Personally I hate to write with a pencil — my handwriting is extremely ugly and incomprehensible. I believe the same problem is very common for IT people, and most of us prefer to use a PC or some mobile device to make notes. Until recently, I believed that prehistoric pen’n’paper notes will cease to exist very soon.
Actually, I still believe that digital media is more flexible and handy, but there is very important exception to the rule.
When you are going to start a new project and need to make a draft plan or a mind map — i believe you need a paper notebook and color pens, not some fancy device or an application. But why? Digital media is so perfect, so versatile and scalable, it allows you to roll back and to store multi-version volumes of info …
I think this digital perfection is serious drawback when you’re going to plan something. Starting the planning process — you need to:
Determine available resources.
Describe achievable goals.
List finite number of steps to take.
So — we’re going to use LIMITED resources and take a FINITE number of steps. But digital media is INFINITE, and have UNLIMITED scalability. And to make matters even worse — we used to this digital perfection and start to make our decisions, considering digital perfection as a model for the real world.
Instead of digital media plain paper sheet:
is limited by its size and these limits are clear for everyone
allows only few changes made without garbling it out.
But these properties are very similar to planning itself — you need to have very good understanding of your and your team limits when you are going to start some project. You can’t “take back” steps you did and you need to be very specific and clear when you describe details to the team.
So, forget about mind maps with ten and more branches of one entity — people usually memorize 5+-2 things about each subject. And, honestly — most of them would rather stick to 5–2 than 5+2 things.
Limit yourself to the paper notebooks or plain paper sheets and color pens.
Put off your lovely and powerful laptops. You can be very productive when all of your attention drawn to a paper sheet, not to e-mail notifiers and instant messangers.
I think these simple steps could sufficiently improve your planning and allow you to make better drafts and mind-maps.
I hate this English verb “draw” — when you finally believe you already know ALL of its translations — it appears in some text with new one.
I’ve started to read Conan Doyle’s stories about Sherlock Holmes. Of course, I’d read it before, but that was a Russian translation, and despite its quality — I’ve missed much.
“Study in scarlet” — is a very first novel of Sherlock Holmes adventures. When i started it — I wasn’t ready for the Victorian English. Some phrases are very easy and understandable, but other ones are tricky as hell.
By the way — English of 19 century was full of euphemisms. The minced oaths were nice way to said bad things. so gentlemen said “By Jove!”, instead of “By God!” and “deuce” instead of “Devil”.
Some people say something like “there are only the Net phenomena”. I wonder if someday people will tell “It’s only Real World stuff, just ignore it”.
Yesterday I overheard Angry Birds theme, translated by some FM-radio. This is quite strange for me. If i was told ten years ago that music from some computer game was translated by ukrainian radiostation — surely I would have thought the guy is joking.
First half of this winter was unusually warm — we hadn’t any snow until middle of January. And then — bah! White Winter with a Russian flavor — a lot of snow and very cold. Now we have about –15 Celsius (5 ºF).
So I have some old kid’s fun — melt ice on frozen balcony window with my palm and look how it freeze again. When glass is really cold — it looks very interesting — you see as crystal of ice forms and glass freezes back.
First one is my older handprint, then fresh one with ice crystal formed, and then zoomed one.
Russian translation of Nickelodeon’s Spongebob Squarepants scares me sometimes. In this episode Squidward dares Bob to go out Krab’s at night (for dumping garbage). Bob was scared, but when he returns to Krab’s he said — “a piece of cake” and snaps his fingers. It was translated on Russian as “give me one cake please”. … → Read More: Idioms and translation.
testyourvocab.com — the site helps me to face sad truth about my English. My vocabulary was estimated and it contains about 11000–12000 words. It’s very modest vocabulary, i think. Also, I believe in my case this estimation a bit too optimistic. I know too much very rare words like “meadow”, “whim”, “shrill” but often don’t … → Read More: My vocabulary
Maybe because Russian language itself is very complex, so all necessary brain cells are already used by it? No!
But Russian and English are very different, so russian-speaking people (including me) usually have similar problems with English: 1. A and The. Russian language doesn’t have nor indefinite, nor definite articles. This means Russians have a tendency … → Read More: Why English is so difficult for russian-speaking persons?
Very interesting — ski mask, or ‘balaclava’ used by special forces and SWAT all around the world — was named after small Ukranian city Balaclava. Two century ago, when Great Britain fought Russia in Crimea war — it was invented by some british soldiers. Crimea’s winter was so freezing, that soldiers forced to use knitted … → Read More: Balaclava
I still can’t believe in plain and stupid fact — my current mobile phone has more computer resources (memory, processor speed. etc) than my desktop PC ten years ago. And when we talk about modern PCs — we need to understand that all of them have more computation power than mainframe supercomputers of 20-th century. … → Read More: Can we make the World a better place without ANY efforts?
Today I’ve decided to start English blog. This is quite a decision for me, because my English is very work-oriented, and I use it for business communication and customer interaction only. I believe I need to change it and start to speak and write just for fun. There is only … → Read More: Let’s start it…
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