This will be a very terse post, my friends, because it's late at night and I'm seconds from bed, but this information is so important it must be shared with everyone.
The Poynter Institute's 50 Quick Writing Tools. Know them, learn them, live them. Not comprehensive by its own admission, but so, so, so excellent a start for so many people who don't know where or how to start.
These are the adventures of a DIY stationery geek.
Monday, August 1
Saturday, July 30
Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Quiz
Just a little blurb between breaking news stories and startling events in the worlds of Language and Postal Services:
If you're reading this blog, you'll find it worthwhile to haunt Merriam-Webster's games section. Lovely crosswords and other games, usually gadgets retooled to center around words instead of garden creatures or gems. You know what I mean.
But what's really cool, what I really enjoy, is their Vocabulary Quiz! You get ten words that pop up sequentially, and each one has four attendant words: you race against the clock to select the best synonym. It's a real test of vocabulary--many of the words are easy or medium, but once in a while they throw in hard or genuinely obscure words.
On the other hand, if you have a good vocabulary, it's simply a physical test of hand-eye coordination and response times. My first score was 3200 points, pretty good for my age bracket (oh yes, they show you how other people your age did!), the average score being 2730. I improved that to 3800 points, and yesterday I scored 3940, after three tries. A lot of that is luck, of course, when the obscure word happens to be one I know.
That leads me to believe a perfect score would be 4000 points, and the only thing that holds me back is my response time. I'll have to be satisfied with that.
But what's really cool, what I really enjoy, is their Vocabulary Quiz! You get ten words that pop up sequentially, and each one has four attendant words: you race against the clock to select the best synonym. It's a real test of vocabulary--many of the words are easy or medium, but once in a while they throw in hard or genuinely obscure words.
On the other hand, if you have a good vocabulary, it's simply a physical test of hand-eye coordination and response times. My first score was 3200 points, pretty good for my age bracket (oh yes, they show you how other people your age did!), the average score being 2730. I improved that to 3800 points, and yesterday I scored 3940, after three tries. A lot of that is luck, of course, when the obscure word happens to be one I know.
That leads me to believe a perfect score would be 4000 points, and the only thing that holds me back is my response time. I'll have to be satisfied with that.
Saturday, July 23
Oh, an' That's a Bad Miss
The unexplained mystery here is how the "Editor-at-Large" of Mashable, Ben Parr, got tangled over his use of "alluded/eluded." This is a screenshot of Parr's post on Google+.
You can be sure other people following him called this out. And sure, it's a common enough mistake, but it's exceptional when it comes from the hands of one whose trade is wordsmithing. One advantage of Google+ is that you can edit your posts after they go up--unlike with Facebook--but it's been over six hours and Parr hasn't touched this. Ouch.
Sunday, July 3
The Subtleties of Font
How many of you have ever practiced calligraphy? Many people think this means one specific style of writing, usually some form of italic or maybe even a German fraktur. In actuality, calligraphy is much more general than that: it's the discipline of very neat handwriting.
That handwriting can come in a variety of forms, which people call fonts, typefaces, or "hands" in casual conversation with other calligraphers. The accouterments that come with rigorous calligraphic execution are numerous and intimidating, and the thousands of hours of practice it requires may be off-putting. Yet at one time, penmanship was considered so essential for a civilized society, especially for anyone intending to do any kind of business, that the Palmer method of handwriting was mandatory in a young student's courseload.
Calligraphy really isn't as intimidating as all that. Once you reconcile yourself with the meditative discipline it requires--an increasing awareness of your own slight muscle movements, a calming focus in your mind--you may begin to understand and appreciate it as a world entirely of its own. And it's not difficult at all to practice, once you realize that handwriting actually comes up often in your life. Any time you're putting pen or pencil to paper, exploit that as a few more seconds for disciplined practice: addresses on bills, shopping lists, postcards, Post-It notes to coworkers, &c.
When I began teaching myself calligraphy (I had a miserable desk job with lots of downtime, so I started practicing drawing evenly spaced loops across a pad of paper), I tried to plunge into an "advanced" font, a very elaborate one that came much later down the timeline. But as I blundered through it, got control of it and then too familiar with it, my "hand" started slipping backward through time and I saw its predecessor fonts appearing on my page. This was a fascinating and magical process for me! Not only was I personally touched by the history of handwriting, I was able to begin to develop my own personal font--not one I'd use for writing checks, but something that would look nice on parchment and with certain acrylic inks.
Oh yes, you develop your own tastes for writing implements, inks, and papers as well.
Now it seems there's an iPad app, Typography Insight, designed to help people who work with fonts appreciate the subtle differences between fonts. I have no fear of technological culture, and I think an app like this only stands to reinforce this hobby of mine (if tidy handwriting is only a "hobby").
That handwriting can come in a variety of forms, which people call fonts, typefaces, or "hands" in casual conversation with other calligraphers. The accouterments that come with rigorous calligraphic execution are numerous and intimidating, and the thousands of hours of practice it requires may be off-putting. Yet at one time, penmanship was considered so essential for a civilized society, especially for anyone intending to do any kind of business, that the Palmer method of handwriting was mandatory in a young student's courseload.
Calligraphy really isn't as intimidating as all that. Once you reconcile yourself with the meditative discipline it requires--an increasing awareness of your own slight muscle movements, a calming focus in your mind--you may begin to understand and appreciate it as a world entirely of its own. And it's not difficult at all to practice, once you realize that handwriting actually comes up often in your life. Any time you're putting pen or pencil to paper, exploit that as a few more seconds for disciplined practice: addresses on bills, shopping lists, postcards, Post-It notes to coworkers, &c.
 |
| Image: The Atlantic |
Oh yes, you develop your own tastes for writing implements, inks, and papers as well.
Now it seems there's an iPad app, Typography Insight, designed to help people who work with fonts appreciate the subtle differences between fonts. I have no fear of technological culture, and I think an app like this only stands to reinforce this hobby of mine (if tidy handwriting is only a "hobby").
Typography Insight: iPad App Teaches Fonts Like Never Before
Saturday, July 2
Broken Images
I apologize for the sudden disappearance of all the images in this blog. I was tooling around on Google+ and saw that all my Picasaweb albums manifested in the Photos section of my new account. Not wanting them to appear in my profile--they wouldn't make sense outside of their blogging context--I deleted them in Google+.
Today I discovered that also deletes them in Picasaweb, where all my online albums are stored. Now I have to go through my backed-up archives, dig out all the photos, re-upload them and re-link them to each individual post. I'm very upset about this hassle and embarrassed about the inconvenience, but at least I learned something and therefore grew as a person.
Images will be restored in the next week or so.
Thursday, June 30
One Acceptable Replacement for Mail
I have to say, I'm a little impressed. Wasn't I just ranting about hating all the crap mail my mail slot fills up with on a weekly basis?
This isn't the total solution to this problem but it's a step in the right direction. My city government is working with Zumbox to transition from physical, analog postal mail to digital e-mail distribution! That's kinda cool. So anything that my local government would mail to me will instead go to my Inbox, where my Gmail will reckon with it handily. They're also pushing other big mailers (AT&T, Verizon, State Farm, &c.) to convert as well--that's less paper being printed and less fuel burned to produce and transport it.
I'm all in favor of this. I still want hand-written letters and postcards, but my junk mail and bills would serve me better as e-mail alerts rather than physical clutter.
This isn't the total solution to this problem but it's a step in the right direction. My city government is working with Zumbox to transition from physical, analog postal mail to digital e-mail distribution! That's kinda cool. So anything that my local government would mail to me will instead go to my Inbox, where my Gmail will reckon with it handily. They're also pushing other big mailers (AT&T, Verizon, State Farm, &c.) to convert as well--that's less paper being printed and less fuel burned to produce and transport it.
I'm all in favor of this. I still want hand-written letters and postcards, but my junk mail and bills would serve me better as e-mail alerts rather than physical clutter.
Tuesday, June 28
Bones to Pick With the Postal System
Okay, I know I dressed down our U.S. infrastructure pertaining to the postal system. I love the postal system, but love doesn't mean turning a blind eye to your object of affection's faults. It means acknowledging them and embracing them as a part of the whole, without which your objet d'amour would be another creature entirely.
And then there are flaws that manifest solely within the postal system's context but are not necessarily the fault of the postal system. By this I mean a few problems or annoyances that only turn up because of the USPS, but problems which are not part of the USPS' agenda or a direct result of its actions. The USPS is a vehicle for an unlimited number of variables--that these variables exploit the USPS, like intestinal parasites, does not mean the USPS is a detriment to modern life. On the contrary: it is up to us, we consumers, to mass up and address these aberrations, to resolve them ourselves.
One common problem is that of the shitty postal carrier. Many postal workers are solid joes: they do their job, they know their dominion, and they accrue valuable experience along the way. Delivering mail is not a simple or uneventful task: carriers can stand in as wardens of their community, if not the glue within a neighborhood.
Yet some carriers don't see it like this. Some of them believe they are destined for greater (albeit ill-defined) things. Some believe they're being oppressed by The Man, and the ongoing state of their employment only serves as evidence of this tyranny. Still others just don't give a rat's ass about the job they do, and that would be true of them in any position: in a restaurant, they would drop your steak on the ground and pick it back up to serve to you; in a bank, they would enter your deposit under the wrong account number; at a repair garage, they would mess your car up worse than you'd delivered it to them.
In the USPS, this can manifest as the jackass who simply crams your mail into your mail slot because he's too ill-tempered to do a reasonable job. Maybe the task is too repetitive for him; maybe his significant other chastises him for lacking ambition; maybe a group of douchebags lollygagged in front of his mail truck, causing him to miss a green light. Whatever the reason, he's inappropriately taken this aggression out on me and decreased the quality of my day in some slight but not unmeasureable way.
What he's done here is jammed the weekly circulars in my mail slot. Jammed them in without an eye toward physical space, crumpled up the very mail he has labored to deliver. Which brings up another issue: I don't want those circulars. None of those ads apply to me at all. They are a shameful waste of resources, both in the gas it took to transport them to me and in the trees that were felled to provide the pulp upon which they would be printed, not to mention the man-hours of labor in every stage of its production and dissemination.
I don't want those damned circulars. Nobody in my building wants those damned circulars. Yet they fill up our mailboxes, not addressed to us but to our addresses solely. Sometimes they say "To Our Friends At" but more often "Resident" or "Customers." It would be worthwhile to note who's advertising in these circulars and specifically boycotting them based on their antiquated, wasteful, debauched advertisement methods.
There's a garbage can at the end of the hall. It's made of metal and large enough that I--all 180 lbs. and 6' of me--could crouch down in it and hide, completely concealed by its lid. Weekly, this capacious container fills up with those blighted, horrid circulars; indeed, that can is there expressly for this function alone, to contain all the trash, garbage, rubbish, and waste that turns up in our mailboxes. (Otherwise, of course, the charming and thoughtful American citizens that live here would simply strew their postal detritus up and down the hallway.) Weekly, this container is over-filled with these accursed circulars and a variety of other junk mail.
What's the solution? I'm not specifically sure. When I meet with the postmaster general to talk about how collection boxes are extincted, I'll also ask if there's a way to opt-out of these colon-lapping circulars, or how one would begin to protest their distribution. Is that the purview of our congresspeople? And is it possible to rally enough support to reverse the tide of this wholly unwanted publication?
And then there are flaws that manifest solely within the postal system's context but are not necessarily the fault of the postal system. By this I mean a few problems or annoyances that only turn up because of the USPS, but problems which are not part of the USPS' agenda or a direct result of its actions. The USPS is a vehicle for an unlimited number of variables--that these variables exploit the USPS, like intestinal parasites, does not mean the USPS is a detriment to modern life. On the contrary: it is up to us, we consumers, to mass up and address these aberrations, to resolve them ourselves.
One common problem is that of the shitty postal carrier. Many postal workers are solid joes: they do their job, they know their dominion, and they accrue valuable experience along the way. Delivering mail is not a simple or uneventful task: carriers can stand in as wardens of their community, if not the glue within a neighborhood.
Yet some carriers don't see it like this. Some of them believe they are destined for greater (albeit ill-defined) things. Some believe they're being oppressed by The Man, and the ongoing state of their employment only serves as evidence of this tyranny. Still others just don't give a rat's ass about the job they do, and that would be true of them in any position: in a restaurant, they would drop your steak on the ground and pick it back up to serve to you; in a bank, they would enter your deposit under the wrong account number; at a repair garage, they would mess your car up worse than you'd delivered it to them.
What he's done here is jammed the weekly circulars in my mail slot. Jammed them in without an eye toward physical space, crumpled up the very mail he has labored to deliver. Which brings up another issue: I don't want those circulars. None of those ads apply to me at all. They are a shameful waste of resources, both in the gas it took to transport them to me and in the trees that were felled to provide the pulp upon which they would be printed, not to mention the man-hours of labor in every stage of its production and dissemination.
I don't want those damned circulars. Nobody in my building wants those damned circulars. Yet they fill up our mailboxes, not addressed to us but to our addresses solely. Sometimes they say "To Our Friends At" but more often "Resident" or "Customers." It would be worthwhile to note who's advertising in these circulars and specifically boycotting them based on their antiquated, wasteful, debauched advertisement methods.
What's the solution? I'm not specifically sure. When I meet with the postmaster general to talk about how collection boxes are extincted, I'll also ask if there's a way to opt-out of these colon-lapping circulars, or how one would begin to protest their distribution. Is that the purview of our congresspeople? And is it possible to rally enough support to reverse the tide of this wholly unwanted publication?
Tuesday, June 21
Searching for Mailboxes!
Now that I'm back into my postcard exchange program, I had to get my mail forwarded from where it was being collected (my mom's house) to my apartment. No problem, except I wrote "St" instead of "Ave." Mail still gets to me, but with angry addendum scrawled around the destination address.
Easily fixed: I submitted new address change cards using (at the postal clerk's advisory) the address I'd been using for the last six months and my corrected address. Didn't need to make a note of the mistaken address at all.
Fine and good, but Postcrossing isn't just about receiving mail--it's about sending, too, obviously. There's a mail slot in my apartment building's bank of mailboxes, a slot crudely gouged out of the slender aluminum door, captioned with the taped note "OUTGOING." But this slot is barely big enough for a business envelope and can in no way accommodate a postcard without folding or mutilation. Spindling's not necessary.
So where do I send my mail? Where, indeed: more USPS mailboxes are being dismantled and removed all the time. In my leisurely perambulations about my neighborhood I've seen nary a one. This means all my outgoing mail has to accumulate in a pile until I have an errand that brings me downtown--if I can find a mailbox downtown, of course.
If I visit my in-laws at their senior living apartments, they have a perfectly adequate mail slot in their postal foyer. That's not always convenient, though, since my wife and I are against owning a car. It would be cheap to rent an Hourcar and visit them for a couple hours, and cheaper still to catch a bus (though the trip down there takes nearly an hour, and an hour back... if we leave while the buses are still running), but seriously?
Seriously? That's the best I can do if I want to send a letter?
Actually, no, I can do better. A very casual Google search turned up two mailbox locators, where you type in your city/state or your ZIP code, and they turn up results for mailboxes in your area.
LifeHacker found this Mailbox Locator program being hosted by Payphone Project (obviously, someone needed to find payphones). It's... okay... It seems to rely on anecdotal evidence for updating its database. People report in and note "this one's no longer here" or "got taken away a couple days ago or so." Maybe that's the best we can go on. Whose responsibility, really, is it to notify us where the mailboxes are? ...Arguably, that of the USPS, would be the first guess I'd hazard. But there's nothing wrong with the citizens rising up and contributing this information, answering a real need.
The responses are entirely text-based, there's no image or pictures here. It would be difficult for me to picture the address locations of each box and I'd end up typing them into Google Maps anyway. Additional confusion ensued when I wasn't keeping track of which search bar I entered my information into. Type it into the one on top for the results you want. Entering it into the search bar just below it (the more obvious one, I think) and you get a bunch of Google results that come up in the Mailbox Locator display window. They don't look like the list of addresses you'd get ordinarily, but both kinds of results do show up after a full window of ads.
But the one I like is Mailbox Map, which uses Google Maps as part of its function. Again, type in your city/state or ZIP code, and it actually provides a graphic illustration of mailboxes (including UPS and USPS offices proper).
I love Google Maps, and I love data aggregators, so this will be the application for me.
Now, the only thing to see is how accurate this tool is. It looks great, but it won't mean anything if the mailboxes aren't where it says they are. And I'd go out and check now, only we're currently experiencing a two-day torrential downpour, so... I guess my postcards will just have to hang out with me a while longer.
UPDATE: I went out looking for the mailboxes in my area when the rain let up. Mailbox Map listed three mailboxes within a three-block area of my apartment. Walking to each site, I confirmed that none of these exist anymore. I suspect the same is true for those mailboxes a few blocks further out in any direction. I tried to look up mailboxes in Mailbox Locator and it simply did not have anything listed for my area at all.
Further UPDATE: Duh. USPS has its own collection box locator. I didn't even think of that. I'm not sure how accurate it is: I found three mailboxes through Mailbox Map and the USPS site doesn't one of the ones I found (again, by walking out to each location). It did list five in my area, however, and I can confirm the location of one of these.
Easily fixed: I submitted new address change cards using (at the postal clerk's advisory) the address I'd been using for the last six months and my corrected address. Didn't need to make a note of the mistaken address at all.
Fine and good, but Postcrossing isn't just about receiving mail--it's about sending, too, obviously. There's a mail slot in my apartment building's bank of mailboxes, a slot crudely gouged out of the slender aluminum door, captioned with the taped note "OUTGOING." But this slot is barely big enough for a business envelope and can in no way accommodate a postcard without folding or mutilation. Spindling's not necessary.
 |
| Image: LifeHacker |
If I visit my in-laws at their senior living apartments, they have a perfectly adequate mail slot in their postal foyer. That's not always convenient, though, since my wife and I are against owning a car. It would be cheap to rent an Hourcar and visit them for a couple hours, and cheaper still to catch a bus (though the trip down there takes nearly an hour, and an hour back... if we leave while the buses are still running), but seriously?
Seriously? That's the best I can do if I want to send a letter?
Actually, no, I can do better. A very casual Google search turned up two mailbox locators, where you type in your city/state or your ZIP code, and they turn up results for mailboxes in your area.
The responses are entirely text-based, there's no image or pictures here. It would be difficult for me to picture the address locations of each box and I'd end up typing them into Google Maps anyway. Additional confusion ensued when I wasn't keeping track of which search bar I entered my information into. Type it into the one on top for the results you want. Entering it into the search bar just below it (the more obvious one, I think) and you get a bunch of Google results that come up in the Mailbox Locator display window. They don't look like the list of addresses you'd get ordinarily, but both kinds of results do show up after a full window of ads.
I love Google Maps, and I love data aggregators, so this will be the application for me.
Now, the only thing to see is how accurate this tool is. It looks great, but it won't mean anything if the mailboxes aren't where it says they are. And I'd go out and check now, only we're currently experiencing a two-day torrential downpour, so... I guess my postcards will just have to hang out with me a while longer.
UPDATE: I went out looking for the mailboxes in my area when the rain let up. Mailbox Map listed three mailboxes within a three-block area of my apartment. Walking to each site, I confirmed that none of these exist anymore. I suspect the same is true for those mailboxes a few blocks further out in any direction. I tried to look up mailboxes in Mailbox Locator and it simply did not have anything listed for my area at all.
Further UPDATE: Duh. USPS has its own collection box locator. I didn't even think of that. I'm not sure how accurate it is: I found three mailboxes through Mailbox Map and the USPS site doesn't one of the ones I found (again, by walking out to each location). It did list five in my area, however, and I can confirm the location of one of these.
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