I juggle many things (recent days have been a lot of dirt moving related to garden beds). But I love sitting with a pen and paper. Working on an issue for Open + Curious.

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There are few opportunities where I get together with other podcasters to review and improve our work. Just spend time listening to various pieces from some peers in prep for a zoom call this evening.

“Show your work” isn’t about showing the finished work. It’s about being open and honest about the work you do. I hope that showing my work inspires others to dig into whatever it is they are passionate about. The photo the final bunch of things, all finished today, after many months of hard work… a new podcast is launched. openAndCurious.org ;)

Back in… not sure, 2020? I started a daily podcast of me simply reading quotes from my collection. Last year I decided to slow down to only 3 quotes per week. I record and schedule them in batches. Screenshot of episode 1,399 being recorded. o_O

30 years ago, I put a few quotes on my first blog. Then things escalated. I collect quotes from all over the place. But sometimes, I dive (using a random number tool to pick one of the 2,000 pages) into this door-stop of a book, 40,000 Quotations Prose and Poetical. Found a few on this page. This one is becoming number 1,431.

I jot down little conversation-related things I find. Then I work them into being posts on https://openandcurious.org/ This little, weird question caught my eye in January.

There’s a magnifying glass in the back there too. Extra pair of low-reflection reading glasses. Lip balm; don’t need it until I need it. Rubik’s cube so I can kill a few minutes without spinning off starting something that then turns into a rabbit hole. What do you keep at hand when working?

There’s a lot I can say about episode notes for individual podcast episodes. I have trouble writing them from scratch. But I’ve been using OpenAI’s LLM for a while now and tinkering on some prompts that work well. It takes me at least half an hour of writing (me writing and revising) to go from a raw transcript to solidly useful episode notes.

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I’ve tried to do digitally the thinking and creative part of writing. It just doesn’t work as well as scribbling on paper. I use these tablets to capture ideas. This seed has been bumping around for 3 months (if you zoom in, it’s interesting that this seed happens to be _about_ reverberations!) Today it gets turned into a new something for Open + Curious.

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I’m a major process-person. Process is discipline. For me, inspiration always runs out. But process enables me to put one dumb foot in front of the other— and then course correct as I go. Pre-flight checklist here minutes before a guest joins me for a recording.

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Currently in my personal knowledge system I have notes on ~400 audio recordings. (Raw recordings I’ve done, podcasts of my own I’ve published, other shows I’ve been on, etc.) That can be my episode notes and writing, but also program-readable meta information. Today, I spent time writing some new tooling to help me sort out transcripts (which recordings have them, which have been sent out, etc.)

I describe my weekly email, 7 for Sunday, as “Hand-rolled and algorithm-free.” I’m using some custom code in WordPress to assemble separate posts into a single “thing” which then goes out via email. It’s definitely a lot of “hand-rolling”. A lot of hand writing my notes and mind-maps for each post, typing the posts, the quotes, ordering and organizing everything, handling links and images and… zoinks, it’s a lot. I love it.

Taking a fresh look at Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work. Book is smashed open to a quote from Russell Brand—with a notecard where I’m about to add this quote to my collection. I’m a bit of an audio nerd—I don’t stream from services, rather stream from the countless CDs that I keep in the ‘ol digital library. I like to start from a movie soundtrack, and then spread out into all the artists. Rubik’s cube, glass of water. Pink postit reminds me: “There are no miracles, there is only discipline“