Meta thinking

<rant on self>
I started a new job the week of Thanksgiving, and have been wrapped up in learning the ropes around there, getting a Christmas tree, meeting with friends, and thinking really really hard about blogging. But not actually typing any words. Thing is, my brain's been so full of not-bloggy stuff that I'm having trouble thinking of a good essay. But the point of the blog isn't to be good (yet!), it's to be disciplined about the writing part. Ok, here goes...
</rant>

I like to think about thinking. For as long as I can remember, certainly back into the late '60s, I've been fascinated by the idea that people can think in ways that dogs or even trees or rocks can't. (Ok, to be fair, I've been told on occassion that I think about as well as a rock...) Anyway, not only the fascinating thoughts, themselves, but the whole idea -- the mechanism of thinking is extremely interesting to me.

So, of course, when I started learning about computers, dabbling in artificial intelligence seemed only natural. Thing is, lots of people much-much smarter than I had been doing this for a dozen years and had far greater design and programming skills than I, so the field seemed hopelessly beyond my grasp. Still, it's interesting to think about how we think -- I mean how we can think at all -- and look for little rules, patterns and systems related to our thinking.

Heh -- one funny thing about the AI world seeming so far ahead of me that I could never catch up: in high school, it seemed to me that the main flaw of the then-popular AI efforts (and by "popular", I mean the ones you read about in the magazines, journals & newspapers) was that everyone seemed to be trying to codify an artificial "fully formed adult" -- one who could speak English, carry on intelligent conversation, make decisions, jokes, laugh at your jokes, etc. It seemed to me that, if the attempt to mechanize intelligence were to have any chance, whatsoever, it would have to stem from a much more organic approach -- one in which one automated the very rudamentary mechanisms of thought, perhaps priming it with very basic instincts (like, maybe, survival, curiosity and mimicry), and then allow it to evolve into something smarter. Of course, one would likely have to make several false-starts, and deal with dozens or hundreds of failed attempts -- but the key, I thought, was to make the underlying structure have as LITTLE pre-programmed ideas as was possible.

I'm now learning that modern AI is "discovering" this area and developing it, with some success and great promise. I take some pride in knowing that I "invented" this back in the 70s. If only I'd-a thought to try to patent it, or something ;)

Hey, one pretty-smart idea in 30 years -- not bad!

Anyway, I don't do much in the way of AI-tinkering, anymore. I do a little games programming, and my AIs always have a bit more "organic" feel than most, but they're still pretty simple "look around for an enemy, shoot at it"-type of things. Still, I like to think that my NPCs add color to an otherwise all-to-predicatble game.

But, while I don't do much in the way of AI programming, I still think it's just fascinating that people can think. I mean, a couple of pounds of wet hamburer between our ears manages to make electrical firings that put out blog entries like this one. Ok, maybe not so impressive but, if you add up all of us, we published the entire internet, including The Wikipedia!

It's funny -- I have a fair number of pretty smart friends, and none of them really get all that excited about this stuff. "Yeah, yeah -- people think; whoop-dee-doo." Ok, maybe they don't say that, but it seems that way, some times...

One of the weird things about thinking about thinking is trying to think about how other people think and how, given information very similar to information that I have, they can come to conclusions substantially different from the ones I do. Of course, much of this has to do with background, education/brainwashing, etc. -- certainly much of the "similar information" that is obvious is really only a very teeny-tiny part of the whole gestalt of who we are and what we know, so the fact that we share 95% of the information regarding some small situation that happened in the past 10 minutes maybe shouldn't be so surprising that we see it differently, based on 20, 30, 40+ years of different backgrounds.

Heh, thinking about thinking -- I just realized that I've written several paragraphs on some of the odd things related to how fascinating I think thinking about thinking is, but haven't really said much about what it is that's so fascinating about thinking (or meta-thinking.) See...? Now I think that's interesting! Ok, it doesn't make for very captivating reading, but it's interesting to think about! To me, anyway.

Yeah, yeah -- "big whoop-dee-doo..." <sigh>

One weird side-effect of all of this is that I wrestle with determinism (vice free will.) Yes, I understand that some claim that the two are not incompatible, but that just strikes me as ...hmm... "not fully honest." I mean, saying "the illusion of free will is so strong that it may as well be true, even if we're all just programmed to believe it" doesn't seem like much of an argument for free will. Anyway, I tend to try to ignore the determinism thing, because it tends to make me sad. But then I start thinking that maybe it's just my destiny to feel that way, and that I'm just following my programming (along with my universe-provided inputs), and that maybe, sometimes, it'll make me happy, too. Or maybe my brain is wired in such a way as to remember that determinism makes me sad ("sad"'s not the right word -- but it puts me in a sort of quiet & reserved mood), but that's just the stored-memories, and I was really quite giddy about it. Of course, that doesn't really fit and, if you can't trust your memories (the ones you remember, I mean! :), well, then you've got bigger problems... Still, the knowledge that neurons just fire their little chemical do-jobs whenever they get properly tickled by nearby neurons (with certain time-to-refire constraints) seems to lead pretty conclusively that, given one's brain-state at any given moment and the world around them at that moment (which produces various stimuli on the sensory neurons for temperature, light, sound, etc.), there seem to be only one possible next-instant of brain state, and that sure sounds a lot like determinism to me!

Heh, I didn't intend for this to turn into an entry about free will (been reading a bit about that over in Scott Adams' blog), but such is my programming that it turned out that way... Actually, when I get to thinking about this stuff, that's when I start to feel more religeous, as I keep hoping that there must be some sort of "spirit" ("soul"?) that accounts for the free-will portion of our beings that can act outside of the "normal laws of physics."

Of course, everything has to follow some set of "laws of the universe" -- that's part of being part of the universe! -- but maybe there's some "other layer", similar to "another dimension" in science-fiction, but really more like "another layer" of a story, that makes it all work & make sense (and gives us free will!) Of course, I can't imagine in the least how such a thing might work, but I like to imagine that it does, somehow, just so I don't have to feel all pre-destined.

...On the other hand, maybe I have to want that, because it's my destiny. <sigh>

Ok, ok... kind of a dopey entry -- but at least I got out some words. Next year, I'll work on upping the quality; after I get the "write regularly" discipline down.

Unconditional Love

Here's a controversial thought, for you...

Actually, before I launch into that, I read an interesting thought about controversy that I want to share. I'll be exploring this idea further in a future blog. The gist of it is this: controversial ideas are ones that people are afraid might be true. Basically, if I say "the moon is made of green cheese", that's not particularly controversial, because nobody really believes it and nobody really cares -- it's "whacky", but not "controversial." On the other hand, if I say "there is [an/no -- choose one] all-powerful God who created the heavens and Earth", folks will get all crazy and line up on either side, ignoring each other, shouting their positions and sometimes even going to war over their fear that somebody might believe the other side of the argument. That's controversial!

Tangent: We all knew that guy in high school whose idea of a "gorgeous girl" was one with two eyes and a nose (and, really, both eyes were optional), right? Most of us would chide him for his constant claim of "oh, my god -- I think I love that girl..." with some variation on "but you love every girl -- and some of ambiguous girl-ness...!" and, of course, he'd always claim "oh, that was yesterday -- this one's different!" I think it's fair to characterize this guy as fairly-universally scorned for his lack of discernment, yes? Even folks who weren't in close contact with this guy know of him and, even if they have some level of forgiveness (probably related to his other redeeming potential) for him, can understand the idea, here. In other words, not a whole lot of controversy around the idea that this guy -- swell pal though he may have been -- was a bit of a wanker when it comes to relationship-building.

I was reminded about this reading a few of my favorite blogs (luckily, most of them didn't do this) when they announced to the entire internet (and these are blogs with REAL readerships!) (I'm paraphrasing wildly, here): "Today [Thanksgiving day] I am thankful for each and every one of you, my readers. You are each my very bestest friend in the entire world and I love you more than any of the others."

But that's not really very controversial. A bit thick on the saccharine, maybe, but hardly a hanging offense.

Ok, anyway... here's my controversial thought for the day (the weekend, actually): "Unconditional love is meaningless."

This insight came up -- at all times -- during grace over Thanksgiving dinner. Of course we're all thankful for all of the wonderful things that we have: a warm home, plenty of food, a nice job, luxuries up the wahzoo, the best family and friends of anyone, ever, etc. But it was either during grace or shortly after that someone said something about giving unconditional love (I keep thinking it was during the prayer -- as one most-often hears that phrase in the context of something coming from God -- but it might have actually been in conversation, immediately following), and I got to thinking that descriptive words that cover everything just aren't very useful.

I mean, if I tell you that something is "blodjot" and you say "what the heck is 'blodjot'?!" and I explain that it's this sort of ineffable quality that everything has, and you ask how you can tell if something is blodjot and I explain that everything is blodjot well, then saying "look at that blodjot thing over there" just doesn't really give you any information, right?

And it gets even weirder with vague notions like "love." If I say I love you and you, knowing that I sometimes use words in non-standard ways, ask what I mean by that, and I explain that I love everybody -- ok, I haven't really told you anything. But then, if I go on to tell you that, not only do I love everybody, but that my love for all of mankind is without bounds, and unconditional -- there is nothing you or anyone else can do to either procure my love (since you already have it) or to lose it -- well, then it sort of becomes a no-op, right? I mean, your most logical reaction might be "<shrug>, ok, whatever..." And, in fact, you might think it rather odd if I were to suggest that you should get really excited and happy about the fact that I have this loving feeling for you -- the same one I have for your mom, my mom, our dog and Sadaam Hussein -- and that there's really nothing you can do about it, it's neither earned nor losable, well, you might think I'm being a bit crazy.

And yet this is exactly what we're (us Americans, raised on some Christian variation -- "my people") have drilled into us from the time we were little kids: some invisible, unknowable, unresponsive "being" has great love for you, and it's unconditional -- you can neither earn it (it's just yours, like it or not) nor lose it -- and it's the same for everyone (mom, dad, sis, bro, G.W. Bush, Sadaam and Oprah), and you should just be about as excited as a kitten with a new ball of string to know about it.

I don't get it.

I mean, the fact that I should be over-the-top excited about it sort of implies that, were this big-deal-thing not-true -- or if the opposite were true -- I should likely feel a big loss or be sad. And, yet, it seems that everything about this whole situation is unknowable and, really, has very little impact on my day to day life and, for all I know, it reverses itself when the sun rises and sets.

I'm assured by folks who claim to be in the know that it does not, in fact, reverse itself, ever -- and that's the big deal! -- but that's not the point...

The point is: yeah ...so? I mean, ok -- The Almighty God, himself loves me without bounds and unconditionally -- I suppose there's a bit of feel-good, there. But it just doesn't really impact my life, does it? I mean, as far as I can understand, he felt pretty much the same way about Hitler (oop, did my blog just get Goodwinized?!) -- so it's not like I'm super special or anything -- and he's not going to stop loving me if I become an axe murderer or drown a few babies, so it's not like I have any pride in having earned this uber-gift.

So I'm stuck in a sort of "yeah <shrug>, ok ...whatever" kind of mode about it.

Ok, no big. But the weird part, to me, is that this line of thinking is somehow controversial. I mean, I realize that my blog isn't exactly the NY Times, but I can imagine that a good half or more of the people who learn that I think this way would find it at least mildly offensive, and that anyone with whom I talk about it would probably tend to polarize on one end of the spectrum or the other, with the majority almost immediately jumping to the conclusion that I was some sort of heartless monster with no romance in my soul at all.

(For whatever it's worth, this would make the people who know me laugh out loud. Not so much that I'm such a syrupy sweet guy, but I do tend to love many things, and am a bit of a hopeless romantic...)

Anyhow... this is a time of year (and, in particular, this weekend) when it's traditional to reflect on all of the things for which one is thankful and certainly up toward the top of my list has to be all of the wonderful people in my life (yes, even the ones who abandoned us to move to Oregon! ;) I'm always amazed to learn how many people would happily consider some sort of "upgrade" for their spouse (mine is perfect, in every way! :), or who do not have several friends who they can count on in times of need, or to whom they would willingly lend $5000 without worry about whether or not it would ever come back to them or whatever. My daughter -- though I tease her about being a bit of a slacker -- is pretty much about as wonderful as anyone's kid I know, and has been since the day she was born (I can only assume that genetics played a large role, here :)) I've been pretty lucky in my career, thanks in large part to the support of family and friends, and I regularly get together with between a dozen and 40 of them for some of the best times of my life. I am extremely thankful for each and every one of them and love them all, dearly.

But my love is conditional: if any of you turn axe-murder-y or drown babies, I'm going to have to review your file...!

And even though I'm sure you're all very nice people, I don't really know the rest of the folks who surf the internet well enough to pass along any particularly strong sentiment. I do, of course, wish you a very happy holiday season, continuing through the next year and all the rest of your days. You get that one for free, just for being human. Heck, I even hope Sadaam has a nice Christmas, whatever that means for him...

[P.S. Isn't there some game people play where they try to enter something into Google and get exactly one hit? Anyway, in looking for images for this entry, I went to images.google.com and put in (no quotes) "the.creation adam god finger" and got exactly the picture I wanted as the one and only hit. Hardly cosmic, or anything, but I don't think I've ever had a 1-perfect-hit on the 1st try, before...]

Idea Trackers

Yesterday was my last day at Palm, inc. It was an interesting time and I learned some things, but this entry isn't so much about my time/work there, although it will overlap some with Palm products.

I've never been much of a cell-phone guy -- the phone they gave me to test with was "my" first ever cell phone. It was a "smart-phone" -- a Treo 650 (I later got a 680, I think it was. I was never very good at marketing names, although I know the internal code name for it) -- so that means it's both a cell phone and a PDA, an organizer that can do email, surf the web, chat/IM/SMS, camera, take notes, etc.

Being "not much of a cell phone guy", I tried to get the hang of it -- I carried it almost everywhere, and tried to integrate it into my life. The cell phone part was somewhat convenient, but it seemed that more than 95% of my calls were to 911 to report accidents or roadside brush fires. Actually, I think the first "real" call I ever made (not counting calling my wife to tell her "write down this number, since I can't remember it") was to call the fire department to report a chimney fire we witnessed while out on an after-dinner walk. That was a pretty nice feeling! (NOTE: if you see flames shooting out of the top of someone's chimney, that's A Problem. If it's not wrestled under control in a matter of seconds, the entire house can be lost rather easily.)

But the fact is, I never really saw much non-emergency use for having instant access to a cell phone. I guess I'm one of those guys who likes to put some thought into the near future, and who enjoys dealing with people who can make commitments and actually keep them, and I've too much experience with people using their cell phones as a way to be sloppy (read: "discourteous, disrespectful and/or down right malicious") in their interpersonal relationships (heh, there's a two-dollar phrase for you!) and, given the prevalence of highway call-boxes (every mile on the interstate!), I guess I just don't have anything in my life that requires that I get in touch with someone in the next hour or two, and I can typically plan to be near a phone, if necessary, sometime between now and the next time I either eat or go to the bathroom (conveniently, places to eat and restrooms often have a nearby phone!)

Some folks ask "well, what if I want to get ahold of you?!" and, I have to say, this is perhaps the worst possible argument for carrying a cell phone. In fact, it's a pretty strong argument against carrying one, if you ask me. These folks offer a plethora of examples as to why my carrying a device that allows them to summon me at any moment they find convenient is "necessary", ranging from "what if I'm going to be late to meet you?" (clue: don't do that. Do it again, and it will weigh in my ability to make appointments with you) to "what if a close relative dies?" (clue: close relatives have been dying for long before the late '90s, and everyone managed pretty well.)

It's not that I don't want to be social -- in fact, I like being social! -- I guess it's just that I don't see the need to carry a social-spam-conduit on my person and, to be honest, if whatever message it is that we have to tell each other isn't worth the effort to actually get ahold of the other one, then it can probably be safely dropped, or at least wait until we see each other, next. "Hey, I wanted to let you know that I have a new, insightful blog entry up" is something that can probably safely wait a week without severe negative impact on the planet.

Before anyone gets it into their heads that I hate cell phone users: I don't. I do have a dislike for rude or unreliable people, but it doesn't matter much to me whether the medium for their annoyingness is cell phones, toy drums, email or their own voice. So, if you own a cell phone, but somehow manage to remain polite, pleasant and reliable, then hurrah for you! I just don't think I need one, is all.

I also tried to use my mobile email device and, despite being up to version 3.5 (and I occasionally used pre-release version-next) of the email software and a "full" qwerty keyboard, I just couldn't manage to do anything "real" with it. I managed to get out a few "hey, I'm sending this via Treo!" mails, and reply with one-liners to a few work mails but, by and large, I didn't find the ability to send mail from anywhere too useful. My friends thought it was neat that I had pocket-google/imdb/etc. and, the first few times, that was fun but, after the novelty wore off, I have to admit that it was a bit of a pain. Reading mail on a handheld was pretty cool, I liked that! But, of course, using it to formulate any sort of thoughtful reply was a pain, so half of the reads ended in frustration, anyway.

So that brings us to "notepad." I really wanted my handheld to be a way-cool electronic notepad -- I've wanted one of these for years (decades!). And it was "ok." I mean, lists & reminders are the kind of a-few-words things that are pretty easy to thumb-type, so I kept grocery lists, gifts-to-buy, ideas-to-pursue, etc., in the little memos program, and that was pretty cool. Sort-a. It was a bit of a hassle, though. I don't know if I was expecting too much (thinking about how cool it would be to have some technology or another for decades can do that), or if I could just never get the hang of the thumb-typing (I was pretty good, though!) or, really, editing (while initial-typing, even <delete>ing, was pretty easy, going back and selecting text, then copy/pasteing was pretty painful) or what -- but I never got to the point where I was fully comfortable using my handheld as a notepad.

I often wondered if it would've been easier if the current units supported Graffiti, Palm's stylus-scribble-recognition system[1]. It seemed to me that if I could write on the screen with a sytlus & scratch-out text & drag a pen across it like a mouse to drag&drop things here & there, it might've clicked in my head. But I guess I can only speculate, there.

Back in the early '90s, when I was still at Apple, some friends & I came up with the "Nut'n", a bit of plastic with a form-factor similar to the Newton (Apple's pocket-sized PDA) but, where the screen would normally be, there was, instead, a cut-out into which you could insert a pad of paper. Then we wrote-up all sorts of humorous (to us) "ad-copy" for it explaining how the Nut'n was fully programmable, high resolution, full-color ("colored pens not included") pen-based computing with wireless data transfer (crumple a sheet & toss it to a friend), encryption (tear up your sheet), full undo/redo support, etc., all at "a fraction of the price of a conventional PDA." "...And hilarity ensued."

As I grew dissatisfied with my handheld note-keeper, I tried other solutions. Carrying a pen & half-sized pad worked pretty well -- I certainly managed to fill several sheets of half-sized yellow paper with ideas & to-do lists -- but even that had flaws: it was sometimes inconvenient, especially if you wanted to use both your hands for something; sometimes the pen would get lost or otherwise become inconvenient, etc.

Finally, I settled on a pocket-sized pad-holder. I think it's made by Mead, or one of those school/office supply aisle companies, is hard-bound (stiffened cardboard), durable (leather-bound), small (just larget than the 2.5x4.25" pad it holds) AND I found the coolest pen to rubber band onto it. The pen collapses to be normal-pen-diameter, but only about 3.5" long -- about like a mini-golf pencil -- but you "pull it apart" to open it for writing, and it becomes a full-sized (i.e., comfortable for writing) ball-point pen!

I've been using it for several weeks now; it's smaller & lighter than a smart-phone, and gets far more use, largely because of its simplicity -- it just does what I want without any hassles. (Well, ok -- I have to somehow manage to read my writing, days or weeks later -- but that's not significantly worse than deciphering thumb-typing-in-a-hurry...) AND the whole thing cost less than eight bucks, including the way-cool collapsable pen with spare ink cartridge.

So that's what I've been using to track my ideas for blog topics as they come to me, which is way-faster than how often I blog them, which is a good thing because, eventually, I'll be able to sort through my 100s of ideas and pick a "top-10" list of actually good, interesting ones. This means that my low-tech solution should, over time, improve the quality of this blog.

(Heh, it can't get much worse, right? ;)

"I'm not a real luddite, I just play one on the internet..."


But the really cool thing about all of this is: I recently started using an idea-keeper pad, and I'm totally loving it! Over the years, I've jotted down this or that idea here and there, or started a small notebook to collect ideas on some project or another (i.e., Ted Lord) but, by and large, my fleeting "deep thoughts" have been lost to the ether.

When I was younger and had substantially more spare time (or is it just fewer thoughts? :), I could explore most of my ideas until either they turned out to be dead ends and I could safely discard them or I could mull them around, develop and evolve them until they got pretty well burned into my brain. But, lately, it seems that a lot of my passing "I should think about <whatever>, some" type thoughts have resulted in me, several hours later, thinking "what was it I was going to try to think more about, again?" It was actually in blogspace that I was reminded by several authors, businessmen and in-general-smart-people that I have come to respect how simple and useful it is to have a small pad to jot down instantaneous ideas for later mulling. Of course, this idea isn't new -- I've heard it repeated throughout my life -- I guess it was just the combination of realizing that I felt I'd lost some important ideas along with the reminder of how well this simple & inexpensive system works and my finally giving up on the idea (at least for now) of trying to find a techie/geeky solution has led me to finally keeping an idea-keeper.

<Don Adams voice> "...And loving it!"</Don Adams>


[1] I may have the ownership/attribution incorrect, but the idea is the same.)

Ted Lord

Ever since the first time I ever saw an MMORPG, I've been fascinated by the whole idea of on-line communities. Not so much for their commercial impact but just for the way that they allow people from widely varying backgrounds from all across the planet interact in a common framework; it was staggering to me.

I've been in various on-line "communities" before -- usenet groups, BBSs, etc., but Clan Lord was different. First, it was a game, in a genre that I enjoy (fantasy RPG, a sort of Dungeons & Dragons-esque thing, but interactive and live, on-line) but, more importantly, Clan Lord was designed from the git-go to foster community. In fact, the game-part was almost secondary -- really a back-drop for the community of cyber-citizens that inhabit the imaginary island of Puddleby. By today's standards, this 1995 game is hopelessly dated with its isometric-view sprite-based graphics but, despite WoW and all the triple-A titles out there, I still think it's one of the best games available. Heck, there are people who've been active accounts for coming-up on ten years! Now, WoW is fun -- I was totally crack-like addicted -- but I'm not still playing like the 1st week, now [almost] 2 years later, and I doubt I'll still have an account in 5, let alone 10 years. But CL is captivating, that way.

But it's also far from perfect so, of course, I often fantasize about making my own variation: Ted Lord. Actually, I play a character named Chum on CL, so I refer to it in those circles, when it comes up, as Chum Lord (has a certain ring to it, don't you think...? :)

Of course, Chum Lord will correct every failing of Clan Lord (not to mention any found in WoW, EQ and all the others), as well as implementing all of my own new, brilliant ideas -- that much goes without saying. But, even ignoring the technological hurdles (and those are shrinking every day), it's an amazing amount of effort to design an on-line community, regardless of whether or not you wrap a game around it.

To begin with -- the ideal, of course, would be that the Island Of Ted [Chum] would be completely free of annoying people. Hmm. I wonder if that includes me, on the days I find myself being annoying. This could turn out to be the world's smallest Massively Multiplayer anything.

Actually, I've got some ideas about a niche I hope to one day fill -- I think I can probably lock it in. This niche, while plenty big enough to support a small group (like, say, me and the handful of people who form the company to bring it into being), is no where near the size needed to pay the bills on a triple-A title, so I don't have to worry about Blizzard or Sony or Microsoft or anyone else throwing an army of people at the idea. Heh -- I don't mean to be coy, but I'd rather not talk about my niche and how I plan to satiate them until I'm a bit further along in development. Mostly because (a) I am a bit slow to get going and (b) because it'd be a fairly simple matter for a small group of interested folk to beat me to the punch. Anyway, I'm certain that you can dream-up your own niche for your own island where there are no people who annoy you.

But I didn't want to talk about Ted Lord [Chum Lord], per se, so much as the idea that a large portion of people who enjoy these games also enjoy the idea of dreaming up their own variation. There's World of Fred and SallyQuest and Skirwan Lord and a host of other pipe-dreams -- it seems everyone's got an idea for how to make these great things just a little bit better. Heh, there's a [rather substantial] niche for you: create a game where the game-part is that the players get to create a game to foist onto others. Actually, that's pretty much what the folks over at Project DarkStar are doing. If you're not into the techie-geek part of creating the game engine, and just want to make content, then maybe you'd rather play Second Life, which is all about player/user content creation.

It's funny, don't you think, that so many people who really-really enjoy cyber-communities in their various forms simultaneously have a desire to hole-up and spend oodles of time creating an "even better" cyber-community which, let's face it, they're not going to compete with WoW or AIM or even There, so we're really talking about a much tinier community and it sort of rings a little like "wouldn't it be cool if I could create a world that was, in essence, Cult Of Me?"

Except I don't think that's quite it; there's more to it than just fleeting fame from being the Big Fish in a rather tiny pond. Maybe. Or maybe it really is just the idea that many of us would like to create a world where we set the rules and then merrily watch as others thrive in our Utopia. Hmmm...

Actually, I think a very large bit of it is that whatever it is that makes this phenomanon -- the one where people swarm to an online community and become totally addicted to it -- happen is an interesting thing to think about. On the one hand, there's the "what is it about this program that makes it call to me, practically control my actions?" angle, which can easily evolve into "if I could write a program like that, could I control other people?" which, even if you're not an evil-overlord-wannabe, is sort of an interesthing thing to think about. But I think it's even more abstract than that. The whole "why are we like this? Why do we do the things we do?" angle of it is pretty interesting and, by playing with programs which embody algorithms that we can analyse (so goes the illusion which ignores the impact of a group of participants and their emergent behaviour), we can learn more about ourselves, our inner-gerwürkkens and, somehow, that makes us happy.

Hmmm... that's not quite it, either, but I think I'm getting close.

I'm going to have to stew on this one for a while. But there's definitely something there...

Biker Babes!

Last weekend, my wife completed the CHP motorcycle safety course -- her first-ever time in the driver's seat of a motorcycle. I stayed for about an hour after I dropped her off and watched the beginning of the range-exercises, then went about an hour early on the 2nd day to pick her up, and was amazed at how well folks progressed. It's interesting to watch people go from having trouble getting on & off the bikes in the 1st 10 minutes to racing around the parking lot at 30mph and making emergency stops at the end. I was pretty impressed by the course instructors, and Vicki and I had a good time talking about rules & safety procedures & motorcycle theory and "stuff like that."

I've been a motorcycle rider for as long as I can remember. Probably about since I was 18 or 19 and, for most of the time since then, a motorcycle has been my main commute vehicle (yes, even in Wisconsin, in the winter :) In addition, I enjoy it for just tooling around and the occasional cross-country trip. (For the past dozen or more years, I've been riding an old, beat-up Gold Wing 1500, the "Honda-bego.")

So we're both pretty excited about the idea of her becoming a motorcycle rider, both from the pleasure-riding angle and also because our 2001 Jetta wagon has got 170,000 miles on it, and will probably need to be upgraded, soon. Because we're a high-milage family, the idea of buying a used motorcycle instead of a new car for our high milage tasks (Vicki works ~50mi from home, I'm about 35) is quite appealing.

Then, yesterday, Vicki picked up a nice (she says -- I've not seen it, yet) used "trainer" bike (a Nighthawk 450.) Our thought is that she'd get something small-medium sized to ride at first, spend the Winter months putzing around on it until she was comfortable then, sometime in Spring, we'd get her a "real" motorcycle (basically, whatever she decides is right for her riding situation, which will probably be somewhat different from the one she got for the purpose of learning.)

So we're both pretty excited about that, too -- new [used] motorcycle, woot!

But I'm a bit nervous, at the same time. On the one hand, Vicki is a very capable and strong person, and can handle herself just fine. On the other hand, she sometimes forgets to pay attention to details, and I worry that one of them might be something important, like cross-traffic, or not locking up the front brake.

But she's also got a low tolerance for pain so, hopefully, a small bit of fear will keep her sharp until she gets fluent with her new motorcycling skills.

Actually, she's pretty skilled, already. I watched her do the "road test" at the end of class last weekend, and she's "all over" it. But that was in a parking lot with no other traffic (I was a bit surprised that they didn't have the whole class ride in a big figure-8, using each other as cross-traffic, actually. I'd-a thought that'd be standard part of beginner-training. Anyway...), and now she's going to be out on real streets with real other cars, some of which are driven by people talking on cell phones, applying make-up and reading the morning paper (yes, I've seen folks do all three at once!)

So that's a bit less-exciting... But I'm still kind-of jazzed at the idea that she'll probably survive her first venture into traffic, and we'll get to ride around together on some upcoming nice-weather weekend. (It's been in the 70s, lately! It's November! :)

Anyway... no Earth-shattering thoughts, today -- just something that's been on my mind, and I know I'm behind in blogging, so I wanted to bang out a few words, this morning.

Drive courteously...

The Key To Success

NOTE: At least for the forseeable future, I seem to be starting each blog entry with a sort of note-to-self about how I'm trying to evolve the blog. I have a pocket-pad full of pretty-big topics that I'd like to try to cover, eventually. Rather than worry about setting aside time to "do it up right", I think I'm going to just tackle them, as the muse strikes, and you get what you get. I've decided to not-edit past posts, except to correct spelling or grammatical problems if I think of it, or to correct gross factual errors (in which case I'll add the edit in [square brackets], so you can see both versions.) Instead, if I decide I have something more or better to say on a subject, or think it needs a major revision/update, I'll just do a Subject v2.0 type of thing. Ok, enough of that -- on with the show!

There are 10,000 paths to failure.
The key to success is to avoid walking any of them.

I accepted a job offer at a different company, Friday/Monday (verbally on Friday; formally, Monday.) It's sort of exciting, starting a new job -- the opportunities are wide open, and there are just a million things one can do. This is somewhat true at an existing job, but one tends to "rut", no matter how hard one tries not to and, it seems, management and corporate culture seem to encourage that, even if one tries to break-out.

Several times in the past couple of days, people have asked me "why do you want to leave <current company>?" It's funny, but they ask it as if there were one, possibly two, reasons and, if I would only speak up, maybe they could fix those things, and then everyone would be happy.

It's funny that no one seems to have noticed that I've never had much of a problem letting everyone around me know just what I think the company is doing wrong and how I suggest they fix it. Pretty much, anyone who can't immediately think of 3 big reasons why I might want to leave, and then follow up with a dozen more after a minute's thought, well, I guess I'm not sure what I can conclude other than maybe that they either are the kind of person who doesn't listen to people like me, or maybe they just don't care. Either way, it struck me as ironic that they'd ask.

<rant, rant, rant> Heh.

The funny thing is, I like most of the people I currently work with. By and large, they're nice, friendly, easy-going people. The other funny thing is: while these are great qualities that one looks for in a dinner companion, they aren't the most important qualities of a co-worker in a cutting-edge product-development work environment. Of course it's nice to work with nice, friendly people but, in order to actually produce great products, there needs a bit of criticality, a bit of bull-headedness, a bit of argumentativeness, a bit of "I'm sorry, Ted, but that's just not good enough! Please try again" attitude. Best if you can wrap all that up in a friendly and easy-going package but, if not, better to have the critical thinker than someone who just says nice things all the time.

There's one; 9,999 to go :)

I think that if I had a genie who would grant me one work-improvemet-related wish (or pick your favorite mechanism for dictating exactly one change-by-fiat to make work better), it'd be that any time anyone could call-out one of the decision makers as engaging in wishful-thinking, the decision under consideration would be tabled until they could demonstrate a thorough risk analysis and that their idea contains more fail-safe consideration than the likely-to-bite-you-in-the-ass kind. If I could figure out a way to word it so that people who attempted to massage the metrics to give a better impression than indicated by reality felt pain according to the level of dishonesty, I'd stick that in there, too.

I understand that it can be just as dangerous to over-plan or be overly conservative as to under-plan or overly ...uh... "adventurous" -- but my current employer is so far off the scale toward "winging it" that I don't think that any possible harm could come from running, full-tilt, toward the other end of the spectrum for several months.

The Silver Bullet is another one (don't genies typically grant three wishes?!) TSB takes many forms, but they all boil down to some variation on either searching frantically for or trying to apply overly simplistic solutions to rather complex problems. Of course, the whole "is there anything we can do to convince you not leave?" thing is just the ultimate version of that -- no one leaves a job because of some thing that they think can be changed; that wouldn't make any sense! Finding a new job is hard -- especially so if you're narrowing your search to "jobs that suck less than my current one"! It'd be way easier to just let your boss know "hey, I'm not happy about <blah>", and let them fix it. Of course, what to do when they don't, right? I suppose you can let on "hey, I'm really unhappy about this thing, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have to tolerate it elsewhere..." It helps, when doing such negotiations, if you're right about that latter part. But the Silver Bullet Thinking thing is to look at one of your good people leaving for a dozen or more reasons that have been articulated over the past year and ask "is there anything we can do to change your mind?" It's almost insulting in that it carries an implication of "...but make it something not too hard, ok? Like, maybe we could paint your cubicle a different color, get you a bigger keyboard or change your phone extention so it spells out a cool acronym -- something like that."

Oh, sorry, was I ranting, again?

But seriously -- what the...???

Silver Bullet thinking doesn't just apply to this question; the folks who engage in it typically apply it to a myriad of situations, all of them, by definition, inappropriate. The classic example is trying to add more people in the mad scramble at the end of a project, but it wouldn't take much effort to think of twenty others.

I often make the analogy of using a cash-advance from one's MasterCard to pay one's Visa bill, and vice versa. While it's crazy, of course, one can see the allure -- I mean, it gives the immediate appearance that one can "buy" all sorts of nice things that one really couldn't otherwise afford, and never have to "pay the piper", so to speak. What I don't get is how otherwise very-smart, very-together people can not see how this sort of behaviour is something to be avoided at all costs, used only in an extreme emergency, as it comes with a tremendous "next month's bill" overhead. Heh, well, I suppose I do get it -- because these otherwise smart and together people spend so much of their lives in a state of emergency that it has become their "normal routine" to apply weird, extreme, emergency procedures to just about everything they encounter.

On the one hand, I suppose I kind of admire them -- I mean, it's a pretty impressive feat, when you consider how much fire these people can juggle, while standing on a barrel of gasoline, drenched in the stuff, themselves.

On the other hand... how do people live like that?!?! I guess I just don't get it, after all.

Which I suppose, in the end, is why I'm moving on: because I don't get it. It sometimes feels as if I grew up in one civilization, where we have our customary foods, greetings, rituals and taboos, and my job is filled with people who grew up in a different civilization, where their customary foods, greetings and rituals have a large overlap with my taboos, and many of their taboos are things that I consider important foundations of ethical behaviour.

"...Or something like that." But in nicer words, because I do like most of them. In a "dinner companion" sort of way...

---

P.S. Heh, this started as a discussion of some of the 10,000 paths to be avoided, but I guess I got distracted by personal current events. This topic is definitely a candidate for a "version-next", as described at the top of this post.

You Just Have To Be Smarter Than A Pumpkin...

A few random thoughts.

First, a cyber-poke-in-the-shins to myself. I have a gazillion topics that I want to tackle in this blog; many of them are quite large and it will be a struggle for me not to use that as an excuse to keep working on drafts and writing and revising or just daydreaming about them and never getting anything "done." One of the points of starting a blog, for me, was to develop some discipline and whack-out a handful of thousand words each week, spread over a few posts. In addition to gaining that discipline, I hope it will help me develop a writing style and, after things start to flow more freely, I'll be able to do more word-smyth-y things with it. But I've been slacking, and it's almost 2 weeks since my last post. Bad, bad, me.

So, the way to keep writing when you either don't have anything of particular import to say, or the things that are important are SO important that you don't just want to brain-dump them onto a blog without "doing them up right", is to just blather on about this or that -- pick a not-particularly-important topic, but one that's topical for you, and write on it. That's why there are so many rant blogs -- "the thing that's really pissing me off today is..." type things.

So here's my minor rant for the day:

It seems that I'm not quite smart enough to go grocery shopping in These Modern Times. Oh, I gave it a fair shot, and I've always thought of myself as a pretty sharp guy but, armed with a detailed list from my wife, I found this morning's trip to the local Safeway frought with peril.

First, I spent about 6 minutes totally mind-boggled, because I didn't realize I was looking at "organic" milk, and I couldn't figure out just when-in-hell milk went to $7 a gallon! I was aghast -- is Exxon making this stuff, now?! Ok, so after I pulled my jaw off the floor, I found the regular-priced milk (still 50% higher than I remember the government-fixed price, but I figure there may be complicated economic factors involved, so ... "ok, whatever.")

Milk: check.

I noticed that my list also contained sour cream, butter & cheese. Now, I don't want to pull any of this "back when I was your age, everything was better" things, but it used to be that milk, butter, sour cream & cheese were all within arm's reach of each other (a) because they all benefit from refrigeration and (b) because they're all the same thing! Of course, back in the day, eggs were nearby, too because, well, milk & eggs somehow were both "home-farm" products that you could maybe imagine the neighbor handing out on weekends (if you live far enough from city-center), and somehow it just made sense.

Well, it turns out that in a modern grocery store (as I presumed this one to be from the track-lighting, and movie-production grade props to make things appear what they were not), cheese is on the "snacks" isle. Ok, you know, I can almost see that -- I mean, cheese is good snack food! Especially if you have things like cheese-sticks/string-cheese. But, oddly enough, the "snacks" isle also contained sour cream, bricks of cheddar and, I guess because they all go in a cooler-unit, jell-o pudding cups. <shrug> Ok, all snack-food, I suppose. But then where are the cheetos? Ah! Cheetos, if I would've given it any thought at all, are obviously beer food! Duh. Ok, I can go along with that one. And once you put Cheetos near the beer, chips of all sorts go there, too, as well as the fig newtons and related products. Ok, I was getting back into the swing of things, here...

But I still had this nagging memory that, back when cheese was with the milk [, butter, etc.], luncheon meat was nearby. I figured that this was because it was easier to install one wall-length cooler unit, and also folks have milk with lunch, too, so it sort of adds up. Then, once you had bologna, salami, sliced roast beeft, etc., the next logical thing was the rest of the meats. Tied together by the web of "goes in a cooler" and "is meat", these things just flowed logically.

I guess that's Old School thinking. The New Way has about 80 different kinds of bologna (how many of you would misspell that word, if it weren't for that cute kid and his Oscar-Mayer song?) and all the other lunch meats (but no sliced cheese!, that's on the "snack" food aisle), then bread -- which kinda makes sense, for making sandwiches, except it blocks your view of the rest of the meats, so you can't stand at the milk-door, look down the row and see meat, then also see things like bacon, steaks and pot roasts; those are hidden by the bread-display.

Oh! And I guess they have to dedicate so much shelf space to every conceivable brand of everything that the aisles are no longer big enough for 2 carts to pass in a straight line. Now, you have to pass about 2/3 of the way then, when the back of my cart is almost up to the back of your cart, we both have to turn slightly to the left (toward the other driver), to pivot the whole affair so that our cart-handles pass each other on a diagonal -- because they don't fit side-by-side! Actually, as assinine as that is, I sort of like the brain-teaser aspect of it...

Anyway, the other reason aisle width is important is because you can't back away from the milk-door far enough to see around the bread display to notice that there's more meat. So you stand there saying "I realize this is Santa Cruz and all, but we can't have abolished steak, for crying out loud...?!", but then you're not really sure. I mean, organic milk is going for $7 a gallon...

By the way, good news: egg nog is out. In gallons. It's cheaper than organic milk, too! Probably better for you. It is if you add enough rum, anyway...

Ok, I finally find the packaged shrimp & sausages, now I need a couple of cans of diced tomatoes. No problem! I remembered seeing "Canned Fruits" aisle-sign a bit back, canned vegetables are probably same aisle or one aisle over, right?

Well, sort-of. Actually, I looked at the canned fruits aisle, and saw no mention on the sign of canned vegetables, so I checked the aisles to either side -- no luck. Then I figured "well, maybe they're being smarty-pants, because tomatoes are a fruit, right?" (even though I'd expect it to be more near canned corn & beans than peaches & pears; but whatever.) So I go check, and the little mid-aisle signs don't have a canned fruits -- but they do have a canned vegetables! <sigh> "Ok, whatever..." So I walk to the far end of the aisle to discover... canned corn & beans. Well, hmmm... (a) where's the canned peaches & pears?! And (b) how about my tomatoes?

Turns out, as any small child could tell you, that tomatoes are "pasta" (small sign), which is "International and Ethnic Foods" (big sign.) You know, given the fact that the shelf-space dedicated to different sizes of chopped, diced, stewed, sauced, pasted and otherwise processed tomatoes is bigger than that dedicated to pastas (although it's close!), you'd think that "canned tomato products" would get its own sign. Nope. Oh well...

Ok, so it's Oct 29, the weekend before Halloween, and we haven't carved a pumpkin, yet. I'm to get two for my wife, and whatever I want to carve. But then I'm thinking... I've been in this store for about 25 minutes, so far, and haven't seen a single pumpkin! And I walked through the produce section twice! (Once on the way to milk, once because I thought maybe canned tomatoes would be near ketchup, which is in condiments which, as everbody knows, is in the produce aisle! (It's probably just the stores I grew up with, but that last bit actually makes sense to me, too. I guess olives & pickles are like produce, sort-of, and mustard & mayo just sort of go near there, too.)

So I go back to produce, thinking that maybe I just didn't see the 8000 pumpkins that were decoratively placed all around the bins of apple, oranges, potatoes, pineapples, etc., because they were so tastefully subdued.

Nope, that wasn't it. Pumpkins, it turns out, are not produce. Ok, Ted, let's think about this... Maybe they're seasonal -- that makes sense, sort-of. I say "sort-of" because coolers & lawn chairs are "seasonal", and get the "on top of the freezers" space when they're "in." Christmas ornaments and Pumpkins are (or should be, in my opinion), scattered throughout the store and, while for sale, make a sort of seaonal decoration for everything else.

Doesn't matter -- pumpkins aren't in the seasonal section, either. Good thing, because I didn't want to try to jiggle a few down from on top of the freezer units! Ok, I'm not that way, so I ask a helpful Safeway employee. "In front of the store", he says, "do you want me to show you?"

Uh, no thanks -- I think I can find the front of the store without much help. And I even recognize that I'm now looking for one of those pallets with the big pumpkin-decor boxes on top full of pumpkins out near where the carts are. Except I came in through the front, and didn't see any such pallets/boxes. Hmmm...

Turns out the pumpkins are in and amongst the carts. So, there's the middle of the store, where nobody parks, with some pumpkins, then 3 huge rows of carts on either side which totally dwarf (and block the view of) the pumpkins, then the doors to the store, in the spot furthest from the pumpkins. Oh, and a sign saying how it's illegal to shoplift. I can't help but wonder how many of those pumpkins are paid for, and if I'm being a chump by bringing mine up to the cashier. That's ok, I can be a chump in that way, if that's what it means...

Anyway... I finally got all the groceries. Wine didn't move (across from liquor, one aisle from beer, easily found by the end-caps of Doritos & related products), nor did roasted chickens (deli) or whatever else was on my list. But those first few items made it seem like this was going to be a serious ordeal!

While I'm gripping about grocery stores, I hate that they make the cashiers read my receipt and tell me to have a good day addressing me by name! (a) While my name isn't that difficult, hardly anyone pronounces it correctly, (b) the make-believe that the cashier is my "corner-grocer/friend" is inappropriate and cheeky and (c) (this is the real killer) to pointedly view my financial documents to pull personal information off of them and then use that information for your own purposes is invasive and rude in the extreme. For anyone whose mother didn't tell them this when they were kids, the proper way to address a stranger -- and this is true in all cases, but especially if you're in the service sector addressing a customer or potential customer -- is "sir" or "madam", as in "thank you, and have a nice day, sir." It's enough to make me want to try to remember to get cash when I go to the grocery store, just so I don't have to watch someone dumpster-dive my name off of my receipt and then use it to get fresh with me.

Day-em! that really pisses me off.

...But, other than that, it's been a pretty good day. The weather is great (70s), the dogs are happy, wife is napping peacefully, and we're going out to a nice dinner, later. (Groceries were for during the week meals.) Plus, I was able to outsmart the pumpkins.

I hope your day is at least that good.

And remember: you just have to be smarter than a pumpkin!

TNWM

I have a friend, Mikey and, every week -- with very few exceptions -- since about mid-1989, he and I have been going to dinner to talk about, well, pretty much whatever it is that we end up talking about.

When I first got a Job at Apple Computer, Mikey had just presented our co-manager with his idea of a "buddy checklist." Pretty straightforward stuff, the buddy checklist -- when a new person joins the group, they're assigned a "checklist buddy" who shows that new person where the bathrooms are, where the copy-machine is, helps them figure out who to talk to to get passwords for the various servers, how to set up a mail account (back then, you set up your own), where the good places to go for lunch are (this was before the cool new campus & cafeteria), etc. Now-a-days, nearly every company of any size has all of this happen as part of an HR indoc, or some similar thing, but Mikey's particular genius is that he saw this need back in '89 and devised a rather complete list of all the stuff that is typically missed in your average first-day "welcome to <Company Name>" schpiel but which is really necessary to function in your new job, and so Carol, our boss, assigned him to try out the new program on me. "How did you two meet?" people ask, and I always say "Mikey was assigned to me as my 'checklist buddy.'"

I think the first dinners were on Monday nights, but something came up that interrupted them, so we switched to Wednesdays. Back then, we were both single and so a lot of our Wed-night dinner talks centered around the trials & tribulations of dating (note to self: do a blog on dating strategy), and how we could enjoy that process more. One thing led to another, and it's been Tuesday nights for the last many-many years, and we've come to refer to it as "Tuesday Night With Mikey" or "TNWM", for short.

[Heh. So, tonight (Tuesday), Mikey's bailing because he wants to attend a town-meeting that's on a matter that's reasonably near & dear to him. Normally, I'd give him flak about it -- especially for missing on the day that I'm posting about how cool TNWM is -- but attending a town-meeting is a very TNWM kind of thing. In fact, we've spent many a Tuesday night doing something civic-minded, like going over the ballot-measures, or attending small claims court or similar. So... I hope you convince 'em, Mikey!]

Ignoring the fact that Mikey's a pretty smart guy, I just think it's cool that we've managed to maintain our friendship and keep in touch on a regular basis for over a decade and a half through several changes of jobs, apartments, houses, girlfriends (we're both married, now), and other normally-drift-apart-causing items here in fast-paced Silicon Valley.

To some people, this might not be much of a big deal -- my wife, Vicki, has lived on the peninsula her entire life (save a couple of years in VA and college in La Jolla), and still has lunch with people with whom she went to kindergarden. I, on the other hand, grew up in a military (Navy) family, and got used to the idea of moving, going to an entirely new school and making a whole new set of friends every 1.5-2 years until I was 10, when we stayed in the same place for 4 years, when we moved to Wisconsin, which I disliked a great deal, and couldn't wait to leave. I don't even remember where I went to kindergarden! (I'm pretty sure it was in Monterrey, though, although I'd have to check to be sure.)

And, to be fair, I have a few friends from the Wisconsin days with whom I still am in touch on a nearly-annual basis -- we've had some of them stay at our place for West-coast vacations, and we always try to visit when I'm back there to see my daughter (a Sr. at UWM, and I occasionally hear from some of the people I went to high-school with (including my 1st WI girlfriend, who's now in L.A. and occasionally comes to a bonfire or similar party-visit with her husband) and write (not often enough :\) a friend from the Navy days -- but, by and large, when someone "goes somewhere else" (leaves work, if that's where I know them from, or moves, or whatever), we tend to drift apart. So I think it's way-cool that Mikey and I decided "we're going to make the effort to not drift apart", and stuck to it.

Good on us!

Seriously, though -- there are, in my opinion, not enough truly top-notch people in the world and, if you happen to know one, it's to your advantage to nurture the friendship make make darned good and sure that, if one of you gets another job, or moves to another city/state or otherwise becomes less accessable, that you make the effort to not lose that person from your life. And it is effort! It's not much, but it's "more than zero", and it's well worth it.

(Heh, when I started writing about TNWM, I didn't think I'd get off on this tangent, but it is important! Such is blogging, eh?)

So, again, maybe lots of people already know all about this, because they've been doing it their whole life but, for those of us who have an early history of pulling-up stakes and starting over, that's my advice: when you run into a rare individual that would be a shame to drift away from, make the effort not to drift away.

Ok, I think I've beat that one to death...

So: TNWM. Over the years, Mikey and I have had a lot of conversations about a lot of interesting things -- neither of us are much "into" sports (except as observers of the fans) or weather, but we both do enjoy talking about philosophy, the economy, psychology, computers (of course!), constitutional law and who knows what else; we we always have plenty to talk about. Also, over the years, we've invited other friends or couples to join us and they always have a great time (of course, they're hand-picked because they're the kind of person who would really "get into" this sort of thing), and then they sort of become regulars and then, as the extra-friends mount up, TNWM started to be this big weekly dinner with a dozen or more interesting, talkative people and we started to notice: hey! We never get to argue about this or that just between the two of us, anymore. Tuesday nights had started to take on a life of their own, and we no longer get to spend all day Monday & Tuesday (or sometimes the whole week leading up) stewing over some topic and then work it out on Tuesday night, because someone else wants to steer things toward whatever they've been thinking about.

"Not that there's anything wrong with that..."

...But, as much as we enjoyed the group dynamic, we also wanted to reclaim the one-on-one conversation, too. So we decided that the first Tuesday of every month should be TNWE -- Tuesday Night With Everybody -- a sort of open-ended, free for all, "if you're cool & interesting & fun to be with and like this sort of thing, please join us" kind of affair, and the other Tuesdays are back to just me & Mikey. Actually, Vicki usually joins us, but that still keeps the "quiet, deep discussion" feel going, without things going 10 directions at once, the way the bigger group does.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, a couple of reasons. First, because it's way-cool, and you should consider setting up something similar with one of the smart people in your life. One of the things that came out of the dating-days discussions was that Mikey noticed that nearly everyone will say "I just love the woods, and camping, and etc..." but, if you ask them "how many times have you been camping in the last 12 months?", they'll answer zero. Ok, then, "when was the last time you went camping?" -- uh... "not since I was a little kid, with Scouts" is a common response. Ok, there's nothing wrong with not going camping but, if you love it so much, why don't you do it?!

I told you that because it ties in: a lot of people that I know say they just love to get together and talk/bullshit/brainstorm/argue/discuss/whatever with other smart people but, when asked how many times they've done that, this year (architecture meetings at work, while close, don't, technically, count), the answer is often "never." Ok, then, when was the last time you did something like that? "Oh," comes the response, "I can't even remember the last time. Five, maybe ten years...?"

So I'm telling you all of this to urge you to go out there and do it! (If you don't like yapping with people so much, but love camping, then do that -- I like camping, but I like yapping more. The point is: if you really love it, then make time to do it!)

And if you can't figure out when you're going to squeeze all this stuff you really love to do into your busy schedule, I've just given you a model for how to make it work. Once a week too much for you? Well, what do you REALLY have to do that's so gosh-darned important that you can't blow it off to do the thing you really enjoy?! But maybe you have some weird set of comittments, ok -- you can still set aside the first Thursday of every month (or whatever) to spend time with the coolest people you know, can't you?!

I don't know your schedule -- I'm just saying: figure it out! It's really not that hard.

The other reason I'm telling you all of this is because, over the coming weeks, months & years, I'm likely to open several topics with some variation on "so, I was talking to Mikey last Tuesday about <blah>, and...", and now you'll have a context for why I do that.

Are You A Packrat, Too?

I'm a bit of a packrat. Actually, I come from a long line of packrats -- my mom was a packrat, and her parents were packrats and her grandfather (my great-grandfather) was SUCH a packrat that he had to have a huge old victorian house just to store all the stuff that he had squirrelled away and I'm pretty sure that the whole reason they had my grandfather in the first place was so that he would grow up to buy a house and then great grandpa'd have some auxilliary storage space.

Of course, how was he to know that grandpa would grow up to be the kind of person who doesn't have a single square foot of available storage at his house, either...?

Anyway, about a dozen years or so ago, I started bemoaning what a hassle it was to be a packrat, and started getting all sorts of helpful adivce from my friends about how to break the pattern, like: put stuff you never use in boxes and date them. Then, when you move, if you haven't looked inside that box for a year or more, put it in the old apartment's dumpster instead of moving it to your new apartment.

<Shrug> Ok, that seems fairly simple. Except I bought a house before I got around to doing that (have I mentioned my procrastination, lately?), and haven't moved, since (plus, we don't own a dumpster, although we do make occasional dump runs), so now I've got a whole 2nd house (ok, it's really "the barn"; but it was the original house on this lot!) full of boxes of stuff that I've not looked at or used for 10 years, but somehow can't bring myself to throw away.

Actually, I'm getting a little better -- more on that in a minute -- but it's painful and slow-going and the slow-going-ness of it makes it more painful and... <whine, whine, whine!>

Scott Adams (The Dilbert Guy) wrote a funny blog entry a while back (actually, he writes a lot of either funny or thought-provoking or both blog entries) called Inconvenient Garbage, in which he talks about inadvertantly contributing to the problem. In addition to being kind of funny, in a "hey, I'm one of the people who are stupid in the way that Scott is mocking <chortle, snort>" way, it was sort of insightful, and actually may be putting me on the path to curing my packrattiness.

Maybe.

It seems that there's this category of stuff that has a vague notion of "sentimental value", but no actual value and, in fact, carries a sort of cost -- or negative value -- in terms of the fact that it's clutter and sort-of junking-up my life in a way that I find vaguely annoying.

My wife -- quite a bright woman -- suggests "well, what would be the bad thing that you imagine might happen if we just take <whatever> to the dump?" Good question! The problem, of course, is that I have no idea. I'm certain that if I knew the answer to that question, I'd be able to look at it, and say "that's dumb!", and then just toss whatever it is. It's like, "but then I won't have <whatever it is>, and at some future point I might want it."

Or something. As I said, I don't actually know the answer -- at least not fully.

But now, at least, I have an interesting way to look at the problem and think about it. And, as I said, I am getting better! I used to have two whole footlockers full of old computer stuff. And by "old computer stuff", I mean things like a binder full of green-bar 14" source-code printouts for the 1st computer game I used to love playing (*-wars on the Qantel), an entire shoebox full of punch cards for the 1st big program I ever wrote and a few old 8k RAM cards for a computer I no longer own (back then, 8k was a LOT of RAM, and cost more than a 1G DIMM does, today!)

(Note for the numerically challenged: 8k = ~8,000; 1G = ~1,000,000,000.)

Actually, I had a good excuse for the punch cards: I occasionally teach intro programming or computer courses, and it's fun to do a little history and break the ice with "back in the day..."-type war-stories. And I had plans to re-invent *-wars on modern technology.

But then, in a blinding flash "let go, Luke...!"-esque moment, I realized that (a) I could tell the war-story with about 3 punch cards to show as example, relieving the need for the other 8,000 of them and (b) that there was not one single line of code in that source binder that was going to be the slightest bit useful in my re-implementation of *-wars (which, btw, in it's latest evolutionary redesign-as-pipe-dream, is nothing even remotely resembling the original game, anyway, so keeping the binder around for code-as-design-notes wasn't even a valid excuse, anymore.) (Have I mentioned my procrastination, lately?)

Where was I? Oh yeah -- so I pitched that huge sorce binder (actually, I think I put it, a few pages at a time, into a bonfire, out of some weird thought that, technically, I was probably still under NDA for it, in some old lawyer's mind), and 98% of the hollerinth cards, two 9-track mag-tapes, all-but-one of the S-100 bus circuit cards and a bunch of other useless junk, and now the whole two footlockers' worth of stuff is squished into that shoebox.

To be honest, I don't know when the next time I'll have occasion to tell "back in the day..." stories with visual aids will be -- so the shoebox could probably be tossed, too -- but I regained nearly a cubic-yard of storage space, so feel better about that, anyway.

The funny thing is: my sense of aesthetics says that those open, austere, no-nick-nacks rooms are the prettiest, yet I don't think I've ever owned one, except in the moments immediately before moving in. I'm trying to exit the "well, the solution is to get a 12,000 sq.ft. house, and keep 11,000 sq.ft. of it full of junk, with one big, open, sparsely furnished living room to admire" mindset and approach the "you know, a good 75% of this stuff is junk, and could easily go to the dump (or Goodwill/Salvation Army/your charitable group, here.)

Actually, in a funny combination of both procrastination and packratiness, I've convinced myself that there's a fortune to be had selling a large fraction of my junk to other people on eBay. Somebody ask me how that's going a year from now; maybe if I haven't sold anything, it'll convince me to take it to the dumpster.

But what really amazes me about all of this is what an amazingly uphill climb that is! Normally, I'm the kind of guy who just says "ok, I need to do <blah>", and then I devise a plan, and start doing it, and pretty soon, I'm done. But with this "get over your need to hang on to old junk" thing, it's a real stumper -- I just don't get what my internal resistance to it is...

Some days, I think I should just go on vacation, and leave someone I trust with instructions "rent a dump truck, and take one heaping load of stuff that you're certain is junk that I'll never use and haul it away." Then, when I get back, I can gasp and scream and maybe cry a little about how "my favorite goldfish bowl -- I was going to fill it with loose change and take Vicki some place nice..." (or whatever) was gone but then, a few days later, I'd feel happier about how the sheer weight of junk in my life had been lessened by one dump-truck's worth and maybe -- just maybe -- it would be easier for me to do the next load.

Maybe.


But I'm sort-a chicken to try. I mean, what if my trusted friend tosses my old goldfish bowl?!?!

And that's the really weird part that I don't get. I know my blog is new, and nobody's reading it (if, for no other reason, than because in my 1st post, I said it wasn't for you to read, yet, anyway!) -- but I can sort of imagine readers falling into two camps:

Camp 1: "Just get over it, dude! Toss that junk, you'll never use it -- it's GARBAGE!"
Camp 2: "Yeah, I know exactly what you mean; I have exactly the same problem."

Ok, and maybe...

Camp 3: "What's the big deal? Those are treasures and you should save them!"

Still, if anyone's reading -- and especially if you're from Camp 2 and you have some bright ideas (it's always easier to coach others than to do, one's self!) -- I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Me First, Then You

This blog entry isn't for you; it's for me. I'll explain that in a bit.

I'm what the folks over at NaNoWriMo call a "one day novelist." It sounds kind-a fancy – like maybe someone who can whip out a novel in a day – but it's really their shorthand to characterize all the people who frequently have the thought "one day, I think it'd be cool to write a novel." So, last year, after several of my friends participated in NaNoWriMo's "write a novel" challenge, I thought "that sounds kind of fun; I should do that, next year", and I went over to their site and entered an email address to be reminded when this year's 50,000-word challenge came around. Both before that time and since, I've taken a few dabbles at "my novel", and written a few scenes.

Yesterday, I got the reminder mail. I went to their site, started poking around, and started getting excited about the idea of getting going.

Then I started thinking about what was involved. 50,000 words in a month is ~2000 words a day, with the occasional day-off (I know, you're supposed to write EVERY day – but there are very few things that I do that I don't occasionally skip a day, and I know myself too well to think I wouldn't take a break) and maybe a few days where you don't quite hit 2000. So then I went to look at a few example entries in blogs that I enjoy, to get a sense of how much 2000 words was and saw that they were in the 2000-word range, and THAT didn't seem so terribly hard, so then I opened up my novel, on which I've been dabbling for over a year, and did a word-count.

I'm embarrassed to publish the actual number, but let's just say that the realization of how small my little pride & joy was left me feeling a bit disappointed. Ok, fine: it was just over sixteen-hundred words. In just over a year.

Ouch.

Ok, fine – so I'm a bit of a procrastinator; I knew that about myself. Plus, I'm a tad nit-picky, and that makes me procrastinate more, as I haven't yet internalized the Nano-concept of "write ANYTHING, even if it's junk. Worry about quality later; for now, you need to just work-out your writing muscle." Then I got to thinking about these other cool blogs, and decided maybe I could do that as a sort of "pre-warm-up" exercise. I've always thought about blogging anyway so, while the 10s of 1000s of other Nano-writers are slaving away staying up until all hours of the night trying to bash out 50k-words in 30 days, I'm going to try to kick-off a blog and stick to it.

I actually DO have some kind-of neat ideas, I think, so it may actually turn into something worthwhile.

But that's not THIS post. THIS post is for me. It's my "statement of intent." If I just tell myself "I should start a blog", I'll never get around to it. But, somehow, having posted a billboard where everyone can see it (and the fact that nobody probably read it doesn't actually matter so much as that the post is published), then I'll actually "have to" make time & do it. That's THIS post.

Initially, my goal is to just bang-out 300-1000 words one to three times per week on whatever suits my fancy. In these initial posts, my main goals will be (a) to write regularly (b) to "find my voice" (including pick a format, develop a style, etc.) (c) diddle around with various blogging software, which will probably be used as an excuse to procrastinate on the actual writing and (d) write about my procrastination enough times that it becomes a matter of pride for me to actually DO goals a-c. Later, after a-d settle-in, I hope to be able to explore various relevant topics in greater detail, probably something in the ~2500 words 2-3x/week range. We'll see how that goes, after this first part.

So, if you're interested in watching me document my struggles with laziness and yet-another-net-idiot's stream-of-consciousness blog, feel free to read these first few entries. But they're not for you, they're for me. When I decide to post my first "real" entry, I'll label it something like "Grand Opening!", or some such. From that point on, the posts will be "for you", in the sense that I hope to be sharing some useful insight that helps others see some relevant issue in some new way that makes Everything Better For Everybody.

"...Or something like that."

Hey, almost 800 words in about 15 minutes, just talking about how hard it is to bang out words – piece o' cake!