Inside View

New Face

THANKS TO MODERN MEDICINE, I'm slowly getting a face that does not bleed when brushed by a mask. If you follow my InsideView.ie blog, you know the back story already.

Safe Travels During COVID on @irishrail. But.

I FEEL SAFEST aboard Irish trains, especially after a 90 minute journey on a crowded Buseireann bus. I wonder when we will feel safe dropping masks because I don't think COVID will ever be as simple as the common flu.

My Unverified Enewetak Story. I Survived.

IN 1979 AND 1980, I flew C-141 missions onto Enewetak atoll. I watched the island being prepared for the return of the natives and I carried fresh topsoil into the island on one mission and carried a palletised skip of dirt off of the atoll.

Professional Treatment h/t @BonSecours

I SPENT 90 MINUTES in Cork's Bon Secours Hospital on the first Monday of October 2021 to get a troublesome skin growth removed. The procedure went well and even though I know I'll have a black eye for a week, it's been worthwhile.

How I was influenced during COVID

I CHANNELED MOST of my attention to trusted voices throughout the COVID-19 phase of my life. Those voices often appeared in the apps on the second screen of my phone (above). Jamie Knightley points out that during the same time period, COVID redefined the value and influence of traditional PR.

Told to Get a COVID Test

THE REPORTING OF more than 600 daily cases of Covid-19 for the first time since late April was a “cause of concern”, the chief medical officer warned today, the same day we were notified by a close contact that she had COVID. A few hours later, a text message offered us a tracking number to be used when we presented to take our COVID tests a few miles away.

Journaling with Speech Bubbles and Keyboard Entries

I TEACH JOURNALING to Media Writing students and for the next three years I plan to enhance that creative process with a few specific tips. One is to require a double spread page of speech bubbles and another task is to show a page that emerges from text input on a keyboard. I believe the Media Writing Journals I will review will have greater creative content at the end of the semester.

Deaths During Christmas

ON THE RUN-UP TO CHRISTMAS, we've had several sad events unfold near our home. First, an arthritic cat adopted us and was deemed so ill that our vet recommended putting her to sleep. Then a neighbour a few doors down died of a heart attack in his home. And now a steady parade of cars park outside our front door as an elderly man works his way through his final days of terminal cancer.

My first two hours with @RoamResearch

I USED A TIMER to allow myself two hours for my first hands-on routine with Roam Research, a note-taking and personal knowledge management service that I used to produce this InsideView.ie blog post. I'm confident that if I could save at least 15 euro a month by focusing my note-taking inside Roam because I could reduce my annual consumption of Moleskine journals (see samples in my photostream below). I'm still going to use pen and paper for some of my sketchnotes but the recurring tasks were always more efficient using a template. During my two hour stint with Roam, I created several of those templates and I linked them to the left hand panel (seen above) that displays when Roam launches.

Planning for a World without an Office Water Cooler

ONE OF THE BIGGEST concerns I have about being locked out of work is losing any sort of internal communications. Since we cannot meet casually around a coffee dock or chat at a table in the canteen, I'm trying to use apps (in the screenshot) that give me meaningful online pulse points.

Listen to "Planning Better Home Screen Newsfeeds E494" on Spreaker.

As I write this, I realise I have no watering hole for staff communications. We have no listserv, no online commons area. More than ever, we need to leverage Microsoft Teams.