Stream of Consciousness
TL;DR - the combination of WordPress and Ulysses on iOS and macOS gives me a lot less excuses not to publish blog posts, as was the case with my beautiful SquareSpace account. Let's see where this takes me. Moving blogs As announced a couple of days ago,
Stream of Consciousness
One of the key takeaways of Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” is that we often look for things everywhere but where they have always been … with us. I had a quite similar experience recently. Here's that story ... Hearing from Kourosh … Kourosh Dini contacted me a couple of weeks
Stream of Consciousness
TL;DR - We often don't think thoughts entirely through, which leads to erroneous conclusions. We are too often intellectually lazy, and accept the first possible explanation. Awareness and simple techniques can aid us in understanding and countering these errors. When we stop wondering Does any of the
Stream of Consciousness
TL;DR - I moved from Squarespace to Wordpress because it makes blogging easier. You may have noticed that the blog looks fundamentally different from, well, yesterday, and that the url it now defaults to is www.exploringtheblackbox.org rather than the usual .net account. The reason is simple: I
Stream of Consciousness
I recently was asked this question in an exchange on an article I wrote on good public governance, a couple of years ago. The article underlying this question is behind this link, and was written by Bill Eggers of Deloitte. Governments aren’t necessarily that slow in taking up eGov
Stream of Consciousness
Whenever I write a letter, especially a draft letter, I usually write the text first. The reason is simple: texts tend to evolve, and may end up being about something completely different from what I set out to write about. Paper is not forgiving, in that a mistake requires me
Stream of Consciousness
You may have noticed that the blog has significantly changed. If you are reading this in a browser, you will notice there is a lot less clutter. I had been an absentee landlord on this blog, only occasionally publishing. The work was only an excuse for my neglect of what
Stream of Consciousness
Sometimes I need to make a point. And on occasion, I want to make that point quite clearly, because I see quite a few people making the same mistake I have made. This is one of those times. Now, there is nothing in this post that is likely to be
Stream of Consciousness
This stray but very powerful thought just hit me: Teaching is, to me, still the most compelling reason to learn something new, either by exploring new horizons or, more importantly, by critically reexamining those areas I thought I knew. Something that just came to me and that I wanted to
Stream of Consciousness
I'm a heavy TextExpander user and I love the application. Taking the time of setting up the text expansion "snippets" once and using them multiple times across different machines saves me time every single day. Losing my snippets But I had an issue. For some reason,
Stream of Consciousness
Maria Popova hits one out of the ballpark again with this "animated essay" on the importance of storytelling. Two essential quotes from a great article. In the first one, she describes in a very clear and concise manner the difference and the interrelation between information, knowledge and wisdom:
Getting Things Done
I've recently taken a close look at the application folder on my Mac. If you sort your applications by "date last opened", you may be in for a surprise. More than 70% of the applications I have installed had not been opened in the past 30