Time for yet another post wishing I had an app to do a certain thing...

Over the past few months I've been waffling between written (with a pen) note-taking and taking notes via a computer.  These options both have their trade-offs.

Analog note-taking requires a notebook to take notes in.  I've been using a Classic Squared Moleskine with grid paper for note taking, and I'm not a fan.  I was previously using a notebook that worked with my Livescribe pen, which had a much better feel to it than the Moleskine, but now that I've started in this Moleskine notebook, I feel like I have to finish it out.

I've given up on the Livescribe pen, not because it's not useful, but because the software support isn't great.  I have a whole notebook of stuff stored in my pen, both written and audio, and the only way I can get it out currently is by using the notebook and the pen together, which is cool, but doesn't acheive the goal of getting my notes digitized.

My favorite physical notebook right now is the Rocketbook.  The Rocketbook is designed to be used with Pilot Frixion pens, whose ink can be erased. The whole Rocketbook can be placed in the microwave with a mug of water, and after a minute or two, the whole notebook is cleaned out of ink.  The Rocketbook has a grid design on the pages and a QR code that is used with their app to digitize the notes and send them to any note-recording application they connect with.  It's an interesting feature, but one that I haven't been able to make good use of.  My favorite characteristic of the notebook, however, is one that is provided by the notebook's need to be safely placed in the microwave: The binding is a plastic, snap-together set of rings that allows the notebook to be laid perfectly flat (take that, Moleskine!) or be folded back onto itselff without the typical problems of spiral-bound notebooks.  I have not yet opened my Rocketbook Everlast (a Rocketbook made with plastic pages that feel like paper) shipment, but I think they've changed the binding to a standard metal one, which is rather disappointing.

Regardless, it's pretty useful to be able to take notes on the computer.  Last week, work issued me a new Mac, so I've been reevaluating my position (again) on what app I want to use to take notes.  I primarily use my note-taking app to record meeting notes and to plan out actions.

Previously my go-to app has been FoldingText.  I love this app, and wish that they'd keep supporting it.  Alas, they've basically abandoned it for work on some other task-based app, rather than focusing on their outliner.  FoldingText is neat because you can use markdown to write notes, and while you're typing them, they are properly formatted. Links turn into links, and heading font sizes get big.  You can also fold the text at any heading, which makes taking notes all onto th same file reasonable, since you can focus on only the section that you want at one time.  The todo-list features and tagging are pretty useful as well.

FoldingText doesn't work so well these days, though.  Since I've had to reinstall, I need to re-register the app, and finding the registration code that works with the useful beta version is proving difficult.  Plus, like I said, they're not really supporting the app, and the features I was using were largely provided by custom-written plugins that, since I lost my old Mac to battery issues, are now gone.

I've considered using a few note-taking-specific apps.  Evernote is always a top suggestion, but I simply can't stand its interface.  Combined with its yearly price to do some of the useful things it does (text recognition), I'd really like to stop using it at all.

I've considered nvALT, which seems a capable note-taker.  What I dislike about nvALT is that although it lets you take notes in Markdown, they're not presented in a formatted way.  You can always run the markdown processor, but this defeats the purpose.  The value is that I can see the text differences while I'm taking notes; I have no need to format the notes after I've taken them.  This holds true for many, many note-taking apps that I've tried based on wanting to have my notes stored in a text file, but organized and searchable together inside of an app.

If I give up on file-based storage, which isn't too unattractive since it would be cool to do things like include images or drawings in my notes, I have a few other options.  I've tried Notability, which is neat because it works on the Mac and iPad and has a mode that lets you easily interleave text, image, and drawing.  But for a pure note-taking app, Notability is pretty lacking in terms of organization and just raw text note ability.  I find myself fiddling with the settings a lot before I can even start writing text, and that's just a no-go.

I tried Together, which isn't a terrible app on the whole.  It lets you take notes into templates, which can be (at least) either markdown or rich text.  The markdown side again doesn't have formatting, but the rich text isn't too bad.  The organization tools in the app are fiddly, though.  I'm not sure how to explain it, but it just feels wrong.  nvALT may not do the realtime formatting I want, but at least the UI isn't filled with a ton of taggy/colory cruft.

The latest app I've acquired is Bear.  Bear is interesting because it does do live formatting in markdown style, although it doesn't seem to save the individual notes as separate files. (It may actually do this in its own storage, but I haven't looked yet.)  It does have the interesting ability to embed files and images into a note, and it imported my old FoldingText note without much trouble, sans the special formatting I used from my custom-coded plugins.  The interface is quite light, and has easily-accessed modes to reduce the screen clutter.  Organization can be done by marking a note with hashtags inline, which is nice. The built-in task list feature reminds me a lot of Evernote's; not great, but present.  Linking between notes is very, very cool.

If I could improve Bear, I would make a few changes.  I would make it possible to fold notes at the headings.  Checkboxes should be completely markdown-like, rather than graphical, so that you could add empty brackets to the beginning of each item in a list, and clicking on them would fill them with an X, something like on Github.  It would also use @-tag labeling on some things, like marking completed tasks automatically with something like  "@done:2017-05-11", and allowing you to search on these with more complex search options.  And of course, saving each note as a separate file (with any supporting embedded files) that could be shared would be great.

It would be great to get some integration between the Rocketbook app and Bear.  If I could get my written notes into Bear easily (and OCR'ed!), that would bridge that gap in a very useful way.

For now, I think I will try Bear.  There is at least one other note app like Bear that I want to give a shot, and having the name of the kind of applicaton I want will make it easier to perform seaches for applications like it.  I am enthusiastic about using these new tools, and hope they make a diffference to my daily operation.

I am reminded again how making friends as an adult is hard.  Maybe it was hard as a kid, too - I can't remember having friends as a kid, really.  It's strange that it's so difficult.  One must assume that this is because other people must not want to make new friends, or because people are are very particular about the kinds of people they want to be friends with, even though with how hard it is to make friends, you'd think people would be more open to less ideal friendships.

I may have mentioned before about how even when it's possible to find an adult couple with kids our kid's ages, there may be weird things that make it difficult to relate.  Some differences in religious belief, food tastes, politics, or economic status.  Usually, we're the ones that don't go to church, eat weird food, and are - between the two of us - mostly liberal (even though I registered as a Republian after the 2016 election, which is a whole different topic), and that ends up being part of what turns people off somehow.

But there's also finding common ground about which to have even an initial conversation.  I find smalltalk simultaneously tedious and essential for this purpose of feeling out people or even just passing the time when you're stuck with them for a while during some event.

Recently I've evnjoyed my conversations with people in a hotel elevator.  For whatever reason, these micro-conversations were always reasonably interesting.  They're short, because, you know, "elevator".  They're low-stress because you're never going to see this person again.  There's always something going on in the hotel for some reason, so there's hardly ever nothing to make smalltalk about.  And everyone at the hotel is away from home on some adventure, which makes for a generally happy attitude.  I found this an interesting observation.

Why I find it so difficult to strike up a conversation with people I've known for years via the kids' school functions is beyond me.  Where I seem to get stuck is when talking about the kids.  I think our kids are generally pretty great.  (Don't tell them that.) As a result, I like to talk them up.  It's not so much that they're better than everyone else's kids, but that they do things that I find interesting, and I don't do a whole lot that I can surprise a potential new friend with on a first conversation.  But in the end, sometimes, it turns into a, "Well my kid does this"-battle, unintentionally, and that doesn't lead to a useful outcome.  I suppose I could listen a bit more and respond with questions about their kids instead.

I'm amused and disheartened by the idea that my grade school friend-making instincts, which were terrrible, are what I'm using to make friends as an adult.  I wonder it there's something that can be done about that.

There has been a recent torrent of releases of streaming TV services by companies both expected and unexpected.  Since they mostly provide a free 2-4 week trial, I've signed up for all of them! Here's what I found.

Sling TV

I've been signed up for Sling TV for a while now. Sling was a good service for getting me the channels that I could not get ofer-the-air.  The antenna in my bedroom is connected to a device that can stream TV throughout my home network.  Supplemented with Sling TV's live TV from a handful of channels, things didn't seem like I was missing cable TV so much.

Sling's major downside is that they are missing key local channels.  For whatever reason, I can only receive 2 of the 3 major networks via Sling, and the one that's missing is the one that my antenna can't pick up due to this stupid Philadelphia-area VHF/UHF issue.  I simply can't get channel 6 over the air.  Nonetheless, since I primarily was using this to supplement my antenna, I most often use Sling to watch SyFy and CNN.

Sling also doesn't provide DVR functionality for TV shows that you want to "record" for later viewing. This is handy for when you don't really want to sit in front of the TV while the show is airing, something that I would do very rarely anyway.

Sling TV runs on my Apple TV, iPhone, Roku, and XBox One.  There is no smart TV app for Sling on my LG TV.  You can watch Sling TV on the computer pretty easily, which is good for travel.

YouTube TV

Hulu TV

Playstation Vue

It has been over a year since my last blog post was published, and yes, this does feel a bit like a confession.

I have a handful of new habits I'm trying out.  Maybe blogging again will stick.  I think there may be a change coming that will facilitate this, but I'm not yet ready to say what that is.

I wish I had more time to go into some of the topics in my head in detail, but for now suffice with a list:

• Note taking on the computer - Apps to use, which ones work, why, and what I'd really like instead.
  
• Lessons learned while building Brewfest - How the new site is designed and built, and why WordPress code simply no longer factors into my life.
  
• Building constant insanity - A continuous process of always surprising others and expanding my horizons.
• Re-learning to solve problems - Using the ToC Thinking Process to solve problems, by first figuring out how to use the ToC Thinking Process.
• The diet, again - A new strategy for getting fit, this time setting a long-term goal and putting money into it.

Well, I signed up to coach Riley's soccer team this spring.  It's been fun so far, but the same issue I dealt with every season in the past seems to be rearing its head again -- how to do substitutions.

Every season, I think that I would like to concentrate more on the live game than having to deal with the substitutions, and if I could have someone else take care of that task, I'd have less on my mind during the game that I'd be able to participate/encourage/coach the players more.  Alas, I have not been able to accomplish that.  Still, I have spent a lot more effort this season trying to keep my head off of the bench and in the game.

When you've got parents instructing their own kids from the sidelines, kids on the bench begging to go back in at positions that they can't play (after 7 seasons of coaching, I swear that any player that asks to play at striker has no business doing it), and a live ball in the game, trying to keep track of who's at what position and who's been subbed where is a living nightmare.  It's absolutely the worst part of coaching soccer, in my opinion.

I used to use this app called Soccer Dad, which is pretty neat, but isn't always the easiest to use on the field.  It actually does a lot that would be great if I could concentrate on only that instead of that and the game, like keeping track of scores and assists, and tracking time played along with substitution data, and aggregating it for the whole season.

My main problems with Soccer Dad are not obvious.  You'd think the drag-n-drop features of the app would be easy on the field, but they're not.  To access who is subbing where is a bit of a chore.  If you want to work the game a little different than the app expects, it can resist what data you're entering, which is not what you want while everyone's screaming and the opponent has the ball.

With 14 players playing 9v9, there's just no way to juggle 5 kids on the bench without some kind of aid.  And so, as is typical with me, I've come up with a design solution.

I want a way to do a number of very basic things, and so I have this list of requirements:

• The entire plan must fit on a 3×5 card.
• It should be easy to start a new game with starting positions.
• It should be obvious what players play well in what positions so that they can be subbed into the correct place.
• There should be a way to indicate alternate starting positions in case some intended starting players don't show up.
• It should be possible to see at a glance which player is currently in a particular position.
• It should be possible to see at a glance what position a player is currently playing.
• The card should indicate the frequency with which a player is subbed so that they don't spend a lot of time on the bench.
• The card should be fully operable with a pen/pencil.
• There should be room on the card for parent phone numbers in case of an emergency.

I want to be able to run the entire game from a single card, and not have to think too hard about where a player can best play or who they can sub for (based on their time on the field).

Initially, I created a card with a simple grid.  Players were listed down the left side, and I wrote in their positions in the grid boxes.  This proved inconvenient, because you couldn't tell at a glance who was in a particular position.  As I subbed in players, I couldn't update the card fast enough to keep it accurate, and the whole thing became useless before the end of the first half. There was also no obvious way to keep track of how many times a player subbed, or where a player on the bench best fit into the game, and thinking about these things cost me precious time in the game.  (Seriously, I've missed many major plays because I had to mentally negotiate which player to put in where.)

My current iteration is a bit more thought through.  Instead of a freeform position entry, I've created a full grid with the positions as labels across the top.  Since we play 9v9, we usually set up as 3-3-2, so there are only 2 defenders and the goalie.  There will be cases in the future where we'll need to play 3-2-3, so I'll probably need to update the design a bit, but I'll save that until after we've tested this design.

Each player and position cell has six sub-cells.  This is merely to keep things organized as the game progresses.  In those cells, I write in an "O" to represent the player playing that position.  When the player leaves that position, I cross off the "O" with an "X".  If a player is on the bench, they get an "O" in the "B" column.

To set up the game, I simply put an "O" in the first box of every green cell.  These are the marked starting positions for the game.  If one of those players doesn't show for the game, I can cross off their row, and replace their position with one of the players from the bench.  This is done by playing the benched player in the green outlined cell instead of the bench.  This may take a little mental work, only because the missing player may not have a specific benched player that replaces him.

When the game is in play, I can scan down the "B" column for who is on the bench, then across to the positions that are colored in purple.  These are positions that the player has shown competency in.  I can see which players in those positions need relief or hadn't yet been subbed out by seeing how many marks were made in their row.

Before our throw-ins, when I need to decide who from the bench is going in where, I can set this all up by writing in the "X"s and "O"s for where I want players to go, then tell them who they're going in for and at what position.

My only concern right now is playtesting this design.  I'm anxious to have a non-rain day to try it out.  I'm a bit worried that having to make four marks in different places on the sheet might be too much to do during the game, but I'm hoping that the ease I'm expecting this to enable when figuring out substitutions will be worth that time.