I had an MRI this morning. There was only twelve minutes of MRI'ing, but I swore to myself next time I'd rather die than do this again. It's weird. I know I'll forget that eventually, I did last time (it was worse than today's). It was broken into 5 separate exposures of different lengths. I tried various ways to keep my mind occupied. First, I counted all the states, first going around the edge of the country then looping through the interior. The second time I did it again. Next time I tried counting my breaths, but eventually lost interest. All the time I'm having bouts of freaking out from claustrophobia. I thought terrible thoughts. All the while it felt like the MRI was pulling me in, even though the operator told me that was just an illusion. But, by the last segment I figured out what to do. I reviewed the code in the project I'm working on now. I realized I had a great map of it memorized, and walked through all the bits I could remember, like the states, just to see how much I could find up there in my brain. My brain is a tool for thought, I realized, and tried not to laugh. It kept me entertained. I'm passing this along as a lifehack for programmers, or other designers and developers. #Of course Bill Gates is a nasty fuck. Come on. All you had to do was read my blog. Even so, I actually like Bill Gates. It's weird. I've met with him a few times and always found it interesting and memorable. At one time believe it or not I wanted to work at Microsoft. Friends later told me I dodged a bullet. Actually a couple of times. Anyway the reporters are going for him now. Time to get out the popcorn. #
Up for discussion, using Markdown as an outline interchange format. First, my outliners will support it if it gains traction. Here's an example. Comments follow. Markdown is good for what it was designed to do, to be a simple alternative to HTML. You could send someone an email in Markdown, and they wouldn't have a clue that it was also something a piece of software could turn into a decent web page. I like Markdown for appropriate uses. I've been urging Facebook to support Markdown so that their posts could have simple styling and links. But is it useful as an interchange format for outlines? Outlines can have attributes attached at any node, and this is something that Markdown can't handle without being extended, and it's questionable whether Markdown can be updated. Further if you start adding technical stuff to Markdown, it stops fulfilling its mission to be human readable. But as I said, I'm not picky, if it becomes popular I'll support it. What do I like for outline interchange? OPML, of course. That's what it was designed for, and it works. I wouldn't mind if we used a JSONified OPML, it's easy to go back and forth between XML and JSON (they're really the same thing, actually). For more information see the checklist I put together for devs supporting OPML in their outline-processing software#