My favorite article in today’s Monday’s Link Roundup is Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories. One of my prized possessions is Mom’s 1945 Purity Cookbook. Thumbing through the grease-stained pages and reading her handwritten notes is like stepping back into Mom’s kitchen. Also, be sure to take a look at Boring Is Productive. I can now feel justly proud of my “boring” morning routines! 
- An Illustrated Homage to Grandparents and the Art of Looking Twice. “As a lover of vintage and vintage-inspired children’s books, I was instantly enamored with The Frank Show (public library) by British illustrator and designer David Mackintosh — a charming homage to grandparents and the art of seeing beneath the grumpy exterior.”
- The simple power of one a day. “There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you’ve built a mountain. Here are some things you might try (don’t do them all, just one of these once a day would change things for you):”
- The Top 10 Social Networks for Creative People. “I begin by looking at WHY networking is critical to your success as a creative professional. Then it’s onto the networks themselves, with quotations from the founders of some networks and success stories from users, explaining the networks’ individual cultures, how to use them, and how they can help your creativity and your career.”
- Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories. “…cookbooks tell us something much more personal about their readers,..The problem is, we often only come about this information by inference – particularly when we know nothing about the original owner. Still, many cookbooks do offer at least a few tantalizing clues who owned them and how they were used.”
- Data Lives Forever in Quartz Glass. “Hitachi has discovered a way to store digital information on slivers of quartz glass. This data can seemingly exist forever, enduring extreme temperatures and hostile conditions without degrading… at least until the sun begins to die and expend to consume the earth, that is.”
- Using WorldCat to Find Genealogy Books. “WorldCat is the world’s largest network of library content and services. It is an online library catalog that lets you look up items in libraries around the world. The items available include books, electronic documents, journals, microform, and audio and video recordings. Best of all, WorldCat is available to everyone free of charge.”
- Boring Is Productive. “Making too many decisions about mundane details is a waste of a limited resource: your mental energy. In the late 1990s, Roy Baumeister (a professor at Florida State University) and colleagues performed several experiments showing that certain types of conscious mental actions appeared to draw from the same “energy source” — gradually diminishing our ability to make smart decisions throughout the day.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged boring, Cookbook, cookbooks, creatives, data, Florida State University, Frank Show, Fused quartz, genealogy, grandparents, Hitachi, homage, How to, Life stories, life story, link roundup, Marketing, productivity, Quartz Glass, reading, Roy Baumeister, simple, social networks, Tips, top, WorldCat
We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Last week I was doing some spring cleaning and came across a collection of letters I had written to my parents some forty-five years ago. At the time, I was a young man teaching in Ghana. After University I’d joined CUSO, a Canadian voluntary organization similar to the Peace Corps, and had been assigned to the West African country for two years. I’d asked my mother to keep these letters as a partial record of my experience…Read more.
Posted in Inspiration, Life stories, memoir, Personal historian, Writing
Tagged aerogram, Canada, CUSO, Ghana, How to, Inspiration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letters, life story, memories, memory triggers, third chapter, Tips, West Africa, Writing
In the Monday’s Link Roundup, don’t miss 20 Awesomely Creative Business Cards. It immediately made me think of ways I could add some “magic” to my own somewhat pedestrian card. If you’re self-employed, keeping a tight rein on expenses is a given. For some handy tips on penny pinching, check out 7 Habits of Highly Frugal People. And for everyone who wants to transfer some precious VHS tapes to a digital format, you’ll find a practical solution in Transfer VHS tapes to your computer.
- Maya Angelou on Home, Belonging, and (Not) Growing Up. “In 2008, Maya Angelou — one of the greatest voices in American literature — penned Letter to My Daughter (public library), a collection of 28 short meditations on subjects as varied as violence, humility, Morocco, philanthropy, poetry, and older lovers, addressed to the daughter she never had but really a blueprint to the life of meaning for any human being with a beating heart.”
- How to Automatically Archive Your Life with IFTTT and Evernote. “Keeping a journal can be fun, but it’s hard sometimes to keep up with recording all your memories or important thoughts. Brilliant webapp automating service If This Then That (IFTTT) can create an automatic journal for you by archiving your events, pics, and social media posts to Evernote.”
- 20 Awesomely Creative Business Cards. “At a time when most people network via LinkedIn or some other form of social media, business cards can seem somewhat obsolete…It doesn’t help that most of them are pretty unmemorable…But just the way a beautifully handwritten note stands out in a bevy of text messages and chats, a unique and imaginative business card leaves a lasting impression. We’ve rounded up some of our favorite examples after the jump.”
- 7 Habits of Highly Frugal People. “If you are tired of living paycheck to paycheck, of having your phone regularly cut off or having to make excuses to skip dinners with your friends if the money has run out before the end of the month then you can use the seven habits of highly effective people to take control of your money situation and live a more frugal lifestyle, and a happier one.”
- Introducing Literary Jukebox: Daily Book Quote Matched with a Song. “As a lover of both literature and music, I frequently find myself immersed in a passage, with a conceptually related song beginning to play in my mind’s ear. I recently started making such matches more consciously and was quickly drawn into a highly addictive exercise in creative intersections and associations…Sometimes, the connections will be fairly obvious. Other times, they might be more esoteric and require some reflection. Whatever the case, I hope you enjoy — I certainly am.”
- Transfer VHS tapes to your computer. “Unlike your old vinyl record collection, those VHS tapes you stored away in the back of your closet aren’t going to see a resurgence in popularity. There are no videophiles extolling the superior experience and fidelity of these analog tapes…In this CNET How To video, and in the gallery below, I’ll walk you through the process of transferring those VHS home movies over to your computer using a simple, relatively inexpensive method.”
- 8000 Facebook members die every day. What happens to their profiles? “Five months ago, Russ Hearl had a friend pass away suddenly. Hearl found out about it on Facebook, and, going to the friend’s profile page, found several comments that he had posted the very day he died.That’s when he decided there needed to be a better way to memorialize a fallen Facebook friend…So he founded Evertalk. As of today the app has been live on Facebook for about four weeks, and users have created 3,000 memorials.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup, Uncategorized
Tagged 7 Habits, archive, book quotes, business cards, creative, End of life, Evernote, Evertalk, Facebook, facebook memorial, Frugality, How to, IFTTT, life story, Maya Angelou, quote, Resources, songs, Tips, transfer VHS tapes, VHS, video, Videocassette recorder
Browsing in quirky little bookstores is a pleasant way to pass the time. If this describes you, be sure to check out 10 of the Coolest Niche Bookstores From Around the World in this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup. And for a insightful look at the history of memoirs, don’t miss The New Yorker article But Enough About Me.
- This column will change your life. “Hofstadter’s law, conceived by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, goes like this: any task you’re planning to complete will always take longer than expected – even when Hofstadter’s law is taken into account. Even if you know a project will overrun, and build that knowledge into your planning, it’ll simply overrun your new estimated finish time, too, Hofstadter says. We chronically underestimate the time things take.”
- eBooks Gone in 5 Years? “The future of what we do, once we start to put books into this connected/network world is totally open, and that’s a very exciting thing for people who love books and who love the web.”
- Quick Tips for Better Interview Video. “Moving from audio only to video and audio recording is not a small transition. Frame composition, lighting, and background are only a few of the considerations now affecting oral history recording that previously- when only recording audio- were of less importance. With that in mind, there are five basic principles for capturing better video.”
- 10 of the Coolest Niche Bookstores From Around the World. “We all know about the plight of independent and specialty bookstores, so we won’t lament it again here. Suffice it to say, fellow book and bookstore lovers, that all is not lost!…Click through to see some of the coolest niche and specialty bookstores in the world, and since no list like this can ever be really complete, be sure to pitch in with your own favorites in the comments.”
- The Ultimate Guide to Publishing Your eBook on Amazon’s Kindle Platform. “The opportunities to grow and expand your business or ideas through publishing an eBook are limitless. With a insightful, compelling eBook, your words can instill valuable wisdom, actions, stories and ideas that can build trust and relationships with your audience. If you follow the seven steps below, you’ll never have to read another article on publishing to Amazon’s Kindle platform ever again.”
- How to Create a Timeline: The Power of Re-working Your Life’s Story, 1 of 2. “A timeline or lifeline exercise is a grid that allows you to have a bird’s eye view of your life, and to see the positive and negative shifts along the way on a single trajectory…Putting your timeline on paper is an opportunity to record vital information about your life and past. There are several benefits to completing this exercise.”
- But Enough About Me. “…memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention…The greatest outpouring of personal narratives in the history of the planet has occurred on the Internet; as soon as there was a cheap and convenient means to do so, people enthusiastically paid to disseminate their autobiographies, commentaries, opinions, and reviews, happily assuming the roles of both author and publisher.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged better, Bookselling, bookstores, E-book, eBook, history, Hofstadter's law, How to, Kindle platform, life story, memoir, New Yorker, niche bookstores, planning, publishing, The New Yorker, timeline, Tips, video interviews
In today’s Monday’s Link Roundup I have the perfect gift for the hard to buy for bibliophile. Check out A Perfume That Smells Of An Obscure Pleasure: The Printed Word. On a more serious note don’t miss the NPR interview with Arnold Weinstein, author of Morning, Noon, And Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books. This is definitely on my list of books to read.
- A Matter of Fashion. “Linguists insist that it’s wrong to designate any kind of English “proper” because language always changes and always has. A common objection is that even so, all people must know which forms of language are acceptable in the public sphere, at the peril of unemployability or, at least, social handicap. Fair enough – but there’s a middle ground.”
- Your Life As A Mini-Movie. “Ptch picks up where your static photo feeds on Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Viddy, Facebook, and Google+ leave off. Dreamworks, the animation studio behind Shrek, is backing the iOS app, which… lets users create, edit, and share 60-second mini-movies from their own photos and video clips. Then comes the movie magic. Ptch helps users add title cards, offers soundtrack help with one of more than 80 preloaded songs, and even integrates comments from your social networks. Like other outfits that do Instagram-like treatments for video, Ptch lets mini-movie makers wrap their creations in one of eight styles. You can share new creations on Ptch, as well as on your desired social channels.”
- Life Stages In Literature.[NPR Interview] “Guest: Arnold Weinstein, distinguished professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and author of Morning, Noon, And Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books. What Twain, Woolf, Roth, Morrison and more tell us about growing up and growing old.The stories and insights to place us, ground us, in our own lives. Literature can get at the heart of what we’re doing and the experience we share can be illuminated.”
- Best Online Language Tools for Word Nerds. “Beside the standard-issue dictionary and spellchecker offered by most word processors and operating systems, there are several web-based language tools at your disposal that can get you just the information you need. Let’s take a look at some of the best online language tools for word nerds and regular people who just want to say that word correctly in conversation.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged Arnold Weinstein, checklist, Comparative Literature, Dreamworks, email, English language, Life Stages, life story, literature, material possessions, NPR, online language tools, perfume, Ptch, The Burning House, The Printed Word, Tips, video
Still putting off writing your life story? Well here’s something you might want to try. Write down a list of twenty statements about yourself that would give someone in the future an idea of who you are… Read more.
Posted in How to, Personal historian, Tips, Writing
Tagged How to, Life stories, life story, lists, Personal historian, personal histories, personal history, Writers Resources, Writing
This Monday’s Link Roundup has its usual collection of eclectic gems. One of my favorites is The QWERTY Effect: How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words. I’m wondering if this effect only applies to touch typists. What about those of us who peck away with a couple of fingers? Another story I love because it’s absolutely serendipitous is MacDonald clan photos found by great-great grandson in antique shop.
- This Is My Home: Inside Anthony’s Parlor of Curiosities. [Video]“…a friend and I were strolling down a street in the East Village when we stumbled upon a whimsical place — a kind of curiosities parlor that stretched, narrow and full of unusual objects and private memories, from the street site of the building to the backyard. Inside it was Anthony Pisano … We, it turns out, we not the only ones mesmerized by Anthony’s curiosities and unusual lens on the world. This Is My Home by filmmakers Kelsey Holtaway and Mark Cersosimo is a beautiful short film, in the vein of This Must Be The Place, that captures Anthony’s singular character through the contents of his home and his heart.”
- Tiny Libraries, DIY Reading Rooms, and Other Micro Book Depots. “We wanted to venture into DIY territory and visit some of the tiniest — but gutsiest — libraries around the world. These are unusual places where lit lovers ventured to create a mini community athenaeum, and guerrilla librarians have set up camp in the face of budget cuts and closing institutions. Each micro library’s aim is different, but whether they’re promoting independent/alternative presses, or simply trying to encourage reading, these plucky, little libraries deserve your attention.”
- Parting Words. “When Brenda Wineapple closed her laptop on “Sister Brother,” her dual biography of the siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein, she cried. Stacy Schiff, having written the final words of “Cleopatra,” was still worried. “I lived a little bit in fear of her,” she explains. When Doris Kearns Goodwin finished “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” she built more shelves in her library annex (once the family garage) to hold all the books she had acquired. Each of these distinguished, prizewinning, best-selling biographers was saying goodbye to a subject with whom she had been living for a long time. For authors of biographies, this intimacy is normal, almost inevitable.”
- MacDonald clan photos found by great-great grandson in antique shop. ““If you are an antique collector and somebody asks would you like to look in the back, you jump at it, because it is where the treasures are hiding.” Alas, the backroom was more disappointing than the front. That is, until Mr. MacDonald spotted a stack of black and white photographs in Edwardian and Victorian frames. He was intrigued. And then astonished. The faces staring up at him belonged to his long dead relatives, an influential Halifax clan of MacDonalds bound by marriage, friendship and political alliance to Sir Charles Tupper.
- Finding Your Book Interrupted … By the Tablet You Read It On. “Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons? People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.”
- The QWERTY Effect: How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words. “A keyboard’s arrangement could have a small but significant impact on how we perceive the meaning of words we type. Specifically, the QWERTY keyboard may gradually attach more positive meanings to words with more letters located on the right side of the layout (everything to the right of T, G and B).”
- The 10 Best Movies Adapted from Memoirs. “Though hundreds of movies made each year are adapted from novels and short stories, relatively few are built from memoir — despite the fact that the form has been at least as popular as novels in the last two decades, and may be more beloved by the general public…we got to thinking about the few really great films adapted from memoirs. Click through to see our picks, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites.”
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Posted in Monday's Link Roundup
Tagged 10 best, biography, Brenda Wineapple, DIY, Doris Kearns Goodwin, e-books, Kelsey Holtaway, life story, Mark Cersosimo, micro book depots, movie memoirs, QWERTY, reading, tablets, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, This Is My Home, tiny libraries, video, Writing
I find the use of “acknowledgment” in a personal history interview one way to build rapport with my interviewee. It’s a particularly effective technique after you’ve been told a touching story… Read more.
Posted in How to, Interviewing, Life stories, Personal historian, Tips
Tagged acknowledgment, How to, Interviewing, Life stories, life story, Personal historian, Tips
What do you do when you lose a potential client? A few weeks ago this happened to me. I was disappointed but it’s not the first time and it won’t be the last time that I hear the words, “I’m sorry but…”. However, over the years I’ve learned to see this as an opportunity and not as a loss. Let me explain…Read more.
Posted in How to, Life stories, Marketing, Personal historian, Tips
Tagged clients, How to, interview, life story, losing clients, Marketing, Personal historian, Tips, winner
What makes a video biography memorable? Is it the person being interviewed? Or is it the inclusion of archival photos and movies? Or could it be the clever use of audio and visual effects? All of these are significant but the most important factor – the #1 secret to a first rate video biography is … Read more.
Posted in How to, Life stories, Personal historian, Questions, Tips, Video production, Writing
Tagged digital storytelling, engaging story, feature film lessons, Filmmaking, how ro, life story, Media Production, story, structure, technique, Tips, video, video biography, video life stories, visual effects, Writing
