Jamie Todd Rubin, Science Fiction Writer

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/06/10/reminder-im-writing-over-on-medium/

REMINDER: I'm Writing Over on Medium

Just a reminder that, while this blog isn’t going anywhere, I am transitioning my online writing over to Medium. I’ve already posted several new things there, and as I pick up steam, plan to do so more regularly. So if you are looking for new stuff from me, head over to Medium.

My Medium profile

Commonplace Blog

Going Paperless

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/04/22/going-paperless-on-medium/

Going Paperless on Medium

As part of the transition over to Medium that I wrote about last time, I have started to make my Going Paperless series of posts available over on Medium. I have created a “Going Paperless” publication, and I’ve migrated roughly a quarter of the posts so far.

In migrating these posts over to Medium, I considered whether or not to update them. The earliest posts are from way back in 2012, and many no longer represent how I work today. I decided to leave them in their original form for 2 reasons:

They show how I once worked, and the entire series provides an evolution of how and why I changed my habits over time. This might prove useful to others.

Some of the way that I used to do things don’t work well for me today, but they still might work well for others.

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/04/16/transitional-notes/

Transitional Notes

I occurs to me to that I have not posted here since back on my birthday. I apologize for that. I’ve got a lot of things going on. Here are some transitional notes to bring things up-to-date.

Retired as Evernote Ambassador

If you haven’t already seen the news, Evernote has transitioned their Ambassador program to a new Community Leader program. I took this opportunity to retire as Evernote Paperless Ambassador. A few points:

I am still an Evernote user.

I retired mainly because I felt like I didn’t have anything new to offer. My posts, while well-received, have begun to repeat themselves.

The program transition seemed like a good time to retire.

I want to use the time I spent writing about Evernote writing about technology more generally. More on this later.

Transition to Medium

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote about “stagnation and transition to Medium,” something that I ultimately didn’t follow through with. Today, I am more serious about it. I have been spending time formulating a plan to transition my writing from this WordPress blog over to Medium. This transition will take place over several months, and there will be a period of time where the posts that I write will appear in both places. But eventually, this blog will retire and my writing will continue on Medium. I have several reasons for making this transition:

My time is growing increasingly limited, thanks to being busy at work, and with the family. This site is a self-maintained WordPress site, and it does take work to maintain it. That time could be better spent writing. I don’t have to maintain Medium the way I do this site. So that’s a plus.

I like Medium as a writing platform. I like its simplicity, its UX/UI, and its discussion model.

I like the kind of pieces that I read on Medium, and I want to be a part of that. My own take is that Medium represents (or had already subsumed) traditional blogging.

Sometimes, I just need something new. Medium represents that new thing for me.

My transition plan here is not complete, but my goal is to be doing this kind of blog writing on Medium exclusively beginning in early September. With a roughly five month transition, and plenty of reminders along the way, it should make it relatively painless for those who want to follow me over there.

Technology writing

I haven’t been writing much at all lately. A while back I announced my retirement from science fiction writing. I am transitioning this blog over to Medium. I’ve retired as Evernote’s paperless ambassador? So what do I plan on writing about?

I suspect, although I am still working this out, that much of what I write will be tech-based. I want to write more about the influence of technology. I want to write more about technology on a micro (vs. macro) scale. That is, that ways that I use technology to improve myself. I’m still fascinated by quantified-self, and have been working on a project in this regard, borrowing concepts from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others. I’ll have more to say on this at some point in the future. I want to write more about coding for wider audience. Coding skills today are like home maintenance skills. Have experience with some of those skill sets can reap large benefits.

Of course, I also want to write about the things I read about, and other miscellaneous things that appear here on this blog from time-to-time.

In conclusion

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/03/27/two-score-and-four/

Two Score and Four

I turned 44 today—two score and four. It marks only the second time in my life that my birthday falls on Easter Sunday, which is a fabulous illustration of the vagaries of the lunar calendar. (The first time my birthday fell on Easter Sunday was in 2005.) The kids woke me up this morning with happy birthday and happy Easter greetings.

Forty-four is not a milestone like 40 or 50, but it holds a special significance for me nonetheless. Three months after graduating from college, I started a job at a company that I still work at today. I was 22 years old on my first day at work at the company. A little later this year, at 44, I will be have been at that same company for 22 years—half of my life. There is something both amazing, and frightening at the thought that there may be a 22 year-old who started with the company, who was yet born when I started there, back in 1994.

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/03/25/mysteriously-anonymous-dentist-and-doctor-offices/

Mysteriously Anonymous Dentist and Doctor Offices

I had to call my dentist office recently to reschedule an appointment, and the call reminded me of a strange phenomenon I encounter any time I call a dentist or doctor office. The phone rings once, twice, and then a spritely receptionist says, “Dentist office.” Sometimes, they said, “Dentist office, how can I help you?”

This happens when I call the doctor’s office as well. Whether it is my doctor, or the kids’ doctor, a phone call to the office always results in the receptionist answering, “Doctor’s office.”

Understand, I am not being deliberately coy here. I am not trying to hide the name of the dentist or doctor’s office by anonymizing it in the generalized form “Dentist office” or “Doctor’s office.” I am telling you, word-for-word, what the receptionists say when answering the phone.

The point is that they don’t identify which dentist or doctor’s office you happen to be calling. As it turned out, when I called to reschedule my appointment, I gave the receptionist my name, and she was puzzled, “I’m sorry Mr. Rubin, but we don’t have an appointment on record for you. The last appointment we have on record  is from back in 2011.”

I had called the wrong dentist’s office, something I would have known immediately if, instead of identifying themselves, vaguely, as “Dentist’s office,” they had said, “ACME Dentist’s” (Now I am being coy.) I would have know instantly that I had called ACME Dentists by mistake.

Doctor’s offices do this to. This a thing, apparently. It is as if a built in assumption exists that if you are calling the number, you know name of the office which you are calling, and there is no need to repeat it for clarity. Except, this isn’t how most businesses operate over the phone. Most businesses are eager to remind you who you have reached. It is a convenient way of confirming that you have reached the right place.

I called Virginia EZ-Pass this morning so that they wouldn’t deactivate the transponder in our second car because it hasn’t been used in the last year. I was greeted with a “Welcome to the Virginia EZ-Pass Customer Service line.” Yup, I’d come to the right place.

Why is it that dentist and doctor offices never identify themselves over the phone? Is there some good reason for this that I can’t fathom out of pure common sense?

Perhaps the dentist and doctor offices are onto something with their attempts at anonymity. Whenever they call me to confirm an appointment, the number displays on my phone as “Dentist” because that’s how I have it in my contacts. Perhaps, from now, when they call, instead of answering, “This is Jamie,” I’ll respond will equal anonymity.

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/03/16/the-perfect-time-machine/

The Perfect Time Machine

Books are the perfect time machine. They can take you into the past, allow you to travel to pivotal times and places in history. And yet, they have the perfect protection against paradox: books provide no ability whatsoever to change the past. I thought about this recently while reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s outstanding No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.

Biographies seem particularly susceptible to time travel. You hope back to some past era, and for a period of days, jump through the life of some famous person. You learn their family roots, and you are there long before the subject is famous. You are there when they are born, a pink and wrinkled baby, wailing for warmth and milk. That baby, often in surroundings, will change the world in some important way.

Long biographies take a particular toll. You come to know the subject better than they could possibly know you. You are, in fact, invisible to the subject, the way a good time traveler should be, never giving any hint that you are there, observing. Regardless of the subject, a certain anxiety steadily builds up with the foreknowledge you have that the subject lacks. I am currently reading Carl Sandburg’s massive Lincoln: The Plains Years and the War Years, and when Lincoln was born, I thought: this little baby will go see a play one day, and that will be the end.

The intimate knowledge that time travel brings can often make you feel as if you are friends with the subject. This has happened to me on several of my jaunts back to colonial America. Twice I’ve gone back to witness John Adams’ extraordinary life. He lived a long life, but on the day he died, July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I found myself saddened almost to tears. Thomas Jefferson died on the same day.

At times I want to shout at the book: “Don’t go to the play!” I plead with Lincoln. “Don’t head down to Brazil!” I tell Theodore Roosevelt, knowing that the injuries and illness he’ll sustain on that journey, to say nothing of the bullet he took giving a stump speech, will lead to an early grave.

But books have built-in protections from the paradox of time travel, protections that cannot be beat. No matter how much I yell and plead, Lincoln cannot hear me, will never hear me, and he will head off to see “Our American Cousin.” Roosevelt will plow unheeded through the Brazilian jungles.

Time traveling through history and biography gives the pleasure of meeting amazing people. Yet at the same time, as we grow to know these people, we also know we have to say goodbye to them. And unlike the subjects, we know the where and when of that goodbye. The foreknowledge lends a weighty anxiety that is the baggage of any foray into the past that we take. It is as inescapable as the knowledge of our subject’s fate. Still, I am an addict. I can’t help but travel back. There are just so many people to meet. So many events to witness.

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/03/15/chasing-comets/

Chasing Comets: Retiring from Science Fiction

I decided that I wanted to be a science fiction writer sometime late in 1992, and I wrote and submitted my first stories in early 1993. In the 23 years since, I’ve lost count of the stories I’ve written, the number of submissions I’ve made, the number of rejections I’ve received. In that 23 year period, I sold 11 stories, and twice as many pieces of nonfiction.

Over the last year or so, my interest in science fiction has waned. While the most recent stories I’ve sold have had elements of science fiction, they are not essential to the story. I haven’t read the science fiction magazines in a long time; I rarely pick up a new science fiction book these days. This has nothing to do with the genre, and everything to do with how my interests have evolved over time.

At the same time, I’ve been having a blast with my blog writing—when I can find the time to do it. The blog writing does not pay in the same way that science fiction writing does, but money was never my primary driver for writing. I write because I enjoy it.

Then, too, my science fiction stories, while good enough to be published in the pro magazines, never made waves. And while I firmly believe that with enough practice, I could continue to improve my craft to a point where I am better equipped to write good stories, I can no longer afford the time that would be required to make these improvements.

I am not giving up writing, but I am acknowledging that there is some writing that I am no longer interested in doing. I’ve done my best, and made it farther than I thought possible back when I started. But, like a pitcher who no longer has command or speed, it’s time for me to call it a day. There are other things I want to do.

I want to spend more time with my kids. “Daddy, why are you always working?” the Little Miss said to me this weekend, when I was typing away at the computer. I had no good answer for her. I feel guilty each time my kids ask me to play, and I tell them it will have to wait.

I plan to continue writing about the things that interest me here on the blog, although I suspect you won’t see me writing much about writing; or science fiction. Those are subjects that I have covered more than enough. I also plan to continue writing nonfiction pieces as the opportunities to do so arise.

None of this is to say that I am giving up science fiction forever. I find that my interests are cyclical. Some of those cycles are short, like the period of the moon’s rotation around the earth. Others are much longer, like a comet that passes by once in a century. I can’t predict when, or if, this particular comet will return, but if it does, I’ll look to hop on for a ride.

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/03/14/ten-checkout-lanes/

Ten Checkout Lanes?

My local Safeway store has 10 checkout lanes. Nine of these are regular checkout lanes, and one of them is for self-checkout. The self-checkout has 6 stations where customers can tally their purchases and bag their own groceries.

When I visited the store Saturday afternoon to do some shopping for the week, just two of the 9 checkout lanes were open. While waiting in line at one of the two open lanes, it occurred to me that I had never seen more than three, or perhaps four lanes open in all of the times (hundreds!) that I have visited the store.

With time to kill while I waited, I wondered why grocery stores are built with 10 checkout lanes any more these days. When my local Safeway was remodeled five or six years ago, it came with ten bright and shiny checkout lanes to replace the ten less shiny lanes that were bulldozed when the old store was torn down. In all of that time, even of the busiest days, like Thanksgiving, I’d never seen more than half of the nine lanes open.

If I were a reporter, I might have located the store manager and asked if they knew of a time when all nine regular checkout lanes were in operation. I’d have been surprised if they could give me even one instance. It is understandable. After all, nine open lanes means paying nine people to attend to the checkout lands. It means needing to pay for additional baggers, and if there is never a need for more than four or—rarely—five lanes, then why pay for nine people?

But that begs the question: why have nine regular checkout lanes at all? Why not have five lanes, and use the space currently occupied by the surplus lanes for additional stock? Passing through the store, even at a busy time, those idle checkout lanes stand out.

Often, the longest line at the grocery store is for the self-checkout lane. It is the lane I use most frequently. But it seems to me there should be some kind of additional discount for using the self-checkout lane. You swipe your own merchandise and bag your own groceries. And what benefit does the lane provide? It might make checkout faster if more of the regular lanes were open, but with only a few open at any given time, people gravitate to the self check-out lanes.

Self-checkout is often like airport security. If you get behind a frequent-flier, you can move through security quickly (presuming that you yourself are also a frequently flier). There are people who can move through self-checkout quickly, and those who seem bewildered by the entire system. They look as though they have no idea how they found their way into this line in the first place.

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/03/07/future-reading-in-2016-and-beyond/

Future Reading in 2016 (and Beyond?)

The post I wrote on Saturday on what I’ve read so far this year got me thinking about the kind of reading I have been doing lately. While predicting what I will read next week or next month is always a challenge—mostly because my future reading is often driven by my current reading—I scribbled out a list of books that I would like to be able to read in the near future. Many of these are books I’ve been wanting to read for years, but haven’t around to. I list them below, exactly how I listed them out last night, in the order they came to me.

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H.W. Brands

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years by Carl Sandburg

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marinates

The Baseball Codes by Jason Turbow

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen (not scheduled for release until the fall of 2016)

The Story of World War II by Donald L. Miller

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

John Quincy Adams: American Visionary by Fred Kaplan

The Second World War (4 volumes) by Sir Winston Churchill

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (4 volumes) by Robert A. Caro

The Abominable by Dan Simmons

Jefferson and His Time (6 volumes) by Dumas Malone

End of Watch by Stephen King

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

The Civil War: A Narrative (3 volumes) by Shelby Foote

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain

Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella (a re-read)

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/03/05/reading-in-2016-so-far/

Reading in 2016, So Far

I have had this tendency to read a lot of fiction at the beginning of the year. That trend seems to have ended this year. I have complete 7 books in the first 9 weeks of the year and all of them have been nonfiction.

I Remember Me by Carl Reiner

I Just Remembered by Carl Reiner

This Time Together by Carol Burnett

Even This I Get to Experience by Norman Lear

My Happy Days in Hollywood by Garry Marshall

What’s So Funny? by Tim Conway

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

As of this writing, I am well into my 8th nonfiction book of the year, No Ordinary Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin. And honestly, there is no end in sight. Waiting in the wings, I’ve got:

The Tides of the Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness by David Gelernter

The Story of World War II by Donald L. Miller

The Second World War by Sir Winston Churchill

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

The Baseball Codes by Jason Turbow

There are recent works of fiction I am looking forward to, including:

Arkwright by Allen Steele

Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer

End of Watch by Stephen King

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/03/04/tinkering/

Tinkering

With the baseball season nearly upon us, I have taken to tinkering with my baseball simulation ideas once again. This time, my vision is a little more clear, at least with respect to what I want to do with the resulting data.

For those who have no idea what I am talking about, for years, I have been fascinated with the idea of writing a baseball simulation. Many of these simulations already exist, but I find that building it myself helps me learn. Also, my goals are somewhat different from the goals of the existing simulations:

My simulations are not interactive. That is, you don’t play the manager. There is a bootstrapped starting point, and the simulations run based on that starting point.

The output of my simulations is data.

Part of what I am doing is writing tools to make use of the data.

Ideally, I’d run 100 years of well-simulated baseball, and have a century of data to play with.

That had been the point of my tinkering now and then over the years. With a century of data, all fictional, it would be interest, I thought, to see who held the all-time home run record, who had the most stolen bases, how many perfect games were played, etc.

More recently, I’ve had another idea that goes beyond this. I had so much fun writing my last published story, “Gemma Barrows Comes to Cooperstown” that it occurred to me that with the data from 100 years of simulated baseball, I could begin to write a series of fiction (alternate universe?) baseball stories about the various seasons, games, standout players, etc. I wouldn’t have to make up the game situations, since my simulation data would provide all of that.

I have also turned to a more tool-based model, and have thus started calling my simulation a “baseball OS” since it is entirely based on command-line tools. I’ve created a GitHub repo for this which I am making public for anyone who wants to peek at what I am working on. Right now, there’s nothing more than documentation, because I haven’t yet rewritten the stuff from last year to fit this tool-based model. I am working more on the framework, the goals I want to achieve, and the milestone features with each release.

This may seem silly, esoteric, or a waste of time, but I can’t begin to express the delight I have in working on this effort in little chunks of time here and there. It relaxes me, teaches me new things, and keep my coding chops as honed as I can manage. I imagine I derive the same pleasure from this effort as someone who works with wood making furniture, or someone who relaxes by painting landscapes.

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/03/01/going-paperless-2-0-searching-in-evernote-part-4-of-4-where/

Going Paperless 2.0: Searching in Evernote, Part 4 of 4: "Where?"

In last week’s post, I described how I take advantage of the native date searching capabilities in Evernote to quickly find notes and documents in a specific time frame, answering the “when?” question of searching. This week, in the final post for this mini-series, I take the “where?” question.

Location services

Evernote can automatically capture the location each note is created. This requires location services (on Apple devices) to be enabled. Without location services enabled, capturing location has to be done manually.

Notes on a map

If you’ve enabled location services, you can get a nice picture of where your notes were created by going to the Atlas view. On Windows machines, the Atlas view may not be visible on the sidebar by default. To make it visible, go to the View menu, click the Left Panel option, and made sure Show Atlas is checked.

By default, I can see a summary of places where I have created notes.

I prefer to look at this on the full map, however. I can this by clicking “All Notes”. What I get is a map of the United States. Scattered across the map, you can see counts of notes that I’ve created in various places.

This map is zoomable, and as I drill into different areas, you’ll see the counts split into more detailed representations of exactly where I was when the notes were created. For instance, back in 2013, I attended the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop for writers at the University of Wyoming, Laramie. Zooming into that part of the map, I see my notes break down as follows, across the campus:

The note flags tell me how many notes where created in each location. Clicking on the flag and then clicking the View All Notes option takes me to a list of all of the notes created in that location:

Descriptive searches

On Evernote for Mac, it is possible to search notes by place using “descriptive searches.” Descriptive searching is a way to do natural language searching, which gets translated into an Evernote-style search for you.

Once, while visiting Maine, I jotted down the name of a few plants that I wanted to remember to add some verisimilitude to a story that I was working on. Of course, once I returned home, I had difficulty finding the note because I couldn’t recall the name of the plants. So I used a descriptive search as follows:

plants in castine

Castine being the name of the town that I was in when I made the note. When I typed this search into Evernote’s search bar, it translated it into a descriptive search:

By clicking on the descriptive search option, I got a list of matching notes—which happened to be a single note, and the very note that I’d been looking for:

Practical vs. Fun

“Where” searches are probably the least practical searches that I do. While I occasionally search for something by location, I can usually find it through other means. For instance, I could have found the note on plants by searching for notes between the dates that I knew I was visiting Maine that summer. I would have had to scroll through a few more notes, but I would have found it.

Still, I think it is fun to browse notes in this fashion from time-to-time. Location gives notes an added dimension, beyond that of just the timeline that I normally think of when I think of how my notes are organized.

And there are a few practical uses. For instance, when I park my car in a parking garage at the airport, I will snap a photo into Evernote of the parking zone in which I am parked. Because I have location services turned on, I end up with the exact location I parked my car, making it easy to find when I return from my trip.

Going to a new restaurant, I’ll create a note with the name of the restaurant, and sometimes jot down what I ordered. With location services turned on, I get the exact location of the place so that if I need to remember where it was that I had lunch with an editor on the Riverwalk in San Antonio, I can locate the note and see where it is on a map.

But again, these tend to be less practical uses for me, and more fun.

Summing it up

When I search for things in Evernote, I tend to think of the “who”, “what”, “when”, and “where”? But these aren’t the only ways to search. Evernote has some powerful search capabilities that go far beyond the basics. I can search for notes by their content type, or by their input source. I can search for notes containing to-do items, or reminders. I can search for notes that I have shared.

When I scan documents, Evernote makes the contents of those documents searchable as well. It even does a pretty good job of making my handwritten notes searchable.

If you are interested in learning just how rich Evernote’s search capabilities are, I’d recommend checking out this document on Evernote’s search grammar. It goes into detail on all of the various ways you can search Evernote, including many that you were probably not even aware of.

If you have a suggestion for a future Going Paperless post, let me know. Send it to me at feedback [at] jamietoddrubin.com. As always, this post and all of my Going Paperless posts is also available on Pinterest.

Last week’s post: Searching in Evernote, Part 3 of 4: “When?”

Enjoy these posts? – Tell a friend

Recommending readers is one of the highest compliments you can pay to a writer. If you enjoy what you read here, or you find the posts useful, tell a friend! Find me online here:

Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Blog | Pinterest | Reddit | Medium | RSS

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/02/29/what-would-you-like-me-to-write-about/

What Would You Like Me to Write About?

Since I am buried in work at the moment, as I just mentioned, but hope to begin writing on the blog again soon in the next day or two, I thought I’d toss out a question:

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/02/29/busy-busy-busy-2/

Busy, Busy, Busy

Sorry for the lack of posts since Tuesday. Things have gotten very busy for me and when that happens, one of the first things to fall by the way side is my blog writing, as much as I enjoy it. I am working my way through this busy period, and hope to resume normal posting in a few days.

In the meantime, for those wondering, Part 4 of my 4-part mini-series on searching in Evernote should come out on schedule tomorrow morning at 9 am.

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/02/23/going-paperless-2-0-searching-in-evernote-part-3-of-4-when/

Going Paperless 2.0: Searching in Evernote, Part 3 of 4: "When?"

In last week’s post, I described how I narrow down searches for specific types of things, like forms, statements, or receipts. This week I am going to address the “when?” question. How I search for things by date in Evernote.

Notes on a timeline

Every note that goes into Evernote gets a create date. The create date is assigned at the date and time at which the note is first created. If you create notes more or less in real time, then by sorting notes by create date, you get a kind of timeline of notes. I find this timeline concept useful because it crosses all boundaries: notebooks, tags, note types. If I look at all the notes I created on a particular day, I get a nice picture of what happened on that day.

This notion of notes as part of timeline encourages me to put things into Evernote in real time. For instance, if I make a phone call, I’ll create a note at the time I make the call. No need to jot down the date/time of the call in the note. It’s captured automatically as part of the note and becomes a part of the overall timeline.

Setting “Create Date” to match document date

Although Evernote sets the create date of a note to the date/time at which the note was added to Evernote, the create date is not written in stone. In the Windows and Mac clients, you can change the create date.

Why would you ever want to change the create date of a note?

I do this all the time when entering scanning documents into Evernote. I do it so that the date of the note matches the date on the document. For instance, I might receive a letter in the mail dated August 3. By the time I receive the letter, it is August 10. After scanning it in, I change the Create Date of the note from August 10 to August 3, so that it matches the date on the letter, like this

There are 3 reasons I do this:

It keep my notion of a “timeline” consistent.

It accurately reflects the information contained in the letter.

It makes searching by date much, much easier.

Searching by date

Evernote has powerful date searching capabilities. It can search dates absolute dates, or relative dates.

Absolute date search

An absolute date search is one where you know the exact date you are looking for. For instance, if I wanted to find all the note created on March 27, 2015, I would run the following absolute date search in Evernote:

created:20150327 -created:20150328

The first criteria tells Evernote to search all notes created since 03/27/2015. The second criteria, the one with the -created, tells Evernote to limit the search to all notes created before 03/28/2015. In other words, the search returns just those notes created on March 27, 2015:

Absolute date searches are useful for when I am looking for something with a specific date. If I am talking to someone on the phone and they say, “It was referenced in the statement dated October 31, 2015,” I can run an absolute search to quickly narrow down what I am looking for.

Of course, it helps that I change the create date on scanned notes to reflect the date on the scanned item. If the statement was dated October 31, 2015, but I didn’t scan it in until November 5th, searching for October 31 won’t get me the note. Changing the create date, therefore, has become an important part of my scanning routine.

Relative date searches

Perhaps even more powerful than the absolute date search is the relative date search. This search allows you to find notes related to a specific date. The most common relative date search that I use is my “daily review” search, which looks like this:

any: created:day updated:day

“day” is a relative reference to “today.” The search is looking for any notes created since today, or updated today.” The “any” token tells the search to perform an “or” search (this or this) as opposed to an “and” search (this and this). The result of this search is all of the notes I created or updated “today”—that is, relative to whatever the current date happens to be. I run this search in the evenings to review my day.

Suppose, however, I wanted to do a weekly review? No problem. I would modify the search as follows:

any: created:day-7 updated:day-7

This search says to look for any notes created or updated in the last 7 days. The results of such a search looks something like this:

Relative date searches can produce some pretty cool results. Not long ago, another Evernote Ambassador, Seunghoon Park, asked if it was possible to show notes created a year ago today, or two years ago today. I replied with the following search:

created:day-365 created:day-364

This tells Evernote to look for all notes created since 365 days ago (1 year) and created prior to 364 days ago. Since I am writing this post on February 22, 2016, the results would be all the notes created on February 22, 2015:

You could store this search as a Saved Search in Evernote and on any given day, see what notes were created a year ago on that day.

Combining “when” with “who” and “what”

Generally speaking, I don’t have more than a dozen notes on a given day, but occasionally I do. Sometimes, I can’t remember exactly when a note was created, but I have general sense. In these cases, combining the various search tactics: who, what, and when, speed things up.

For instance, I can’t recall when exactly I received Kelly’s W-2 form, but I know it was in the last 2 months. I also know that I have received a lot of notes in the last 2 months (395 to be precise). Searching all of those would be too time consuming. So to find Kelly’s W-2, I ran the following search:

created:month-2 tag:taxes tag:kelly

The search is telling Evernote to look for all notes created in the last 2 months (the when) tagged “taxes” (the what) and tagged “kelly” (the who). That search resulted in a single match:

Instead of spending minutes searching through a larger set, I found exactly what I was looking for on the first try with a relatively short search phrase.

Date searching in Evernote has proven very effective for me in answering the “when” questions. It certainly helps that I’ve taken the time to change the create dates of scanned documents to the date on the document so that my searches are more accurate. Relative searches are also useful in my daily reviews, or to find out what kinds of things were happening in my life a a month ago, or even a year ago.

Next week, I will wrap up this 4-part mini series with the final search question, “Where?” That post will focus on searching notes by the location in which they were created.

If you have a suggestion for a future Going Paperless post, let me know. Send it to me at feedback [at] jamietoddrubin.com. As always, this post and all of my Going Paperless posts is also available on Pinterest.

Last week’s post: Searching in Evernote, Part 2 of 4: “What?”

Enjoy these posts? – Tell a friend

Recommending readers is one of the highest compliments you can pay to a writer. If you enjoy what you read here, or you find the posts useful, tell a friend! Find me online here:

Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Blog | Pinterest | Reddit | Medium | RSS

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/02/22/need-a-little-patience/

Need a Little Patience...

Physicist Alan Lightman had an interesting editorial in Saturday’s Washington Post. In “What the detection of gravitational waves teaches us about patience,” Lightman noted how:

I was struck by the fact that the leaders of the scientific project are well into their senior years… they have been working on this project, called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), for 40 years.

Lightman goes on to note that,

The world at large, and the United States in particular, has developed an unfortunate need for instant gratification. We not only live in the age of information. We live in the Age of the Now.

This resonated with me for several reasons, not the least of which is my current re-reading of Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The evolution of discovery in atomic physics is often compressed in text books, but Rhodes does a fantastic job of illustrating the decades worth of study and experimentation—to say nothing of the brilliant minds—that helped us see the structure of the atom. An entirely new field—quantum mechanics—emerged as a result. None of this happened overnight. Instead, scientists worked patiently for decades to gain these insights and understandings.

I think there is some truth to Lightman’s assertion that our need for instant gratification affects our patience when it comes to scientific discovery. When told of the cost of theoretical research, the response is often: “What are the practical benefits?” This question is a reflection of that need for instant gratification. Practical applications are not always known ahead of time, but as scientists such as Neils Bohr used to argue, such research allows us to better understand the rules of the cosmic chess game.

I find it convenient to stream movies and TV shows, and to receive same-day orders through Amazon Prime. But I also think we need to do a better job of teaching young students the process of scientific discovery. The scientific method does not serve instantaneous gratification. It is a cumulative process, often slow, and painstaking because it builds upon itself, and it is self-correcting. Hypotheses must be tested experimentally; results must be published and peer-reviewed. All of this takes time.

New Post has been published on http://www.jamierubin.net/2016/02/19/re-reading-books/

Re-reading Books

From time-to-time, I re-read books. Since 1996, 17 out of every 100 books that I read are books that I have already read. Over the course of 20 years, that adds up to over 100 books that I’ve re-read. I sometimes feel guilty about this. Why spend the time reading a book I’ve already read, when I could be reading something new? After all: so many books, so little time.

I recently started re-reading Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and in doing so, I realized that there are, for me at least, three good reasons for re-reading books.

1. I enjoyed the book

There are some books that I enjoyed so much, I look forward to re-reading them. For years, each April, I’d re-read Isaac Asimov’s 3-volume autobiography. Over the years, I’ve read those three books 13 or 14 times each.

I loved Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 (I haven’t watched the mini-series), and I especially loved Craig Wasson’s narration of the audiobook. I have read/listened to that book 5 times.

I tend to re-read a book for the sheer pleasure of it at times when I feel I need a bit of a mental boost, and the book that I choose to re-read always serves its purpose.

2. I don’t remember much about the book

I mentioned that I am currently re-reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I first read this book in December 2003. If you asked me what I thought of the book, I’d tell you that it was one of the best books I’ve ever read on project management. But the intervening thirteen years between my first reading, and my present reading reminded me of just how well the book integrates scientific development in historical context. I had forgotten all about this aspect of the book, and this time around I am finding it fascinating.

This is true of other books that I’ve read, and return to years later. I sometimes feel like I read books in a coma. I am totally in the moment when I read them, and can recall the gist of the book months or years later, but much of the details, even the interesting details, seem to abandon me. Returning to a book that I read, and don’t remember well offers new insights and surprises for things I’d forgotten, or glossed over the first time.

3. Additional context brings out new understanding

My re-reading of The Making of the Atomic Bomb cemented in my mind a third reason for re-reading books from time-to-time: additional context brings out new understanding. In the 13 years since I first read the book, I have read an additional 369 books. Those 369 books included many books on history and science. A few years ago, for instance, I read William Manchester’s 3-volume biography of Winston Churchill, which gave me the best education I’d received to-date on the Great War.

While reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb this time around, the context that I have in understanding the formative times in Europe, during which some of the scientists who played a key role in the development of the bomb lived. Having that context provides me with a wider scope of understanding than my first reading.