Welcome to a new version of an old newsletter, "Vacuum"
After starting and stopping several newsletters and mailing lists and weblogs over the past few decades, I’m at it again. There are just too many things to be said that require a format longer and more thoughtful than random tweets, but not as impersonal as a blog. To that end, I’m rebooting a mailing list that I first had in 1999 called “Vacuum”. The idea is to reconstruct a little community of thoughtful people on the Internet, especially a group that has some experience with how the net has changed, and bounce some ideas in the form of essays off of you all.
Writing in Markdown
One of the themes of this newsletter is tools that give you superpowers. I’d like to convince you that the Markdown markup language, wielded carefully, can be one of those super tools. Markdown lets you edit text that looks good when you’re writing it as well as when you’ve published it, and by its relative simplicity also empowers you to turn your text into data to published or analyzed effectively.
What is your superpower?
What’s your superpower, and what routine do you do to invoke it? I am convinced that everyone has a superpower, a special set of talents and experiences that they are especially well placed to get exceptional outcomes. You might not know yet what that superpower is, but once you discover it there’s an opportunity to build on top of it. In the past I’ve picked up some of my own little habits that accumulated over time that look like superpowers, in their own way.