Archive for July, 2008

Stephen Fry on arguments between cousins

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

My previous post on winning arguments unfairly reminded me of a blog posting by the actor, writer, wit, and all-around bon vivant Stephen Fry. In this post,  (scroll down to "Getting Overheated") Fry discusses how Englishers and Americans differ when having an argument. While he and his fellow Englishmen love a ...

Studying for the GRE

Monday, July 21st, 2008

I've stopped updating my previous blog, Oddments of High Unimportance, after Google's Blogger-bots thought I was a spam-blog and prevented me from making posts for about 2 weeks. They finally decided I was for real and basically republished the blog, adding a "9" to the first part of the URL. ...

Winning Arguments (Unfairly)

Monday, July 21st, 2008

The following notes are from a 1982 book by Daniel Cohen called "Re:thinking: How to Succeed by Learning How to Think." (Bookfinder link -- this book is WAY old, people!) It struck me at the time I read it, sometime in the mid-90's, as a coherent summary of the mind literature ...

Write what you feel

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

Advice for the creative writer, yes. But the student? My manager is taking a summer class and his teacher told the class, "Don't write down what I say. Write down what you feel about what I say." Interesting advice for a note-taker who's thinking about regurgitating the content for the ...

Links 18-Jul-08

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Even a tech writer learns to use dashed lines for impromptu diagrams, but it takes a designer to delineate more of its uses. (I probably got this link from the essential xblog, which is a must-read in my RSS library.) Convenience and impermanence. But look at the size of that keyboard! ...