Life @ NCP

She owned a mixing bowl designed to please a cook with a round bottom.

Read the above sentence one more time, and try to make sense of its meaning. How can a cook has a round bottom, does it mean big bottom? Aha, it is the round bottom of a mixing bowl, not a cook’s. That is unclear. The phrases are ordered incorrectly, mixed up in its meaning and context, but it can easily be fixed by re-ordering and adding a comma: She owned a mixing bowl with a round bottom, designed to please a cook. There you go. For many, writing is already difficult, but editing is even harder. Fortunately with this book, Bruce Kaplan provides an easy-to-understand rules in common situations to edit and to improve your writing.

The table of content is below for you to peruse:

Why learn editing? the benefits for you
Lean and clean: what editors do
The golden rules: for professional writing and editing
Ruthless people: what makes a good editor?
Be active: avoiding the passive voice
Split personalities: beware the split infinitive
Time for action: turning nouns into verbs
Small and pesky: two words that slow the pace
Nuisance value: more overused words
Is that so? how to avoid that
Every which way: the difference between which and that
Short is beautiful: avoid long sentences
Briefly speaking: a guide to shorter, simpler words
Pronouns: how to avoid confusion
Feeling single, seeing plural: more tricky pronouns
Collective nouns: which verb form do I use?
Clichés: avoid them like the plague
The future that is to come: the tautology trap
Stating the obvious: first cousin to the tautology
There, there: a few little words we can do without
Putting on the style: be consistent
Punctuation: basic rules
Contractions: when, and when not, to use them
To quote or not to quote: direct and indirect speech
Tricky, tricky: serial or cereal?
The plurals trap: don't get caught
Under a spell: a handy guide to difficult words
Oops: the misplaced phrase
If only: be careful to say what you mean
Now, see here: look out for this common error
Kid stuff: avoid slang
Former, latter, last: how to keep order
Get to the point: how to write a news story
Heads, you win: how to write a headline
Editing checklist: a last round-up
Hot tips: things to remember
And finally: set your standards high
Resources: things to keep handy

My favourite section is ‘every which way’. It is a section that explains the difference between which and that. Which introduces a non-defining clause, where the information within it can be completely omitted from the sentence. For example: The car, which a teenager was driving, crashed into a post. In this sentence, the main information is that the car crashed, and the driver, incidentally happened to be a teenager.

On the other hand, that introduces a defining clause, where the information within the clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence. For example: The car that the teenager was driving crashed into a post. In this case, the main information includes the fact that a teenager drove the car. If you are not sure whether to use which or that, Kaplan advises to always use that.

Another favourite section of mine is the ‘two words that slow the pace’. According to Kaplan, the words of the are not needed. Rather than writing the manager of the bank, I should write the bank manager. Another example, rather than the owner of the horse, I should write the horse’s owner. Brilliant! It is more succinct, easier to read and more pleasing to the eye.

I finished reading the book within an hour, it is a short book, and it can easily be skimmed, and you will find loads of hidden treasure as you do. Later, I plan to at least gloss over this book every time I need to edit my own writing, it makes it so much easier to do, almost like priming my brain to by having a checklist for editing. Editing made easy, indeed.

Thank you Bruce Kaplan.

When the sound of the gusting wind woke me up at 1 am this morning, I sat up in bed. I couldn’t sleep anymore; the noise was intolerable, like the constant sound of waves hitting a beach. On and on, with no end in sight. My memory traveled back to when we visited a small boutique hotel on the waterfront of Curaçao, where I heard the same rhythm, except now I was in my own flat, 14 stories above sea level.

I looked outside the window, hoping for something interesting. Farsta train station shone brightly. A train left the platform, illuminating its surroundings briefly with the warm, soft, fluorescent light of its windows. As it faded in the distance, dullness returned: an empty car park, empty roads, and dark apartment blocks. Everyone was asleep except me.

I wished it would snow, like last week. The snow didn’t stay, but I was hooked for hours by the window watching the beautiful snow flakes as they fell, as they melted away to nothingness when they touched the road. In May when we moved in, the sales brochure had painted a tantalising picture of how the scenery would look like in winter. The trees were all white, filling up spaces where the roads were absent. On the horizon, there were two gleaming frozen lakes, inviting me to visit. A lovely backdrop that we had fallen in love with.

I have never missed a Christmas in Sweden. Every Christmas for the last three years, I have chosen to be in Stockholm, but every year I have never received a white Christmas. I hate January and February for their abundance of snow, because snow should only appear in December. As a former southern hemisphere inhabitant from Australia, that was what we were missing with our Christmas, we were told. We had the delicious ham, the hearty roast and the bountiful presents, but the Europeans told us, “it’s never the same, because it’s not a white Christmas”. Bloody hell, I am in one of the coldest countries on earth but where is my white Christmas?

The morning came and I walked out of my apartment. The path I usually walked on had turned into a slippery slope, buried deep in snow. I called out for Min’an to take a look, and soon after he came with a red snow sleigh. Very unlike him, I thought. He never fancied the white stuff. Nevertheless we rode the sleigh on the slope, woo hoo! It was only for a short time but it felt satisfyingly triumphant when we reached the bottom. I had not done that in my life ever, I thought.

And I was right – I still had not done that yet in my life. Because it was just a dream. I woke up and sat up in bed again, this time at 3.36 am, just about two hours later. The wind was still howling like wolves. I slumped back to bed, struggling to sleep with all my might.

Would you snow please, Stockholm?

The second quarter for 2015 just ended and it’s been pretty chock full for us. After an unsuccessful attempt to get to London we’ve decided to stay in Stockholm for the next few years!

Apart from some certainty about where we’ll be six months from now (we really didn’t know at the beginning of Q2!), it also means we can make some concrete decisions about where we’re staying and working on. There’s no avoiding the winters, but at least it’s sunny outside for now.

Now that we’ve been in Stockholm for just over 2 years, and likely a few more, we might as well make better use of it. Inspired by Eat your Kimchi, we’re starting a small side blog to write up some of our experiences in Stockholm. Something we’ve affectionately titled Stuck in Stockholm.

Getting to know the people and the places here has not always been a walk in the park, and we’d like to share some of our experiences navigating the foreign landscape that is Stockholm.

This is for you, the new migrant stepping off the boat, ready for danger at any turn. Whether for work, for education, or more commonly as it turns out, for love, you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and do the hard yards to call yourself a resident of the land… at least for a few months.

Check it out, comments are welcome with more posts to come.

We’ve also got our own spot now, so if any of you are passing by Stockholm you’ve got a bed in this part of the world. Here’s a shot of the living room.

Not the most creative bunch as you can tell 😉 Not only does it look uncannily similar to our place in Sydney, it’s even filled with the same things!

To be fair, they aren’t the same set of games but they will be after our next trip down under.

On the topic of board games, we’ve also put our small boardgame scanning app Gamenauts on the app store, play store, amazon store and more to come. Don’t even get me started on the horrigible release and approval process…or the horrors of how much of a cut they take. >:(

Much learning here, we’ve actually had the app out on the Google Play store for a while now, but it’s only after Marty spammed a bunch of board game groups on Google+ that we started seeing a spike in numbers.

It’s still a modest number of downloads, and even less in actual revenue. Let’s just say it isn’t enough to cover a decent meal here in Stockholm, but the upward gradient has been steeper than anything we’ve had so far. It’s also hard to describe the feeling you get when you see someone else writing about you, in a different language no less!

I’m going to cut the shameless hawking here and spare you the agony. There’ve been a few more things we’ve been up to though, so stay tuned!

My phone broke again this morning. It wouldn’t turn on. And this was not the first time it had happened. Minch had to replace the battery just one month ago, and I waited for two weeks for the battery to come, all while using a replacement mobile.

I thought getting home from work would be the most boring ride today. What would I do? My laptop was useless without the internet, which I relied upon my phone to access. As I arrived on the platform, I missed my train, just. The next train to go home was in three minutes.

So, I found a place to sit down and started drawing to kill time. I drew a lot last year, but this year not so much, not sure why. Maybe the negativity I suffered at work has started to affect me long-term. I was drawn to the garbage bin on the platform. It was an easy pick, cylindrical shape at the top, cylindrical shape at the bottom, connected by a rectangular block. Before I knew it, the train had arrived. I hurried into the train and I continued my drawing, this time with different target objects. Everyone is very interesting when you look at them closely.

Then I heard it, “Enskede Gård”.
I looked out of the window, the announcement lady wasn’t lying, it was the Enskede Gård station.
“Shit”. I hopped out of the train immediately.
I had taken the wrong train. Thanks to the garbage bin I drew. I cursed myself. I had to take a train two stations back to take the correct train. Bah, the returning train would only be there for another eight minutes. Eight minutes! I thought I would be home by now.

I glanced over the railways to the scenery of residential houses around the station. There were lots of apartment blocks, with plenty of greenery surrounding them. I gathered my attention to a park nearby, looking for shapes I could easily draw. My next target object was a playhouse for children next to the sandpit. Drawing the shapes took me just several minutes, and that times goes by very fast, I love it, I was in the zone. I forgot about anything else, and it’s such a distant feeling. I feelit sometimes when I write, but never as intense as when I draw. After I finished, I re-drew the playhouse, this time in just two minutes. This was today’s deliberate practice.

The train carried me back to the connecting station, only for me to miss another train in the right direction to get home. But this time rather than sighing, I knew the drill. I took my pencil out and I drew another target object. The lady was sitting in the waiting area and her jeans had a huge hole that exposed her knee. I was worried that she would think I was creepy, looking at her legs rather intently.

Before I knew it, the right train arrived, and I got home. I had spent a good 40 minutes getting lost on the metro, though it felt really quick.

Minch fixed my phone and by the next day I was back in action without a hitch. Using the internet during the train journey was not going to be a problem anymore, but I will certainly be drawing more often instead.

All this cryptic error messages really says is…use the 64 bit version of Windows, not the 32 bit as the cordova docs suggest.

As a tip to prevent much pain, suffering and tears, the Windows Phone emulator will NOT run in in a nested virtualisation environment, at least not when I tried it on Virtualbox. e.g. it won’t run on a mac running Virtualbox containing Windows.

Bootcamp or something similar is probably your best bet for running it on a mac. Or a windows phone device, though Parallels users might have better luck.