My Daily Work Journal, Diary, Secret Weapon

Writing is the key to power—organizing your thoughts on a day-to-day basis in order to know WHAT to do next and WHY. If you wrote for 7 out of the 8 hours of a work-day, and put in that 8th hour in a more brilliant way than any that have come before you, than you’ve accomplished more than the person who toiled for 8 straight hours without the benefit of clear thought.

Here are some of my latest daily work journal entries:

• Getting My Stories Right – Career Repositioning Everything’s in flux! To me, this is the most interesting sort of time in my career. I’ve made several successful transition leaps—print to webmaster. Webmaster to SEO. And now SEO to some yet-unnamed but more important evolution of my career—a culmination of everything. What is it called? I’m not precisely sure. I’m drawn towards some ...
• Daily Work Diary Thought-work For Getting Into The Zone Ah, welcome again to my daily work diary. Things got rough again recently with the loss of my wife’s grandmother. I’m deep in my first project in my new role where I work. I’m going to be out of the office for two days next week for a big company management off-site. And I have ...
• Life after SEO I need to get myself more productive on a daily basis at work. This is my daily work journal, and I should do better to keep that continuous, if not rather unpolished, story rolling out every day. A nice strong narrative keeps your work and your live moving along forward—the correct direction. Life’s little knocks ...
• My journey from squishy wizard to lightning bruiser Bear with me a moment. I’ll get to the squishy wizard stuff. Well, a new day has started. I’m going to keep on track with my daily journal in the Tiger code in vim. This is part of my old-school is cool agenda, and practicing what I preach. It is also to keep me on-track ...
• Planning My Daily Workflow I’m going to try to move my daily journal entry once again back into the Tiger code-base. This has a few advantages. It helps ensure that I actually go into the Tiger code-base every day, which is where much of my capabilities and productive momentum comes from lately professionally. But it also keeps me immersed ...
• Too Many Meetings Will Make You Dumb Okay, working in vim is something akin to getting prepared for the future. I’m starting to see why I’m so drawn to it. All the nuances, and working magic spontaneously without hardly thinking has unlimited parallels to the Epiphany vision in Vernor Vinge’s 2006 Rainbows End Hugo Award winning scifi book that I’m finally getting ...
• Trying to Re-Kickstart My Daily Work Journal I have some very good ideas, but it’s the end of November, and my last entry here was the beginning of October, and mid-September before that. And THOSE were probably still only journal entries too. However, my Mom did die of lung cancer, and all that. My kid did just turn 2, and once-in-a-lifetime events ...
• Navigating disruption – both personal and professional I’m definitely working hard to keep my grip on the rudder of the ship of life. I simply have to keep control and pull off some genius navigation to get myself out of the current dire straits and into some smooth sailing once again. This post is about thinking through that navigation chore. It may ...
• Tablet Form-factor Matters — I’ll take all three One-handed typing (with coffee in the other) is possible on the iPhone, but not the Nexus 7. I’m typing this on the NYC subway right now—Nexus 7 relegated to a coaster. But when I read books, up comes the Nexus 7—which is usually on me these days, whereas the iPad isn’t. The iPad I use ...
• Sudden Social Soil Liquefaction in SEO… When? Okay, I can feel client work heating up again. My last two days of journal entries have been flops. I’ve been put on another in-jeopardy account to do my ride-in-on-a-white-horse routine. Helping the agency with these needs pays for the rest of my time—preparing for SEO to become disrupted and helping the agency to navigate ...
• Deleting Animation Effects in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac Wow, I had a few straight days to mostly focus, and this is the result. Massive forward movement. My hypothesis about focus and momentum isn’t simply a theory. If you can dig in and get into the groove… get into the zone… for a few hours straight, then a few days straight, you can ...
• Implementing JSONPath in Python, with Examples Okay, I cranked out ezscrape features both for Amie and Jennifer on Monday and Tuesday. ezscrape is turning out as beautifully as I had hoped. It looks like today I may have the focus to do one of those videos. But because tomorrow is my last day in before my Colorado trip, I’m thinking better ...
• Damn, I need a product. Guess I’m an SEO. Today I was neck-deep in PowerPoint. I hate that. But like any exercise, I was able to get some value out of it. Having to put your thoughts into ANY structured format also helps you clarify your thoughts. My thoughts lately, as much as I want them to be about the future of SEO, keeps ...
• Converting GData Rows to a List of Dicts – racing to something announce-able Okay, I have so much to do, and this is a perfect example of so much time slipping by. How can I just hit this eztab thing home? I need to have something announceable more than I have lately, and the file saving/emailing stuff is hardly announced/being used besides Tamika’s special case use. And I’m ...
• Moved all the Twitter functions into ezscrape to put it through its paces Okay, now’s your chance to do something amazing. Don’t blow it. Functions like twitter really test all the various things I built for ezscrape. Move at least one twitter function over. Pshwew! Just did a bunch of error checking code to make sure that making new ezscrapes isn’t infuriating from errors, and that things like urlfield ...
• URL ReWriting with RegEx – the hardest part of easy screen scraping Okay. I slip in a bit of coding here and there at work. Progress is much slower than I would like interweaving it with meetings and such. But little breakthrough like yesterday keep me going. I’m working on a big, sexy feature nobody will “get” until it exists. And I gave to supplement these thing ...
• I finally grok the group and groups in Python RegEx API Okay, I’m up to a fairly tricky RegEx URL ReWrite puzzle in Python, and I thought I’d dedicate this journal entry specifically towards the solution. I had the sudden insight that the challenge I’m encountering could shed some light on match.group() for those struggling with it, plus nuances of Python that are both a huge ...
• I’m going to use Apache ReWrite Rules to handle URL rewriting in ezscrape tab Okay, it’s a bit frustrating to be off-plan—and now even off my off-plan plan. But it’s what I have to do to put food on the table. I am now in a race to re-demonstrate my value as a tool-maker that benefits everyone across-the-board. Now that Tiger is public, I can do this in a ...
• Focus Denied! Screw this – I’m installing 12.10 Quantal Quetzal An unfortunate fact of professional life is that focus is both a luxury and the secret to success. How well one reconciles that fact determines much about achievement. Single people with no kids can always take evenings and nights, and really apply a lot of personal time towards this end, but once you’re married—if you’re ...
• Inching Towards Easy Screen Scraping Tab / Python List of List of Dicts Okay, I’m going to try to make this a true Focus Friday. There are several particular challenges to overcome. This is my career we are talking about here. I must produce fairly regular inspired work. Okay, so how to get started? It’s a 1, 2, 3 step procedure again. Ugh! What point are you even at? ...
• Using a List of Dicts in Python For GData InsertRow Okay, yesterday I made remarkable progress on the next big thing in 360iTiger: the ezscrape tab. I got regular expression support in just before leaving yesterday, and today it’s already 3:00 PM, and I’m just getting started. It’s been a very different day today than the rest of the week—full of meetings and surprises. What ...
• Finally Using Python Regular Expression Named Groups For Easy Scraping NOTE: The headline is a spoiler. Yesterday I added support for a newurl (url rewriting) in the ezscrape feature, based on the fact that you may want to scrape from a slightly different URL than the one provided, such as getting YouTube channel upload counts, which is not visible on the main channel page, but ...
• Tackling The Unusual Implementation of Regex in Python I started some great work yesterday to add an easier way of screen-scraping to Tiger. I have to support Regular Expressions, and it brings up the whole nuanced mess that is Regular Expressions under Python. It’s not quite as bad as the urllib2 exception use cases ruining it for all the mainstream cases, but it’s ...
• Easy Pattern Matching and Screen Scraping for 360iTiger Okay, in my quest to reinvent myself online, or perhaps to invent myself for the first time, I have to decide whether what I’m trying to do is build personal brand, or just to be genuine doing my thing, and let all the personal brand stuff be the side-effect. Of course, the later is my ...
• Web Hierarchy is for Chumps – Here’s My Website Hierarchy Who is Mike Levin? I’m trying to answer that a bit better, because I feel that highly developed personal brands are simply the future of SEO—because social signals will EVENTUALLY displace the link graph, and those Likes, +1′s and Tweets will EVENTUALLY become qualitative in nature. Long-running social profiles in Gmail, Facebook Twitter become gold—maybe ...