Why I Am Not Interested In Benefits

Harriet Harman is a skilled and experienced politician, and if she feels the need to support her political opponents' policy to reduce benefits to claimants  I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she knows what she is doing.  As to the issue itself, I am inclined to be generous when it comes to benefits.  But I don't really care too much about it.  I am quite sure that a journalist who put his mind to it could come up with a highly outrageous story of people living dreadful lives funded by the public purse.  And likewise, J.K.Rowling is not going to be the only example of someone for whom benefits provided a vital help in an otherwise highly productive life.

Jazz Notes

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I came across an idea a while back called Morning Pages.  The idea is aimed at creative writers and is rather prescriptive. You have to write three pages of free form prose first thing every morning.  I liked the idea but for me it wasn't free form enough.  So I have adapted it.  I try and do it fairly early in the morning but I already have other things I want to do first.  So I might leave it to lunchtime. I also don't have a set time allocated to it or a set amount I need to write.  So I have taken the free form but and really run with it.  In light of this I call them my Jazz Notes.  Basically, once a day I just sit down with a reporters pad and pencil and jam.

Focus Blocks

Steve Pavlina's blog has not been offering me much value lately - though I always read anything new he comes up with. But today he managed to deliver something really handy and right on time. I am at the stage with developing my business where finding the time to get things done is critical.

Will Smart Phones Change The Way We Write?

I am writing this blog post was just walking down the street. Well I say writing it, in fact I'm using the voice recognition software built into my smartphone. As it happens I have just come back from a meeting where lots of people were getting up and giving talks. I was taking notes on those talks, and it is very noticeable that we have a very different way of writing things down to the way we speak them out loud.

How Different People See The Same Thing

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Today there was a vote at the UN about whether or not Israel has committed war crimes during its invasion of Gaza.  You'll know what I think about the situation if you follow my Twitter feed - but I was interested in the pattern of voting.  The US opposed investigating.   It was as far as  I could see from a quick glance the only country to do so.  Most European countries choose to abstain, and the rest of the world wanted to carry out an enquiry.