Up to this month, I had never written any really short stories, like 500 words or fewer. I had also written very little fiction. However, with a postcard story contest I found out about from Vancouver Canada, I have “all of a sudden” (relatively to my life timeline), written five! I can’t share them yet, and may not be able to until fall, unless they get eliminated really early, but here were the postcards I chose.
Writing
Lessons Learned from the First COVID Lockdown for the Second
In many places in the world, people have gone through multiple lockdowns due to COVID-19. Where I live, we have been super fortunate to have sensible and law abiding citizens that we’ve had only one lockdown, when COVID first broke here in March 2020. Inevitably, with a place being attractive to those not wanting to be restricted, some will come with their gonzo ways to ruin it. Recently, we had some of that, with the ratio of close contacts to those coming into the province being like 5 to 1. There’s no way everybody coming into the province lived with an average of 5 people, who would have had to quarantine themselves as well. That’s assuming every one of these close contacts caught COVID, never mind some who might not have. Dumb traveling yahoos!
A Pub ic Practical Joke
Back on April Fool’s Day, I shared some really good and practical advice on removing “pubic” from spellcheck to avoid some potentially very embarrassing misspellings that wouldn’t be caught! Today, I’m going the other way with the same mishap, except now, I’m creating it instead of trying to prevent it.
Answers for Tim Ferriss’ Question 11 from Tribe of Mentors
One of my favourite podcasts is the Tim Ferriss Show. Among the many things Tim is successful at in addition to a podcast host, is being an author. Of his books, there is one called Tribe of Mentors: Short life advice from the best in the world, presumably about life advice that is short rather than advice about living a short life. It is based on answers to 11 really good questions that Tim needed to answer for himself at one point in his life, and of which he asked some people who he most admired to see what they would say so he could learn from the best. A sample can be heard in this podcast episode link, along with more about the questions and their sequence.
A Dumb Smart Phone
Technology is supposed to make things smaller and better, often also cheaper. However, that has been anything but with the so-called “smart” phone. It’s gotten bigger with bigger screens, and now is looking at folding screens to make it thicker. It’s gotten heavier and more bulky to carry around. Most of the new features are more addictive than helpful like with apps and social media. And we’re paying more and more for it? What kind of rational product development is this? But I shouldn’t criticize unless I had a better solution, right? Well, allow me to imagine one.
Digital Citizen 