This postI’ve started trying to keep up better with my blog reading (and yes, I’ll be weeding down the list of feeds I’m subscribed to so it’ll be manageable), and as a result, I’ve come across some goodies to share.
First, today’s Dilbert:
Second, Darren Barefoot has an excellent post on giving presentations called Everything I Know About Presentations, I Learned in Theatre School. There are seventeen tips in all, and they’re good. The fourth one under Content particularly rang true for me:
4. Dialogue Starts on the Page. I find my talks are much more cogent and compelling when I’ve written them as informal essays first. Then I try to commit as much of it as I can to memory, and write out the key points on index cards. Too many speakers seem to think they’ve prepared a talk by creating some slides. The slides should come last.
For the last talk I gave in church, a few weeks ago, I did basically just that — wrote it out as an informal essay. And it made a world of difference. Where before I was mostly meandering around, now I had focus. (You were right, Liz. ~sigh~) Planning the talk didn’t make it any more difficult to speak by the Spirit; I could still deviate from the plan if so inspired. The same idea holds true for writing a novel, I’ve found — I can just wing it and write by the seat of my pants, but things generally went much smoother if I planned it in advance. And outlining it didn’t mean I couldn’t discover things along the way, make minor detours, sometimes even scrap the whole plan and go in a different direction. But major changes are usually rare.
Third, I came across Matt Haughey’s post today on 43 Folders, Adventures in $40 eyeglasses. My glasses are old, and for that matter, I don’t think I’ve gotten a new prescription for my contacts in around 3.5 years. So, when I do get a new prescription, I’m thinking I’ll probably buy my glasses online, as Matt describes. Saves a heap of money.
Finally, Matt Wood’s written a rather nice post on 43 Folders called Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups. The idea is that instead of grouping your feeds by topic in Google Reader (or your aggregator of choice), you group them by how often you read them, or how you read them. When I get some time later today I’m going to try this out, because I have a feeling that it’ll work way better than my current system (by topic). For me, I think organizing them by how often I read them (daily, weekly, once in a while, rarely) will be most effective. In a few weeks I’ll post an update on how it’s going.
