Eulogy for Arlo

Our dog, Arlo, went to his rest on March 29, 2019. He was 12 years old, and he is greatly missed. Arlo came to our family as a shelter dog. He was intended for one of our children, but ended up being “Dad’s dog”. Andy took great pleasure in walking Arlo, playing with him and taking care of his needs. Arlo loved it when the family would get home in the evening, and would be ready for dinner and a walk. Arlo was an older dog when he came to us (seven years old), so he was not as active as a younger dog. However, that was the right kind of dog for our family. His favorite place was the bed in the master bedroom, where he would take naps during the day, watch TV with us in the evening, and sleep with me and my wife. He was a great snuggler, and was always ready to be close when someone was having difficulty and needed some love. Arlo was Andy’s first dog, and it was in his 50’s that Andy discovered he was a dog person. Arlo will always have a special place in our hearts. We love you, Arlo.

 

Marking the passing of a good friend.

Arlo 2007-2019

Read Knowledge Processing System for Marketers, Creators, and Knowledge Workers

The focus of this article is a subject I’ve been fascinated with for a long time. What started as a simple Email Friday Newsletter topic, transformed into what you see here; far too long for an email. “Knowledge Processing.” Or PKM. PKM = Personal Knowledge Management. PKM is a systems approach to dealing with the …

A terrific example of this method (via the Zettlekasten blog), I want to explore this sometime!

Read Wizard Kit: How I Protect Myself from Surveillance | Linux Journal

How do consumers protect themselves from surveillance and start to restore some semblance of privacy? Services like Google and Facebook have many settings where you can limit your privacy exposure. This article doesn’t cover those, however, as much already has been written about that. What follows is more like what Doc Searls calls a “wizard kit” of various open-source technologies that I have adopted and customized over the years to protect my own privacy.

A lot of good tips for protecting your privacy.

Read: How I’m able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

Read How I’m able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

I start­ed using LaTeX to write lec­ture notes in the sec­ond se­mes­ter of my bach­e­lor in math­e­mat­ics, and I’ve been using it ever since, which makes for a total of more than 1700 pages of notes. To give you an idea of what those notes look like, here are some ex­am­ples:

I think it is amazing that someone could take math notes using a computer – wow!

The power of cleaning up your kanban backlog

When I restarted working with my kanban board in January 2019, I did not remove any of the items in the backlog part of the board.  Last week, I had to move to a different cubicle last week, and I took all the backlog post-it notes off the board with the intent of adding them to the board in my new cubicle. On Monday, I started creating new post-it notes for my current work, and decided to not look for those old backlog items just yet. I rapidly built up a new backlog (as I captured every task I thought of (step 1 in Getting Things Done)), but have been completing tasks at a much quicker rate than in early January (completed at least 10 tasks a day through Wednesday). I think not having those old items has helped me to feel more motivated about completing tasks on the board. Whatever the reason is for the increased productivity, it feels good!

Read: Austin and Lockhart, Texas: 10 barbecue restaurants in 72 hours

Read Austin and Lockhart, Texas: 10 barbecue restaurants in 72 hours by philg

On a recent business trip to Austin I resolved to consume 100 percent of my calories at barbecue restaurants.
The trip started with an Uber ride from the airport (the city’s license raj effectively outlawed Uber, but the state legislature brought them back). Traffic was horrific reverse-commuting …

Wow! I still remember the last great barbecue I ate in Texas (I think it was Cooper’s in Llano), this is a great list to sample on my next trip for Texas…