By far and away the greatest boon to my blogging practice over the past couple of years is giving myself the ability to post here by email, something I described the technical aspects of back in 2016 when I coded it up.

It’s proved a valuable new tool for posting when I’m out of the office or when I’m traveling, especially when I want to post a photo just after taking it. It’s also allowed me to use the speech-to-text feature of my phone to dictate posts, which requires a lot of proofing and editing, but is generally easier than trying to tap things out in full on the tiny phone keyboard.

I added a new feature to this setup today, giving myself the ability to add categories to blog posts by including lines that start with a hash (#) symbol.

So, for example, I want to categorize this post as Weblogging, Email and Postmark, so I enter those three terms in the body of my email, as you can see in the screen shot below, and that’s how this post gets categorized.

Until this point I’d go back to posts later on and add categories; this saves that step.

In the window of Wright’s Shoes on Queen Street (which has uncommonly good window displays that have got me into the store more than once).

The Clyde River project posting letters home from World War I continues today:

Well, Jack, how is the war going along? We don’t know anything about it here. We might as well be in the woods a thousand miles for all that we don’t know that there is a war.

With all that we know about the war, and with our modern communications tools, it’s easy to forget that those in the middle of it didn’t know much about what was happening. And of course they didn’t know when, or if, the war would end.

I spend an inordinate amount of my time attempting to map characters from one TV show onto characters from another (like Jerry=Kirk, Kramer=Spock, George=Bones, Elaine=Scotty).

So, apparently, do the Johns Hamilton Gray.

From the book This Could Help by Patrick Rhone:

Why wait for the eulogy to state what someone means to you? If someone’s life and accomplishments have great meaning the day after they are gone, my bet is they had even greater meaning the day before. Tell them today — right now — while you have the chance. Because this moment may be your only chance. Because none are guaranteed.

You never know how it might have an impact on someone who needs to hear it. We so often do not get the full story. Even from those we are close to. A kind word of gratitude for who someone is and what they mean to you could make someone’s day or even save their life.

I’m generally adverse to aphorisms, but I’m also a frequent sender of thank you notes, and I gotta tell you, thanking someone is way better than not thanking them and then having them up and die.

Saying thanks is also much more satisfying than complaining.

(Pro tip: telling someone who is dying what they’ve meant to you will not make them die faster, nor make them think you’re ready for them to die; there’s only an upside).

Heinz Wittenbrink was one of the people that Oliver and I met at Smart Stuff That Matters in Amersfoort last month; he was in our initial “get to know each other by the stories we tell” group, so we got to know him personally, not professionally (always the preferred route).

On the Saturday morning after the unconference we had a morning and early afternoon to ourselves, and we spent it in the old city centre, having a leisurely breakfast, doing some shopping, and visiting Mondriaanhuis.

We ran into Heinz in the bookstore just after eating breakfast, and then again, an hour later, in Mondriaanhuis, as one might run into an old friend while doing errands around town. Those brief happenstance meetings were among the highlights of the weekend for me.

Heinz, in Zurück von der Smart Stuff that Matters Unconference 2018, has written thoughtful reflections on the unconference, reflections that Ton has helpfully translated excerpts of into English.

As with Ton, it was these words from Heinz that rang loudest for me:

To list the themes [….of the sessions I attended…] fails to express what was special about the unconference: that you meet people or meet them again, for whom these themes are personal themes, so that they are actually talking about their lives when they talk about them. At an unconference like this one does not try to create results that can be broadcast in abstracted formulations, but through learning about different practices and discussing them, extend your own living practice and view it from new perspectives. These practices or ways of living cannot be separated from the relationships in which and with which you live, and the relationships you create or change at such an event like this.

Heinz’s “die eigene Lebenspraxis zu erweitern und mit neuen Perspektiven anzugehen,” to “extend your own living practice and view it from new perspectives,” is a lovely construction, and is the basis for almost everything I do.

It was lovely to meet Heinz in Amersfoort; I am certain that our paths will cross again, either formally or perhaps reaching for the same magazine in a Graz newsstand.

(Heinz, in blue on the right; photo by Ton Zylstra, license)

I am a big fan of the Paper-Oh Circulo A6 notebook, and my sketching over the past 18 months has largely been predicated on having one at my side almost all of the time. This, in turn, has been made possible by the perfectly-sized A6 Handy Zippered Pouch from Modulor that I’ve been using to carry them around: the pouch holds a Circulo notebook, a pencil, an eraser, and a package of 5 sketching markers. And it fits into my back pocket, or into my bag.

When we were at Modulor last month, thus, I made sure to pick up some additional pouches, both in A6 and in B6, so that I’d never be without one. I also purchase an A6 Phat Bag, which is made out of polyethylene fiber that purports to be tear resistant and “writable / paintable.”

Here’s the new bag assortment, along with my well-used pouch, purchased on an earlier visit to the store:

I arrived at the office to this error message on the screen of my MacBook Air. The “Accept” button seems like a very Zen approach to the issue.

Jeremy Keith has assembled a compelling collection of writing about writing online.