A few days ago I wrote about how Readability is changing the way I consume news and information online. But the thing that makes all the difference is that a few months ago they released a new feature that allows you to send anything you find online to your Kindle. This feature has existed for awhile, but the folks at Readability made it really, really easy. Like, one click easy. Here's how it works.

Now that I've got more free time, I need to come up with a constructive way to spend it. I set up this blog thinking it'd help me improve my writing, even if it lacked a real focus. Much of the advice I see about blogging says to pick a specific topic and focus on it. Good examples of people doing that are all over the place. In fact, I'd say that every successful blog is focused on one topic. The blogs I just linked to are, in order, about cycling in Portland, practical personal finance, productivity, and odd shit found on Etsy. Anyway, the question remained: What to write about?

Instead of working 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., I'll now come in at seven in the morning and leave around eleven. The idea behind starting at 7 a.m. is to be able to produce breaking news segments the morning of the show (rather than several days before as is usually the case). A good example of this is the terrorist attacks in Norway. I found out about the attacks a few minutes before 8 a.m., and after a few minutes discussing the event with our host and executive producer, I was on the phone with relatives in Norway trying to track down someone who could tell us what was going on there. Thanks to Kristian Foden-Vencil, a reporter at OPB who's half-Norwegian, we ended up getting in touch with a man who was only 300 meters away from where the bomb went off. We had him on the show and he told us what it felt and sounded like. Awareness of the event to a completely produced segment in under an hour.

Today I start my first paid gig in radio. I'll be an associate producer on Think Out Loud job-sharing with my awesome co-worker Julie Sabatier. She's now working part-time so that she can spend more time on her other radio show, Destination DIY. I help out with Destination DIY, too.

Readability is a web service that converts online articles into an ad-free, more readable format. Here's a quick comparison of what an article looks like before conversion by Readability:

And after conversion:

These are my two favorite works of art. On the left is a drawing by Vincent Van Gogh completed in 1880. The drawing on the right was completed by Van Gogh in 1882, just two years later. Look at either of them separately and it's easy to pass them off as unremarkable. But side by side the progression of skill is impossible to ignore.