sacha chua living an awesome life

I find myself procrastinating posting this, so that’s probably a good sign that I should face my fear and get this out the door. =)

I spent a few weeks rereading all of my blog posts and picking my favourites. I cleaned them up, added pictures and updates, and organized them into chapters. Now, for less than the cost of a cup of yummy hot chocolate, you can check out this PDF compilation of the highlights of my past ten years of blog posts.

I designed the PDF for reading on laptops, tablets, and other large screens, but I’ll put together an EPUB version for smaller e-book readers if people want one. Check out the preview to see if it works for you. =)

There are tons of things I can do to tweak this. I might revisit it in August (when I turn 29) and again when I finish my twenties. In the meantime, though, it’s better to share this (warts, potential misunderstandings, and all), fix it up a little, and then start on the next book! I’ve got “101 Things You Can Do With Emacs” bouncing around my brain…

Small steps!

If you do buy it and want to hear about any updates, e-mail me your receipt (sacha@sachachua.com) and I’ll add you to my list. That way, if I release an update, I can send you a link to the PDF. Enjoy!

I spent the weekend editing, tidying, and formatting the 5-star posts from my blog archives. I’m currently working on a two-column landscape PDF optimized for on-screen reading. It’s 253 pages long and has posts, sketches, and photos. I might take advantage of Microsoft Word’s built-in inking capabilities to annotate it even further.

I enjoy investing time into organizing my posts and improving the layout. I learned a lot about Microsoft Word, using field codes to create section-specific tables of contents, creating headers that included the section names, and tweaking my styles for consistent formatting.

The book is coming together well, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.

My next steps are:

• flesh out the introduction and the notes at the end; perhaps create a sketchnote for the entire journey, or sketchnotes for the different chapters?
• design a cover image
• create a sample PDF with the first chapter and the full table of contents
• figure out how to publish and sell the PDF
• create an EPUB version so that I can republish it to different platforms

This is actually quite fun. After I finish putting together these blog highlights, I think I’ll go back and create collections of posts on topics such as blogging, networking, Emacs, and other things I write a lot about.

I’ve been rereading more than ten years of my blog posts, rating each of the entries on a scale of 1 to 5 based on how significant the memory was to me. I started blogging in 2001, although really, that was more like 2002 – mostly notes from class, Emacs Lisp adventures, and other things I wanted to remember.

I was eighteen years old and taking my bachelor’s degree in computer science at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, firmly convinced that I would teach in the Philippines all my life and grow old in an apartment with a cat or two. My plans have changed a bit since then. I moved halfway around the world for my master’s degree, enjoyed working in the IT industry, got married, and started my own business (four months ago!), picking up three cats along the way.

It hasn’t been easy rereading my blog posts. I winced at memories of ex-boyfriends, mistakes like sending people a ton of mail, and the chapter drafts for the Wicked Cool Emacs books (I turned the project over to Ian Eure, but he seems to have been busy with other things too). I missed the earnestness of my declarations of teaching and of not joining the brain drain. I miss having close, close friends and spending time with my family without a departure date looming on the horizon. Some things I do better than my past self, and some things I do worse. I don’t play the piano or sew the way I used to, and my blog posts remind me of what it was like to have fun with those skills. I knew things before that I’ve forgotten since, and it’s interesting reading them in my own words.

Still, it’s been a great experience rereading all of my old posts. Writing and reading help me remember the good stuff vividly. Eventually I’ll get the hang of refreshing my memory, and then I won’t forget so much of the things I’ve learned along the way.

I’m planning to collect the highlights into an e-book so that it’s easy for you to read through things as well if you want to. In the meantime, let me share a few numbers.

I rated 1439 of 6054 posts (24%) as interesting and worth going back to. That’s probably too many to include in one e-book (well, maybe just the long version), but maybe I can focus on the posts rated 3 to 5. I’ll need to go over the posts rated 2 to 5 and re-rank them. I’m pretty good at saying, “This was definitely significant to me: 5!” and “This was a highlight, but it’s not too important: 2”. The rankings in the middle are a little more difficult. What makes something a 3 versus a 4? What can I demote or promote among the 2s and 5s in comparison to other highlights?

Some more context for numbers: In the early years, I used Planner Mode for Emacs to capture quick snippets about life. Many of these notes weren’t particularly for public use, but they weren’t confidential, so I included them when I figured out how to add blogging capabilities to Planner Mode and again when I converted my blog to WordPress. In 2003, I graduated from university. In 2004, I went to Japan for a six-month technical internship. In 2005, I went to Canada for my master’s degree. I graduated in 2007 and started working at IBM, writing a lot about what I was learning along the way. In 2010, W- and I married. I also started trying to limit myself to one or two posts a day. In 2012, I left IBM in order to experiment with business, and I’ve been writing about what I’m learning there too.

I like getting a sense of the kinds of posts I find myself still enjoying after years. I want to write more of them, and I want to have more of the memories and experiments that lead to them.

Figuring out an easy way to export filtered blog posts might take time, but I’m looking forward to putting together something that I can re-read on my Kindle and share with other people to make reading my blog easier.

It’s amazing what you can learn from yourself when you’ve forgotten. I hope many people will be able to look back at their own decades of writing someday.

The combination that I use to write most of my blog posts (Emacs, Org Mode, and org2blog) automatically keeps track of the time that it takes me to write a post, making it easy to calculate my actual words per minute rate. I created a table with data from 32 of my previous posts, discarding posts that didn’t have any time data.

It turns out that my median is actually around 16 wpm when writing blog posts, far lower than the 110wpm that I clock during typing tests and the 180wpm that I speak at when excited. This accounts for thinking, writing, research, and editing. For example, this post has 388 words and was written in 23 minutes – a rate of around 16wpm (hah!), including a little bit of research but excluding the tabulation of data (which I did before starting the blog post).

I talk slower in my head when I’m writing than when I speak, testing the words out and trying to figure out where I’m going to go. There are a number of ways I can write faster. I can experiment with outlining more of my posts, like the way a list of blog ideas helps me sit down and write a lot without idling between thoughts. I can try out dictation using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and my new headset, to see whether the shift from from writing to speaking also changes my baseline speed.

And then there’s accepting that I write a lot already, and decently quickly too, so I could focus on other improvements. Organizing or illustrating my notes, for example, or revising old posts.

This is good, though. I want to write and explore and share as much as I can. I think the bottleneck isn’t:

• having enough writing time
• being able to type fast enough
• knowing the tools well enough
• being able to express myself through words

The bottleneck is probably more about my own speed of understanding and learning. That’s an entirely different area of hacking – and it looks like there are ways to tweak that, too. The visualization and peg techniques from memory books will help me absorb and retain more. Experience will help me get better at making sense of what’s going on. I wonder how I can come up with comparable numbers.

One of my friends was surprised that I use both Evernote and Microsoft OneNote. Many people are fervently in love with one or the other, as they’re both excellent notetaking tools. I like them both, and I also add Emacs OrgMode to the mix. I figured it would be a good idea to write about how I manage my notes so that I can think about ways to make it even better. Besides, other people might find it useful, or they might share a few good tips!

I take most of my text notes using the Emacs text editor. In particular, I use Org Mode because org-capture totally rocks. It’s easy for me to quickly take a timestamped note. I share most of my notes on my blog, but some stay in my private notes – post drafts, sensitive information, random tidbits. I save sensitive information to an encrypted location as needed. Every week, I review my inbox of notes, filing them under the appropriate headings in a large outline file.

Org is great for text. It can handle attachments too, but I want a more graphical way to manage the visual notes and reference pictures that I take. Evernote’s handwriting recognition gives me a way to search for words in my sketchnotes, which is awesome for digging up sketchnotes or book notes (and for wowing people; yes, the future is here). OneNote is better at capturing screenshots and snippets, though, so I use it to collect elements from sketches and pictures that I like. I also use OneNote for Latin studies because it feels the most like a paper notebook.

I share as much as possible on my blog so that I can have more ways to get to what I know. Google searches occasionally lead me back to blog posts I’ve completely forgotten about, which is pretty nifty. Besides, people often comment and share even more information, and that’s awesome.

I’m still trying to figure out better ways to get to what I’ve stored in all these places. I’ve been going back and adding more posts to this topical index. I’m thinking of reviewing the 6,000+ posts in my archive and rating them on a scale of 1-5 so that I can filter them for the highlights view of my blog. So much in the past, and that’s just ten years of writing – imagine what the archive will be like when I’ve been writing and drawing for decades. =)

I picked up this quote recently. It’s from Carl Sagan:

“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

• Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Writing, drawing, and photography are all miniature time machines. They’re amazing and fantastic, but you’ve got to have a way back into them in order to make the most of them.

How do you manage your notes?

UPDATE 2012-11-15: Here’s the video recap!

Designing Content So It Works

Carl Friesen, Global Reach Communications

Like these? Check out my other sketchnotes, visual book notes/reviews, and visual metaphors.

Here’s the text from the sketchnotes to improve people’s ability to search for it:

Designing content so that it works

Designing content so that it works
Carl Friesen, Global Reach Communications

Website for e-book on content design showyourexpertise.com

1 2 3 4 5

stories

The Trend
Client wants customized solution
Show that you understand their world

1. Trend & historic causes
2. current situation
3. Thoughts on developments, reasons
4. Recommendations

The How-To
1.
2.
3.

Example: trustees, communication process

must be:
Relevant + Realistic
not necessarily what you do, but what clients will find helpful

Helpful!
- process with steps or
- a list of success factors

1. outcome
2. supplies/equipment
3. steps
4. avoiding pitfalls/problems

The How-to-Work-With
How to get good results from working with you

cannot be self-serving
include info on saving money
1. wild success experience
2. factors
3. advice

The Case Study
Leading-edge thought & sound implementation
Trans-Canada highway story
Wildlife protection

Not about showing how clever you are!

Must have learning points THEY can use
Must be a story
Tell with the client credibility

1. Initial situation
2. Steps
3. Problems & solutions
4. Lessons learned

The Survey
Shows that you stay in touch
must be what your audience cares about

More useful with a trend

Distribute appropriately
Level of detail
Consider limited distribution
The Opinion
informed opinion, thought leadership
at no charge

Long form
-situation
-views on good & bad aspects
-recommendations

The Review
-New product/service
-What’s different
-Discuss good/bad

The Comment

Notes by Sacha Chua, @sachac, LivingAnAwesomeLife.com

Adjusting to early-morning wake-up times and 45-minute commutes. I’m still a little twitchy – a little sleep deprivation plus a two-hour timeshift earlier than my previous schedule. I can tell by the tic near my eyes, a slight tremble in hands. Handled with tea in the morning and the occasional walk through the rows of cubicles. With a little more sleep and a few more weeks, I’ll settle into a new normal. Fortunately, I still feel mentally there, not fogged, and I get lots of things done. It’s good work, and I’m glad to help make a difference.

It’s a little bit weird typing a full day on a QWERTY layout and then coming home and typing in Dvorak. It takes me a little while to adjust. Typing words, no problem. Keyboard shortcuts, isolated movements – that’s a little harder. I wonder why copying and pasting opens a download window in my browser, and then I catch myself and press the correct keys.

I need to find new rhythms for writing. I can’t blog externally about what I’m working on at the client, but there’s still so much I’m learning and sharing. I could keep posting book notes – there are so many to do! – but a little variety is good.

Today I helped J- edit some of her writing homework for her English classes. The essay was easy: trim unnecessary words, make tenses consistent, clarify wording… She wasn’t sure where she was going with her fiction chapter, the first in a new story. I read through pages of dialogue that went back-and-forth without much progress. I pulled out one idea and suggested starting the chapter with something like this:

My dad isn’t my real dad.

My best friend hates me.

And my shadow just told me to hit a chicken.

“That’s awesome!” she said. Now she’s off and writing, curious about what happens next in the story. I’m curious too.

Adjusting. Tightening things up, dropping the unnecessary, getting the hang of a different flow. We’ll see what happens. =)