If you liked DeGeneres’s previous two books, you’ll like this third volume as well. Like the others it’s a collection of oddball riffs and random thoughts, a pleasantly weird collection of stories both fictional and real, with recurring themes playing throughout. Like eating almonds in a casino and how you should never, ever do it. The affection for her partner Portia also shines through.
It’s also relatively short. The chapters are only a few pages, so if a joke doesn’t quite grab you, there’s little time to lament the fact before she’s moved on to something else. There’s also a coloring section for kids. Very thoughtful. A bit tricky for the audio book version, though.
What I like most is just how nice DeGeneres is, without sacrificing any of the humor as a consequence. A lot of the anecdotes and observation had me giggling. The whole thing is just kind of adorable.
If you’re looking for serious observations on life made easier to digest through the use of humor, you’ll want to give this book a pass. If you delight in the absurd, this is an entirely delightful way to spend a few hours.
This very short book provides some basic advice for how to crank out more words for writing. Some of it may come off as the “well, duh” variety, but it’s presented earnestly, enthusiastically, and with no filler.
And that’s my biggest criticism of the book. Fox deliberately eschews providing personal anecdotes to fill out the book and it feels unnecessarily lean as a result. There are a few references to the neuroscience behind some of the techniques discussed, but little else. Still, for someone struggling to write more and to write more consistently, you can’t go wrong with the advice, which comes down to:
Write in sprints. This is something that is strongly encouraged for National Novel Writing Month (which Fox mentions), where your goal is to write without stopping to edit or even fix typos. If your writing sprint is 20 minutes, you write for 20 minutes, always pushing ahead, never going back. That comes when you specifically go back to edit, which Fox himself only does after finishing the complete manuscript.
Write sprints regularly, preferably daily and for at least an hour.
Track sprints using a spreadsheet (Fox links to one he created if you are not inclined to create your own).
Avoid all distractions when writing. Fox suggests indulging/checking things like email before beginning your sprint.
Create a space for your writing. This is not just a physical space, but a time and place where you will not be disturbed, such as very early in the morning when all sensible people are still in bed.
Develop a positive mindset, allowing yourself to see the possibilities of what accomplishing your goals will look like. Also, improve your life beyond writing to boost your overall frame of mind.
Learn to type faster. This is probably the main “Well, duh” piece of advice, but he makes a valid point. Typing 5,000 words per hour amounts to 83 words per minute. If your typing speed maxes out at 50 WPM, you have a problem there.
Do your fingers fail you (mine certainly do)? He also suggests dictation software for writing, noting that most people can speak much faster than they can type, and as sprints aren’t intended for editing, it’s a perfect fit for cranking out great loads of words. I’ve seen dictation software mentioned before by other authors, and am now intrigued enough to consider testing it.
Overall, despite its slim size, this is a good book full of sensible advice and tips. Recommended.
Although I had no infections or other maladies to assist me, I maintained my losing streak and was down for the month, shedding another 1.4 pounds. I benefited from a massive 2.1 pound drop on the last day of the month (today) but would have still been down regardless, so yay for me. I now stand 11.6 pounds from my official™ goal of 150 pounds. With a week and a bit of travel up north to Barkerville, I would expect the hiking and whatnot will at least let me hold the line, even as we indulge in hot dogs and other yummy but perhaps not calorie-wise camping foods.
For the year to date my weight loss is actually, for the first time, an actual loss, down 0.7 pounds. With the body fat also down, it appears I am finally starting to lose weight for real and getting back to the ultra-sexy form of a few years ago.
I will, as always, resist having a donut to celebrate.
June 1: 163 pounds June 30: 161.6 pounds (-1.4 pounds for the month)
Year to date: From 162.3 to 161.6 pounds (down 0.7 pounds)
And the body fat:
January 1: 18.5% (30.2 pounds of fat)
June 30: 17.5% (28.4 pounds of fat (down 1.8 pounds)
Tom Hanks is a good writer and these are good stories.
Tom Hanks is also obsessed with typewriters. They inform the title of this collection, they pop up in many of these stories, and a typewriter takes center stage in several of them. Typewriters are the glue that binds everything together in Uncommon Type, and what a typewriter symbolizes reflects directly in many of the tales–a simple machine from a simpler time, a nostalgic callback, an evocation of memories both warm and bittersweet.
The first story actually defies all of this, though, and perhaps sets an inadvertently light tone for the remainder of the collection. “Three Exhausting Weeks” is just that–a story about friends that become more than friends, with the go-getter Anna driving the protagonist (and narrator) to exhaustion with her frenetic lifestyle over a stretch of just a few weeks. It’s breezy and funny and very unlike many of the other stories, which trade on sentimentality, a yearning for a simpler world and are often more character studies or mood pieces than fleshed-out stories.
This is not to say the more meditative stories are bad, but some of them never generate much heat, they just ramble along amiably and then end with a quick sign-off.
Another favorite, though, is the seemingly inevitable time travel story, “The Past Is Important to Us.” This seems much like a lot of the other tales, filled with lovely, warm people sharing wonderful times together, but it twists beautifully, in a way that I don’t feel is diminished even when the twist seems unavoidable.
“A Month on Greene Street” was another I enjoyed. A cynical single mother moves to a new neighborhood and thinks the worst of her likewise single next-door neighbor. For added flavor she also has occasional visions of the future. Hanks does some nice character-building here and the ending is both sweet and satisfying.
“A Month on Greene Street” also highlights both a strength and weakness of the stories. The women are complex, multilayered characters, but most of the men are much simpler, and less interesting as a result. I’m not sure if this is actually a fault of Hanks’ writing or if he just sees men as less interesting in general, but it was something that began to stand out as I read through more of the stories. One exception may be the newspaper columnist Hank Fiset, whose columns are interspersed throughout the book. His voice is clear, loud and colorful as he rambles on about the future of the paper he writes for and, of course, typewriters.
Overall, even when a story didn’t make my socks roll up and down, I was still entertained by the surprisingly sturdy wordcraft. As I mentioned at the top, Hanks is a good writer, and there are certain moods and technologies and emotions he is very fond of and obviously enjoys writing about. If you are up for some low-key character studies about mostly decent, but variably flawed people, Uncommon Type will serve you well. Jut don’t go in expecting explosions and car chases. There is bowling, though.
Actually, Canada, I just like riffing on “French Kissing in the USA” whenever possible, because it’s a goofy little song.
It’s been awhile since I’ve done any real brainstorming, but I love lists, I have a brain and it’s often stormy in these parts, so I have all the ingredients in place.
The goal here is to plant a few (dozen) seeds and see if any of them grow into big beautiful stories or writing exercises while I ponder other projects.
Here we go.
a story based on the song “Eat to the Beat”
what if they really are lizard people?
three wishes/Invisible Weekend redux: getting to try out as a shapeshifter or some kind of shapeshifter story
worst superpower ever
a talking duck (walks into a bar?)
when the line between waking and dreams blurs completely–how risky do you become in your actions?
a monster that feeds on hope and optimism (no, not Trump)
angry trees
the world is suddenly depopulated by 99.6% (30.4 million people–about 7 million less than the population of Canada)
getting stuck in the past
a bar walks into a man
a haunted playground
a Stage 4 cancer patient acquires a time machine–can traveling to the future lead to a cure?
seeing a person on the train, but only as a reflection in the window
The next task: pick one of these and turn it into a lovingly handcrafted tale of thrills and adventure that tugs at the heartstrings (which sounds pretty unhealthy when you think about it).
(Technically this is not paving, but pouring concrete.)
Here’s something you sometimes see in cities or any urban area that has decent foot traffic. For the most part people walk along sidewalks and stick to them because the alternatives are unattractive for varying reasons–trespassing in someone’s yard and getting eaten by a dog, walking into the street and being run over by a bus, and so on–but sometimes there are routes off a sidewalk people will take, when that route is more direct and without risk of dogs, buses or other obstacles.
This is the sidewalk in front of the Burnaby Public Library on Central Boulevard.
Walk which way?
There are a pair of roundabouts here that bisect the sidewalk. Here’s an image from Google Maps that shows both of them (the one in the photo I took above is on the right):
A decision was made to have the sidewalk in front of the library not line up directly along the street, as would normally be the case. As you can see especially from the photo, people who come from either intersection, where the sidewalk does align next to the street, continue to walk in a straight line, ignoring the sidewalk directly in front of the library altogether.
The unnatural foot path (so to speak) becomes quite muddy and slick in winter, but it’s perfectly fine for most of the year, provided you’re not especially susceptible to tripping on small, exposed tree roots.
Anyone who understands human behavior should have anticipated the development of this foot path when looking at the plans for this block. Sidewalks that deliberately steer you away from getting from Point A to Point B are bad design. People will always take the shortest route if it’s easier and safe to do so.
The fix here would be to add a stretch of sidewalk where the existing foot path lies. The tree roots complicate things, so that may never happen, but the roots will eventually get ground down by the traffic on them, anyway.
Sometimes this bad design, while not anticipated, is still fixed later. Such is the case in Thornton Park in Vancouver. When the park was rehabilitated as part of the redesign of the nearby Main Street SkyTrain station, several pedestrian-made paths were converted into permanent sidewalks. It’s always nice to see recognition of real-life usage and adapting the environment to it where it makes sense.
A utility box on Columbia Street, cropped to only show the foxy cop illustration on it:
A seagull resting and pondering who to later fly over and poop on, along the boardwalk at Westminster quay. He seems to be saying, “Yeah, it’s gonna be you.” (It did cry fiercely when I later walked by again, but was too lazy to actually get up and do more than that.)
And at the bottom of the stairs on the south side of my condo building, leading to Allen Street, a strange collection of stuff, including personal photographs, that appeared today. There’s no doubt an interesting story behind this, but I’m not sure I want to hear it because the story is also very likely sad/horrifying. I expect all of this to be gone by tomorrow.
One of the consequences of having the world’s tiniest bladder is often needing to pee when there is no convenient place to do so.
This happened yesterday as I walked to Lougheed Town Centre. Fortunately, much of the walk is along trails and I diverged off the main route to find an out-of-the-way spot to relieve the aforementioned tiny bladder. After I finished I noticed this a short distance away, just a few steps from a nearby creek. It’s a collection of painted stones, inscribed with positive words and phrases like “Believe”, “Keep your head up!” and “Let your path take flight.” Colorful, unexpected and entirely unexpected.
I also took a shot of this flower bed a few minutes before finding the stones, and rather like the way the perspective makes the flowers appear to go on endlessly. The lone white lily poking out is cute, too. The flower bed is located at Griffin House, a printing business on Cariboo Road. Kudos to the company for the color it adds to the area.
Run 583 Average pace: 5:33/km Location: Brunette River trail
Start: 5:04 pm
Distance: 5:05 km
Time: 28:03
Weather: High cloud, some sun
Temp: 20ºC
Humidity: 53%
Wind: light
BPM: 168
Weight: 164.6 pounds
Total distance to date: 4495 km
Devices: Apple Watch, iPhone 8
There were a few changes for today’s run: I went on the river trail, it was significantly cooler than the last run, and I ran on a Friday, which I normally don’t do. This was my first run during the week, which means I had four days off since the last run, one day more than I’d like. But I was well-rested, at least.
High cloud effectively blotted out the sun, making the run even more comfortable than it would have been otherwise.
I had a few goals:
keep my BPM under 170
try to come in under 6:00/km for the first time in a hundred years or so
not feel the need to shout obscenities at the end
Happily, I accomplished every goal, though my BPM increased over Sunday’s run from 164 to 168. That was likely due to the pace. Where last Sunday I eked out a terrible 6:18/km, today–hoping for something in the 5:50ish range–I came in at a better-than-expected 5:33/km. I don’t think I’ve ever improved my pace from one run to the next by 45 seconds before.
I actually picked up the pace in the second km, going from 5:30 to 5:25 before starting to feel a bit tired during the fourth km. I slowed, but that gave me enough gas to finish the fifth km with a pace of 5:31/km, nearly matching my start.
Best of all, I felt no cramps, discomfort or anything else bothersome, other than the knees feeling a bit sore but not actively shrieking in pain for me to stop. I did watch a bug come at my face and bounce off my cheek, just below my right eye. That was a little weird.
In all, it was a tremendous relief to finally get back under the 6:00/km pace again. The previous six runs were all between 6:00-6:22/km. The last time I managed to be under was when I hit 5:49/km back on April 14, more than two months ago. Ay caramba. The last run on the river was way back on March 24 and I was a little faster then at 5:27/km.
I’m planning on running again on Sunday and will decide on whether I want to try the horror of Burnaby Lake again or stick to the river trail. The river trail is better for the ego, but the lake is more interesting. Hmm.
Last Friday, June 15, I finally went in and got my blood work done, including the world famous poop on a stick test (which you have to pay for, because people don’t like handling poop or something).
By Monday the results were in and I got a phone call from the doctor’s office. This was disconcerting because I had previously agreed that they would only call me if there was something up, that a negative report would be treated as “no news is good news” in terms of letting me know. The person told me it was “non urgent” but wanted me to come by in two days to discuss these non-urgent results.
And so I made the many-days excursion to the office in Steveston, but I only arrived just in time, so I couldn’t sight-see, despite the spiffy nice weather.
As it turned out, the doctor was behind schedule by a million years. I sat in the waiting area, plinking away on my phone, using the clinic’s spotty but free Wi-Fi for about half an hour before being let into exam room #6, where I sat for about another half hour. With little else to do, I examined the soles of my shoes and discovered they were embedded with thousands of tiny bits of gravel. I plucked them all out, as shown here:
When boredom strikes in the exam room.
I need better shoes. It’s on my agenda for the week.
When the doctor finally arrived, he confirmed all tests were good–except one. My kidney was apparently not quite up to snuff. When I had the kidney infection the clinic that I went to didn’t seem to update my file, as this was news to him. He admitted the infection could be responsible for the current results, though enough time had elapsed to still raise a flag. I am going to take the kidney test again in mid-July to see if things look normal or wacky. Disturbingly, the affected area has been acting up the last few days, making me wonder if the infection may have simply gone dormant. With a vacation to the north in a week and a half, the timing is awkward, to say the least.
But I’ll have some answers soon enough. Also, my poop is fine.
Here’s to the second half of 2018 being pretty please oh pretty pretty please better health-wise than the first half.
After chatting with a Lenovo rep, I found out my credit card had triggered an alert and their system automatically canceled the order for the ThinkPad Carbon X1, with no verification or anything else happening after the fact. It might be because the card is new and I think I only used it once before this purchase, which may have made the order look a bit shady. The rep pushed the order through again, so if everything doesn’t get nuked a second time, I should have my first full-blown Windows laptop in anywhere from a few weeks to a month (the shipping is free, not fast).
In the next few weeks I’ll do the follow-up task of logging out all appropriate accounts on my MacBook Pro, wiping its SSD, then selling it (to a buyer or back to Apple for a gift card/credit) as I have no real use for multiple laptops. I will miss typing on the MacBook Pro the same way I might miss bapping my fingers against a hard plastic surface.
Today I finally made a decision on a laptop, after Lenovo put a bunch of their models on sale again for Father’s Day.
I went with the ThinkPad Carbon X1, with the following specs:
8th Generation Intel Core i5-8250U Processor (1.60GHz, up to 3.40GHz with Turbo Boost, 6MB Cache)
Windows 10 Home 64
14″ FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS anti-glare multi-touch, 300 nits
8 GB LPDDR3 2133MHz (Onboard)
Integrated Intel® UHD Graphics 620
Black
720p HD Camera with ThinkShutter and microphone
Fingerprint Reader
UltraNav (TrackPoint and ClickPad)
256GB Solid State Drive PCIe-NVME OPAL2.0 M.2
3 cell Li-Ion 57Wh
65W AC Adapter (2pin) – USB Type C
Intel Dual Band 8265 Wireless AC (2 x 2) & Bluetooth 4.1 with vPro
I’ve highlighted the most relevant specs. The one not shown is the keyboard, which has 1.8 mm of travel, an absurdly luxurious amount compared to many laptops these days (my MacBook Pro has a measly 0.8 mm of travel, which explains why it is so clicky, loud and awful). It was the primary deciding factor.
Well, that and the 25% discount making the price reasonable. Without that discount it would have cost even more than the MacBook Pro I bought in late 2016 and at that premium I would have considered other options.
In terms of what I’m trading into, the MBP comes with a faster processor (2GHz vs. 1.6GHz), but it’s also a generation behind and the 8th gen Intel CPUs have gone quad core, seeing the first significant speed boosts in awhile. And while I could have gotten a 2K display to again match the MBP, I stepped down a bit to a 1920×1080 in order to get a touchscreen. I won’t use it a lot, but it will be handy to have when I do.
The battery life should be even better and the ThinkPad is about a half pound lighter.
It includes Thunderbolt 3 ports, as well as USB 3.0, HDMI and mini-SD, so it works with both current peripherals and is still equipped for when USB-C really hits the mainstream.
It even includes a fingerprint reader for logins, something that Apple only offers on models that cost a whopping $670 more (granted these models also offer faster CPUs and more TB3 ports, but come on).
What I’m looking forward to the most, though, is that keyboard. In the weeks since I’ve semi-retired the MacBook Pro I’ve been using my Surface Pro 3 instead and its keyboard is so much nicer to type on. And I don’t have to worry about footing a $700 out-of-warranty repair if one of its keys stops working.
As for the MacBook Pro, I’ll miss the trackpad, but really that’s all. macOS is nice but it doesn’t make my socks roll up and down anymore than Windows 10 does. It has things I like, things that bug me, just like Windows 10. I’ll be happy to get away from the horrible (for me) typing experience, the need for adapters and the lack of touch. I’ll probably be taking the MBP to the Apple store and trading it in for a gift card that will likely go to a new Watch, iPad or phone. Basically anything except another Mac. 😛
And unless Apple abandons its butterfly keyboard design–and I don’t think they will–I will never buy another Mac laptop again. I’m not sure why anyone would these days. There are better options available, no matter what your criteria is–price, port selection, display options, battery life. About the only area where the MacBook Pro is ahead now is in class action lawsuits.
UPDATE: I just received an email informing me that the order for my ThinkPad Carbon X1 has been cancelled, with no explanation as to why. I’ll try using Lenovo’s chat on their site on Monday or call their 1-800 number, but this is a bit puzzling, to say the least. I guess my laptop quest may continue after all.
Seriously… I’m Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres
