Archive for the ‘Deep Thoughts’ Category

Paying for presence of mind

Thursday, June 13, 2013

You should be grateful. I pay a lot of money to keep in contact with you.

Every month I pay ~$20 to keep my hosting on Linode. True, it serves more than just my blog (it also serves several sites, as well as my email). But it’s all to keep in contact with people.

I pay two phone bills: one for home, and one for my mobile phone. Those average around $50 a month.

I pay Google for my Google Voice number. Sure, it’s not a monetary transaction, but I make up for it in the ad revenue they can squeeze out of me.

Funny thing is you also pay to keep in contact with me. Whatever price you pay for hosting, and whatever privacy costs you might make in exchange for free email.

Being present and available has it’s cost. Looking at email and answering the phone costs attention and a certain amount of bandwidth.

Telemarketers and spammers treat these platforms as commodities only because we have no way to bill them in return. If we could send them a bill for our attention, would they be so cavalier about how they treat us? Perhaps it might balance out in the end.

But ultimately we’re the final arbiters of what gets our attention: by answering the phone, reading the email, or responding in kind.

We pay dearly to keep in contact with each other, to keep our presence felt. How would our conversations vary if we treated it as a privilege rather than a given?

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Just because you’re grinding the organ doesn’t mean I have to dance

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Q: How do you know when the next Ubuntu is close to release?

A: When the Canonical vs. the community posts hit Planet Ubuntu.

I’ve joked in the past that every single release of Ubuntu has to have some tempest-in-a-teapot event occur that causes people to get upset over the current direction of Ubuntu.  And sure enough this latest release of Ubuntu and post-UDS discussions have delivered: Unity changing to QT, Ubuntu moving to rolling releases, Mir taking over the role of X server, cats sleeping with dogs, mass hysteria. It never fails; there’s always some design decision that comes out of some meeting that causes people to go irate in the community.

But it’s not that they are necessarily bad decisions. You could make a pretty good case for each of those decisions. They all have technical merit at some level.

No, what generally causes the most amount of anguish is that the community isn’t consulted.

There’s a phrase I’d like to think I’ve coined: “Just because you’re grinding the organ doesn’t mean I have to dance”. I think it’s pretty apropos of how Canonical seems to treat the community. They grind the organ, and the community puts on a show, and those who dance the best and brightest get the goodies and gratitude. And every decision that comes down changes the tune a little bit, and the good little community dances away.

Now, if it’s a particularly good tune, I don’t mind dancing. Hell, I might even involuntarily dance along to a great tune every now and again.

But when the expectation is that the community will dance no matter what, then we have a problem.

Greg, the most even-keeled person I’ve met, quit the community in a blog post today over similar reasons. He’s no longer willing to dance.

A lot of what was built up for Ubuntu was built on the idea of a community where ideas with merit were implemented. With the last few releases it feels more like  the community is just there to take direction from Canonical, and act accordingly. The organ grinds, and we dance away.

I’ve noticed in our own loco that there’s not a lot of joy in the dance. We dance because that’s what’s expected of us, not because we’re excited. We know that if we stop we no longer get CDs or stickers or recognition. Our Pavlovian response is to keep dancing because that is what the organ grinder expects of us.

We’re told to trust the organ grinders, yet we are not trusted to know the purpose of the grinding. That will come later. Keep dancing.

Always in motion. Keep dancing.

Do your Global Jams. Have Release Parties. Keep dancing.

Keep the community strong, fix bugs, help with documentation, package applications and keep them up to date. Keep dancing.

Keep dancing.

Should you wear out, there’s always more who will keep dancing. Keep dancing.

And so the community dances and dances away to the sounds of the organ grinder. Is it a good song? Who cares, just keep dancing away. That’s what the community is there for; keep dancing.

Just because you’re grinding the organ doesn’t mean I have to dance.

To quote the great bard “Men Without Hats”: We can dance if we want to.

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Posted in Deep Thoughts, Rants, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »

Daft Punk is my favorite band of all time – why context matters

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Like most people who listen to music I have a Last.fm page which busily “scrobbles” all of my listening habits. It’s not that I’m particularly interested in giving CBS (the parent company of Last.fm) my listening habits; it’s just easy to send them along via my Squeezebox, and it paints an interesting profile of me as someone who loves to listen to music.

What’s really interesting is the artists that show up as my most listened artists.

I’m a huge Rush fan. I’ve been a Rush fan ever since high school. Any time Rush is in town, expect JoDee and I to either be in the audience, or having an existential crisis over why we can’t go.

Yet if you look at my Last.fm profile, you’ll notice something peculiar.

Rush is the 9th most listened band in my list, after Daft Punk, Risha, Obituary, Testament, and so on. Heck, even Claude Debussy ranks higher in total listens than Rush.

So, does this mean that Rush is not my number one band of all time? Should I instead be putting my efforts into seeing Daft Punk in concert?

Perhaps, but there’s something more to that data than just number of songs played might show you.

I spend most of my working hours listening to music via the Squeezebox. And my work involves programming, which is usually best done with either extremely angry music, or with very nondescript, almost sound-track-like music.

Daft Punk released what I consider to be the penultimate developer album, namely the Tron: Legacy soundtrack.

Chances are I’ll probably put this album on at least once a week, if not more.

Why not listen to Rush? Well, on occasion I do, but Neil Peart is my favorite drummer of all time, and there’s a reason I keep drumsticks near my desk. (Note to current boss: the sticks in my cubicle are merely for show. Honest. :) )

But without context, and without knowing where and when I listen to this music, you might think I was full of it, and Daft Punk and Risha are my favorite artists. And while that may be true in an office context, I have far more Rush memorabilia than any of the bands in the top 20 combined. (Sorry, Claude.)

There’s an old saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”, but you also can’t measure what you can’t put into context. My musical tastes vary depending on location,and I’m sure yours do too. I’m sure you can come up with examples where context would give you a completely different answer outside of numerical counting.

(This is why I get cranky when people talk about radio ratings for an entire market. No wonder Detroit only has one under-served classical radio station, but 10 decades stations. But that’s another rant for another time.)

What measurements are you taking right now that could be improved by figuring out the context?

 

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Posted in Deep Thoughts, Music, Productivity, Rants | 2 Comments »

The Pope resigns, and you can too

Monday, February 11, 2013

Today Pope Benedict XVI said he’s resigning.

A life-long appointment as the leader of the Catholic church just gave his notice that he’s no longer willing or able to continue full-speed ahead on the current course.

Good for him.

Whatever reasons he has personally, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to complete his commitment. He renegotiated the agreements with himself and others close to him.

Better to make the hard decisions now than wait until it’s too late.

What agreements have you made with yourself or others that need renegotiating? Are you dreading something because the time has long past since you got any value from it? Are there roles or responsibilities you currently have that are bringing you dread thinking about them?

Not every one of your roles is a lifetime appointment. Give yourself permission to resign from those that are forces of habit and no longer bringing you joy.

Posted in Deep Thoughts, GTD, Productivity | 2 Comments »

Dead Letter Contexts

Thursday, February 7, 2013

In working through my GTD processes I’ve noticed something that I’ve known in my subconscious for quite some time  but haven’t really articulated until a few weeks ago; namely I have dead letter contexts.

The dead letter office (now known as mail recovery centers. How politically correct.) is the place where mail ends up when it can’t be delivered for some reason or another. Ultimately it’ll be auctioned off if the contents are valuable, ostensibly at whatever the going rate for such items would be.

How does this relate to my GTD process?

I’ve found over time I have contexts where I rarely check them at all, if ever. The prime example of a dead letter context is my @calls list. Even though I’m near a phone almost all of my waking moments, I dread using the phone, and will procrastinate as much as humanly possible until either the time passes where it’s reasonable to make a phone call, or I gird my loins and decide to plow through my @calls list because they’ve been sitting there long enough.

Here’s an example: the seat in our car is coming apart at the seams. I asked my dad for his recommendation on where to take the car to get the seat fixed. He gave me the names of several locations, and I dutifully looked them up via Google to get their phone numbers. I put “Call X at # to ask about seat repair @calls” into my @calls list. There. Next action captured. Done.

And it sat there.

and sat there.

and sat there.

Finally JoDee gave me the ultimatum: either you get the car seat fixed, or I will go out there with needle and thread and fix it myself. Rather than admit defeat, I told her if I didn’t move forward on this by the end of the month she could go out there and sew up the car.

And the ”Call X at # to ask about seat repair @calls” sat there on the @calls list.

Finally, near the end of the month I had an epiphany and decided to check for an e-mail address for these places.

Email sent. Information acquired. Now to find time to take it over.

By moving the context from something I dread doing (@calls) to something that don’t mind doing at all (@computer) I was able to make progress in a project that has been sitting there for over a year.

How many other projects are stalled because you’ve put them in a dead letter context? Are you checking all of your contexts when you can act on them? Or are you parking things in contexts you’ll never check and resisting doing anything at all to move things forward?

Be honest with yourself about your contexts, and if your inclination is to move something to a someday / maybe because you haven’t moved on the project for a few months, it’s time to rethink what your next action truly is.

Your contexts are letters to yourself of future actions. Know which ones need a forwarding address.

 

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Even Bach Played Scales

Monday, February 4, 2013

Even Bach Played Scales.

I don’t have any proof of this. Typing “Bach Playing Scales” gives you some discussion about how Bach’s tuning isn’t the same as our modern piano, along with some discussions about Bach’s Inventions (practice pieces he devised) using scales. But there’s little record of Bach actually playing scales. Yet we can be assured Bach played scales, just like I can be assured Neil Peart plays the rudiments, and other great musicians practice fundamentals in order to stay sharp and perform at their peak. Yet they don’t have to make a big deal about how many scales or rudiments they play; they just do them. It’s all part of their craft, much the same way carpenters sharpen their tools.

It’s all part about making ourselves ready for the work at hand.

No matter what you do, whether it’s programming, performing, or even presenting, you’ll need to practice in order to maintain your edge. None of these happen in a vacuum, and constant vigilance is necessary in order to keep that edge. And it needs to be consistent. Few people can cram years of practice into the span of a few hours.

It’s interesting Bach’s practice pieces are called “Inventions“. Perhaps practice is the mother of invention after all.

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Ten things I will never do in this lifetime, and ten more unlikely things

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Here are ten things I will never be able to do in this lifetime:

  1. Be a member of a sorority
  2. Be a child prodigy
  3. Fully understand what it’s like to be non-white / non-male
  4. Grow up in a single parent home
  5. Meet Richard Feynman, or any of the notable heroes in my life who have already passed on
  6. Live my entire life outside of Earth
  7. Play little league baseball (not that I particularly care, either)
  8. Be crowned King of the British Empire
  9. Fly though the air with just the power of my mind
  10. Exist solely as a one-dimensional being

Funny enough, there are things that are  highly unlikely, but not impossible:

  1. Be called on by the BBC to play The Doctor in Doctor Who
  2. Act as the understudy for Neal Peart on tour
  3. Resolve the Middle East Conflicts with lasting peace
  4. Dig a hole to China in my back yard
  5. Play Ping Pong with Stephen Hawking
  6. Put Groucho Marx glasses on the Sphinx
  7. Be able to watch a broadway musical without a barf bag
  8. Climb a space elevator to the moon
  9. Watch a shuttle mission take-off in person
  10. Stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth with my bare hands

It’s interesting that the unlikely list filled out faster than the impossible list.

How many of the items on my impossible list are things that happened to me in the past, and are only made impossible because we can’t (yet) travel back in time, or live our lives differently? I’m even dubious of the impossible “Fly though the air with just the power of my mind”. Maybe some day we’ll uncover something that will allow us to harness some as-yet-untapped levation power of the human being. Extremely unlikely? Heck yes. Impossible? I’m not so sure.

What’s unlikely in your life? What would need to change to make it more possible?

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Cheat to Win

Friday, January 18, 2013

Yesterday, Lance Armstrong felt it was time to fess up to something that we pretty much already knew: Lance Armstrong was using performance enhancing drugs in order to help him win all of those cycling achievements. The outrage that followed was predictable: people believed in Lance’s abilities to push the sport of cycling a little further, and by using foreign substances the myth of Lance Armstrong as superhuman athlete shattered with one little admission.

Imagine what would have happened had he said he wasn’t doping, and could back it up with proof?

I can’t think of a sport that hasn’t had some performance-drug scandal. Baseball even had the US Congress get involved with investigating their doping scandal (which still boggles my mind why Congress would get involved in the first place, but apparently they have a nose for spending time on irrelevant issues).  Doping has become so commonplace, it’s the remarkable athlete who can say they haven’t taken any performance-enhancing drugs, and can back it up.

What does that say about the competitive culture we put these athletes through?

I think they should just make these performance enhancing drugs legal. Why not? Athletes are always looking for that competitive edge: the extra millisecond shaved off a race time, the extra force applied to a ball. Make them part of the training regime. If you want to compete with your God-given abilities, that’s your prerogative  but the real competitors are using drugs, baby.  It’s all about the end result, so why not give it to them in spades?

I  suspect one of the reasons competitive sports have rules against this sort of free-doping is pretty simple: kids idolize these athletes.

Imagine you’re 12 years old, and your hero is freely admitting his performance is because of performance-enhancing drugs. What’s your 12 year old logic going to do with that information? “Well, if it’s good enough for Lance Armstrong, then it must be good enough for me” which you then equate the drug as necessary to achieve the performance. It’s the same reason young bands think partying will make them rock stars (note: it won’t).

Or, kids will think even more damaging thoughts: “well, Lance Armstrong achieved his performance using drugs, so I guess I won’t even try: the bar is set too high”. Eventually, discouraged kids and aspiring athletes hang it up, because the only way to achieve these results are with performance-enhancing drugs, and those who believe natural ability should trump any score are shut out.

The world of sport (as if that were a thing) needs to accept that they’ve created a culture where doping is considered part of the training regiment. At the moment it’s considered cheating. I’m reminded of Timothy Ferriss’ book “The Four Hour Work Week” where he claims he won martial arts contests by exercising one of the rules, and pushed his opponents out of the ring rather than face them directly in a contest he couldn’t win. He alleges because he was so successful, now everybody does it. Whether that’s true or not, for those who are more interested in competition vs. others rather than competition vs. self, it seems an obvious tactic. Competition breeds people looking for some advantage, and doping is a now part of those competitive advantages.

And as long as we idolize and encourage this sort of competitive behavior, and reward it with monetary and lifestyle rewards, we’re only going to see more confessions, more preventative measures, and more people getting discouraged their natural performance isn’t good enough for the big leagues.

Until we either accept the culture of doping, or change the cultural mindset that personal competition is more important than external competition, we’re getting exactly the lying, cheating athletes (and human beings) we deserve.

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The Humble Dime: The hardest working coin in the USA

Monday, January 14, 2013
One Mighty Dime. (Source: WIkipedia)

One Mighty Dime. (Source: Wikipedia)

Of all of the coins in the United States of American currency, none is more hard working than the humble dime. This lowly, misunderstood coin is a little workhorse, combining value with it’s diminutive size. What other coin can boast such statistics:

  • A dime is 2.268g, with a value to gram ratio of .2268g per cent. By contrast, the utterly lazy penny is 2.5g per cent, the slacking nickel is 1.0g per cent. Only the quarter comes close at .2268g per cent, but the quarter is 24.26 mm, vs. the dainty dime’s 17.91mm.
  • The quarter recently was recently featured in “State Quarter” edition, where the mint featured all 50 states on the backs of the quarter. The dime has had no such redesign, choosing instead remain consistent since it’s redesign with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s head in the 1940s.
  • A roll of dimes has 50 coins, and costs $5.00. A roll of quarters has 40 coins, but costs twice as much.
  • The dime is all about hard working value. “The dime novel”, “The March of Dimes”. By comparison, the quarter is referred to as “two bits”, which can be used in the pejorative  “He’s a two-bit lawyer”.
  • Which is cooler: “Dimebag” Darrel, or Nickelback?
  • In the late 1980s you could make a telephone call on a public pay phone with two dimes. At the time, putting in a quarter yielded no nickel as change.

So, the next time you head to a parking meter with a handful of change, remember the hardest working coin in USA currency. Deposit those dimes into the vending machine with pride. When someone asks you for a quarter, give them three dimes instead. And tell them “keep the change. I don’t need your lazy nickels”.

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Posted in Deep Thoughts, Silly Stuff | 1 Comment »

Deep thoughts on unity and the copyright divide

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Just listened again to Jono Bacon’s awesome song “Unite“, which features a clip of Charlie Chaplin’s speech from “The Great Dictator”. Jono notes that the song uses this clip from The Great Dictator, which was released in 1940, and likely very much under the wiles of those who would like to ensure it never reaches the public domain.

This got me thinking:

Movie Studios and Record Companies are scared of letting their work go into the public domain because they’re afraid their golden years are long behind them.

Fear is a great motivator to do the wrong thing. Maybe by removing the fear we can move back to doing what’s right.

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Posted in Deep Thoughts, Music, Rants | Comments Off

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