Running Dropbox on Ubuntu behind a proxy
| April 4, 2012 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
If you require a proxy to connect to Dropbox, you may run into an error with the GUI installer that prevents Dropbox from starting on Ubuntu.
The solution is to follow the instructions here.
You will need to enter two lines into the terminal, and start Dropbox from the terminal. Or you can add the startup line to your startup file.
Recursive high-volume learning
| March 6, 2012 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
Scott Young is a recognized expert on rapid learning and hacking academia. He recently wrote a post describing how he is completing the MIT computer science program at 4x the normal pace.
What is Scot’s philosophy of learning?
“Most students learn in an iterative fashion—take lesson one, master it, then move onto lesson two. The academic system basically enforces this method of learning since lessons and homework are trickled out in lockstep.
There are two weaknesses with this approach. First, you don’t get to see how early concepts are going to be applied to later ones. Second, it doesn’t allow you to invest your time in the topics you find most challenging, instead you conform to the pace of the group. …
I prefer a recursive strategy. First I “learn” the entire course material, which usually doesn’t mean I’ve mastered it, but I understand the basic principles. Then I recursively deepen my understanding on harder topics until I’ve mastered it. This deepening can be done by deliberate practice in problems as mentioned previously or by using intuition-generating methods like the Feynman Technique.”
Some very interesting ideas. But how do they apply to those of us working in the real world?
Well, you can observe two things about Scott’s strategy:
1. It is high speed and high volume
2. It is recursive
Step 1: He scans a large body of material at high speed.
Step 2: He then returns to the hard (but valuable) parts, and focuses on them.
There is only one info management algorithm in the world that is specifically designed to support this workflow: Cyborganize.
All the other info management systems are locked into a linear, progressive paradigm, much like the way traditional academia works. These systems, such as GTD, expect a predefined life path in which “reading assignments” and “homework” are doled out in paired bits.
That is not how life works.
If you read any Steve Blank, you know he is constantly hammering the differences between traditional management and entrepreneurship. Traditional companies are designed to execute an established business model. That is what traditional info management systems are good at. But startups must SEARCH for a viable business model, before they can ossify into a structure optimal for executing that business model.
Well, life is much like a startup. If you intend to grow and evolve as a person, then you need Cyborganize, because you need to SEARCH for new life models.
On the other hand, if you just want to be a union man punching the clock, then GTD is fine for your utterly predictable life.
Personally, I think you can achieve greater happiness with a flexible, evolving approach. But I don’t judge those who find stasis fulfilling.
Less choice equals more freedom
| March 6, 2012 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
“Stanford Professor BJ Fogg identified the three things you need for behavioral change: motivation, ability, and triggers. A trigger is reminder to do something now. ”
- quote from Ramit Sethi’s blog
Compared to some of the tools out there, like PersonalBrain and Ultra Recall, the tools I recommend for Cyborganize seem pretty simple and limited.
That’s a good thing.
Why? Because fewer organizational options means you have obvious triggers guiding you to the next step in your info-processing algorithm.
That’s why i don’t like wikis and other open ended tools. Too much choice equals no triggers. You have to think hard to figure out what to do next. That takes your mind off the content.
Mindspace is critically limited. Having a confusing workspace can cut your effective intelligence in half.
The Longform Loop goes from Org-Mode to WordPress. Because they are simple, both of these apps keep the triggers rolling continuously. This small-chunks cognitive labor, with the next step always clear.
That way, you can focus on the ideas. Your mind can wander off onto tangents. You can completely lose your place. Simply glance at the screen, and you know what to do next.
Freedom to think is freedom to work.
ConnectedText – welcome to the Cyborganize family
| March 5, 2012 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
I think I’m coming around on CT.
The markup is still way too intensive for the earlier stages of fast text flow that Cyborganize demands. And the structural possibilities are too defined and diverse.
But as an end-stage to the Longform Loop, it makes a lot of sense.
I can see also that it has the potential to fulfill a large part of what I wanted UR to be, but found it too slow and limited to be – a fairly intelligent interconnected text database.
Obviously there are a lot of powerful possibilities here. But you need to already know what you want to do, and be sure it’s not going to change much, before you do it.
One question. I’ve been thinking about UR for a contact manager. Would CT do that better? I don’t see anyone using it for that, and UR seems like a natural choice. Then again, it might be nice to have everything, including contacts, integrated in the final T1.
Here’s a demo vid of CT: http://www.coulthard.com/index.php?/blog/comments/academic_research_using_connectedtext
The home page is also pretty informative: http://www.connectedtext.com/
Clear Line – finally, a free wordpress theme I actually like!
| December 17, 2011 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
Hallelujah, finally found a decent free WordPress theme. I was beginning to think such a thing didn’t exist.
I have fine-grain control over all the important elements. My key criteria are readability, proper balance, and typography.
Since I have control over font sizes of all elements now, I decided to go with a fixed width for easier scanning.
I also figured out how to have a static page and a blog page together on the same site – a major improvement.
It’s right there in the options under Settings -> Reading. You just need to create a blank page and designate it as the “blog” page.
I really like all the options and functionality included in Clear Line. It does a lot more than I’m currently asking of it. And it includes nice integrated share buttons – which importantly you can turn off.
I’ll be using this for all my T2 blogs. It can be adapted for public or private needs. In short, it is Da Bomb. I am ecstatic.
Did I mention you can configure columns however you want? Control H2, H3, H4, etc? I better stop now…
Also, I picked up a new plugin, Redirection, that will eliminate the need to manually fix links when I’m reshuffling my page hierarchy or doing SEO optimization. Verrah nice.
Adding the Journal T2 wordpress blog, importance of journaling, future journaling setup
| December 16, 2011 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
I wasn’t adhering to journaling.
In the past, I had decent adherence to a journaling system in Ultra Recall. I created separate entries for each day, with dates formatted so they’d sort in numerical order. (2012/12/16).
Then I’d make a parent over 3-4 for half week review, and over two half weeks for a week review, and so forth.
That system worked very well. Each layer of abstraction built into the next. I wound up with a comprehensive review of my life. I was able to pick out major patterns and gain a far more accurate self perspective, which translated directly into higher quality life decisions.
In other words, journaling in this manner is indispensable. If you’re not writing the story of your life, the story of your life will write you.
Obviously, I don’t use UR anymore. At first I looked for a software replacement that would run on Linux.
But then it occurred to me that Org-mode would do this more effectively. I’d just need separate text files for each layer of abstraction. I.e., one for daily entries, another for di-weekly, another for weekly, etc.
But then I realized that the fundamental problem with my journaling adherence wasn’t functionality, but presentation. WordPress offers an inherently superior dashboard style presentation than Org-mode.
Yes, choosing WordPress over Org-mode would require a bit more copy pasting during reviews. But the gains in adherence and usability would be well worthwhile.
Then I had to think through how to structure the journal in Wordpess.
At first I thought that daily entries should be posts. But that won’t work, because the posts are displayed by most recent first, which reverses the needed chronological order.
Then I realized that pages offered the perfect solution. I could still use numerical sorting in titles to make it self organizing. And WordPress supports outline hierarchy for pages. Yeah it’s a little clunky, but it’ll do.
More importantly, I can have the journal as an always open tab in my browser, to drop memories into the day’s entry whenever the thought strikes me. This massively increases adherence.
So now I’m doing my journal in WordPress. I have two days so far. It’s working well. The habit is becoming ingrained.
The following tabs are always open in my Chrome browser: T3, TweetDeck, Journal T2, and the T1 blog page that shows a listing of all my T2 blog addresses, for easy access.
This system is working very, very well. Stuff goes where it’s supposed to.
Now, when I do a review session from the daily level, that entails a little extra work, because my info is fragmented.
I need to pull data from email, my T2 blogs, my T2 twitters, maybe Org-mode timestamps, and any other sources to bulk out those daily entries.
But really, this doesn’t sound too difficult. I only review about 3 days at a time. So I just keep all three open in tabs, and add info as needed.
When done, I dump all that info from the three days into a scratch file, and do the di-weekly review. After that, I don’t have to collect supplemental info for the rest of the review process, unless I find out something retroactively. In retroactive cases, I can just add it to the day discovered, and it will work its way up the abstraction chain.
Kewl.
EDIT: Out of respect for the rule of three, I think I will limit reviews to only three sub-entries per round. So my structure won’t follow “weeks” and “months” and “years”. Instead, three days, nine days (week), 27 days (month), roughly 3 months, roughly 6 months, roughly 1.5 years, roughly 4 years, roughly 12 years, roughly 36 years, entire lifespan. Guess that last one will have to be given at the eulogy 
EDIT: No. If reviewing is good, more reviewing is better. I will follow a rule of two instead. Two days, four days (half week), eight days (week), 16 days (two weeks), 32 days (month), 64 days (two months), roughly four months, roughly eight months, 1.3 years, 2.6 years, 5.2 years, 10 years, 20 years, 40 years, 80 years. Yeah, that’s a lot better.
Also, some reflections on the importance of journaling:
Monitoring is passive management. Active management is setting goals. Without passive management, you don’t know if you’re reaching your goals or stuck in a loop. Also, you can’t appreciate your victories or see the forest for the trees. This leads to discouragement and suboptimization. You fail to learn and adapt, and you fail to appreciate. It’s a recipe for general failure.
Later, I want to get this audio watch to log every minute, send it off for transcription or use Dragon Naturally speaking, and develop a full lifelong. See here:
http://quantifiedself.com/2011/12/fenn-lipkowitzs-amazing-lifelog/
http://www.pimall.com/nais/recordwatch.html
Hiding and displaying private posts in WordPress
| December 8, 2011 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
WordPress has a security/usability bug. The secure option is insufficiently usable.
Let’s say you’re running a semi-public T2 exoself. (Like this one). And you want to make some pages private, for your eyes only.
You can publish it as “visibility: private”. But the problem is that it will then not show up on automatically generated menus of your page structure, which is a huge pain in the butt. The only place it shows up is on the admin panel.
Lame.
The other option is to get the plugin “Page Restrict”, publish it as “visibility: public”, and check the “restrict post” button at the bottom of the post editing page.
The only problem with this is that the restricted page’s headline still displays to everyone. They just can’t read the content.
This is also lame, but there’s currently no way around it without getting into the code.
Other plugins and source links:
- page restriction
- user access manager
- http://wordpress.org/support/topic/showing-private-pages-in-menu – specifically addresses menus
EDIT:
Ok, I have found a better solution for this.
Scrap the Page Restrict plugin, and grab “Role Scoper” instead.
This will intelligently handle the display of private posts in menus etc, with no need for additional customization.
There’s just one remaining problem. WordPress search engine plugins don’t intelligently handle the display of private posts in search results. It’s all or nothing with Search Unleashed – either everyone can see search excerpts from private posts, or no one can.
The only solution is to disable the search plugin. This isn’t such a big deal on T2 semi-public blogs, since they shouldn’t be incredibly massive. Your T3 still needs the search plugin, but that should be 100% private, so no problem there.
Voila, issue solved
When everything’s an exoself, work disappears
| December 8, 2011 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
In Cyborganize, everything is an exoself.
There is no friction. Therefore there is no work.
The redesigned longform loop provides a highly responsive, low sorting environment. It’s an obvious exoself.
But the rest of Cyborganize is just as much an exoself.
Sorting tasks in BrainStormWFO? That’s not work. The exoself is doing the work. You just have to show up.
Ditto for Emacs scratch files. A subject pops into your head. You write the headline, then organize your thoughts. How is that work?
More involved workflows for more complex projects are just the same story, with more steps. None of it is work.
Work is overmind effort. Cyborganize channels undermind effort automatically, so that the overmind doesn’t have to work.
Meet the new Longform Loop
| December 5, 2011 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
This post represents a massive revision of the Longform Loop.
Whenever a portion of Cyborganize goes unused, that’s a sign that it’s in need of redesign. I was not using my T1 TiddlyWiki setup. Hence this redesign.
No more wikis
Wiki software has no place in Cyborganize. It violates a fundamental design principle – hierarchy beats interconnected webs.
Every piece of info must exist in a one-to-one navigable structure. Otherwise it’s impossible to grasp the extent of the info available. One keeps stumbling over duplicates, and meanwhile underconnected bits get lost.
My T1 structure was based on a faulty paradigm.
Rethinking T1
While my T1 wiki concept failed miserably, my WordPress T2 exoselves greatly outperformed their intended role, as you know if you’ve been following recent posts.
So I sat down to puzzle out how the new version of the Longform Loop should work. Obviously my abstract, theoretical design had failed. Now I had the benefit of practical experience.
Clearly, I had mis-selected my central paradigm. T3 is distinguished from higher tiers by the level of polish. But that is not the distinction between T2 and T1. It cannot be. The resulting fragmentation is catastrophic.
Nor can the distinction be “completeness” – for what is ever complete? My T2′s were evolving to ever greater degrees of completeness and polish, but they were doing so in an unexpected way. There were actually two sub-tiers within a T2 WordPress blogs. The lower tier are blog posts – focused thoughts tossed off on a single subject. The upper tier are blog pages – hierarchically organized, complete, polished takes on a topic.
Gradually, info migrates from blog posts to a crystallized page structure. The system efficiently captures both dynamic growth and cumulative insight – a very hard combination to achieve.
I’ve already talked about how this process is central to personal productivity. Therefore the T2 exoself cannot be assigned any other purpose than personal expression, because that would interfere fatally with its primary function.
Expanding T2 operations
To prevent such interference, I reorganized all my T2 exoselves. Some I made private, others public, or pseudonymous. Most of the associated Twitter accounts I made private, to ensure that I would never hesitate to fully express my ideas, no matter how embarrassing or impolitic.
I also greatly increased the number of my T2 exoselves, from six to ten, and reactivated or reorganized several that had become inactive. I added several life areas, such as career, social, and dreams, that had not previously been separate T2 verticals.
My method for adding content a T2 is to capture thought germs in Twitter, and then build casual blog posts when longer inpirations strike, and then organize into pages as necessary.
T1 for the big picture
All of these changes still leave the problem of T1 content, however. That tier no longer represented the highest level of quality – T2′s could now be infinitely polished and extensive. So what was the purpose of T1?
Well, one obvious problem that T2′s couldn’t solve, is cross-subject thoughts. For example, does socializing with a business partner fall under career or business?
So I decided that T1 should contain only those thoughts that crossed T2 subject boundaries in ways that made classification difficult.
Selecting the new T1 software
This still left the problem of software selection.
I was really set on some kind of wiki platform. How could such multi-subject information ever be organized into a hierarchical outline? I loved the way WordPress provided a lower and upper tier with the blog post / page distinction, but I didn’t see how to make all the interlinking, tagging, categorization, etc work.
Finally I smacked my head and realized I was forgetting the basic insight that gave birth to Cyborganize in the first place: ANY info is organizable into a hierarchical outline. That was what BrainStormWFO had first taught me. It didn’t matter if the outline was perfect. I just needed a unique, non-redundant, easy to navigate index of all my pages.
The new T1
Thus the new T1 was born. Like T2, it is hosted on a WordPress installation. The only difference between it and T2, is that it only accepts longform thoughts that cover multiple T2′s. This naturally biases it towards a more big-picture perspective, although there is still plenty of nitty-gritty detail. So it winds up being something like the mindmap wiki I originally envisioned afterall – just vastly easier to maintain.
The first page I created on my T1? A directory of my T2 blogs, so I could easily keep track of what goes where. I also created links to the associated Twitter accounts.
Twitter and goals
For managing all the Twitter feeds, I use Tweetdeck and Polly for Linux. Twitter has replaced journaling, which I was never good at adhering to. Twitter auto-datestamps everything, and enforces brevity. It’s really quite an excellent journaling platform.
I also found that the little subtitle beneath a T2 blog’s main title is a great place to put one’s current top goal for that subject area. Likewise, the T1 subtitle makes a great place to put your primary life goal.
This compensates for Cyborganize’s absence of efficient goal processing in BrainStormWFO task sorting. That process focuses on atomic tasks, so big goals are only implicitly reflected. The improved Longform Loop now makes them explicit.
T2 blogs are exo-selves. Implications for T1 workflow.
| November 30, 2011 | Posted by Joseph Buchignani under Uncategorized |
Recently I wrote a post about how T2 blogs are the key to progress on a complex project.
This post will expand on that idea.
A T2 blog + Twitter stream is an exo-self.
Of course, all of Cyborganize is an exo-self. But the T2 blog fulfills a critical function.
You will get a natural feel for when a new T2 exo-self is called for. When a project burgeons past the point where your general T2 blog can adequately express it.
The T2 exo-self ensures that constant forward progress is maintained on the project. It does this by crystallizing polished thoughts as they arise.
The T2 becomes a gestalt for the project’s status. It is a constant reminder of where you are, what you’ve done, and where you’re going. It unlocks your brain to move forward.
I am convinced that for me personally, not having a functional exo-self for a project guarantees failure. That’s because an info blockage builds up in the workflow and brain, until it becomes like a clogged toilet. I’m not willing to accept this level of dissonance, or kludge around it, so I wind up just letting the project fail. I demand perfection – frictionless info flow.
Of course, once this flow is achieved, it makes forward progress inevitable. Continuous applied effort plus integrated learning plus real feedback equals success.
Therefore, the first step in any project is to set up the exo-self. After that, one can execute the task loop serenely.
The first priority is always pushing updates to the exo-self that are impinging on your consciousness. This keeps the info pathways clear, in both your workflow and your brain. It removes anxiety over unexpressed info dumps.
This new paradigm is hugely important for me. It has restored my serenity in tackling large, challenging, long-term projects.
The key to making this work is understanding that an exo-self cannot be adapted to multiple purposes. It must remain first and foremost an exo-self. It cannot also be a blog with mass appeal. It cannot also be a collaborative workspace. Those require their own platforms. I had to learn this lesson the hard way.
This blog is an exo-self, nothing more. When I attempted to make it a popularly accessible resource, it stalled my development of Cyborganize concepts.
I will keep the blog public for feedback purposes – that is an important component of a healthy exo-self. But I would not say that Cyborganize has launched yet. Launch would occur when I create a site dedicated for public consumption, with no exo-self functions.
This involves some duplication of effort, but there is no other way to make it work.
One important question remains – how will T1 wikis work, in light of the exo-self paradigm? At what point does one make the transition to T1? How does one manage that transition? Should T1′s also be public? If so, is TiddlyWiki the right choice?
One obvious transition point occurs when the hierarchical page structure of WordPress no longer fits, and an interlinked structure is needed.
Beyond that, I don’t know how to answer the question.
It does seem clear to me that none of my projects have proceeded to the point of maturity where a T1 wiki is called for.
One problem I have is the “jump” between T2 and T1. For T2 blogs, I resolve the “jump” by having T2 blog posts as an intermediate step to T2 hierarchical pages.
So perhaps the answer for T1 is to only farm T1 content from structured T2 pages, where the hierarchical structure has begun to interfere with the underlying conceptual structure.
Yeah, I think that makes sense.
Then there’s the question of how to queue info for the jump. For T2 blog posts to T2 pages, I plan to set a tag in the title – (To promote) or (promoted). The former means the content needs to be transferred to the page structure, while the latter means it already has been.
I can employ the same method for T2 pages.
Well, I guess that resolves almost all of my T1 problems. The only remaining question is publishing.
The way things are structured now, though, I don’t think failure to publish T1 wikis will be a problem. The feeder T2′s will continue to generate feedback and project impetus. And there ought to be a “non-disclosure” period between drafts and final book form (or whatever medium).
Meanwhile, I can continue to push through significant updates to the T1 via the (To promote) and (Promoted) tags.
This also obviates the need to transfer ALL of my content to T1 wikis, which is nice. That’s a step that should be taken as late in the book publishing process as possible. Only the thorny bits of content need to be redone in the wiki, while the project is still developing.
Yeah, I’m very happy with this. I have a clear info workflow roadmap for the entirety of a project life cycle. Awesome.
Actually, one more thing – the T1 should have its own Twitter stream. Damn things are very handy. Guess it will be private, since T1 isn’t divided by subject.
