Early in my career, when I worked in online customer service, I applied for an internal position change, so I could be a trainer. My parents were teachers, and I thought I had picked up a thing or two from seeing how they approached education. As a supervisor, I focused on coaching, particularly with positive reinforcement and talking through ways to continue to improve.

I didn’t get the job, and I’ll never forget the reason they gave me.

“You aren’t enough of an ogre.”

Today a Twitter friend mentioned mince pies, and all at once a million memories rushed to mind.

My Nana made mince pies for holiday meals, and they were a special treat. I haven't had mince pies often since then. I think I found some when I studied in Scotland. Both of my Nana's parents had emigrated from Scotland to Canada, so I found other familiar dishes when I studied at the University of Aberdeen as well.

Shepherd's pie, that was a tasty one. Fluffy mashed potatoes floating on some beef and veggies.

I logged in on my phone to write this post. When I headed upstairs to go to sleep, I told myself I would write tomorrow. That would be okay.

Last night though, I said I would try to post something once a day each month. So while I should be asleep, I am jotting down a few notes.

Those are the tradeoffs sometimes. Sleep or keep a commitment. That is one truth. The other is that there were other moments during the day that I spent on relaxing on destressing, and I could have used those moments for something to write instead.

Over a year ago, I wrote my last post on this site. Time to change that.

Technically, at this moment it is Monday, November 2, but as I haven’t gone to bed for the night yet on November, I’m going to call this day one of November 2015.

Some people use November to write a novel: NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). November is also NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month.

One of the key features in OS X Yosemite and iOS8 is Continuity.

Continuity allows easy handoffs of features between your iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac or Mac Pro. Answer a phone call or text message on your laptop. Even if you don’t have wi-fi, you can easily create a wi-fi network from an instantly created hotspot from your phone.

This has always seemed like a somewhat handy feature, but a bit quirky. Sure I guess I’ll answer a call on my computer rather than pulling out my phone?

If you work on almost any site design, you’ll run into a fun little problem: short pages, and the footers that hate them.

Footers should be at the bottom of the page. Not just hanging out at the bottom of your content, but at the foot of your viewport. Nice and orderly, always in the same spot, no matter the height of the page, rather than just wandering to and fro up the screen like barbarians.

A former professor from my alma mater shared this article on Facebook: “ABD Company: What’s worse than getting a Ph.D. in today’s job market? Not finishing one.” by Rebecca Schuman

The article takes a good look at the challenges that can lead to an incomplete dissertation, in particular the anxiety about seeking perfection before turning in work for review. One line struck me in particular:

I’m getting ready to launch a new design for my personal site. It’s not perfect, and it’s not complete.

There are more improvements I can make to the design, more types of content I’d like to add, more landing pages, search options, better taxonomy: a whole host of things. I could work to get all of those things done before I launch, and it would be quite some time before I launch.

Or I can take a deep breath, accept the imperfection, and get ready to press the launch button.

Izzy wrote this using Draft, which I've been using lately for all of my writing.

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She got most frustrated when she tried to touch the laptop's screen, and it didn't do anything.

It amazed me how quickly she has picked up using technology, even with only a few minutes of access every so often.

We had to lock down our iPhones and iPad, because she was using Siri to access all sorts of apps on the phone, including Target shopping.

A lot of people have been sharing a story about a teen who suggested the federal government could save millions of dollars by switching all fonts used in printing to Garamond.