Kyle Cordes

I picked this idea up from Dale Emery, in his excellent “Resistance as a Resource” talk at AYE, which is based on a paper available at his website. He shared a story of an HR manager who spoke with disdain about a group of people at their company as “resistors” to change; in their case [...]

Tags: commentary

A few weeks ago, around the time of the Reddit sale to Conde Nast, I read Aaron’s Swartz’s summary of his life to date, including a description of his brief high school experience: dissatisfied with high school, he quit. He was then officially “home schooled”, but he actually wandered off to teach himself and take [...]

My Old Way of Thinking Until recently, my strategy for deciding what possessions to keep has been simple: to a first approximation, “keep everything forever”. There is family history in this direction, so I come by this honestly. I have kept many pieces of equipment, cables, books, magazines, tools, office supplies, and much more. There [...]

Tags: commentary, top

On my office PC, I have a complex, tuned mechanism for processing email: many filters, many folders, etc. I check email at least a couple times per hour (sometimes every few minutes) and tend to send many short replies to message threads. When I travel, my email processing is much simpler: check email a few [...]

Tags: commentary

I’m back from AYE. The last session I attended was Dwayne Phillips‘s on “Distraction”. Distraction is a recurring enemy here, always ready to strike, to divert me from the task at hand. I’ve recently been using “disconnection” to fight distraction and focus on an intense task for a few hours, and noticed the same notion [...]

Tags: commentary, conferences

I’ve recently been working on having fewer accounts, at fewer banks, fewer lines of credit, etc.  This is in an attempt to reduce the accidental complexity of my life, as well as reduce the likelihood of the identity theft. Imagine my joy, in reading Will Shipley’s E-TRADE nightmare, that one of my former accounts that [...]