Mitch Wagner

This was a pain for me to figure out but once I got it figured it, it was simple.

Use the line tool. Instead of clicking and then dragging—which will draw a single line—click at the start of your shape, then click on the next corner, and then the next corner, and so on until you’re done.

To close the shape, your final click should be on the starting point. You can customize with the fill tool—if you do, then when you close the shape, you’ll automatically get a color fill.

Use the curved-line selection for wavy edges, and the straight-line selection for nice, straight edges.

If you don’t close the shape, you end up with a multi-point or wavy line instead.

Here’s a video that shows you how to use the line tool with clear written instructions in the extended caption.

I should illustrate this with screenshots but I need to move on now. Maybe another time.

I needed to draw an L-shaped box for a diagram. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to draw it using Excalidraw. I found this YouTube video. I then had to figure out why the audio wouldn’t play. I had this problem yesterday and thought I had resolved it but I guess not.

After ten minutes of that, I tried a different video and the audio played just fine.

Aha, I said to myself—audio does not play because there is no audio.

I scrubbed back and forth in the video trying to figure out what they were doing. No luck.

Then I expanded the caption and discovered there are also detailed instructions in the caption. Hooray!

I fiddled for about two minutes and got a nice, L-shaped box.

That was easy! I declared to myself.

Conclusions:

1. YouTube instructional videos for software are evil. Please, please, please just give me written documentation with diagrams, and maybe the occasional animated GIF to illustrate where to click and mouse around and so forth.
2. That’s really weird usage of the word “easy.”

Deborah Cohen at The Atlantic: IBM has a history of more than a century of innovation.

The company was the Watson family business for 60 years, and offered lifetime employment, though it’s recently been sued for age discrimination.

The System/360 mainframe, announced in 1964, was one of the greater products of the 20th Century, as important as the Model T. The System/360 introduced computing architecture that ran across a line of computers—some bigger and more powerful, and others smaller, meaning users could re-use their software between different models in a line.

The company’s technological accomplishments are still recognizable as the forerunners of the digital era, yet its culture of social responsibility—a focus on employees rather than shareholders, restraint in executive compensation, and investment in anti-poverty programs—proved a dead end. A mashup of progressivism and paternalism, communalism and cutthroat competition, the once ballyhooed “IBM Way” was, for better and worse, inextricably intertwined with the family at the top.