I spent the morning wondering "is there such a thing as a coding notebook" cause I do a lot of algorithmic thinking on paper, but your traditional notebooks never seem to cut it in terms of form factor or like, pagination or something. I couldn't think what such a thing would look like though. So then I was like ok well form follows function, what are the features of my current setup that I'm looking to replicate or improve upon:
... Oh, it's a whiteboard. I'm looking for a portable whiteboard. Ok.
Yeah I have some experience with whiteboard paint. It's not great.
anyway I don't have room for a board or anything really at home. Yet another suboptimal feature of covid working life.
The whiteboard in my office might actually l be what I miss the most during WFH. Sure, having monitors would help my day to day efficiency but there's some times where what I really need is a 6x10 space to map a bunch of stuff out and I can't replicate that at home.
I just remembered that my phd supervisor once wrote equations all over a door in my office in permanent marker, and it wouldn't come off. And then one day I had the outside door open when one of the maintenance staff walked by, and he stopped and called over his colleague, and they did a bunch of head shaking and tut-tutting about it "Look at that then." "Gonna have to paint over that, I bet ya." "yeah that's not gonna come off, made a lot of work for us there haven't they", etc. etc.
(I don't think they ever ended up painting it, I think they did a minor refit/remodel a few years later and just took the door out altogether).
... Oh, it's a whiteboard. I'm looking for a portable whiteboard. Ok.
This is incredibly relatable.
Spoilered for a long walk that doesn’t go anywhere except rant city.
I keep oscillating between notebooks and using a digital “Visio”+Wiki markup solution.
Notebooks are the best, 1) the data is not sucked into some third-party’s data warehouse, 2) no Blue Glow, 3) the tactile feel of the page helps me think (I tried a tablet with an Apple Pencil and I couldn’t get it to click with my stupid brain).
Digital notebooks are great though because of the ability to easily edit and version information. Plus being able to search quickly is so useful for my scattered brain.
I saw some solutions that have a paper book with orienting marks so you’d take a photo and they’d OCR it for you, but they also have shitty data ownership terms in order to use their value-add service.
yeah I've tried an ipad +pencil which SHOULD be a portable digital version of an infinite canvas, but somehow doesn't quite work - I think it's a combination of it being slightly slower to scribble down notes, and never being able to view the screen all at once while still having all the details legible. Always ends up more irritating than useful.
I used cursive pretty much exclusively from second grade (when I learned how) through college because I could write so much faster in cursive than in print. I only got out of the habit when I started taking a lot of programming classes, because it's hard to write code/pseudocode in cursive.
My handwriting in general is much worse now than it was in college, mostly because I don't use it nearly as much. I'd like to fix that; but also I have a terrible writing deathgrip, so I'd need to basically retrain myself from the ground up, and so far I find my attempts to correct my grip intensely frustrating. It's so slow! And I can write so much faster if I revert to the wrong way! Sure my whole arm tires within seconds but at least it's fast!
Question for the cursive-haters in the thread: do you think there's value in being able to at least read cursive? So many historical documents are written in it - including a lot of family history stuff from just a generation or two ago. Hell, my mom still sends me handwritten cards in cursive. I can't imagine not being able to read them.
I don’t hate cursive, but I do have to read handwritten case notes by doctors, nurses, and a range of allied health staff, which basically ends up being a discordant pile of elegant cursive, scribbled cursive, the first three letters of a word followed by a long squiggly line, chicken scratches, just scribbles, micrographia, ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME, print but the i’s dotted with little circles, or some mishmash therein.
Everyone on our team seems to be good at deciphering one type of writing. There are even doctors’ notes where we’re basically like, oh, it’s so-and-so, only Clinician A can read that so really this will just have to wait until they’re in on Wednesday. (Not really but it comes close sometimes.)
It doesn’t help that most of the notes come from pretty time-poor folks, either. It’s like a broken typewriter sneezed in the middle of a whirlwind during an earthquake.
If you want someone to decipher cursive, get ye to a social worker that has to read notes from a range of rushed, time-poor health professionals. We’ll figure that shit out. Eventually.
So my screen name is some stupid shit I came up with when I was like 15 that is a sort of still phonetically accurate mangling of "Two-Fisted Death" because I saw someone with that name in StarCraft lobby and as a teenager I thought it was super cool, but it wouldn't fit in the name field of the MUD I first used it in.
In my senior year in college I was super into puzzle pirates, where I also used the name. At one point someone in my flag was like "Tofu, what even is your name?" and immediately someone else chimed in with the correct answer.
I was shocked, because he was literally the first person to just instantly jump to the right answer and asked why.
His response: "I'm a pharmacist. It's what I do all day. "
Thank you for clearing this up because I have been trying to decipher your handle for YEARS and now I feel like a dumb-ass a little bit.
i just made our customer service manager cry laughing by telling her the person who is the absolute worst at doing exceptions for pushy customers, gets incredibly flabbergasted on the phone when the customer is upset, and is terrible at communications in general, wants to be in charge of customer service for our new division when it becomes a reality
i felt kinda bad but then that same person came into my office to ask for advice on something they were working on, i gave constructive advise on what we'd like to see from that project
they laughed and left and said that they had felt better talking to their direct manager because that manager had just said "yeah what you have sounds fine"
The new person did some meeting small-talk about how some of the columns/tables in our database are [Like This] instead of like_this, and it's annoying. It is, but it's also like... whatever. It's a combo of active design choices and passing through 50 hands over decades, it's what it is and there is no real solution because it's not really like a misstep it's just an annoying thing.
But because everyone has to prove they're totally up on Tech Stuff we spent like 10 minutes circling around it, including the suggestion "isn't there some function that could just rename all of these?"
Yeah let's get to work on that, sounds like a winner.
yeah I've tried an ipad +pencil which SHOULD be a portable digital version of an infinite canvas, but somehow doesn't quite work - I think it's a combination of it being slightly slower to scribble down notes, and never being able to view the screen all at once while still having all the details legible. Always ends up more irritating than useful.
You should use a Buddha board. If you write it down and still can't remember by the time it dries then I guess it wasn't important!
I thought Ikea had one, but I'm not seeing one with paper
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/mala-easel-softwood-white-50021076/
Paper roll is on the bottom but comes up and over. My kids like it. I tend to clip the paper in place with chip clips, especially when they're using it for painting. Folds flat easily.
It's uh, very low down for your average height adult though.
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
yeah I've tried an ipad +pencil which SHOULD be a portable digital version of an infinite canvas, but somehow doesn't quite work - I think it's a combination of it being slightly slower to scribble down notes, and never being able to view the screen all at once while still having all the details legible. Always ends up more irritating than useful.
Have you considered memento-ing your notes all over your body?
The printing press I work on was very much not designed for people my height (6'3"/190cm), so I bump my head on stuff fairly frequently. Usually just hard enough to annoy me, but not cause any damage.
Last night, however, saw me whack my head on a sensor for our fire suppression system that gashed my forehead bad enough to net me a couple stitches.
But on the other hand, the fact that I'm fully vaccinated managed to net me an extra day of vacation thanks to the plant's vaccine incentive policy, so swings and roundabouts I suppose.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Have you considered doing what the Japanese do, and wearing a hard hat every hour you’re on the job if it requires even the faintest whiff of manual labor?
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David_TA fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered Userregular
With Jet fuel (and aviation gasoline), we mostly use liters and kilos and with a standard density, a kilo is just 0.8 of a liter, or a metric ton is 0.8 of a cubic meter. So either way, it's either divided by or times 0.8, depending on which way you're going.
And then we also use US gallons, one US gallon being 3.785411784 liters. You know, for simplicity.
With Jet fuel (and aviation gasoline), we mostly use liters and kilos and with a standard density, a kilo is just 0.8 of a liter, or a metric ton is 0.8 of a cubic meter. So either way, it's either divided by or times 0.8, depending on which way you're going.
And then we also use US gallons, one US gallon being 3.785411784 liters. You know, for simplicity.
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... Oh, it's a whiteboard. I'm looking for a portable whiteboard. Ok.
You have to think of posterity.
Future generations wont be able to confusedly pore over whiteboards.
We painted our conference rooms with whiteboard paint.
It's great until someone forgets to erase it, and then it is so damned hard to clean it off.
anyway I don't have room for a board or anything really at home. Yet another suboptimal feature of covid working life.
A giant roll of paper hanging on some sort of frame you wear. You can just reach up or over and grab some paper and pull it off.
And pockets to store it in.
(I don't think they ever ended up painting it, I think they did a minor refit/remodel a few years later and just took the door out altogether).
My wife is looking at a new desk and were kind of liking the one that comes with the top finished with Whiteboard material.
I thought Ikea had one, but I'm not seeing one with paper
"I spilled my tea and wiped out all the notes on quarter 3." :bigfrown:
Ugh no that's gonna scratch like crazy :bigfrown:
Edit: just get a glass-topped desk if you want a dry-erase surface. More durable; easier to clean.
This is incredibly relatable.
Spoilered for a long walk that doesn’t go anywhere except rant city.
Notebooks are the best, 1) the data is not sucked into some third-party’s data warehouse, 2) no Blue Glow, 3) the tactile feel of the page helps me think (I tried a tablet with an Apple Pencil and I couldn’t get it to click with my stupid brain).
Digital notebooks are great though because of the ability to easily edit and version information. Plus being able to search quickly is so useful for my scattered brain.
I saw some solutions that have a paper book with orienting marks so you’d take a photo and they’d OCR it for you, but they also have shitty data ownership terms in order to use their value-add service.
Thank you for clearing this up because I have been trying to decipher your handle for YEARS and now I feel like a dumb-ass a little bit.
i felt kinda bad but then that same person came into my office to ask for advice on something they were working on, i gave constructive advise on what we'd like to see from that project
they laughed and left and said that they had felt better talking to their direct manager because that manager had just said "yeah what you have sounds fine"
But because everyone has to prove they're totally up on Tech Stuff we spent like 10 minutes circling around it, including the suggestion "isn't there some function that could just rename all of these?"
Yeah let's get to work on that, sounds like a winner.
You should use a Buddha board. If you write it down and still can't remember by the time it dries then I guess it wasn't important!
My new job is in Vancouver, and Washington doesn't have income tax. If I move about 5 miles, I cease paying state income tax.
EDIT: Oh, you were asking about the California hatred! Well that makes more sense. Yeah, what QT said.
Paper roll is on the bottom but comes up and over. My kids like it. I tend to clip the paper in place with chip clips, especially when they're using it for painting. Folds flat easily.
It's uh, very low down for your average height adult though.
Have you considered memento-ing your notes all over your body?
Last night, however, saw me whack my head on a sensor for our fire suppression system that gashed my forehead bad enough to net me a couple stitches.
But on the other hand, the fact that I'm fully vaccinated managed to net me an extra day of vacation thanks to the plant's vaccine incentive policy, so swings and roundabouts I suppose.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
And then we also use US gallons, one US gallon being 3.785411784 liters. You know, for simplicity.
How does that translate into garbage bags?
OSP, huh...
Nah I prefer rats. One human has the blood volume of about 195 rats.
Is this in whole rats, or rat blood volume equivalents?
"wyd?"
"compiling some code"
"without me?