Category: Personal

  • “Change Your Life” Productivity Apps & How to Use Them— Updated!

    I first wrote about the suite of applications, services, products and gadgets I use to keep my head above water almost three years ago.  In the intervening time things have changed (Smartr/Xobni, for example, has gone away), hence this fresh list. Here are my 14 “Change Your Life” apps and how I use them. Please…

  • Vonage = a Practical Tip when Moving Abroad (Notes from Bergen)

    From the “Department of Things I Wish I’d Taken Care of Faster” Department… Executive Summary of this post: if you’re moving out of your home country, then get a VOIP line that lets your relatives call as if you’re down the street. The Story: Before we left Oregon at the end of last summer for…

  • Thanks to the Kindest of Strangers

    Dear Reader, please help me get this post to Charlie, my hat rescuer, so that he knows how grateful I am. The Story: If you’ve seen me or photos of me the last few years, then chances are you’ve seen me wearing this cap: The cap is from the Goorin Bros shop on NW23rd Street  in Portland,…

  • Notes from Bergen 3: Paternal Victories

    “Dad,” my teenager daughter asked one recent morning as she picked her way through over-easy eggs, seedy toast and Earl Grey tea. “What have you eaten for breakfast?” At a quick scan it’s an innocuous question, but down, deep down, subterranean with stalactites, a parenting victory glints in dim light. Here’s what I mean. This year…

  • Pragmatics: you can only walk through one door at a time

    Sharon washed up at the table next to me during a post-conference dinner here in Bergen and opened up over beer and reindeer steaks. She’s a bright young woman about to finish a Masters in finance and economics who doesn’t know how to approach the post-graduation void. Sharon started reeling off different directions and opportunities,…

  • Against Disruption: Louis Menand, Douglas Adams, Books and Technology

    Have you ever smacked into a glass door when you didn’t realize it was closed?  I have.  It hurts.  The intersection of my face and a glass door happened at my great aunt’s tiny desert house in the 80s, where the mix of a trick of the sunlight and my distracted boyhood mind made the…

  • My 2014 in Books

    I read a lot — magazines, two newspapers, email newsletters, and countless social-media-shared links I chase down digital rabbit holes. I’d never know anything, for example, without Jason Hirshhorn’s magnificent daily Media Redefined. But I’m lost without books.  Actual books.  Whether paper or digital, if I’m not reading at least two books then I get…

  • Notes from Bergen 2: Walking Meditation and Gershwin

    The “ion” trailing at the end of the word “meditation” reveals buried movement in usually concrete and restful nouns. Like “locomotion” or “concentration” or “constipation” or “friction” or even the simple “action,” the word “meditation” conveys fragile, balletic flow, conveys just how difficult it is to be without thinking. Meditation challenges me. I’m busy-minded at…

  • In Praise of Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto”

    I first smacked my forehead (ouch!) against a wall of decision fatigue when I was the Editor in Chief of iMedia Connection (a daily trade journal covering a different collision between marketing and technology). The best part of editing involves coaxing order from mess, making points pointier and helping writers to say what they want…

  • Notes from Bergen

    Our two most precious currencies are time and attention.  Money, our more conventional currency, helps to focus attention and to make us chary of how we spend our time. I write this sitting in Chaos Coffee, perched at the edge of the University of Bergen campus and a block from Nygård Skole where W, my…