I switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail back in 2006 or 2007; it took awhile to come to grips with it, but I loved some of its conveniences and never switched back. I kept the old Yahoo Mail account as a backup just-in-case account, but I only check it every week or so. I'm always hesitant when trying new Google products. I didn't try Google's Wave product when it was introduced (and which died a relatively quick death). The company's offhand attitude and abandonment of its Google Reader users really set the warning flag. I don't plan on keeping any notes in Google Keep. And as for Google Play's takeover of my beloved Songza service -- well, I'm not holding out any hopes for that. Songza did exactly what I wanted from it and I'd have cheerfully paid them for the service. I simply don't trust Google to do anything I expect, even if I did pay them.

But I have been trying out Inbox by Google for a month or so and I'm liking it. Based on what I've read, Google really wants to push users to Inbox and I thought, well, let's try it. They may one day turn off Gmail and users will wake up with Inbox. So it makes sense to start coming to grips with it now.

What I Like

• Inbox's guiding philosophy is to view the email inbox as a to-do list. For any item in the Inbox, you must Do, Delete, or Defer. Viewing emails, newsletters, promotions, Facebook notifications, listserv digests, etc. as tasks has been a standard tenet of productivity literature since David Allen's first book. But while email clients helped me move emails around and write them or reply to them, they didn't really provide a framework to help me process them more quickly. Inbox, as I've been using it, is really helping me process (that is, delete or archive) emails in a more sane manner.
• Inbox groups emails into pre-defined bins like Promos, Updates, Purchases, and so on. Their groupings are pretty accurate and it's easy to move an email from one group to another. What I like best about the groups is that it's easy to scan them and delete them all in a single stroke; this bulk management of emails saves me a good deal of time.
• It's also easy to define my own group (in Gmail-speak, a label or tag).
• I love the feature that lets me create reminders to myself right there in the Inbox and then set them to appear at any date/time or to recur. In the past, I'd have used the FollowUpThen email reminder service (which I pay for) or SaneLater (which I stopped paying for) or Google Calendar or GQueues. (Geez, do I think I need a lot of help in my life or what?) Instead, the Reminders are quick and easy to set, they appear in my iPod's Google app and Notifications, and my inbox is clear of any emails I used to keep there as reminders.
• It's dead easy to snooze emails so I can deal with them later. Snoozing an email is like setting a reminder. It makes keeping a clean Inbox a breeze. Previously, I'd have forwarded the email to FollowUpThen and archived the original mail. Inbox's Snooze feature is much neater and more convenient.
• Inbox delivers the grouped email once a day -- 7am. So if I get any new Facebook notices or Promos or Updates, then Inbox holds them back from appearing till the next morning. I have found that rather authoritarian management of my email to be liberating. I'm one of those sad people who likes to check his inbox every 5 minutes. But knowing that these bulk emails are by default not urgent, and that they'll show up in tomorrow morning's email anyway, means my Inbox stays mostly empty. Personal emails from Liz or friends appear instantly and so I don't need to plow through other emails to get to them. So during the day, I'm more likely to receive only emails that will be of  immediate interest to me.
• (You can, of course, look inside Inbox's Social, Promos, Updates, etc. folders and see the emails that have arrived and that are being held for the next day. I prefer, in most cases, to let Inbox deliver them to me in a batch at 7am.)
• You can set three default snooze times for a reminder or an email; I use 7am, 2pm, and 7pm. When I open up Inbox in the evening -- BAM -- I'll see all the reminders and snoozed emails that I couldn't deal with earlier in the day. At this point, I deal with them by reading them, taking action, or deleting them. The Inbox becomes my to-do list -- which is the way I've always used it.

What I Wish Were Better

• Google's material design of Inbox looks nice in the browser, but the performance is not as snappy as in Gmail. Even on my Chromebook, Inbox is a visually stuttering application. However, using Inbox on my iPod is a treat and cements the idea for me that Inbox is optimized for mobile rather than the browser.
• Still haven't figured out how to filter an email so Inbox can automatically send it to the Trash. I still have to create those filters in Gmail. I also had saved searches in Gmail; the search facility in Inbox never seems to work as I expect.
• Some operations are simply easier in Gmail for me. I am taking part in an online course, so I'm receiving a ton of notifications throughout the day on new posts to the course's Facebook group. Processing 20 of these messages in Inbox just takes too many clicks. It's far quicker for me to zip into Gmail and process the emails rapid-fire.

I went all-in on Inbox over the Christmas break, avoided Gmail, and it was the best way to learn Inbox quickly. I also recommend reading Computerworld's JR Raphael's post on adopting Inbox. The second half of his post, where he talks about workflow, convinced me to give Inbox a try.

Today, I still access Gmail when I need to process a big batch of emails quickly. But Inbox rules the roost for the moment. Until Google says otherwise.

Update, January 11, 2017

I've gone back to using Gmail plain. Inbox's best feature was the scheduling function, but I have already duplicated that with FollowupThen. Inbox was just too slow, even when using it in Chrome on my iMac, even when using it on my flipping Chromebook. I often had to click on a mail two or three times for it to display as the clicks never seemed to register; Google's Material Design took so much time to load I got impatient. The only time Inbox performed at an acceptable speed was when I started using Kiwi for Gmail Lite; even so, I found myself flipping over to Gmail to process mails more quickly. Inbox by Google will have to offer much faster performance before I'm willing to switch again.

1. The Best Book on American Poetry Ever
2. From the Public Domain Review, a quaint and curious trip down ephemera lane: Christmas Festive Bonanza Digest
3. How to write a Verbatim poem
4. The Lost Art of Memorizing Poetry | The American Reader
5. Maybe this is why I'm finding NPR's news hosts' attempts to emulate chirpy chatter ever more annoying: NPR is graying, and public radio is worried about it - The Washington Post

1. Man binge-watches The Simpsons for over two days while taking LSD 
2. Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective
3. The Raven writing gloves
4. Zap your bad habits with Pavlok
5. The Works of William Hazlitt
6. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in three paintings
7. Stevereads on his favorite SF mass-market paperback covers from the early '80s

I was having lunch with a friend who’d survived a heart attack a couple of years ago. When I asked him if he had any dietary restrictions, he shared the story of going to his doctor post-coronary with a written list of questions about what he should or shouldn’t eat going forward.

The doctor took a look at the list, then ripped up the paper and threw it in the bin.

“Here’s my dietary advice,” said the doctor. “Don’t be a moron.”

“What do you mean?” asked my friend.

“I mean,” replied the doctor, “use your common sense. Eat heart-healthy food most of the time, and if you really fancy the odd bowl of macaroni and cheese, enjoy it.”

While I was a little taken aback at the bluntness of the advice when I first heard the story, I’ve come to realize that it’s a fantastic response for pretty much any kind of question people have about how to live their lives.

When Procrastination doesn't keep me from doing what I should be doing, I fall back on creating a links post.

1. Digitized K-mart in-store background music (1989-1993). As Susie Bright said in her Facebook post, "This is a soundtrack waiting for its porn film."
2. Pick your guru carefully.
3. 19th-century views of the Year 2000.
4. Alternate Histories has released its 2015 Holiday Pack!
5. The James Randi documentary, An Honest Liar, which I saw via Netflix. Randi fought the good fight, but as his nemesis Uri Gellar says near the end, "We won." And as the movie shows, Randi's own need to believe is great. The most bizarre scene is an old television clip of him hanging upside-down, escaping from a straitjacket, while a woman in elegant poofy dress sings "You've Got the Magic Touch."

It’s worth stopping to consider what the Doc Martin creators did next. One thing we know they did not do, for whatever reasons, was go back to Simon Mayle. They needed a writer who could think in terms of serial television storytelling by creating a world that could hold a supporting cast of regular characters causing trouble for the protagonist yet also sparking off their own stories. The stories had to be involving and promise change without actually delivering it (if the castaways leave Gilligan's Island, the show is over). And the show had to have a “voice” to go with its “look,” as everyone knew from the start that Port Isaac would be the show’s chief visual asset.

The producers contracted with Dominic Minghella to create this new Doc Martin series for Buffalo Pictures and ITV. By 2004, Minghella’s credits included writing stints on TV series and TV movies, so he knew the business and knew what was needed. But the credit that probably secured the job for him was his time as writer and script editor on the Hamish Macbeth series (1995-97).

Based on (but in no way resembling) MC Beaton's mystery novels, Hamish Macbeth was an easygoing police constable in a remote and picturesque North Scottish village who dealt with the escapades of the eccentric locals and the stray bad apples who come to town. The location shots were magnificent, there was a large cast of village characters to help and hinder Hamish, and -- just to complicate his life a little more -- he suffers romantic misunderstandings with two local women. Macbeth's job entitled him to poke his nose behind usually closed doors, talk to all manner and classes of people, and be privy to most everyone's secrets. A single episode could shift tonally from light rural humor to grim mystery to romantic heartbreak to outlandish adventure-type setpiece.

Minghella therefore had experience creating the texture of the kind of world that the new Doc Martin would inhabit.

So Doc Martin’s genetic code includes: movies, setting, a production framework, and a writer skilled in creating episodic stories blending humor, drama, and romance. The producers also kept the “Doc Martin” name while dropping “Martin Bamford”. As that character had been created by Ferguson and Crowdy, good business sense dictated creating a new character not beholden to another’s copyright. The new character would now be called Martin Ellingham, his surname being an anagram of Minghella. Clever, that.

Another consideration was taking ITV’s fish-out-of-water idea under advisement and pushing it a bit further. Northern Exposure is probably the most obvious template for this sort of series; the 1990-1995 series was a big hit with its story of an uptight, big-city doctor bemused and frustrated by the quirky residents of a remote Alaskan village. Rob Morrow’s Dr. Joel was obnoxious and spiky, but he softened a bit as the series wore on and fell in love with the beautiful Maggie; the unsophisticated yet accepting community surrounding him patiently tolerated his bad attitude with warmth and good humor.

It was a good, smart show (for a few seasons, anyway), but why remake Northern Exposure in Cornwall? Why remake Hamish Macbeth, for that matter? What could be done to make Doc Martin's tone different from other fish-out-of-water, city-mouse-meets-country-mouse stories that dot the English literary and televisual landscape? What could be the central conflict that would drive the storytelling?

The answer was to take what worked for Northern Exposure — the culture clash between high-powered, no-nonsense doctor and sleepy little backward village — and push it to its logical, humorous extreme: make the protagonist so cranky and unlikable that, as Clunes has said, the village would be united in horror against him.

This is classic fiction writing 101 (and I mean that in a good way; we too often forget the basics): put the character in conflict with his setting to bring forth both his best and worst traits. That’s an aspect of story structure lacking from the Bamford movies and Hamish Macbeth: those characters loved living in their villages. They wanted to fit in. They had friends and allies. And to be fair, that's probably a reason viewers tuned in to watch those shows. But having the new Doc Martin be irritated every time he strolled through the village or examined his patients might spark more vigorous comic moments and give the character more bite. This sweet setting demanded dollops of vinegar.

Leading to the question: what was the tone of the show going to be? Straight-forward medical drama? Light drama with humorous touches, a la All Creatures Great and Small? A bit of soap opera, a bit of comedy, with a few bits of seriousness tossed about here and there to leaven the tone? How quirky and eccentric could the stories and characters become before they tipped over into too silly?  How quickly should the romance get started and how would that play out over the series?

Many such questions and choices must have presented themselves and even more decisions had to be made. Committing millions of pounds to any entertainment venture requires hard-headed decision-making behind the scenes: planning, budgeting, contracts, casting, cinematography, catering, editing, promotion, etc. No matter what the viewer may think as they see the whimsical story unfold before them, very few big decisions about that story are left to chance.

In the end, the movies leave only trace amounts of their DNA in the TV show: a doctor named Martin, a lead actor, a director, and a setting. The blueprint created for the first six episodes of Doc Martin— all written by Minghella and directed by Bolt — established a durable template for the series that came after. It also spawned a character better adapted for his TV surroundings and the rigors of weekly episodic storytelling.

All that’s left is to get our irascible doctor pointed in the general direction of the Cornish coast…

A new translation effort aims to make all of Shakespeare’s plays comprehensible to today’s audiences

Source: A Facelift for Shakespeare

I once interviewed an actor playing Hamlet who preferred using Shakespeare's language in a production where the rest of the cast played a revised text. He felt the text was perfectly understandable if it was capably played, and that removing Shakespeare's language constrained him from fully inhabiting the character.

I sympathize with McWhorter's points insofar as reading the plays; but if I'm watching a performance, then I think the music of the words, and the actors' skill (movement, intonation, characterization) will convey the meaning.

But the question remains: who would fardels bear??

For every half-hour working in an office, people should sit for 20 minutes, stand for eight minutes and then move around and stretch for two minutes, Dr. Hedge recommends, based on a review of studies that he has presented at corporate seminars and expects to publish. He says standing for more than 10 minutes tends to cause people to lean, which can lead to back problems and other musculoskeletal issues.