One of my friends was surprised that I use both Evernote and Microsoft ?OneNote. Many people are fervently in love with one or the other, as they’re both excellent notetaking tools. I like them both, and I also add Emacs ?OrgMode to the mix. I figured it would be a good idea to write about how I manage my notes so that I can think about ways to make it even better. Besides, other people might find it useful, or they might share a few good tips!

I take most of my text notes using the Emacs text editor. In particular, I use Org Mode because org-capture totally rocks. It’s easy for me to quickly take a timestamped note. I share most of my notes on my blog, but some stay in my private notes – post drafts, sensitive information, random tidbits. I save sensitive information to an encrypted location as needed. Every week, I review my inbox of notes, filing them under the appropriate headings in a large outline file.

Org is great for text. It can handle attachments too, but I want a more graphical way to manage the visual notes and reference pictures that I take. Evernote’s handwriting recognition gives me a way to search for words in my sketchnotes, which is awesome for digging up sketchnotes or book notes (and for wowing people; yes, the future is here). ?OneNote is better at capturing screenshots and snippets, though, so I use it to collect elements from sketches and pictures that I like. I also use ?OneNote for Latin studies because it feels the most like a paper notebook.

I share as much as possible on my blog so that I can have more ways to get to what I know. Google searches occasionally lead me back to blog posts I’ve completely forgotten about, which is pretty nifty. Besides, people often comment and share even more information, and that’s awesome.

I’m still trying to figure out better ways to get to what I’ve stored in all these places. I’ve been going back and adding more posts to this topical index. I’m thinking of reviewing the 6,000+ posts in my archive and rating them on a scale of 1-5 so that I can filter them for the highlights view of my blog. So much in the past, and that’s just ten years of writing – imagine what the archive will be like when I’ve been writing and drawing for decades. =)

I picked up this quote recently. It’s from Carl Sagan:

“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

• Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Writing, drawing, and photography are all miniature time machines. They’re amazing and fantastic, but you’ve got to have a way back into them in order to make the most of them.

How do you manage your notes?

Read the original or check out the comments on: Taking stock of the way I take notes (Sacha Chua's blog)

Playing around with different ways to draw simple figures. =)

Investigating the effects of drawing lines from different directions. I’m right-handed.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Drawing studies (Sacha Chua's blog)

• The ability to mark a branch "diverged," to prevent (or warn) on attempted merges from master (for example) into a maintenance branch.

• The ability to create and track dedicated topic branches, and complementary tooling to encourage rebasing commits in these sorts of branches. We might call them "patch sets" or "sets" rather than "branches." Also, it might be useful to think about using/displaying these commits, when published, in a different way.

• Represent merge commits as hyperlinks to the user, when possible. I think ?GitHub's "network graph" and similar visualizations are great for showing how commits and branches interact and relate to each other.

  This would probably require some additional or modifies output from "git log".

• Named stashes.

• Branched stashes (perhaps this is closer to what I'm thinking about for the request regarding topic branches.)

• The ability to checkout "working copies," of different points/branches currently from a single repository at the same time, using "native" git utilities.

  Related, "shelf" functionality is scriptable, but this too needs to be easier and more well supported.

I think legit is a step in the right direction, but it's weird and probably makes it more difficult to understand what's happening with git conceptually as opposed to the above features which would provide more appropriate conceptual metaphors for the work that would-be-git-users need.

A responsive site design is one that can adapt to different screen sizes and different devices. As you resize the browser window, elements move around or even disappear from the page.

I’ve been thinking about what the code for responsive life would look like. I recently accepted another contract, which means I’m pretty much working at close to capacity. Although I really like the breathing room of having a day or two free each week, it also seemed like a good opportunity to make a difference. With the reduction in my discretionary time, what do I give up, and what do I shift around?

Working a little later during the afternoons means that I can’t come home early to cook something nice for dinner. My husband’s been doing most of the cooking lately, but I don’t want him saddled with all the housework. Besides, I enjoy cooking. I can shift that to more of the weekends. By cooking and baking our meals in advance, we get to enjoy making food, and the weeks are a little bit easier. I thought about trying one of those meal delivery services, or even experimenting with a personal chef. I don’t know. I get a lot of intangible benefits from learning how to cook, especially when my husband and I are cooking together.

Some things I simply need to drop or postpone. For example, studying Latin takes me a lot of time. I struggle with the inflections. I don’t think I’ll be able to focus on it well over the next few weeks, so I’ll take it up again when the crunch time is over. I will probably have to repeat some of things I learned, but I think it will be all right.

Sometimes it’s a matter of investing in more tools and social processes. For example, I’m experimenting with dictation as a way to write while doing other things, or while relaxing my wrists. I’m thinking of restarting my experiments in outsourcing, too. It should be easy to find someone who can handle the data entry from the receipts that I’m scanning, or who can help me cross-reference my passport entry stamps with trips in my record so that when I submit my application for Canadian citizenship, all my paperwork is in order. Little things like that, particularly little things that take a lot of time — those would be great candidates for outsourcing.

There are some hobbies that I still want to hang onto. Writing and gardening are both great ways for me to relax. Drawing lets me take notes from books and presentations. I guess that’s a little like the min-width of a web site design. I don’t want my life get any smaller than that. I don’t want to work so much that I don’t have time to spend with family and friends, or my laptop and a good book. After all, this is my adventure. I can choose what I do.

So far things have been wonderful, so I just want to make sure that I monitor the balance as I try out this new arrangement. That way, I can fix things if anything starts to get out of whack.

What if I stretch life the other way? Both of these contracts will eventually wrap up, and I occasionally think about what I want to do next. I’d like to see what it’s like to spend some focused time on building things: writing a book, working on my own code, playing around with ideas. I guess the web design equivalent of this would be is building a site for people who have those humongous monitors. Just have so much more room to play with – that’s a completely different playing field.

Different kinds of work lend us different metaphors for looking at life. It might be interesting to look at life through the lens of design. How can I improve the user experience? How can I adapt to changing conditions? How can I take advantage of emerging technologies and toolkits?

We’ll see. This is going to be fun.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Responsive web, responsive life (Sacha Chua's blog)

In a post entitled Please Don't Learn How to Code, software developer Jeff Atwood argues that the "everyone should learn programming" meme has gotten out of control, and that most people don't need to learn how to code.

I mostly disagree with Atwood's premise and land on Benjamin Stein's side of the argument. Coding teaches you analytical thinking skills, logic workflows, and debugging like no other activity can, and you can apply those skills to lots of situations beyond actually building production apps.

But Atwood hit one nail right on the head that I can't stress enough to people who want to make digital tools:

[Coding] puts the method before the problem. Before you go rushing out to learn to code, figure out what your problem actually is. Do you even have a problem? Can you explain it to others in a way they can understand? Have you researched the problem, and its possible solutions, deeply? Does coding solve that problem? Are you sure?

I often get email from people who "have a great idea for an app" or newcomers who want to contribute to ThinkUp but aren't programmers. These people are convinced the first thing they have to do is learn how to write code. It isn't.

The world of software development needs more people who know how to define better solutions than the ones we have now.

See, when I ask these people to describe their great app idea, they never have wireframes or mockups, and usually can only explain it in the vaguest terms. When I ask newcomers what they want to change or add to ThinkUp, they often can't tell me—they just want to be a part of the community. (Nothing wrong with that, but code isn't the only way to contribute. It's not even the primary way.)

Software development is not code. It's solving problems. Before you learn how to code, learn how to propose better solutions. You are most likely already qualified to do this.

A few years back I took a weekend-long intensive course on shooting and producing video journalism. In the first hour of the first day, our instructor said, "What makes great television? If you love watching TV, you already know."

The same principle applies here. If you love, use, and think about technology, you already have a good idea of what's possible, and what elements make up a user interface. You know when to expect a text field and when you should get a dropdown. You understand the difference between saving a file locally and saving it to the cloud. You know the apps you love the most and what about them makes them special.

This is what you need to know to start designing new solutions.

If you aspire to build an app, the first thing you should do is define the problem, your idea for the solution, your target user base. Do your research. Know all the existing solutions out there, and exactly how your spec is different and better. Choose a platform, and start mocking up screens. Get in deep. Agonize over what words appear on the button labels, what the user success, information, and error messages should read, every single thing that could go wrong in the process of using the app and how it will recover, what your one-sentence description will be when your app appears in a store somewhere. Arguably, defining great specifications is a more important part of creating digital tools than writing the code itself.

If you want to build a new app, or contribute to an existing one, you don't have to learn how to code first. But please do learn how to propose better solutions.

Org Mode is a personal information manager for the Emacs text editor. People have contributed a ton of useful features to it over the years, and the development shows no sign of slowing down. One of the features I’ve been playing around with is the ability to track habits.

Org habits are recurring tasks. For example, everyday, I want to:

• take my vitamins
• capture a quick note about the day, and
• plan the next day

Every week, I want to:

• talk to my mom
• check the org-mode mailing list
• write a weekly review and plan the next week
• clear and reorganize my belt bag
• clear my inbox
• write a bunch of blog posts
• back up my computer

Once a month, I want to:

• update the topical index for my blog
• review and uninstall programs
• balance my books and update my budget
• review the past month and plan the next
• check the library for new books

Org habits let me manage my task list without cluttering future days with tasks. The Org agenda view displays habits that are due today, indicating consistency with colour. In particular, it shows overdue days in red, so you can get the Seinfeld-esque pleasure/commitment-device of not breaking the chain.

Here’s a view from Sunday:

2 days-agenda (W19-W20):
Sunday     13 May 2012
               8:00...... ----------------
              10:00...... ----------------
              12:00...... ----------------
              14:00...... ----------------
              15:57...... now - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
              16:00...... ----------------
              18:00...... ----------------
  organizer:  22:00...... TODO Capture a one-sentence note                                           !      
  organizer:  22:00...... TODO Plan the next day                                    ** ***** ** *****!      
  organizer:  Scheduled:  TODO Make a list of recipes I want to learn
  organizer:  Scheduled:  TODO Write a bunch of blog posts             :writing:
  organizer:  Scheduled:  TODO Set up ?WordPress as my backup system
Monday     14 May 2012 W20
  organizer:  Scheduled:  TODO Build Emacs interface so that I can have Org automatically switch my tasks

To use Org habits, customize org-modules and enable the habit module. To set something as a habit, use C-c C-x p (org-set-property) to set the STYLE property to habit. For more information, you should definitely check out the Org manual’s section on habits.

Yay Emacs and the people who contribute to it!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Org-mode and habits (Sacha Chua's blog)

Click on the image for a larger version or contact me for a high-res version (2608x1600px). Feel free to share this under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.

Lots of great research released under Creative Commons. Yay Jeremiah Owyang and Altimeter!

Quick notes for searching, more later: Social business hierarchy of needs: Foundation –> Safety –> Formation –> Enablement –> Enlightenment

If you like this, you might also like:

• my notes from the previous Third Tuesday Toronto talk (Engagio)
• more sketchnotes from meetups and books
• the Third Tuesday Toronto meetup group
• other cool sketchnotes around the Web

Enjoy!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Sketchnotes: Jeremiah Owyang @ Third Tuesday Toronto (#3TYYZ) on the Social Business Hierarchy of Needs (Sacha Chua's blog)

We’re settling into a routine of making pizza from scratch almost every week. It’s relatively quick and easy to make. I use the basic bread dough recipe from Jamie Oliver’s cookbook, "jamie’s kitchen". W- prefers it when we make a double batch of dough with just one batch worth of yeast, and let the dough rise overnight. This results in these really puffy, bread-like pizza crusts.

After the dough rises, it takes me just an hour to prepare four pizzas. I divide the dough into four parts, forming them into rectangles by stretching and rolling them out. I use practically all of the baking sheets in the house. While the pizza crusts rise again, I chop and grate the rest of the ingredients. Assembly is quick and fun, although I still tend to err on the side of loading the pizza up with too much food. Baking takes twenty minutes per batch of two pizzas, and then we have plenty of pizza to eat through the week.

We’re always looking for kid-friendly recipes that we can cook in bulk. Pizza is a great way to use up bits and pieces from the fridge: pepperoni, chicken, peppers, tomatoes, and so on. Other family go-to recipes include pasta and curry. Good to be able to make things ahead!

I moved the calendar to the fridge so that we can use it to plan the meals during the week. Another step towards even smoother everyday routines!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Pizza pizza pizza pizza (Sacha Chua's blog)

Technically not my decision – W- was the one who decided to get J- a kick scooter so that she can easily go to school or hang out with friends. Since J- stays with her mom during the weekends, the scooter’s fair game for trips to stores or libraries.

The Razor A5 Lux was $69.99 during a Toys R Us sale a few weeks ago. None of the stores we went to had it in stock, so W- got a raincheck. This week, we dropped by Dufferin Mall and bought the kick scooter. The box wouldn’t fit in my bike bags, so we tested the scooter and discarded the box when we were satisfied that we didn’t need to return it. Without the box, the scooter fit neatly into my bike bag.

My bike’s big and hard to lug up the stairs, so I’ve been trying out the A5 for short trips. It cuts the 750m walk from ten minutes to five, although there’s a bit more exercise involved. I don’t have the same carrying capacity that I have on my bicycle, but the scooter is a lot more convenient for short trips. Worth it, I think! We’ll see how it works out over the next couple of weeks.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Decision review: Razor A5 Lux kick scooter (Sacha Chua's blog)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Weekly review: Week ending May 11, 2012 (Sacha Chua's blog)

Click on the image to view a larger version.

I weighed everything we received from Cooper’s Farm for this season’s community-supported agriculture program so that I could compare it with Plan B Organic Farms. The numbers always surprise me when I tally things up at the end. Did we really go through that many potatoes? Wow, we actually got more onions than cabbage. Sure didn’t feel that way.

Getting vegetables bi-weekly instead of weekly definitely helped stave off the “oh no I’m swimming in vegetables” feeling. Some food was still wasted, though. Some of the beets got mold before we could do stuff with them (they came moist) and the rutabaga and turnips stumped us. But we managed to plow through most of the vegetables.

We averaged 5.5kg per delivery, which was less than what we received with Plan B Organic Farms (see my fall analysis). That was a fall share, though, so winter/spring is understandably smaller in terms of the harvest. I opted for Cooper’s Farm because I thought the delivery might come in really handy during winter, but this winter was unusually mild, so I didn’t end up with as many “thank goodness I don’t have to trudge out for vegetables in the snow” moments as I thought I might have. That’s okay.

I wish someone else was keeping track of what the corresponding Plan B Organic Farms results were! Oh well. =)

This season, we’re going to skip the CSA and buy our vegetables ourselves. I want to see what that comes out to in terms of cost and whether we still get through as many vegetables without the forced commitment of a vegetable box. We’ll see!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Quantified Awesome: Analysis of the winter/spring season for the Cooper’s Farm community-supported agriculture program (Sacha Chua's blog)

Originally published on CNN.com.

Startups are fighting a war for talent in Silicon Valley, and the companies that actively welcome men and women are going to win it. Smart companies don't recruit "brogrammers."

The term "brogrammer" is a joke, of course. Male software engineers don't actually pop their collars, wear sunglasses and lift weights while writing code, and share hot tubs with bikini-clad women. But the joke is funny (to some people) because it reflects a certain truth about a community that excludes great talent in favor of frat house fun.

The tech industry's testosterone level can make the thickest-skinned women consider a different career. But the rise of the "brogrammer" joke and its ensuing backlash has some benefits: it helps talented women choose worthy employers, it gives a name and faces to a problem that plagues the industry, and it publicly shames some of the most sexist offenders.

Where the Women Are

In 1999, Google's Marissa Mayer almost didn't take the job at the all-male startup because there were more women at another firm who'd made her an offer. If Mayer had just graduated from college today with offers from two equally compelling startups—one all-male and one not—it's clear which path she would choose.

If you write software for a living and you're located in Silicon Valley, you have your pick of employment options at an array of tech startups. (Yes, even in this economy.) When a recruiter's pickup line is "Wanna bro down and crush some code?"—like Klout's was—you get a sense of what that company's looking for. If you're a woman, it's not you.

That's pretty sad, but it's not all bad. As a woman and a software developer, crossing Klout off the list of places where I might work helps me narrow my options. I'd rather find out an employer glorifies young dudes before I take the position than after.

That's one small way "brogrammer" culture is actually useful. It's a red flag to women engineers, product developers, designers, project managers, marketers, business development, and PR specialists. It says, "This company is not where you want to work."

Conversely, companies who assemble inclusive teams are more likely to snag great hires of all stripes. Tech startups founded by women are few and far between, but they're highly attractive to female and male candidates who don't want to join a boys' club. Established companies with executives who are vocal about women's issues, like Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, also have an advantage. (Sandberg's TED talk is one of my all-time favorite career advice presentations for women.)

Rehabilitation via Humiliation

The Valley's "brogrammer" problem has received a good bit of attention recently, with a focus on some of the worst public offenders. I find sexism in 2012 corporate America appalling, but I'm also an optimist. The folks perpetuating this culture are probably not overt misogynists. Most of the time, they simply don't know any better.

The path to enlightenment is sometimes paved with public shaming.

Path's Matt Van Horn "feels terrible" about sexist comments he made during a conference presentation that caused disgusted attendees get up and leave. Geeklist began a women in technology committee after mishandling the retraction of a promotional video that featured a scantily-clad female dancer.

Cynics would argue that apologies don't resolve the underlying problem. But humiliation is an effective behavior modifier. I don't think these people will make these mistakes again. The bonus: Onlookers have real-life examples of what not to do at their companies.

The tech industry has always been male-dominated. But the perception of those men has changed. Media no longer casts the billionaire geeks of Silicon Valley as awkward nerds who can't get a date. Instead, they're superheroes, the protagonist in epic movies and biographies. A new generation of young people from all walks of life aspire to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. They'll want to work for the most attractive companies—the ones who built welcoming, diverse teams.

"Brogrammer" culture is exclusionary and problematic. It celebrates frat house values, youth over experience, and men over women. In the war for hiring great talent, the companies who exacerbate this problem instead of work to solve it will lose. That's a good thing.

I like sketching notes of books and presentations. It forces me to squeeze the information onto one page, and the notes are easy to share and review.

I prefer to draw on a computer because I can use colour, erase what I’ve written, and move items around. My favourite drawing application for this is Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, which has the best pen-based controls I’ve come across so far. When I don’t have my laptop, I draw on paper and scan it in. I’ve been thinking about getting a tablet, but I’m holding off on it until I pass certain thresholds that I’ve set.

After I draw my notes and clean them up a little, I save them to a directory on my hard disk. I save a lower-resolution version to another directory, where it automatically gets imported into Evernote and synchronized with Dropbox. Evernote lets me search my handwriting, and it’s good for looking up individual items. With Dropbox, I can use Foldersync Lite to synchronize my sketchnotes folder to my phone’s SD card, where I can use Gallery to browse my sketches. The sketches are readable on my phone’s screen, and I can zoom in for details.

Windows Live Writer makes it easy to include the image in a blog post. It automatically scales the image to my preferred dimensions, and I can set it to link to a higher-resolution version of the image. After I publish it, I announce it on Twitter as well.

When I come across elements I like in other people’s sketchnotes, I take a small screenshot and I add them to a Microsoft Onenote notebook for sketchnote inspiration. I collect colour combinations, visual metaphors, title treatments, lettering examples, and so on. It’s easy to flip through the notebook and search for specific keywords.

I’m working on getting even better at sketchnotes. For me, this means:

• using more colours whether I’m drawing on my computer or on paper: I can try banning black from my visual vocabulary for a while
• drawing more quick icons to illustrate my notes, even if they’re literal
• drawing more visual metaphors so that I can get beyond the first idea
• experimenting with more layouts
• collecting sketchnote elements from other artists and keeping them in a notebook for inspiration

It’s easy to get started with sketchnotes. The key things for me were:

• Give yourself permission to draw badly. Stick figures? Wonky shapes? Sure!
• Leave yourself plenty of whitespace so that you can come back and draw. Write on different parts of the page, not just one side.
• Write less by focusing on the important concepts. Draw more during the “filler” time, or add drawings after you’ve written your notes.
• Have fun!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Sketchnote workflow (Sacha Chua's blog)

Assumption:

1. git is pretty awesome, but it's conceptually complex. As a result using git demands a preexisting familiarity with git itself or some sort of wrapper to minimize the conceptual overhead.

2. The collaboration methods (i.e. hosting) provided by git, which are simple by design to allow maximum flexibility, do not provide enough structure to be practically useful. As a result providers like GitHub (and BitBucket and gitorious) offer a valuable service that makes it easier--or even possible--for people to use git.

Caveats:

• there are problems with using centralized repository services controlled by third parties, particularly for open source/free software projects.

  There are ways that ?GitHub succeeds an fails in this regard. but this dynamic is too complex to fully investigate within the scope of this post.

• If you use ?GitHub as designed, and the way that most projects use ?GitHub, then you have a very specific and particular view of how Git works.

  While this isn't a bad thing, it's less easy to use git in some more distributed workflows as a result. This isn't ?GitHub's fault so much as it is an artifact of people not really knowing how git itself works.

Assertion:

1. GitHub's "fork" model disincentives people from working in "topic" branches.

2. By making it really easy for people to publish their branches, ?GitHub disincentives the most productive use of the "git rebase" command that leads to clean and clear histories.

3. There's no distinction between a "soft fork" where you create a fork for the purpose of submitting a patch (i.e. a "pull request") and a "hard fork," where you actually want to break the relationship with the original project.

   This is mostly meaningful in context of the other features that ?GitHub provides, notably the "Network" chart, and the issue tracker. In a soft-fork that I would intend to merge back in, I'd like the issues to "come with," the repository, or at least connect in some way to the "parent." For hard forks, it might make sense to leave the old issues behind. The same with the network chart, which is incredibly powerful, but it's not great at guessing how your repository relates to the rest of its "social network."

The solution: keep innovating, keep fighting lock-in, and don't let ?GitHub dictate how you work.

Chris Guillebeau’s new book The $100 Startup was released just yesterday. Here are my notes! Click on the image to view a larger version.

The book is packed with clear, practical advice and backed by concrete, diverse stories from successful microbusinesses around the world. It’s not a very deep book (don’t look here for step-by-step instructions, thorough analyses of case studies, or hand-holding through the business startup process), but it’s an enjoyable read. I’ll probably find myself referring to it a lot for inspiration and ideas. If you like this book, you’ll probably also like The Lean Startup (see my notes). Enjoy!

 

Check out more sketchnotes or read about my ongoing experiments in business. I’d love to hear from you!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Sketchnotes: The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future (Sacha Chua's blog)

I’ve been blogging for almost ten years. I started with notes from my university classes and snippets of open source code, and became comfortable enough to share decisions I’m puzzling through and things I’m learning about life. There’s a lot of stuff in my archive, and I want to be able to review things again.

Categories would probably make this easier, but I use categories liberally and sometimes inconsistently. I use them like tags, quick keywords that I add so that people might explore a category and bump into other posts. I probably should split it out so that I assign posts to one category and leave everything else as tags. Someday.

In the meantime, it’s easy enough to maintain a manual topical index of my blog posts, and it’s a good opportunity to review what I’ve been writing as well.

I use Emacs Org Mode to manage a large text file divided into headings. Every month, I copy a list of titles into my topical index. I hacked Org-friendly output into my ?WordPress theme – you can see April’s blog posts as an example (sachachua.com/blog/2012/04/?org=1). I manually organize the list items under different headings, splitting off new headings when I can see a pattern. Working with two windows viewing the same buffer makes it easy to move information around, and org-refile is handy too. I use a checklist structure so that Org can automatically update the number of posts under each heading (C-u M-x org-update-statistics-cookies). When I’m happy with the structure, I use org-publish-current-file to publish it using the settings I’ve configured. The files are in my public Dropbox folder, so they’re automatically published to the Web. It takes me about 10 minutes to add a month of posts to my index and publish the page.

I like seeing how much I’ve written about different topics, and it encourages me to write and organize more posts. Maybe the index might be handy for other people too!

• Org source for my blog index
• Topical index as a webpage

Read the original or check out the comments on: Maintaining a manual topical index for my blog using Emacs (Sacha Chua's blog)

Click on the image for a large version. Want an even better version for printing out? Contact me. Feel free to reuse or share this image under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

We heard from Pamela ?MacDonald, Liako Dertilis, and Billy Dertilis of Red Rocket Coffee at today’s Small Business Network meetup at the Toronto Reference Library. They shared hard-won lessons from building a coffee shop business that now has three locations.

The small business network meetup at the Toronto Reference Library happens on the second Tuesday of every month. You can view my sketchnotes from past meetups:

• The Shy Entrepreneur (me) – April 2012
• Sal Sloan of Fetching! – March 2012
• Kristina Chau of notyouraverageparty – February 2012

View more sketchnotes, read my notes about business, or browse around my blog!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Sketchnotes: Red Rocket Coffee, Toronto Public Library Small Business Network meetup (Sacha Chua's blog)

Link: How to Tell if Your Tech Salary is Fair

Most people have no idea what the market rate or prevailing wage is for their profession and career level, much less where they fall on the pay scale.I’m tired of fluffy unvetted career advice, so I’ve sourced and linked to ten ways you can determine what other people with your job are paid.

W- and I spent Sunday afternoon gardening. We dug up the boxes, amended the raised beds with nine bags of sheep manure, and filled the deck planter boxes with soil. We had bought twenty bunches of seedlings the day before at this corner store that had a large variety of plants and sold them cheaper than Home Depot or Rona did. Somehow we managed to squeeze all of them in.

I love gardening with herbs. Pulling up weeds among the lavender sprigs, separating the basil seedlings, planting cilantro in the boxes – all those scents wafting through the air, sticking to my fingers. The memories of tastes: basil in pesto and salad and sauce, oregano spicing things up, rosemary sprinkled on potatoes or sausage. And then the softness of a fine tilth, still a touch sandy but better than it was when we started. Our garden doesn’t have a lot of colour, but maybe we’ll plant more flowers next year. Other people’s gardens and the Toronto parks are filled with vibrant colours. This week, the tulips are putting on a show.

Computer work is abstract, but I’ve been building other senses into my life. Drawing teaches me to look more closely, and painting (digital – less clean-up!) gives me a new appreciation for colour combinations. Touch comes from kneading dough and working the soil and cuddling the cats. My husband and I both enjoy cooking, so that takes care of taste and smell. Sound is the one sense I tend to forget. I tend to find music distracting and earphones have a high failure rate in our household (aforementioned cats), so I usually work in silence. Maybe I’ll play around with that.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Gardening with herbs and exercising the senses (Sacha Chua's blog)

One of the things I like about meetups is the opportunity to test introductions. With all the different things I enjoy doing, what do I want to focus on, and what hooks do I want to give people in order to make conversation easier?

I’ve been thinking about introductions because of conversations with Judy Gombita and Rachel Lane at last week’s #torontob2b meetup. Judy delights in introducing me as the famous Shy Connector. This makes me grin a little in embarrassment, as (a) chances are that people haven’t come across it, and I don’t like making people feel a little out of the loop because they don’t know someone who’s supposed to be famous, and (b) umm, the whole point about shyness?

After the event, I thought about what some better reactions might be. For example, I could use that opportunity to give a 15-second summary of the key points, in case they’re useful for other people. Chances are, the people I’m meeting at these events are either extroverted or have found ways to cope. For extroverts, it might be something they can share with their introverted friends (a handy excuse to reach out). For introverts, I might share a surprising tip (for example, public speaking lets you get around starting a conversation) and find out what their tips are. If I keep a copy of the presentation on my phone, that makes it even easier for people to pick it up quickly.

Rachel and I are figuring out this tricky introduction bit, too. In one of these conversations, Rachel introduced herself as just a freelancer focusing on digital strategy and copywriting. After that conversation wrapped up, I passed on the lesson that Alan Lepofsky taught me about eliminating “just” from self-descriptions. After all, “independent” isn’t a synonym for “unemployed”; it can be something awesome. So now I’m going to introduce her as Rachel, who focuses on digital strategy, and who is also into wonderful things such as making Toronto greener through Guerrilla Gardening and helping people learn through Ladies Learning Code.

While we were talking about introductions, Rachel asked me how I wanted her to introduce me. “Consultant” is too vague. “Enterprise social software adoption consulting” is a mouthful, and it’s relevant to only a tiny fraction of people. “Blogger” is too generic, although mentioning that I blog at ?LivingAnAwesomeLife.com does give people a sense of my personality.

I think that at these meetups, I’m going to focus on sketchnotes, because that’s something that will be useful for anyone attending. I can quickly show some examples on my phone (or show the event’s notes if this is post-talk conversation) and promise to send it to people. That would be a good lead-in to exchanging contact information or connecting on Twitter, and it also gives me an excuse to follow up.

I’ll try emphasizing sketchnotes next time. When introducing myself, I can:

• connect with people’s challenges with information overload
• explain that I sketch notes of books, presentations, and meetings so that people can quickly understand and review key ideas, and that I blog at ?LivingAnAwesomeLife.com
• offer to send them my notes from the event

I’ll put together a business card focusing on sketchnotes too. Cards are good physical triggers for memory.

This is quite a different introduction for me. You know how you get a sense of where people put you in their mental classifications of people? I usually fit in the “geek” box. Although I’m sure people can figure that out as soon as they start browsing my website… =)

How do you experiment with your introduction?

Read the original or check out the comments on: Tweaking my introduction, focusing on sketchnotes (Sacha Chua's blog)

Business: April was my second full month as an independent business owner. It’s awesome having a flexible schedule, especially as the weather warms up. Instead of laying the groundwork for another consulting engagement or other active income gig for September, I’ve been focusing on developing skills and content instead – writing, drawing, things like that. I think that will work out better for me with our plans for this year. In May, I look forward to doing consulting 3-4 days a week and using the other days to improve my system and learn more about drawing.

• Unstructured time update, now that I have my own business
• Getting ready for my “The Shy Entrepreneur” talk at the Toronto Reference Library tomorrow (Apr 10 Tue, 6 PM)
• Learning how to say no
• On why I don’t want to work on a tech startup (yet)
• Getting the hang of making time for business development
• Optimizing for weather and other thoughts about self-employed time
• Thinking about the time/money swap
• Learning how to manage time
• Why I’m temporarily unhireable
• Learning about business finances
• From maker time to learner time

Drawing: I’ve been working on more visual metaphors and book reviews, and general drawing practice as well. Tracing pictures is easy, and it’s pretty fun too. In May, I’m looking forward to drawing more book reviews and meetup notes, and testing if I can review the images easily on my phone.

• Practising faces
• Visual metaphors: Argument
• Visual book review: Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us about the Art of Persuasion
• Sketches: People-watching at High Park
• Visual metaphors: Change
• Visual metaphors: Trust

Life: Warmer weather is biking weather, hooray! I biked to work throughout April, except for two rainy days. I look forward to biking almost all the time in May as well. I enjoy the bike ride downtown, and it’s good exercise.

• Back to biking
• Decision review: Got the Lenovo battery slice for my X220 tablet
• Waking up with barcodes
• Garden update
• Digital uncluttering: my backup and clean up plan

Time reviews: Did lots of things, yay!

• Weekly review: Week ending April 6, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending April 13, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending April 20, 2012
• Weekly review: Week ending April 27, 2012
• Monthly review: March 2012

Tracking focus: In May, I want to analyze the season’s output for the Cooper’s Farm community supported agriculture program. I also want to start tracking grocery receipts at the line-item level, which I might do with Lemon or with a virtual assistant. I’m curious about whether we can shift towards buying more vegetables this season.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Monthly review: April 2012 (Sacha Chua's blog)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Weekly review: Week ending May 4, 2012 (Sacha Chua's blog)

I like superhero comics and movies because it’s fun imagining a superpower, seeing the kinds of appropriate challenges that could oppose it, and watching how the heroes creatively deal with the situation. Teams of superheroes are even more interesting, because the combinations of powers lead to interesting possibilities, such as Colossus and Wolverine’s Fastball Special.

Comics are also cool because they portray all sorts of dynamic situations you’re unlikely to find in real life. Like the way I’m beginning to appreciate the startling colours and juxtapositions of abstract art, I like the way comic books play with reality. I may never see someone flying through the air, but isn’t it amazing that the brain can recognize and make sense of these images?

So yes, I’m definitely looking forward to watching The Avengers.

The AMC movie chain is organizing a marathon viewing of Marvel movies for $40:

• Iron Man
• The Incredible Hulk
• Iron Man 2
• Thor in 3D
• Captain America in 3D
• The Avengers in 3D

Tempting, but that’s a long time to sit in a movie theatre. From my experience with movie marathons of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars at friends’ places, I know I need to get up and move. Besides, I rather like being able to watch with subtitles and do something else at the same time, such as fold laundry or draw or write.

So, W- and I have been putting together our own Avengers movie lead-up. He requested the movies from the library. We watched the Hulk last weekend, and this weekend we’ll watch the Iron Man movies. I’d recently watched Thor and Captain America in the theatres, which is fortunate as there are hundreds of holds for those videos. For my part, I’ve been requesting and reading Avengers-related comic books. Hooray, Toronto Public Library!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Looking forward to watching the Avengers (Sacha Chua's blog)

Click on the images to view larger versions. I might redraw these sometime – I still have to get the hang of working with paper! =)

Building a Social Enterprise
Andrew Jenkins, Volterra

Marketing Automation
Jeffrey Yee, Eloqua

Designing Content So It Works
Carl Friesen, Global Reach Communications

Like these? Check out my other sketchnotes, visual book notes/reviews, and visual metaphors.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Sketchnotes: #torontob2b May 3, 2012 (Sacha Chua's blog)

Someone remarked that I’m clearly an optimistic person, and asked me how old I was. When I told him that I’m 28, he laughed and said that I’m optimistic because I’m young, and that he’s cynical because he’s 35 and part of Generation X (and older and wiser and more experienced, probably his unspoken continuation).

I thought I’d write about this because it’s something that comes up from time to time, as if happiness and optimism are exclusive to the young and naïve.

Oddly, I never hear it from people who are also happy and optimistic. I know someone who’s well into his eighties and who is somehow more energetic and bubbly than I am. I have role models who are wonderfully engaged with work and life. That’s what makes it easy for me to grin and let the stereotyping slide right off my back. I know something many cynical people don’t accept: that it’s possible to be delighted with life without necessarily letting myself be pushed around by it. I know that because other people have shown it’s possible.

I’m patiently waiting for the time when people won’t conflate my happiness with these other confounding factors, when silver hair and wrinkled skin throw happiness into sharper relief. Then people will tell me it’s easy to be happy with such a lucky life. That’s okay. People will always find reasons.

In the meantime, for other people who are in the same boat: Life is pretty good. Some people will tell you that you only think so because you don’t know much of it yet, but you don’t have to believe them. =)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Optimism, happiness, and being young (Sacha Chua's blog)

This is part of my Visual Metaphors series. Like it? Suggest other terms you’d like to see!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Visual metaphor: Danger (Sacha Chua's blog)

It turns out that the best indicator of success isn’t IQ or natural talent or how well off you were at birth. Rather it’s something called grit – the perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Grit requires a clear goal, self-confidence and a careful balance between stubborness and flexibility. For the last few months I’ve been living one of the most productive (and most challenging) times of my life. I’ve been building a system that has more parts, does more things and is much larger than just about anything I’ve built before. It’s been challenging and rewarding work and I couldn’t have done it without lots of support from great mentors. As I’ve stumbled, fallen down, hit brick walls, picked myself up and kept going I’ve been wondering – does grit apply equally to programmers and success in building good software?

Programming culture is generally synonymous with hard work and long hours — death marches, all-nighters, 80 hour work weeks, we do them all. But we’re talking about grit here, not masochism. Grit isn’t strictly equal to working obscenely hard, long hours. Part of the problem with thinking about grit in relation to programming is defining what success means for a programmer. Is your definition of success simply finding a working solution? Does it mean finding the most efficient solution? Are you successful if you cover every single edge case or is it enough to just take care of the most common ones? Is your program really better if it handles everything you could throw at it or should you handle core uses cases well and fail gracefully on the others? Part of the problem of coming up with a good solution is asking the right question. This is especially true of building software. However merely coming up with the right question requires a certain amount of grit. We need the patience to look beyond the obvious problems and solutions and ask the hard questions.

So now we’ve found the right question and defined bounds on the possible solutions. What next? How does grit help with the actual act of writing code and building stuff? Programming is not easy. It can be fun and exciting and uplifting, but sometimes it is downright hard and depressing. Sometimes we spend hours sifting through possible solutions before hitting upon the appopriate one. Sometimes we spend several intimate hours with a debugger tracking down pointer bugs before finding that one variable we forgot to initialize. Being tenacious and persistent in the face of seemingly unrelenting roadblocks is not an added benefit for a programmer – it is a bare necessity. When it comes down to the act of sitting down, writing and debugging code grit is not optional. Without it not only can we not be good programmers, we can’t even be an average ones.

But if our goal is to be a good (maybe even great) programmer, then grit will continue to help. One of the qualities of good programmers is that they get a lot of stuff done. In particular they do a lot that isn’t strictly their job. This includes fixing and extending their tools and improving core infrastructure. They do this even if they aren’t in charge of infrastructure because they realize that their code depends on what’s underneath. Grit is the difference between waiting for someone else to fix the annoying bug in the library that you depend on and diving in and fixing it ourselves. When Steve Yegge talks about the difference between “superhumanly godlike” and “smart”, grit is a part of what he’s talking about. Not that there’s anything wrong with being smart, but it might not be enough. Of course to cultivate that level of grit we need to cultivate a good deal of courage. Diving into someone else’s code and fixing it can be a daunting task but it’s one that has to be mastered.

While I’ve always liked programming it’s taken me a long time to understand the importance of grit. When you do something because you like it (mostly) it’s tempting to stay away from the parts that are painful and hard. For a long time I avoided writing large programs because I was afraid of all the complexity that was involved. I was afraid of becoming familiar with complex algorithms because I was afraid of the possibility that I’d get it wrong. I understand now that I can’t become a good programmer if I don’t push myself to do the things that I consider hard and dislike. I need to have the grit to handle large complex problems and spend the time to understand and apply advanced algorithms. The good news is that just like perseverance and discipline, grit can be trained and improved. I’m no longer as afraid to dive into unknown codebases as I was a few months ago. I now find it much easier to hold complex code paths in my head. I’m certainly far, far away from being superhuman, but I try to suck a little less every day.

It’s hard to get better without knowing what better is.

I want to draw better. What does better mean? For me, “better” means having a wider visual vocabulary for both individual concepts (icons? shapes?) as well as layout (graphic organizers? metaphors?). “Better” means cleaner lettering and more font or design choices. “Better” means being able to draw more things more recognizably, and to design pages so that they’re visually appealing as well as informative. “Better” means becoming more comfortable with colour and shade, and using them to emphasize what’s important. Someday, “better” might even include working with animation.

How can I learn how to draw better? Practice is a big part of it, of course. I can revise my previous sketches, and I can make new ones. I can also look at sites like Sketchnote Army for inspiration. I can collect graphic organizers and visual metaphors. For deliberate practice, I can draw lines, circles, and other shapes, and I can work on lettering.

I want to write better. “Better” means adding more vividness to my writing: picking just the right verb, noticing little details and fleshing them out, adding more specifics and more data. “Better” means pushing beyond clichés. “Better” means writing so that other people can learn more effectively – digging deeper to find things people might be curious about, organizing my notes so that other people can learn more from them.

How can I learn how to write better? Again, practice and inspiration. I can revise my posts and organize them into a coherent e-book or blog series. I can challenge myself to research and share a topic I’m curious about. I can read other people’s work and play around with their styles.

I want to connect better. “Better” means knowing more about people’s lives – it’s easy to know about mine, but I think it would be interesting to know more about people too. It boggles my mind wonderfully that I now have old friends here in Canada (by golly!). I’d like to cultivate more friends and build deeper friendships both in person and online.

What does your “better” look like?

Read the original or check out the comments on: Learning more about what I want to learn (Sacha Chua's blog)

I organized my files, weeded out blurry photos, and thought about how I want to improve my workflow for input, processing, and output.

Here’s what I want from my digital filing system:

Easy year-end backups: I’d like to be able to copy a folder onto a DVD and a separate drive, secure in the knowledge that if I really needed to get back to something, I could look it up.

Offline search: I want to be able to search the data even without the physical DVD or disk, so I don’t have to guess what year something happened or pop lots of DVDs into my drive.

Face tagging: I want to quickly retrieve all pictures with a specified combination of people. It would be awesome to get statistics off that, too.

Remove duplicates: I don’t want to wade through duplicate pictures when classifying my files, so I used VisiPics to find and delete images that were identical or of lower resolution.

Review by type: I want to review all of my presentations, drawings, blog posts, or 4×6-printable favourite photos regardless of their year. I want to be able to do this offline, too.

Search by topic: I want to find all of my resources related to a topic.

Map: I want to build a map what I know and what I want to learn. This map might contain hyperlinks to more details.

Quick visual review: I’d love to be able to quickly flip through or view slideshows of my visual book summaries, sketchnotes, and photo highlights. This is a good way to trigger memory. Maybe an “On this Day” reminder, too?

Hmm, planning…

Right now, I back up my data onto a drive weekly, and I use Dropbox for network backups too. I save my sketchnotes and summaries into a folder, and I keep small versions into another folder so that I can easily review them. I use Evernote so that I can search my hand-written notes and images. I use Picasa for images and face recognition, and Bibble 5 for tags. I don’t have offline search of backup DVDs yet, but I haven’t needed it. Besides, I can always search through my blog posts and notes.

Getting there…

Read the original or check out the comments on: Digital uncluttering: my backup and clean up plan (Sacha Chua's blog)

It turns out that when I have more control over my schedule, I don’t fill it with development. I haven’t been working on open source or personal projects, much less client websites or applications. This is a surprise to my 2010 self, who figured she would spend the whole day coding if she could.

I spend most of my discretionary time learning instead: drawing, writing, Latin, business, life. Maybe it’s because I’m in the fledgling stage of business and there’s so much to learn. Maybe it’s because 3-4 days of consulting a week takes up a large chunk of brainspace. Maybe it’s because development won’t get me where I want to go in this short-term search for a business that can survive unpredictable schedules and the primary care of young children.

Learning time. Yeah, that seems like the focus that fits me. If I imagine days and weeks stretching ahead of me – maybe in half a year, after this consulting engagement – I can easily see myself spending time exploring ideas and sharing my notes. I’d want to plumb this, deepen my understanding of this, before I focus on something like development.

Self-structured learning time is intimidating, but I want to see if I can get past the initial anxieties and figure out things that work. Writers have been able to do so for millennia. Things will be okay.

I’ll still build things, of course. Code is a powerful way to crystallize learning and make it easier for people to do better. It also helps me ask questions that would be hard to answer manually.

Okay. I give myself permission to focus on learning after this. I know I’ll probably feel that itch to do something that creates immediate or measurable value for people. That’s okay. I might feel insecure at some point. That’s normal. But there’s so much I want to learn, and I think I’ll be able to stay motivated even without outside drivers. Worth trying it out and sticking with it through at least the initial bumps.

This will be fun!

(Thanks to Mel Chua for the nudge!)

Read the original or check out the comments on: From maker time to learner time (Sacha Chua's blog)

I know it’s not Sunday in most parts of the world, and it’s almost not Sunday anymore here, so I’m going to slip this in quickly.

Two social events last Monday, and I was pretty much wiped out afterwards. I took it easy afterwards, and the rest of the week eventually brought me back to a good balance. =)

Read the original or check out the comments on: Weekly review: Week ending April 27, 2012 (Sacha Chua's blog)

In normalen Zigaretten sind etliche Stoffe und Substanzen enthalten, die gesundheitsschädlich sind. Neben einer großen Zahl an Reizgasen sorgen auch mehr als vierzig Teerstoffe für ein erhöhtes Krebsrisiko. Den meisten Rauchern ist dieser Umstand bekannt, nur die wenigsten hören jedoch mit dem Rauchen auf. Woran liegt das? Schuld daran ist ein weiterer Inhaltsstoff der Zigarette, das Nikotin. Nikotin ist ein sehr starkes Nervengift, das von der Tabakpflanze gebildet wird, um Schädlinge abzuhalten. Dieses Gift hat eine anregende Wirkung, in höheren Dosen wirkt Nikotin lähmend. Gefährlich wird dieses Alkaloid aber vor allem durch seine anhä...

Link: “Gangbang Interviews” and “Bikini Shots”: Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem

"Want to bro down and crush code?" No.

A woman sued Nutella, claiming she was mislead by advertising into thinking it was a health food. The case settled for $3mm dollars.

While it is absolutely true that most advertising is misleading and immoral and that advertisers should be treated like we used to treat lepers, legal sanctions are a bit much. A proper and more effective punishment for this kind of thing isn’t $3mm, it’s the people who make and approve these ads not getting invited to dinner parties.

In a better world, parents wouldn’t fall for such ads and people who purveyed them would be drummed out of polite society. And lawyers who filed suits like this would also be mocked and avoided. A pox on all their houses!

I’ve been in business for a little more than two months, which is a blink of an eye in the business world. It’s encouraging to see my bank account balance creep up slowly. I move the HST and an additional 30% for taxes to a separate account so that I’m not at all tempted to touch it.

I’ve made a few purchases here and there, things to help me work more happily and effectively:

• an extended battery for my laptop so that I can use it all day without looking for a power outlet
• the Artrage Studio Pro drawing program
• a few books to read and review

Those decisions have worked out well. I’m still flipflopping on the idea of getting a tablet, so I’ll postpone it until I meet some more of my other savings targets. Although I’m earning a decent income now, I plan to work on riskier, self-directed projects in a number of months. A good savings cushion will help reduce stress then, so I don’t want to get used to a level of expenses that match my current income.

I’ll try managing my business finances like the way I manage my personal finances. Because I’m still building up my business’ emergency fund, most of the income will go towards that. Some of the income will go towards an opportunity fund and other things, though, because it’s good to train myself to experiment within the context of the business.

What about long-term savings? I haven’t been adding to my investments because I’m not sure if I’ll need the money in the short term. Besides, I suspect I might be better off investing the money in developing my capabilities. Would I have a higher return on investment than the stock market, which has been up and down and sideways over the past few years? Maybe. I can probably hedge my bets by going half and half. I can’t time the market, but I can keep regularly investing in it and things will probably work out.

Many people struggle with managing irregular cashflow. If I fight lifestyle inflation and err on the side of caution, I think things will be all right. I’ll only be able to test this once I move into that pattern of work. In the meantime, I can get ready for it. Here we go!

Read the original or check out the comments on: Learning about business finances (Sacha Chua's blog)

The House passed CISPA and I can’t find an easy to access list of who voted for and against it. I think that’s important info, so here it is (data from house.gov):

Voted For CISPA

Adams Aye
Aderholt Aye
Alexander Aye
Altmire Aye
Amodei Aye
Austria Aye
Bachmann Aye
Bachus Aye
Barletta Aye
Barrow Aye
Bartlett Aye
Bass (NH) Aye
Benishek Aye
Berg Aye
Biggert Aye
Bilbray Aye
Bilirakis Aye
Bishop (GA) Aye
Bishop (NY) Aye
Black Aye
Blackburn Aye
Bonner Aye
Bono Mack Aye
Boren Aye
Boswell Aye
Boustany Aye
Brady (TX) Aye
Broun (GA) Aye
Buchanan Aye
Buerkle Aye
Burgess Aye
Burton (IN) Aye
Butterfield Aye
Calvert Aye
Camp Aye
Campbell Aye
Cantor Aye
Capito Aye
Cardoza Aye
Carney Aye
Carter Aye
Cassidy Aye
Castor (FL) Aye
Chabot Aye
Chaffetz Aye
Chandler Aye
Clyburn Aye
Coble Aye
Coffman (CO) Aye
Cole Aye
Conaway Aye
Connolly (VA) Aye
Cooper Aye
Costa Aye
Cravaack Aye
Crawford Aye
Crenshaw Aye
Critz Aye
Cuellar Aye
Culberson Aye
Denham Aye
Dent Aye
?DesJarlais Aye
Diaz-Balart Aye
Dicks Aye
Dold Aye
Donnelly (IN) Aye
Dreier Aye
Duffy Aye
Duncan (SC) Aye
Duncan (TN) Aye
Ellmers Aye
Fincher Aye
Fitzpatrick Aye
Flake Aye
Fleischmann Aye
Flores Aye
Forbes Aye
Fortenberry Aye
Foxx Aye
Franks (AZ) Aye
Frelinghuysen Aye
Gallegly Aye
Garamendi Aye
Gardner Aye
Garrett Aye
Gerlach Aye
Gibbs Aye
Gingrey (GA) Aye
Gonzalez Aye
Goodlatte Aye
Gowdy Aye
Granger Aye
Graves (GA) Aye
Graves (MO) Aye
Griffin (AR) Aye
Griffith (VA) Aye
Grimm Aye
Guinta Aye
Guthrie Aye
Hanabusa Aye
Hanna Aye
Harper Aye
Harris Aye
Hartzler Aye
Hastings (WA) Aye
Hayworth Aye
Heck Aye
Hensarling Aye
Herger Aye
Herrera Beutler Aye
Hochul Aye
Huelskamp Aye
Huizenga (MI) Aye
Hultgren Aye
Hunter Aye
Hurt Aye
Israel Aye
Issa Aye
Jenkins Aye
Johnson (OH) Aye
Johnson, Sam Aye
Jordan Aye
Kelly Aye
King (IA) Aye
King (NY) Aye
Kingston Aye
Kinzinger (IL) Aye
Kissell Aye
Kline Aye
Labrador Aye
Lamborn Aye
Lance Aye
Langevin Aye
Lankford Aye
Larsen (WA) Aye
Latham Aye
?LaTourette Aye
Latta Aye
Lewis (CA) Aye
Lipinski Aye
?LoBiondo Aye
Long Aye
Lucas Aye
Luetkemeyer Aye
Lummis Aye
Lungren, Daniel E. Aye
Manzullo Aye
Matheson Aye
?McCarthy (CA) Aye
?McCarthy (NY) Aye
?McCaul Aye
?McIntyre Aye
?McKeon Aye
?McKinley Aye
?McMorris Rodgers Aye
Meehan Aye
Mica Aye
Miller (FL) Aye
Miller (MI) Aye
Miller, Gary Aye
Moran Aye
Mulvaney Aye
Murphy (PA) Aye
Myrick Aye
Neugebauer Aye
Noem Aye
Nugent Aye
Nunes Aye
Nunnelee Aye
Olson Aye
Owens Aye
Palazzo Aye
Paulsen Aye
Peterson Aye
Petri Aye
Pitts Aye
Platts Aye
Poe (TX) Aye
Pompeo Aye
Price (GA) Aye
Quayle Aye
Reed Aye
Reichert Aye
Renacci Aye
Ribble Aye
Rivera Aye
Roby Aye
Roe (TN) Aye
Rogers (AL) Aye
Rogers (KY) Aye
Rogers (MI) Aye
Rokita Aye
Rooney Aye
Ros-Lehtinen Aye
Roskam Aye
Ross (AR) Aye
Ross (FL) Aye
Royce Aye
Runyan Aye
Ruppersberger Aye
Ryan (WI) Aye
Scalise Aye
Schilling Aye
Schmidt Aye
Schock Aye
Schrader Aye
Scott (SC) Aye
Scott, Austin Aye
Scott, David Aye
Sessions Aye
Shimkus Aye
Shuler Aye
Shuster Aye
Smith (NE) Aye
Smith (NJ) Aye
Smith (TX) Aye
Smith (WA) Aye
Southerland Aye
Stearns Aye
Stivers Aye
Stutzman Aye
Sullivan Aye
Terry Aye
Thompson (CA) Aye
Thompson (PA) Aye
Thornberry Aye
Tiberi Aye
Tipton Aye
Towns Aye
Turner (NY) Aye
Turner (OH) Aye
Upton Aye
Walberg Aye
Walden Aye
Webster Aye
West Aye
Westmoreland Aye
Whitfield Aye
Wilson (SC) Aye
Wittman Aye
Wolf Aye
Womack Aye
Woodall Aye
Yoder Aye
Young (AK) Aye
Young (FL) Aye
Young (IN) Aye

Voted Against CISPA

Ackerman No
Akin No
Amash No
Andrews No
Baca No
Baldwin No
Barton (TX) No
Bass (CA) No
Becerra No
Berkley No
Berman No
Bishop (UT) No
Bonamici No
Brady (PA) No
Braley (IA) No
Brooks No
Brown (FL) No
Capps No
Capuano No
Carnahan No
Carson (IN) No
Chu No
Cicilline No
Clarke (MI) No
Clarke (NY) No
Clay No
Cleaver No
Cohen No
Conyers No
Costello No
Courtney No
Crowley No
Cummings No
Davis (CA) No
Davis (IL) No
?DeFazio No
?DeGette No
?DeLauro No
Deutch No
Dingell No
Doggett No
Doyle No
Edwards No
Ellison No
Emerson No
Engel No
Eshoo No
Farenthold No
Farr No
Fattah No
Fleming No
Frank (MA) No
Fudge No
Gibson No
Gohmert No
Gosar No
Green, Al No
Green, Gene No
Grijalva No
Gutierrez No
Hahn No
Hall No
Hastings (FL) No
Heinrich No
Higgins No
Himes No
Hinchey No
Hinojosa No
Holt No
Honda No
Hoyer No
Jackson (IL) No
Jackson Lee (TX) No
Johnson (GA) No
Johnson (IL) No
Johnson, E. B. No
Jones No
Kaptur No
Keating No
Kildee No
Kind No
Kucinich No
Landry No
Larson (CT) No
Lee (CA) No
Levin No
Lewis (GA) No
Loebsack No
Lofgren, Zoe No
Lowey No
Luján No
Lynch No
Mack No
Marchant No
Markey No
Matsui No
?McClintock No
?McCollum No
?McCotter No
?McDermott No
?McGovern No
?McNerney No
Meeks No
Michaud No
Miller (NC) No
Miller, George No
Moore No
Murphy (CT) No
Nadler No
Napolitano No
Neal No
Olver No
Pallone No
Pascrell No
Pastor (AZ) No
Pearce No
Pelosi No
Perlmutter No
Peters No
Pingree (ME) No
Polis No
Posey No
Price (NC) No
Quigley No
Rahall No
Rehberg No
Reyes No
Richardson No
Richmond No
Rigell No
Rohrabacher No
Rothman (NJ) No
Roybal-Allard No
Rush No
Ryan (OH) No
Sánchez, Linda T. No
Sanchez, Loretta No
Sarbanes No
Schakowsky No
Schiff No
Schwartz No
Schweikert No
Scott (VA) No
Sensenbrenner No
Serrano No
Sewell No
Sherman No
Simpson No
Speier No
Stark No
Sutton No
Thompson (MS) No
Tierney No
Tonko No
Tsongas No
Van Hollen No
Velázquez No
Visclosky No
Walsh (IL) No
Walz (MN) No
Wasserman Schultz No
Waters No
Watt No
Waxman No
Welch No
Wilson (FL) No
Woolsey No
Yarmuth No

Didn’t Vote

Blumenauer Not Voting
Bucshon Not Voting
Canseco Not Voting
Davis (KY) Not Voting
Filner Not Voting
Hirono Not Voting
Holden Not Voting
Maloney Not Voting
Marino Not Voting
?McHenry Not Voting
Paul Not Voting
Pence Not Voting
Rangel Not Voting
Sires Not Voting
Slaughter Not Voting

Hooray for perennials! Even when my newly-planted seeds are growing unencouragingly slowly, at least I can look at the perennials and enjoy their returns. The strawberries are green and leafy. The sage, oregano, and thyme are ready to use in cooking. The blueberry bushes in the front have grown their leaves back, too, and the lavender plants are getting bushier.

Of the seeds I planted, the peas are doing the best. They’re almost at the point of reaching the twine that I’ve rigged up for support. I’d say that the lettuce and carrot seedlings were inching along, but they haven’t reached an inch of height yet. They’re centimetring along, that’s what.

Next year, I think I’ll plant more tulips and daffodils. They look pretty in other people’s gardens, and I like the cheerful colours. With the community-supported agriculture program, I don’t have to try to grow as many vegetables, so I’m fine with turning over some of the garden space to decorative plants.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Garden update (Sacha Chua's blog)

The Shit Girls Say meme blew up because all of us vaguely recognize the college-age woman who says those things. The meme is also highly annoying because it implies "girls" are airheads.

I prefer a more constructive commentary on female speaking habits, which is why I loved a recent podcast interview with Tara Mohr, a women's leadership expert. Mohr describes little ways in which women unconsciously discount or minimize what they have to say, by overusing words like "just" and "actually," making declarative statements sound like questions, and by talking too quickly to avoid interruption.

I excerpted the best 8 minutes of Mohr's interview from the original 50-minute episode of the Jillian Michaels podcast and embedded it here for quick listening. The interview is now on ?YouTube, and every woman should hear it.

The bit is essentially a summary of Mohr's article, Public Speaking Tips For Women. But I found the audio version to be very effective because you can hear examples of pitfalls to avoid. Now, I'm off to banish "Does that make sense?" from my conversational habits.

Update: Related bit on speaking with authority:

Every few years there seems to be some new blogging platform that’s going to solve all (or at least some) of the problems of the old ones. A few years ago Posterous made a splash with its idea of being a hub for your social media and driving everything by email. A few weeks ago a new, invite-only platform called Svbtle made the rounds (disclaimer: I signed up for an invite to check out the new hotness). Svbtle aims to take some of the pressure of blogging by allowing you to save quick, private, spur-of-the-moment “ideas” as well as more permanent, public posts. Though I love to see new platforms and all the innovation brought to bear on web publishing, I have some nagging doubts. I’ve been blogging on and off for about five years and I’m starting to think that blogs are the wrong model.

To be clear, they’re not the wrong model for everyone and everything. But they’re certainly not the end-all and be-all of web publishing. As I start measuring the lifetime of my blog in years instead of months, I’m starting to get just a bit frustrated by a platform designed for immediacy. Blogs are fine if you’re writing about what’s happening in the world right now. Blogs are great if you want an online diary of your life. Blogs are wonderful for documenting the growth of your project and community over the years. However blogs are perhaps not so great for people who want to use their writing to augment their thought process. They are not all that great if there are a handful of topics and ideas that you keep revisiting and refining over time.

For example, I’ve written about writing for the web and publishing models before. This will be the third in the de facto series. However, the posts are widely separated in time. In a typical blog format they won’t appear side-by-side unless I remember them and put in links. It would be great if I could have a single web page, at a fixed URL that holds the evolution of my thoughts on the matter over time. As a visitor to the site you could see each of the versions, not just the most recent one. You could comment on each of the versions, or on the combined document. While we’re at it, I’d also like to see paragraph-level comments and version histories (but with a UI better than standard diff).

What I’m describing is more of an essay platform than it is a blogging platform. However I don’t want stiffly siloed platforms either. I’d like to be able to post articles like the one about what I learned in my first semester of graduate school. These posts would fade into the background over time, just like a normal blog. Writers like Craig Mod do a good job of creating large, permanent articles surrounded by smaller “satellite” articles. But when I last asked him (over Twitter a few months ago) he maintained it by hand. Another solution is two have two separate sites like Dustin Curtis does: one for permanent works and one as a traditional blog. But personally I’m of the opinion that software should do as much work as possible and I’ve already separated some of my writing.

The strange thing about the web is that it is both ephemeral and permanent. Today’s hot articles will be lost and forgotten tomorrow. And yet nothing that gets put online ever truly gets deleted. What I want is a writing and publishing platform that reconciles these two opposite natures. There are other technical and interface aspects I could highlight, but they’re orthogonal to the overall purpose of this platform: let me post time dependent pieces which can be archived after a few days, but also let me have long running, heavily edited works.

I don’t know that such a platform exists. I also don’t know for certain that such a platfrom doesn’t exists. I suppose that the only way to really get what I want is to build it (after all, talk is cheap, show me the code) and I hope one day I’ll actually get around to it. Till then I’ll keep thinking about how we can support writing and publishing for the bipolar web (and linking back to older versions). I’d love to hear what you think about the matter.

The consulting work I’m doing now is a wonderful fit for who I am at this moment. In the past two months, I’ve been able to do a lot. They’d like to keep me, and I can see how I could make a good difference here. But I didn’t leave one wonderful job just to start another wonderful job, did I?

My primary reason for experimenting with entrepreneurship is to build something more flexible and more scalable than employment. By flexibility, I mean that it should be able to accommodate the unpredictable schedules and irregular demands of raising young children if W- and I have more kids. By scalability, I don’t mean the mind-boggling aspirations of venture-backed startups. I mean the ability to create more value with less time, and possibly by involving other people.

My secondary reason for experimenting is to learn what I can learn so that I can share those lessons with as many as people as possible. Thanks to frugality and other factors, I enjoy the privilege of being able to learn about entrepreneurship without immediate financial pressure. Thanks to a great network, I can learn from people’s experiences instead of struggling in isolation. Thanks to a keen interest in both technology and business, I can try things out instead of waiting for the missing piece. With all these advantages, maybe I can make things easier for other people.

With these reasons in mind, it becomes easier to say no, even though I also really want to say yes. Full-time work doing what I’m doing now? It would probably be awesome, but it doesn’t follow my reasons, so I’d prefer to help people learn how to do what I do. If I could be in more than one place, I would be in so many. Since I can be in only one place at a time, I’ll focus on training people, and I’ll work on the questions that I most want to ask.

Read the original or check out the comments on: Why I’m temporarily unhireable (Sacha Chua's blog)

As you educate yourself about your own talent and ambitions, you graduate from doing a task right to doing the right task. It takes some experience to realize that a lot of work is better left undone. It might be busywork that is performed out of habit, or it might be work that is heading in the wrong direction. Working smart means making sure you are spending your time on jobs that are effective and that actually need to be done.

via End Malaria Day