I can’t think of anything to say. Besides, everyone else is already saying it — and saying it much better than I ever could.
All political ramifications aside, though, my thoughts, prayers, and well-wishes go out to Bhutto’s family. I know how hard it is to lose a loved one; especially a mother. And the more public that person is, the harder it must be for close family since any sendoff that you might want to give your loved one is inevitably hijacked by everyone else. I hope her family — especially her children — are hanging in there.
While I’m not a music producer, back in 2004 I helped produce my former band’s first full-length album. Since we were doing everything ourselves (recording, producing, mastering, etc.) we basically had to teach ourselves all there was to know about small-scale music production. And, believe me, there’s a lot to know.
Two of the issues that came up back then were those of overall song loudness (how loud we wanted to make our music) and of compression (which would make even the soft parts of a song loud but would compromise on musical texture and nuance). This is a big issue in music these days, with Rolling Stone magazine calling it ‘The Death of High Fidelity‘. I wanted to write about this back in August when Scott Rosenberg wrote his ‘The Unbearable Loudness of Recording‘ blog post but I never got around to it. Now, thanks to the excellent Rolling Stone article, I don’t have to write about it at all! So, if you’re interested in music and the technical reasons for why modern music sounds so crappy, the article makes a good — but long — read.
In recent months I have been particularly disappointed with Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Radio Nowhere’ which is an excellent song that is seriously compromised by it being too loud and too in-your-face. What’s worse is that it’s too loud and too in-your-face throughout the duration of the song. Compare that to something like Linkin Park’s ‘What I’ve Done’ which is also loud — it is, after all, a hard rock record — but has so much more light and shade (i.e. musical variation) in it.
I’ve always liked Linkin Park. The band’s music is melodic, has a great beat, and pulls off both hardness and softness really well. The rap rock style works nicely and all of its music exceptionally well produced.
The first two singles off the band’s new album, ‘Minutes to Midnight’, though, are particularly good. ‘What I’ve Done’ was good in it’s own right but it got so much cooler when it was featured as the closing track for ‘Transformers‘ (2007) and I really like the slightly-harder-than-U2 sound they’ve chosen for ‘Shadow of the Day’. I guess it pays to have Rick Rubin as your producer, doesn’t it? :)
I’ll now have to give the whole album a listen. I’m sure it won’t disappoint.
I take a lot of notes. And I mean a lot of notes. I take notes for things like:
Planning out a report, paper, or essay
Brainstorming a website, business strategy problem, or a computer program/algorithm
Taking notes during a class lecture or conference
Even making a shopping list or a list of things to do
I like to think I take good notes and, since I’m a bit of a perfectionist (some would say I’m obsessive), over the years I have actively refined my note-taking technique. Here’s how I take notes these days.
Note-Taking Tools
I start by making sure that I have good note-taking tools. These days I take notes with a mechanical pencil with 0.5 or 0.7mm 2B lead (i.e. softer but darker than the typical HB or #2 pencil; see Wikipedia entry on the pencil for details on gradation) on white, good quality, narrow-lined file paper. I also use a good quality eraser.
I use a pencil and eraser because I like clear and neat notes and diagrams (i.e. dark lines and no cross-outs). I use file paper because that gives me more flexibility in terms of storing, organizing, moving, and re-writing notes within subject-indexed, tab-separated file folders (’binders’ for Americans).
May I geek out a bit? These days I’m using a Faber Castel Grip Matic pencil, the 2B lead that came with it, and a Staedtler Rasoplast eraser. The pencil’s pretty old now so I need to buy a new one. I generally prefer Staedtler over Faber Castel — I’ve been using the former’s pens, pencils, lead, and erasers for about 16 years now — but I haven’t been able to find the right products in Australia so far. I guess I need to look harder. Oh, and Pilot and Uni products are good too; particularly the Uni SA-S fine ballpoint pen which I have been using exclusively for about 3 years now.
Note Organization
I organize my notes rather thoroughly: listing on each page the date, subject, page number, and, if in a meeting, the names of the participants in that meeting. To organize the notes themselves I use a series of headings and nested bullet points. Here’s an example:
More recently I’ve started to take notes on my laptop. For that I use Microsoft Word with 12pt Georgia font and the same sets of headings and series of nested bulleted lists as I do on paper (except that those are now defined as MS Word Styles so they look a little different). This is what my electronic notes look like:
The Actual Notes
Then come the actual notes themselves. Since I write a lot, I’ve had to develop my own, mostly intuitive, shorthand to write things down quickly. For example: “this func. says nothing abt. price lvl.; dep. only on tech, labour & capital.” Since I type quickly, I write full-ish sentences when typing notes, though. They may not be entirely grammatically correct, but I don’t usually abbreviate words.
In the actual note-taking I try to write down as much as I can while still listening to the lecture/discussion, not missing anything going on (even at a deeper level), and participating in the discussion as well. It’s not easy but I’ve been doing it for years so I’m used to it by now. Taking notes this way gives me a pretty accurate recording of what went on during the class (since that’s what I developed my note-taking for) and, even if something isn’t quite clear to me at that time, I can usually follow the logic and work it out later.
At the end of every note-taking session (e.g. at the end of every class) I try to review the notes to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Then, usually while preparing for an assignment or just before an exam, I do one of two things. I either extract what is important from my notes (and in parallel from lecture slides and assigned readings) by re-writing them on a new sheet of paper or on my laptop. That is, I take notes of my notes. If not that, I make an index in which I identify what I’ve written and on which page that topic is located. The former helps me prepare for closed book exams and assignments. The latter helps me get ready for open book exams and meetings during which I might need to refer to my notes.
I do, however, use a mind map-type construction for breaking down complex problems. But, since I’m a stickler for writing things neatly, I use lists instead of diagrams. For example:
And that’s about it. Oh, one last thing: storage. Since I have craploads on notes, I generally have a crapload of file folders to store all my notes in as well. And since I’ve been using, for the most part, the same system for about ten years now, my old notes still come in handy every now and then. The only problem is: I can’t take all my old notes with me.
All of that, I guess, goes some way to demonstrate why the obsessive note-taker in me wants so desperately to get a tablet PC. I mean, seriously, how could I not want to get the ultimate note-taking tool? But, since I can’t afford one now, I am so looking forward to getting one later and then scanning all my MBA notes into it so that they’re ready for use any where, any time. In fact, I’m getting all excited just thinking about it now! Yes. I am a geek. I wrote a whole blog post on note-taking (with pictures and all), didn’t I? :)
Nadia finished her MA a few months ago but her official graduation ceremony was held at the University yesterday afternoon.
The ‘Conferring of Degrees’, as it is called, was held at the Wilson Hall, and if you look closely at the following photograph, you can see Nadia walking back down the aisle after having received her degree for the Chancellor (the dude sitting in the big chair in the centre of the stage):
Note the Douglas Annand and Tom Bass mural, ‘A Search for Truth’ on the back wall — yes, a naked man with a nicely chiseled butt (in 3-D, no less since it’s part-sculpture) adorns the hall in which we graduate — as well as the large pipe organ built into the top-left side of that wall.
Here are Nadia and Nuzhat, just before going into Wilson Hall (the lighting was harsh; it was two in the afternoon):
And here is Nadia once’s she’s gotten her degree. First showing off the arches of the Old Arts Centre (which was the original University central quadrangle in the 1880s):
And then posing in front of the University of Melbourne logo (behind the logo you can see the quadrangle’s lawn and similar arches on the other side of the building):
So that’s that. Nadia is now a double MA: her first in English Literature and now this one in Creative Writing.
Wateen Telecom, the Abu Dhabi Group’s latest telecommunications investment in Pakistan (i.e. after Warid Telecom), is has just launched its Wireless Broadband (a.k.a. WiMax) service in Pakistan.
With speeds ranging from 128kbps to 2Mbps, a coverage of 22 cities, and pretty reasonable tariffs, its sounds like a good deal.
Tim Berry, CEO of Palo Alto Software recently blogged about why he likes his tablet PC. In fact, he gives five reasons for it. It’s a good article that echoes what a lot of other tablet PC enthusiasts have said about the benefits of this form factor.
For me, one of the biggest benefits of using tablet PCs — i.e. being able to write on Powerpoint slides mid-presentation — became very clear very quickly when I was first exposed to this technology in the classroom. This was thanks to John Asker who taught us Managerial Economics at MBS. John conducted his class lectures using Powerpoint slides on which he took notes (with a stylus) using his Fujitsu Lifebook convertible tablet PC.
Doing this was especially useful when explaining, for example, complex ideas that involved diagrams and areas under the curve. At the end of each class, John would save those annotated slides and then post them onto the course website as PDF files.
Here’s an example…and you can imagine how much harder it would have been to explain the concept presented here without either lots of whiteboard work or more complex Powerpoint slides:
The same is true for the following slide, except that this one is even more complicated (and even harder to explain on the board…unless you used multiple colours, of course, though even then it would probably be harder to do):
In the study term that followed this one, we took a course called Economics and Public Policy that was, basically, a course on managerial macroeconomics. In that, everything was taught using the whiteboard and, at times, that got really difficult to follow. I remember thinking back than how much better the course could have been had the professor been using Powerpoint slides and a tablet PC. Oh well. Widespread adoption takes time.
