Tag: personal

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Back to Writing – My First Workshop in, Like, Forever

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank on dis...
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank on display at the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin, Germany. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The last time I took a writing workshop was at the tail end of my college education – I guess around 20 years ago. Since then, from time to time I have kept a journal (which is a man’s version of a “diary”), written poetry, written short stories, and blogged a good bit.

Oh, and I Twitter and Facebook – sometimes even in the same sentence. 🙂

Recently I received an email from Voices of September 11th about a diary-writing workshop co-sponsored with the Anne Frank Center USA in Manhattan. I decided to join the four-week workshop. So far, so good – and the most interesting bit has been learning about the Anne Frank diary itself, which apparently comes in a total of three distinct revisions – two of which were written by Anne herself, and the third edited by her father.

I plan to, as much as possible, post the diary entries I write during this workshop on this blog. They will all be tagged with “anne frank diary workshop”.

Enjoy!

 

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Open to New Technology Ideas and Solutions – Apple Included

This is going to be a somewhat personal post.

You may know me as “that guy who thinks the World would be a better place if Mac did not exist.”

Indeed, recently I posted a tweet:

I am grudgingly adding Apple hardware to my technology hoard. But that’s only because they finally have hardware worth buying. 😉

The truth is, I am a “Windows guy.” This blog is mostly about Windows-based technology and solutions. That’s just the way I grew up. While I have worked a good amount in Linux, I never had the opportunity to work much on a Mac or other Apple system. Eventually the lack of opportunity turned into a practical acceptance of “you just can’t learn how to use everything well.”

I decided that Windows users, jobs, projects, and challenges were enough to fill the rest of my lifetime. Why bother with starting the learning curve over again by trying to double-specialize in Mac?

But that is changing for me. One piece of Apple hardware I now find so compelling that I readily recommend it – the iPad. It’s a great tablet, and I have been waiting a long time for special-use devices like tablets to become readily available.

It’s not the right choice for everyone. For example my own recently acquired tablet is an Android-powered Galaxy Tab 10.1. It just meshes better with my own personal application needs. But my wife and mom both got an iPad, because it was a better match for them.

And my conservative technology self tends to move very slowly when it comes to adding new breeds of the stuff. Always better to work with tech that you know well, until new and unfamiliar gives you a compelling reason to switch! Apple just gave this Windows guy a reason.