I've taken up sketchnoting recently, and I love it! So, what is sketchnoting? Why is it useful? And how do you get started?
The answer to the first question is pretty straight-forward: Sketchnoting is a way of note-taking that involves not just notes, but also sketches. Mike Rohde, the godfather of sketchnoting, defines it as taking rich visual notes, mixing handwriting and drawing to create a more appealing set of notes. And that's exactly what it is.
Friday, July 6, and Saturday, July 7, I'll be attending the Stoos Stampede 2012 at De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam.
One of my favorite quotest from Jack Welch, former Chairman and CEO of GE, is "An organizations ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage."
The Stoos Communique agrees, and states that organizations can become learning networks of individuals creating value and that the role of leaders should include the stewardship of the living rather than the management of the machine.
I have been using the Jack Welch quote as a tagline in my email for over 10 years. It has taken me at least as long to grok its real depth and truth. It has taken me a decade to move from learning from books and courses, to learning from anything and everything. To move from process improvement to system improvement. To move from work-life balance, to just balance. To move from being a true professional, to being authentically me.
Seems a bit vague right? Maybe a little example will help. About a decade ago, I got myself a nice podcasting rig, and started recording stuff. Nothing special, just me talking about things that matter to me, not unlike keeping a spoken diary like they do in Star Trek. It reminded me of how, as a child, I recorded stuff on an old tape recorder that I requisitioned from my dad. I didn't publish those recordings. The idea was to get some practice before launching my project management podcast. Then, I changed jobs and procrastinated the hell out of my rediscovered hobby. But lessons are repeated until learned, so recently, I got the recording bug again. This time, to make sure I mash-up my passions, I've made sure to immediately volunteer my recording services to anyone. First up, the StoosCast!
A week from now, on July 9, I'll publish the processed audio files from Stoos Stampede 2012 right here on this website as two podcast episodes.
After the StoosCast, I intend to revive the Xebia Podcast, and offer my services to lean/agile conferences to make sure I follow through this time. Also, I intend to start recording stuff at some of my client's in-house events.
So, how does that help me grok the Jack Welch quote and the passage from the Stoos Communique? The revival of my field recording hobby, is but an example of a trend I'm spotting in my life and some of the people I meet professionally. The trend is to approach work and other stuff holistically. I've always loved reading, recording, broadcasting, writing, and drawing. But somewhere along the way in my professional career, I stopped doing those things because of self-imposed rules and time-constraints focussing my efforts on other forms of, mostly professional, development. Now, I'm (re)integrating those passions into all aspects of my life. And I'm having a lot of fun doing it!
UPDATE 20121010: My month-long trip to the States, followed by a full-immersion return to work have so far prevented me from editing the audio I recorded at Stoos Stampede. In case you're wondering: Yes, I am still planning to publish the finished files. Probably by the end of this month...
UPDATE 20130216: Finally got round to scrubbing, editing, and uploading the Stoos Stampede interviews.
Yesterday, I had a momentary lapse of reason and bought a T-Mobile Web'n'Walk stick to be able to connect to the internet whenever and wherever I want.
The girl in the T-Mobile store in Groningen was very helpful and sold me the last Web'n'Walk they had, sending me on my merry way to the hotel where I discovered the stick didn't work. At least, not out of the box it didn't.
Figuring this had to be an issue with the Mac software T-Mobile ship with the stick, I decided to be sensible and call customer service. Their first response was "I'm sorry sir, we don't support Mac." At which point I curtly stated this was unacceptable as I had asked this in the store (and gotten a yes), and checked it on the package (which states they do support Mac). The inevitable cop-out was a callback appointment that they failed to live up to.
Which left me to solve the problem myself. As it turns out, it's very, very easy. Here's what I did to get the app to install.
Everything installed without a hitch. And after installation the software even updated itself to the latest version.
So it would seem T-Mobile ships a faulty installer with otherwise working software. Very easy to fix that. But they haven't yet.
Today, my iPhone suddenly got hotter than usual and drained its battery within four hours after being fully recharged overnight. I thought nothing of it, but when I got home and tried to recharge it, a message was displayed stating I should restore the phone using iTunes.
A bit annoyed at the inevitable loss of all my data, but otherwise not worried, I went about restoring my three month old iPhone 3GS 32GB. And failed. Three times.
Every time I ran the restore it ran, slowly but surely, all the way up until the end of the progress bar on my iPhone. Only to return the message in iTunes "The iPhone 'iPhone' could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (1002)."
At first, I thought it might have something to do with the firewall. So I turned it off. But turning it off had no effect.
Then, I created a new Administrator account with a fresh copy of iTunes and unplugged all peripherals except the iPhone cable. Still no effect.
So now my iPhone is dead and I'm effectively phone-less, sad, and sorry I bought a phone that lasts for three months with a two year contract. I'll take it to the T-Mobile store tomorrow where I fully expect to be charged €50 for them to tell me they can't help me either.
Up until now, I was such an Apple fan-boy my cognitive dissonance took care of issues like flaky connectivity and short battery life. But now the phone has stopped working altogether it finally dawns on me: the iPhone is a beautiful wanna-have piece of technology that sucks. Big time.
And I still have to pay for it for another 21 months... Yay!
After reading lots of reviews, I decided to buy FiRe Field Recorder from AudioFile Engineering today. It won out over the also excellent iProRecorder from Bias, the creators of Peak, because of its integration with SoundCloud. I'm amazed with the sound quality and the ease of use. My very first recording came out good enough to post here. I didn't even have to put it through Levelator!
20091030 FiRe Field Recorder Review by laurensbonnemaI had lunch today with a friend who's a bit of a photography-nut (which is a Good Thing mind you) so naturally we ended up discussing iPhone photo apps. He recommended CameraBag to me to do some sweet image post-processing on the iPhone. Trusting his judgement, I downloaded it as soon as I had a chance to, i.e. ten minutes after lunch. And it rocks! With CameraBag, you can add filters to you photos before you upload them or send them. It's a simple and fast way to improve you plain vanilla iPhone pics.
Of course, using CameraBag got me thinking what else I'd been missing out on so far. After some googling and review reading, I've come up with the following must-have iPhone photo apps in addition to CameraBag:
Of course, I do most of my post-processing and editing on my Mac. For that, I use Photoshop Elements for post-processing of RAW files and correcting stuff like lighting and red eyes, Pixelmator for all edits I can't do with Photoshop Elements such as advanced filtering, and Photomatix for creating HDR images.
And now, let's go take some photo's...
UPDATE 2009-10-16: In addition to the aforementioned iPhone photo apps, I've completed my collection with the following apps:
