My favorite novels
Bob Bly, one of the world’s best copywriters — or at least one of the world’s most influential due to his books on copywriting — posted a list of his 10 favorite novels (and one play). That made me think about the novels, poetry, and plays that had a big influence on me and my writing style. My criteria was that the books had to be ones that I loved at the time, reread several times, and which I still love now. So here’s my list, organized the time period in which I first read them: Childhood Where the Wild Things...
read moreQuick tip for Gmail users
If you use Gmail and access other email accounts through your Gmail account, you probably know that Gmail checks the other accounts based on how often they get email. So if you don’t get a lot of email through the other accounts, they might only get checked once an hour. That can be annoying. You know that someone has sent you an email, to one of those other accounts, and to get it you have to manually go into the settings and force Gmail to check the account. There’s no way — yet — to get Gmail to check those accounts,...
read moreSay bye-bye to bi- words
A couple times this week, I’ve come across issues with bi- words. The first time, it was “bi-monthly.” Now, is that twice a month or every two months? The second time, it was “bi-weekly.” Is that twice a week, or every two weeks? I’m just not sure. You see the problem, right? This is a great example of the Curse of Knowledge, which I often summarize as “just because you know what you’re talking about doesn’t mean anybody else does.” You simply can’t use these words to say what...
read moreNew website
Just launched the new carlthoren.com. For the past year, I had my site up on Apple’s MobileMe, which was easy to set up, but expensive and inflexible. For this new site, I used WordPress, which I love, in conjunction with the easy-to-use and modify Atahualpa theme. I highly recommend this theme: It’s the only one I’ve come across which provides a control panel with hundreds of design and site options that take care of the CSS for you. And if you do need to add some custom code, it’s usually obvious what you need to do....
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