John Booze

Growing up I was highly introverted. To the point where I wasn’t comfortable having a conversation. I was always afraid I was saying the wrong thing so I often chose to be quiet. Fortunately, I enjoy learning and trying new things. One day, my friend Serena told me she recently took an intro improv class. She wanted to take the next class but she was occupied with singing activities the next semester. [Read More]

The last post pointed out how keeping a daily log can make a huge difference. Notetaking software can make this habit a lot easier. Joplin For my work logs I’ve been using Joplin for these reasons: You’re in control of the storage. This is important when critical business information may be stored in the notes. I’m using OneDrive. Open-source. Since this software is open-source, you don’t have the risk of it suddenly disappearing because a company was purchased or went out of business. [Read More]

I’ve now been working from home for 20 months. It’s been a learning experience, but overall I vastly prefer it to working in an office. Mark Seemann’s article on latency vs throughput was highly inflential in my approach. My big takeaway is the concept of oral culture vs written culture. My counter-move was to begin to write things down. When people would call a meeting, I’d ask for an agenda. [Read More]

Back in high school I played trumpet. I never really got any good at it. I particularly struggled with the relationships between the notes in a scale. During college, I took a music theory class and things started to make more sense. After I moved to Washington for work I wanted to incorporate musicality back in my life, so I decided to learn piano. This was when everything really came together. [Read More]

Last week’s post cautions learners to be aware of Illusions of Competency. A common Illusion of Competency is spending time on things you already know vs what you’re struggling with. This of course makes sense. We want to protect our ego and feel competent. So we just keep reviewing questions where we already know the answers. How do we take off the blinders and keep ourselves in check? Anki Anki is a great software tool to address this issue using a technique called Spaced Repetition learning. [Read More]

I highly recommend the free online course Learning How to Learn by Oakley and Sejnowski. The concepts and techniques presented in the course offer significant dividends for all future learning endeavors. This would have been invaluable to know in college, high school, and earlier. Like an investment account, the sooner you start, the more time it has to grow with compound interest. Illusions of Competency One concept that really stuck out to me was the concept of “illusions of competency. [Read More]

As I’ve previously mentioned, KEXP is my favorite Seattle radio station and they also organize live events. On October 24th, 2015 KEXP put on an event called “R” day at the Old Rainier Brewery. Beat Connection and Helio Sequence performed. While I was there a woman comes up to me and asks “Are you the guitarist from Motopony?” And I respond, “no.” Then she asks “Oh, well what band do you play in? [Read More]

KEXP is my favorite Seattle radio station. My car’s radio is practically locked into the 90.3 tuning. Different DJ’s rotate throughout the day spanning all genre’s of music. From blues to underground hiphop. Bands local to the Pacific Northwest or perhaps from a different country like Iceland. I totally appreciate that I’m constantly discovering new music from this radio station. Thanks to the realtime playlist, I can take note of what was played. [Read More]

An effective technique to retain what you read is to manually take notes. Throughout my school years, I used a mechanical pencil. I’ve come around to prefer pens. You don’t have to worry about lead with a pen and they write darker than a pencil. The downside is you can’t correct mistakes. A real conundrum for my inner perfectionist. PILOT FriXion Erasable Pen 🖊️ Well that’s what I though until I discovered the PILOT FriXion Erasable Pen. [Read More]

Like many others, I started working from home when the pandemic began around March, 2020. My primary computer usage changed from a desktop to a laptop. One of the big differences I noticed is that I’m less effective using a trackpad vs a mouse. For whatever reason, I’m not that comfortable using a laptop on a table or at a desk. I prefer to sit on a bed or a recliner so a laptop desk sounded like the solution for me. [Read More]