So, I’ve had another semi-brush with fame. I was catching up on my RSS feeds, and found that Bike Snob NYC had lifted my picture of the lawyer tabs on my road bike to use in his Friday Fun Quiz:
Here’s the original:
On the one hand, it’s cool. And on the other hand it’s pretty cool to see someone else reusing my work. I’ve dropped him an email asking for photo credit. And it’s incentive to get back to writing – running, biking, and swimming have all been pretty good lately, but not great.
I am so proud.
ThinkGeek never fails to amaze:
It looks like the boyos and I have a potential date for the first camping trip of the year in about 3 weeks – Missy’s got supper club, and we’ve got warm weather and worms to dunk. Cannot wait to sleep in the woods again.
Training has been good this week – on schedule for the first time in a while. Great run on Tuesday – finished 4 miles in under 8:00/mile. I was spent at the end, but for a change of pace it rocked. Nice to know I’m closer to being able to hang with the fit guys at work.
I played soccer tonight. Tons and tons of fun, but I cannot get to sleep thanks to adrenaline. So, here’s what’s been bouncing around inside my head.
1. “Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.” – Clay Shirky. He’s talking about the train wreck in the newspaper world, but this bit could be applied across the board. Thinking big thoughts is good for society.
2. “Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, who was one of the authors, said, “What is amazing to me as I learn about this is how flimsy was the theoretical basis of the claims that derivatives and other complex financial instruments reduced risk, when their use in fact brought on instabilities.†– New York Times. I considered “financial engineering” while I was working on my MBA, but the reliance on much of what I was exposed to on equations extremely sensitive to a single assumption made me leery. As I keep listening to Planet Money, I’m more a believer that the 3-6-3 model (Pay 3% to people in savings accounts, lend at 6%, and be on the golf course at 3PM) for the banking and finance industry was a system that didn’t need a lot of tinkering. Plus, who really needs millions of dollars?
3. “Getting things done, especially the right things, is incredibly satisfying, but waking up one day to realize you’re a stressed-out workaholic at the age of 28 is not. Life requires balance. You’ll be more productive, more creative, and more satisfied if you calm down and unplug every once in a while, even if it’s once in a very long while.” Questioning the ‘Cult of Done‘. I hadn’t heard of the ‘Cult of Done’, but this is a great piece encouraging taking even good stuff with a grain of salt. Understanding the limits of models, etc. See item 2.
4. “(F)inancial warfare comes with all sorts of risks. The Unites States is deeply in debt to other countries — especially China, which holds over a trillion dollars in U.S. securities — and that kind of leverage, in the wrong hands, could be destabilizing.” Danger Room (Wired). This keeps me up at night. Actually blowing stuff up is risky, expensive, and morally ambiguous. Blowing $100 billion on wrecking a country’s market over a dispute is arguably just expensive.
5. Belated reminder that William Gibson’s birthday is St. Patrick’s day. Makes a phenomenal excuse to go drunk driving on the information superhighway. His guest series over the last week is very NSFW, but worth a look. (Assuming you’re on a personal computer, of age in your jurisdiction, and not averse to boobs and foul language).
6. This is big and interesting – MIT backs free access to scientific papers. Cool counterpoint to the newspaper story.
7. For file under studies noone really needed: “The data suggests that relevant information will emerge even when the group’s communications aren’t firing on all cylinders. Groups where at least one member had a requisite answer to the problem tended to be more successful than those that rated highly for the open sharing of information. The sharing did seem to help the group build a cohesiveness in a way that simply obtaining the answer did not, however. So, being stuck in a meeting where people are discussing things you already know can serve a positive function.” Really? Having a clue helps? But if you don’t have a clue, at least you can have that in common with the rest of the clueless…
Be good to each other.
This is a really interesting interview with the guy who wrote this book
There’s another view of Web 2.0 evangelists which I call ‘Why not?’ For example, ‘Why not turn up at Grand Central Station wearing underpants in a big Flash Mob?’
But I don’t think ‘Why Not?’ is good enough. Things need to have a purpose. If you have a project or a purpose, you can use the medium to achieve that. With no ideas, no project, you have nothing. The evangelists simply believe can use this metaphysical glow of this medium to woo people.
People forget the world’s first Flash Mob in 2003, organised by Bill Wasik, was a joke. It was a joke on the gullibility of New York hipsters who would react to any kind of electronic information, and do anything you told them. [From ‘Like pedos in a playground’ – the media and Web 2.0 • The Register]
I’m not really down on Web 2.0; moreso I’m down on technology for technology’s sake. There’s a difference between doing something that’s cool, and doing something that everyone ought to do.
In some cases, experience and limiting access to channels isn’t a bad thing. The most difficult part of any kind of freedom is self-control
Hmm – google book search works with the iPod Touch, but not Google Sync. I’m kind of bummed about it.
Google Sync allows you to get your Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar events to your phone. Once you set up Sync on your phone, it will automatically begin synchronizing your address book and calendar in the background, over-the-air, so you can attend to other tasks. Sync uses push technology so any changes or additions to your calendar or contacts are reflected on your device in minutes.
an experimental Humvee, equipped with a laser. The real-life ray gun then took aim at the drone, and began blasting. Soon, the drone had a hole burnt through it — and was crashing down to the desert. [From Laser 1, Drone 0 in Boeing Test]
An old glass jar inside a beaten up old safe at the bottom of a waste pit may seem an unlikely place to find a pivotal piece of 20th century history. But that’s just where the first bulk batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made has been found – abandoned at the world’s oldest nuclear processing site [From Earliest weapons-grade plutonium found in US dump
The Times of London reports that the United Kingdom’s Home office Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain to routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. [From UK Police To Step Up Hacking of Home PCs]
Question for the cloud – How well does iTunes video work on an Intel Atom powered netbook? (Like Lenovo S10, MSI WInd, Acer Aspire One, etc?)
I’d meant to get this out before the New Year, even to the point of getting a draft going days ago. (By getting a draft going, I mean that I came up with a concept in my head, and put a sentence into ecto.) And it kind of died there.
But, I’ll resurrect it here, as 43folders is back with good stuff that sums up a couple of other bits that have really resonated with me lately:
Even (or especially) for people with a notional gift for their chosen field, talent — like luck, rich parents, and unmined gold — is just a raw material. It’s not the one-bit switch that determines artistic success. And, any “talent†one theoretically possesses is likely to stay stuck under a layer of river rock unless and until its claim-holder learns to repeatedly pan, sluice, or dredge it into something that can be refined, polished, and, in most cases, vended. Fancy ladies buy gold jewelry; not drawings of mining equipment.
Even closer to my own state of mind was O’Reilly writer Simon St. Laurent’s resolution to practice:
I don’t expect to become a master at either of these things. Frankly, I think that “mastery” is usually the wrong goal, a strange habit in our culture of setting ourselves up to fail. Mastery happens, but we need to remember – and value – the intermediate steps.
Even closer to home for me has been getting to know a couple of musician friends up here a little bit better. Missy and I went to our first live show together in, well, like forever a couple of nights ago to see Ben and Nancy play, and, man, did it bring together a bunch of thoughts that have been rambling about my head for a while.
Practice and Train
The first is just the unabashed joy of DOING something WELL. What I captured at the San Antonio Marathon, and what I’m beginning to recapture through my coursework at the War College is that half-assing things, while sometimes the right thing to do, is ultimately a method of last resort. Quality comes from repetition/practice/drills. My first two marathons were matters of survival. My MBA was getting a box checked off. San Antonio was the first marathon I did after committing to being a runner, being (relatively) consistent about training, and really doing the groundwork.
My kid brother’s a real inspiration here. He took up the violin last spring, and got to the point where he played Christmas carols for the family this year over the holiday. I want to do that. But I picked up the guitar maybe a dozen times in the whole year, and the piano even fewer. No wonder I can’t play.
Be Realistic
It’s kind of important here to discriminate between doing something WELL and in achieving excellence or being the best. 30,000 people ran the San Antonio Marathon with me; only Meschack Kirwa won the race. I finished in the middle of the pack, but I’m completely satisfied with that result. My point, here, is not to necessarily settle for mediocrity, but to realize that a lot of things are still worth doing. And that the more you do them, the further along the distribution curve of results you’ll get.
We did “A Charlie Brown’s Christmas” as the church’s pageant this year, and filled out the list of kids who wanted to participate beyond what we needed for speaking parts by letting some of the musically talented kids play christmas carols. And, man, was I happy we did. It wasn’t perfect, but it really helped set the mood. There had been a brief motion early on in November when we started practicing to use a CD for the songs, but I put the kaibosh on that. Vince Guaraldi’s album is as close to perfect as a Christmas album can be, but that wasn’t what we were after. We wanted the kids to think about Christmas, and to celebrate Christ’s birth using their own talents. In the end, we had a couple of kids show talent even their parents hadn’t realized. No one’s going to take our show to Broadway, but we didn’t want them to.
What I’m saying here, I guess, is that unless you’re Usain Bolt, or Michael Phelps, there’s always someone better, and it’s always easier not to use a talent. But that’s the wrong answer.
Get Help
I finally understand what people mean when they’ve been telling me to “get help.” It means that I should actually go out and talk to people who know what the heck they’re doing. (My wife’s yelling at me that, no, it means I ought to go see a shrink)
Again, coming back to the church’s Pageant. We hatched the idea, coordination kind of fell to me, since, well, I am the elder for Christian Education. So, I went out and watched the TV show, we bought the screenplay, and I adopted it for the Church. Then, when we started rehearsals, one of the other teachers was helping out tremendously, and had a much better talent for getting the kids to move around the stage than I did. Another teacher took the kids without speaking parts, and did a tremendous job arranging a chorus around the show. I took the kids who didn’t want to be on stage at all, and we built stuff. My initial concept had been that I’d do the directing; but others were stronger at that. Help offered itself, and I had the good sense to say “yes”.
So, I’m going to adopt that attitude elsewhere. I’m going to actually discuss essays with my professors. I’ll get career advice from folks I work with and follow through. I’m going to take “Triathlon Swim Training” classes at the Mystic Y.
Focus
Another thing people have continually told me is that “you can’t do everything”. While I’d like to think I’ve proven them wrong, I’ve realized that what they were really trying to say was “you can’t do everything WELL.”
And it turns out that they were right.
I’ve already kind of started to put this into practice. If something isn’t important to me, it’s gone. I gave a pretty major project for which I’d won a big proposal to another engineer at the office so that I could concentrate on the work I really want to do. I’m paring down my RSS feeds (as useful as he was earlier today, 43folders and almost all the tech rumor sites are gone), and I plan on being quicker to “mark all read” when I haven’t had the chance to read news in a couple of days. And I think I’m pretty much done with television. I’ll watch the conclusion to Battlestar Galactica and this season of 24 on Hulu, and maybe catch Headlines once in a while with the wife.
Cub Scouts? I’ll help out where asked, but am not really moved by the whole scouting thing. If things don’t improve with the pack we’re with, we’ll do Webelos with a different pack in the area that has some super dig-it parents.
I’ve cleaned my spaces in the house – they’re filled with stuff I want to do, and I may cut up the credit card so that i can’t buy new stuff with which to distract myself.
Alright already, enough with the preaching
So, what do I want to do? (Husbanding and fathering are, as always, above everything)
First, while I’m committed to the fleet seminar program at the War College, I really want to go back for a technical masters’ (or PhD groundwork) in Computer Science, specifically state processing or digital signals processing as applied to software defined radio. To support this, I need to:
Not necessarily less important is that I want to continue to contribute at church. There’s a bunch of projects cooking, and a bunch of talent newly inspired and some new arrivals. Good times.
I also want to write more, and write better. My plan for this is:
Music’s on my mind. Action items here are:
Become more accomplished as a geek.
Hey, isn’t this a running blog?
It just hit me that this went way, way longer than I’d planned. I’m putting the fitness stuff in another post.
2009 ought to be good. My predictions:
Thoughts I want to explore in 2009
All right. Enough.
Happy New Year, y’all.
