Expanded ideas

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Warning: politics

February 12, 2010 in Expanded ideas, The System | 4 comments

Embedded within the migraine that is American politics are some very interesting ideas. Economics, markets, ethics, freedom, equality, education, transportation, and security are all intriguing topics. Recently, I figured out that the headache comes not from people or trying to make the ideas work, but in politics. Getting a majority of the people to agree on anything is a giant pain of coordination. When you throw in fearmongering, power struggles, critically wounded media, and the fact most people would rather not think deeply about any of this you end up with the major downer that we face today.

All that said, here are some pithy one-liners about politics:

  • If I were part of the Democratic leadership, I’d be wondering how you take the high road in a race to the bottom. And win.
  • If I were a Republican, I’d be wondering how to dig myself out of this giant hole I made by winning a race to the bottom.
  • If I were a libertarian, I’d be wondering how to convince people that the Tea Party is different from what I believe in.
  • If I were a leader of the Tea Party, I’d be wondering what I’m going to do when someone who claims to be a part of the Tea Party blows up a building or goes nuts with an assault rifle.
  • If I were a politician, I’d wonder how much I have to compromise my values and what I really wanted to accomplish but still get enough votes to keep my job.
  • If I were skeptical of climate change due to human activity, I’d be wondering how I’m going to find a spaceship, because this line of reasoning leads to the conclusion that the Earth is about to become very inhospitable.
  • If I were a nihilist, I’d wonder…nothing.

There, have I offended everyone?

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Goodbye, gutbombs

January 19, 2010 in Expanded ideas | No comments

Last March my wife and I joined a gym, started working out with a trainer, started trying to eat better, and thusly set out to improve our health. Amazingly, we’ve stuck with it (after two previous failed attempts in years past) and are both in much better shape than we’ve been in for quite some time.

One of my personal reasons for doing this was what I’d been hearing about the correlation between working out, eating better, and brain function. Lots of people who read way more into this than I do had been saying that if you eat better and exercise more, your brain will work better.

I’ve noticed this first hand. The day after my first serious run, my mind was in overdrive. I had lots of great ideas, I worked through them quickly, and I didn’t procrastinate when it came to exploring or realizing them.

Today, I had the opposite experience. I went out for a rather large Tex-Mex lunch. Lots of starch. I got home and took a nap, as is often my wont. Usually I wake up ready to get back to work after my naps. But today was different. My brain was thoroughly sluggish. My body’s energy was going towards digestion, not thought.

I guess this is something of a break-up letter for me. You see, I’ve long enjoyed the large, starchy lunch. But, I’m not sure I can put up with it anymore. If its a choice between starchy, tasty lunches and a high-functioning brain, I’m going to have to choose my brain.

Sorry, lunch-time gutbombs. We had a good run, but I’m going to have to quit you for a while.

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Dallas could get a pedestrian bridge

September 25, 2009 in Curated, Expanded ideas | No comments

Trinity gift is $10 million for pedestrian bridge. Catering to pedestrians, in Dallas? Surely you jest!

I’ll just sit here and quietly hope that the plans for an urban park around the Trinity aren’t derailed by everything that is politics.

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Tracking your own context switches

September 8, 2009 in Expanded ideas | 1 comment

Why I do Time Tracking

At one point, I tracked every context switch during my work day. I kept a legal pad next to my mouse and I would write down the time whenever I switched between coding, emailing, surfing, talking to someone in my cube or walking around to find someone I needed to talk to.

People thought I was odd. They’d ask what I was jotting down when I noted my context switch, so I briefly explained it. “Okaaaayyyyyy?”, they’d say. An unintended side-effect was that people did end up bugging me about random things less. In fact, it was way more effective at that than putting up a sign that said “unless something is on fire, email me”. So it goes.

I never ended up running any aggregate numbers on the data. But, it did give me an idea about the frequency and cost of my context switches. I wish there was a better way to track this sort of thing passively. I’m sure it would still shock me how much time I go in and out of focus.

If you’ve never tried this sort of experiment, it’s worth running for a week or two. You’ll almost certainly notice something worth trying to cut out by glancing over the list of things you’re spending time or wasting focus on.

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My Why Story

August 23, 2009 in Expanded ideas | No comments

Chris Wanstrath:

Now we can all stop obsessing about who we think he was and instead focus on who he actually was – a prolific and inspiring hacker.

I met Why The Lucky Stiff for the first time at SXSW 2006. By some odd cosmic occurrence, he was performing during the Interactive schedule. I’m not sure the programming committee realized it would be a performance and not a panel. But there they were. All new material. Attempted audience interaction, subterfuged by the shoddy conference WiFi1. It was great.

After The Thirsty Cups performed, I introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Adam, glad to meet you”, etc. Then I came with my wildcard. Until I’d met him and shook his hand, I’d harbored a theory that Why was really an A-List celebrity, probably one from Ocean’s 11, that was using an alter-ego identity to share his love of Ruby. He suggested that I was, in fact, Brad Pitt. Which may be true. But I like to think that he enjoyed my theory.

One of my life-long pleasures has been making people laugh. Along those lines, a high watermark in that endeavor was when Why posted my zany Star Trek/Ruby sketch to Red Handed. I felt I had arrived; he praised my Picard impersonation!

Life is good.

I’d somewhat forgotten this, but a lack of seriousness, in the “I write weighty code, you should take me seriously” sort of way, is my best guess as to what Why’s schtick is. Lots of people have made a big deal about how unprofessional it is for him to just yank his code off the net, or about how his code was messy, stuff like this. They’re missing the point. I think Why just wanted to have fun, with code, and spread the fun, with code.

To an extent we, the community of developers who care about code and software, have forgotten how to have fun with what we do. Personally, I’m going to get right back on that.

More: Rick Olson sent me a picture from SXSW 2006, and Damon Clinkscales sent along some videos he took of the performance. Thanks, guys!

1 Even though SXSW was less than a thousand geeks at this time.

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Working from home, better

August 12, 2009 in Expanded ideas | No comments

Tips for working alone:

The other thing I’m doing is bringing back my practice of writing “daily pages”… ~750 words a day to myself, that sort of help me get everything out in the open in my head and so that I can find a bit of clarity in my typically scrambled thoughts.

I do this too. I find it’s pretty handy for focusing my thoughts and bringing ideas out.

Some other things I’ve done working from home the past year or so:

  • Put as many distractions as possible in another room. Get the TV, Xbox, etc. out of your workspace.
  • Keep it clean. Nothing is more distracting, to me, than mess and clutter.
  • Take a nap! I’ve become a regular nap taker lately, right after lunch; it’s noticeable the improvement it brings.
  • Use Twitter, IRC, Campfire, IM, etc. as your watercooler. Standard disclaimers apply - make sure your work/socializing blend is right.
  • Get out every once in a while. I try to get out to socialize with other geeks or get lunch with my wife at least twice a week.

And remember, working from home isn’t for everyone. If it’s not for you, look into your local coworking space. (Dallas folks: give Cohabitat a try, it’s great.)

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Kill your menubar darlings

August 10, 2009 in Curated, Expanded ideas | No comments

The Menubar Challenge - everybody, clear out your menubars! It’s one of my secret productivity weapons, I highly recommend it. Also, read everything on Minimal Mac; it’s the best.

Here’s my current attempt to use as little as possible in my menubar:

OS X menubar.png

LittleSnapper normally isn’t running, so that doesn’t count. If I could, I would run DropBox and FastScripts without menubar icons. I’m still not sure I like having a clock visible at all times, but at least analog clocks are classy-lookin’. I’d love to remove the battery icon, but it appears doing so disables the “your battery is tapped” warnings, leading to spontaneous laptop sleeping.

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Instapaper is wonderful

July 6, 2009 in Expanded ideas | 1 comment

I have loved Instapaper ever since I became aware of it. It fits perfectly into my workflow. There’s tons of stuff I want to read, but not just yet. Instapaper gives you a little bookmarklet to save these jewels for later when you’ve got more time to slow down and read a longer piece.

When the accompanying iPhone app came out, I fell in love again. Instapaper is perfect for filling your interstitial time, which is something I often find myself when I fish my iPhone out of my pocket. Also, you have to check out the tilt-scrolling feature; every reading app should implement it.

The love affair grew stronger recently. The newest version of the iPhone app came out boasting great improvements to the interaction design and new functionality that makes it an even better tool for occupying the time where you would otherwise find yourself day-dreaming1.

Instapaper logo

Firstly: a sort of light-weight feed reading mechanism. It’s not for every site out there; there’s a curated list of sites you can consume in this way. I went with The Economist, but noticed things like Wikipedia Featured, Wired, The New Yorker, and popular stories posted to Instapaper. Great idea.

Next: folders. I’ve used it to organize my reading list into topics so that I can quickly go to whatever matches my mood or energy level. This functionality is present in the web app too, and Marco’s done a great job of making it really easy to set things up just the way you want.

Finally: shared favorites. Peek into what other people have marked as great reading. Maybe it’s a cliche “social feature”, but I’m excited to see curated reading lists from my wonderful friends.

In conclusion: Marco Ament is awesome, start using Instapaper and leave your username in the comments so I can read your stuff.

1 For example, wondering why butterscotch is so awesome.

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Breaking with tradition

June 21, 2009 in Code, Curated, Expanded ideas, Gaming | No comments

For the like-minded aficionados of the non-traditional: A Redis implementation of Twitter, designed for learning about non-relational datastores and Clojure’s creator Rich Hickey on state (bonus track: Jonas Boner on the same). Derek Sivers on the fatal determinism of declaring a goal or as I like to say, “the reason you find so many weblogs with one post promising to post a lot”. Michael Heilemann on the lack of good fiction in contemporary games.

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Shippin’ ain’t easy

May 29, 2009 in Expanded ideas | No comments

Shippin’ web apps ain’t easy. The Contrast guys lay it out. Garrett Dimon shows what goes into an iteration on Sifter. My experience with Dash matches what these folks are saying: building web apps is exciting, but a lot of the work is below the waterline, per se. A lot of work goes into support and infrastructure, but doesn’t manifest itself as new functionality.

Neat because you can: living frugally, JavaScript pixel art and hand-built microprocessors. Also, C as a functional language is nicer to think about than I’d first thought. If you ever get bored, check out the C output of the Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compiler it doesn’t even look like C. This makes my brain hurt even more.

Finally, for future reference: my mantra for the week was “cut the Gordian knot.”

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