Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Road cycling fan no longer

I watched Miguel Indurain as a kid. He is a legend in cycling. When I first started watching cycling, Indurain was already on three Tour wins with a fourth on it's way. I watched him take his next Tour title and I was hooked on the sport.

We didn't see the likes of another Indurain until Lance Armstrong came on the scene. After chalking up a succession of Tour wins, there was just no stopping him. There was an aura about him. He just looked like he belonged there. Now today, his credibility as a sportsman is in tatters, but Lance Armstrong isn't the only guilty party to disgrace the sport. His is obviously the most widely covered and most damaging to the sport due to the number of Tour wins he achieved in his career, but there are others.The last 15 years of cycling have seen an increase in the frequency of doping scandals that have been reported. Year after year, riders are accused of doping and what's surprising to me is that riders are still testing positive for banned substances. Enough is enough.

For me the sport has been dogged by too many years of scandals which in turn have led to rumours of corruption higher up in the sport. My love of road cycling is definitely over. As a Brit I should have been over the moon to see Bradley Wiggins on the top of the podium in the Tour last year, but I barely paid much attention to it.

Maybe in a few years, if the sport has really tidied up its image then I'll watch again. However, it's no more road cycling for me.

Mind mapping to outlining

I've been trying to get back into using mind mapping on a daily basis again. I've used it a couple of times this week already. So far so good.The problem I have is that the largest notebook that I am using is a tad on the small side (think half of A4 size) and therefore I can only fit two levels of branches in a single mind map.

And that's the recurring problem I have with mind mapping. You need a big workspace to mind map effectively and that means nothing smaller than A4, but I tend to favour smaller notebooks as a daily scratchpad and dumping ground.

Which brings me to outlining. It's fit perfectly with the small notebooks I have and it although it's more linear than mind mapping, I can still organise stuff in a hierarchy much like mind maps do.

Which is better to use though?

Matt Gemmell recently blogged about his array of writing tools. While my selection is somewhat smaller, I thought it was still worth writing about the tools that I use.

I keep a list of writing ideas in my notebook. During the weekend I pick out what I want to write about and do a quick outline of the article in my notebook.

Once I have an outline for some posts, I enter them into
Pop. This is a minimal text editor for iOS that lets you write and copy what you have written. That's it. No saving of files, sharing or syncing. It is everything that many apps dread to be: featureless. This is where Pop excels though. A minimal interface means that I can just open the app and get on with writing. I tend to use Pop when I'm out and about. For jotting ideas down or expanding on my initial outlines, it's hard to beat. You just open and write.

If I'm at home I tend to use
Plaintext on my iPad. It has a similar minimal user interface to Pop but also includes syncing to your Dropbox. At this point I liked to have a hard copy of my writing, so that I can have it available on my laptop.

Finally there's
Mou. I tend to do final edits and drafts with Mou as well as use it for composing emails and writing guides. Mou has some nice features like split views, word counts and of course it's a Markdown editor, so I can add headings, lists and hyperlinks easily.

I'm also looking at
Scrivener for longer forms of writing such as short stories and novels. I've already done Nanowrimo once and would love to do it again this year.

I initially tried to use web based writing tools for a while there, but the simplicity of native applications like the ones I have mentioned are hard to beat.

This was supposed to be this year's theme but I opted for being independent instead in light of my recent foray into the world of freelancing. I thought I would take a minute to outline what being present is, and why I was going to make it my theme for the year.

The world we live is increasingly dominated by technology and distractions. Ironically what you're reading right now is a distraction, but let's just say it's a good distraction.

Anyway, technology and distractions. Being a dad of two kids means that you are inevitably in the presence of other parents and their kids a lot of the time. One thing that I notice is the number of parents that are glued to their mobile phones when they are in the presence of their kids.

On one of our frequent trips to the driving range last year, I decided to treat my son to a round of crazy golf there. During our game, I noticed that the mum in the family in front of us was checking her phone every minute. She spent more time with the phone in her hand than her putter. The sad part was that while her kids were trying to impress her with their putting abilities, the mum was too pre-occupied with her phone to even notice. She wasn't being present with her kids.

Being present for me means your undivided attention. Since observing this I've become more aware of the time and attention I am giving to my family. I generally turn my phone off at night now after dinner. It's so that I can be present at home, mentally and physically, without any distractions putting me off. I don't want my kids to remember me as having my head buried in a phone all the time. I want them to remember all the times that I was present for them.

It doesn't always work out this way though, but I'm learning to schedule my freelancing work during the day and to limit my time using technology at night and at the weekend. Being present might not be this years theme for myself, but I'm more and more aware of it every time I go to check my phone or pick up the iPad for a quick surf.

Back on a regular reading schedule

The last couple of months have been a bit hectic in our house with an unscheduled job hunt for myself and the holidays were just coming up. With everything that was going on during this time, I stopped reading for a while. What's surprising about this is that I'm a pretty consistent reader, maybe making my way through a couple of books a month.

Things are settled down now so I've started getting back on track with my reading again. I picked up where I left off with Post Captain, and I'm digesting a couple of freelancing books this month. I'm sticking with one fiction book and one or two non-fiction books every month.

In the future I'm hoping to publish my progress through the books throughout the year, so watch out for posts on the blog and possibly reviews as well.

Always be learning

One of Patrick Rhone's latest posts is his list of tools for daily learning. Patrick's list is a great place to start for daily learning and I'm glad to see that there's a couple of tools there that I use myself. I've never considered them as learning tools but that's what they are really. Tools for discovering new things and learning.

My take on it is to always be learning. Never stop learning.

My first exposure to computer programming came when I was about ten when my Granpa bought an Atari 800XL. Right from the moment he got it, he immersed himself in programming books and magazines. As a kid you wouldn't give it any thought, but now when I think back I think it was amazing that given my Granpa's age, he was still learning on a daily basis.

This way of thinking that you should always be learning is something I've tried to do for the last few years, but along the way I usually forget things. I've learned the hard way that I need to keep a journal for such things so that I can review it at a later date.

My daily learning comes in the form of technical things like programming languages, web frameworks and other web development related topics. I've also read up on topics like decision making, writing and of course I'm reading through the Aubrey-Maturin series, which his made me much more knowledgeable of 19th century naval warfare.

The benefits of daily learning are just that. Daily learning. Being that bit more wiser on a daily basis. I'll never stop reading, writing, learning and discovering new things. Having a blog to write about my learning experiences when I'm in my seventies? I hope so.