goal.
How to Write a Kickass Article
I would like to note that as I write this, I am not following the advice contained within whatsoever.
I want to write better articles. I want to use them to reason and think. I would like to do some research and link to sources, so that my articles have some ground to stand on and they provide real value.
To this end, I’ve been doing some research on writing a good article and I made the cheat sheet below for myself. I don’t plan to follow this dogmatically, but it will help me remember what to focus on in different stages of my writing. The following is primarily a reframing of the essay app’s writing guide, because its advice resonated with me the most of what I found online.
How to Write a Kickass Article
Added a colophon page. I wrote it in a who, what, when, where, and how format, and I like how it turned out. I haven’t seen others doing it this way. I considered adding a “why” section but decided against it. I’m not sure if the colophon is the right spot for that, but if not, then where?
Added a changelog to my blog. For now, it is very small and very meta. weidok.al/changelog…
I added a /chipotle page to my blog. I know this started as satire, but this might actually come in handy for me. weidok.al/chipotle/
scritch scratch swoop and slash
furious scribbles relent
taut hush, reflection
Experimentation Is Where the Fun Is At!
My new shipment from The Goulet Pen Company makes it feel like Christmas!
I ordered their notebook sampler and got a random ink sample set for free.
An Analog Blog Post
The following was transcribed from the pictured journal entry. I used Google Lens and a LOT of editing.
It has been easy to not make time to write recently. “Busyness” is the main culprit, but I’ve also been spending time with its less boisterous sibling, distraction. And so here I find myself, back at the roots of my writing practice. The journal. I’ve missed the empty page. The empty screen is nice too, in my writing software of choice, but I can’t help feeling the weight of the myriad windows/apps/messages vying for my attention. So I’ve returned to my empty page. It welcomes my attention and thought, but does not compete for them. It is an escape in plain sight.
There’s some nice footage of Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser at the Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio at the 2:00 minute timestamp of this week’s TW@N video 😁 We have neat facilities out here in The Land! youtu.be/xQeA-KzTL…
I just used the Google Assistant to make a reservation this morning and it was pretty nice. It waited until the restaurant was open to call and then sent me a text confirming the reservation.
I replaced our mulch with gravel and started our first garden! We will have cucumbers and three varieties of bell pepper. 🪨🥒🫑
Ever wondered what the heck that fancy ChatGPT Large Language Model AI is actually doing? This animated 3D visualization is an awesome step-by-step guide! bbycroft.net/llm
Felt good to be back on the grill yesterday!
Can you tell which is the original…? 😅
I asked GPT-4o to describe an image of me, and then fed the generated text into Microsoft Designer to see how well it could generate a copy of me. Microsoft Designer turned the handsome-dial a little too high, but this is impressive!
Here’s the description that was generated from the original:
The image shows a young man with short, neatly trimmed hair and a light beard. He is smiling warmly, showing his teeth. He is wearing a gray zip-up sweater. The background is an outdoor setting with blurred trees and foliage, suggesting it might be a park or a natural area. The overall mood of the image is friendly and relaxed.
Is 1285 a good score on Google’s dino game? What are your high scores?
Check the Categorization of Your Domain in Cloudflare Radar to Make Sure Federal Employees Can Visit Your Site
I updated the font across my site to Inter instead of system-ui, which was the Tiny Theme default. I found out Tiny Theme has all sorts of pre-defined font groupings in main.css, so what I actually changed the font-family to was –font-neo-grotesque, of which the primary font was Inter. I like it!
Is this a blog or a node in a botnet?
I finally found out why my blog was blocked on the NASA network! Cloudflare had it categorized as a DGA Domain, so they thought it was an autogenerated domain that was part of an evil botnet 🤦♂️ I’ve submitted a request for Cloudflare to recategorize it under “Personal Blogs” so it doesn’t show up as a security threat any more. I guess my last name does look a little suspect and not quite like a real word someone would use for a domain…
Recent Microblogs
So far, I think I’m most proud to have passed on a love of pocket journals to my daughter ❤️ She loves scribbling on the pages and showing off what she drew.
After taking this picture, she disassembled the pen she was using, pulled out the refill, blew on it, and squealed “Blow bubbles!”. She has now been dipping the pen refill in and out of the pen body and blowing on it for the past few minutes pretending to blow bubbles. She is such a sweet soul. My heart is full.
I have much more important tasks to do, but it was nice to just sit on the couch for hours this morning with a coffee and put tabs on my Bible. It felt really good to accomplish something I want to do. The “have to dos” will have to wait.
