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Hosting regular dinners would be one of them.
The voice above my shoulder says: Congrats, you live in a palace. Now, either enjoy yourself here, or pack it up and enjoy yourself someplace else.
I'm so into optimization I hate the idea of a wasted evening, wasted space, idle monies, ideas not scribbled down and acted on. If I get to the point of diminishing returns I will be sure and send you a postcard.
There's a thing in high-tech that people who are supposedly "fast paced" will adhere to. In any situation where there is a question about how to proceed, the rule says it is better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Statistically, you will only screw up and get caught a small percentage of the time, and by defaulting to constant fast-paced action, you will set a track record of being fast paced, which is ultimately more useful than actual achievement.
Of course, sometimes you will screw up and get caught, in which case yeah, you have to pony up. A typical apology. "I'm sorry yaddah yaddah went unexpectedly. We need to work as a team to get higher visibility into this space. And, I also have a habit of asking for forgiveness rather than permission." The last part is said jokingly, because you are putting the person you're apologizing to in the position of choosing either a) to forgive you, or b) to admit that they would rather be a slow-paced neanderthal and conduct business as if cryogenically frozen. So this argument wins by intimidation.
Has anyone seen this dynamic and has some good stories to tell?
In no particular order, here are some seemingly unrelated points, that are actually related if you think super-hard about them. Which I wouldn't advise, in truth. Your ball.
* I'm so happy today is Sunday and tomorrow is Monday and we get to talk about something else now. That was just painful. I know my browser has a little X just like everyone else's, but I thought I would find something. Mostly I just found an unflattering mirror. Why am I not there? Am I not supportive enough? Do I scoff? Do I mentally scoff? Do I wear scoffed shoes? The fact is, gender does not slice up the blogging world cleanly. Gender cleanly slices up all of world history, or human psychology, or any number of things, but it's slicing of the blog world is imperfect, leaving the tell-tale jaggies of misapplied generalizations in its wake. Here is my thing: I just feel like I gave at the office, is all. Literally. I spend 40 hours a week overcoming and blah blah, and that's enough for me. Enough.
* There is a need for a concise blog post that talks about how to be an identity blogger who gets to their definition of being on "top" quickly. Not that great a need, mind you, just more than zero need. Also, the concise part is important. These lists can have an oompah loompah quality if they get too parsimonious. And by parsimonious I don't mean the little orange things that grow on trees.
* If the forgiveness / permission rule is good at work, does it also apply at home? "Honey, I just spent $500 on shoes. Do you want me to take them back?" Your financial relationship is one of trust. Why should being an employee be any different. And why should being a blogger-slash-information source be any different.
OK. I don't want to sleep because I still have more Alias to watch on DVD. Just started the third season. Wow, they must have fired some writers and hired new ones. Or something. Another reason not to sleep: enjoying the nighttime cool air. It turns words such as these into little dwarfs. Insert corny javascript formatting trick here.
Overheard at our house - or not?
"You married a dynamic, innovative woman. What you have right now is a traditional, static one, and that's not fair to you."
"Of course everyone else is going to get the spun version. I'm not going to come out saying, 'I need to take a year to be more relaxed, responsive, and creative.' They are going to get spin. I'm not giving you the spinned version."
"Sure, he's too short for you. But he's in advertising. It's worth a plane ticket, I think."
"I know I've been bristly around him and I'm sorry. If the only way I'm ever going to see you is for us all to get together and do couple stuff, then that's fine. He obviously is giving something you want, even if he has been a dick to you. Oh. Scratch the even if."
I leave it to you to decide which are true and which are made-up. No hints!
As promised here and here, I have completed a small specification for a feature in Outlook for people who are overwhelmed with the quantity of e-mail.
Thanks to the following links for their source of inspiration:
News.com article
43 folders
Joel
Julie
Robert Scoble
Marc Ochant
Oh, and you might enjoy my other specification work
Outlook - revising the feature on automatic picture download settings
SharePoint
WinFS (we can all dream, can't we?)
Sorry, Joel, you are still my hero and even more so for achieving what me and my friends tried to do in 1992 with no credit and no rolodex: start a company for US (the people who have to show up every day). However I do have a problem with the binary system of judging programmers as either productive or mediocre. Yes, I have subscribed to binary systems before, but this is different. (Scroll down to the word "halo" if you're following the link.)
* Sometimes being clever about solving the problem is a time-sink in and of itself
* Sometimes a witty developer who is fast - and by fast, I mean a SQL developer who still uses the letter a as an alias and knows tradition is on his side - will cut out a problem bigger than necessary. A more timid, less productive developer will try to solve less of the problem. This can mean a better fit.
* Speaking of fits, you wrote in 2000 how it stinks that some people are not rewarded for their efforts that can't be measured. But forget about people for a sec, logical solutions are like employees working for the "team" (the problem set), and sometimes it's hard to see that they are correct. Sometimes solutions don't get any respect and are given the old 2.5.
* It's not always the solution that is the most justifiable - extensible, portable, forward-thinking, handling every case and file format - that gets shipped. Sometimes these are just too hard to test. So efficiency in this case means being less of a hotshot and scaling it back. Looks bad in reviews. Looks good to colleagues. Same as in your 2000 article.
* Sometimes a byzantine work is well rewarded, like Windows NT. Sometimes, like Pink, it is not. Good developers are on all kinds of projects, not just productive ones.
* Creativity is sometimes completely overrated. It can come to the desperate. Remember the theme to ghostbusters? That was written at 2am on the fly when the other song was turning out horribly. That's how development is sometimes. Of course you know that. What's the lesson here, spend 12 hours on something you have the sinking feeling is going to be a failure? Then erase it and rebuild from scratch? No, the lesson is: the hit can come to anyone, without warning, and it is most efficient to simply be ready for it. Sometimes admirable qualities like believing in your self and your own creative solutions can turn a 2 hour detour into 12. Ask me whether I'd want a busy developer working for me or a creative one and I'd say busy.
* Of course, as a storyteller I'd enjoy working alongside the creative one more. Sigh.
* I conclude. Efficiency is impossible to assign to a person. You have to assign it to a situation. It is simply not a personal characteristic.
Thanks for reading and keep up the great work.
The fall fashions are out. Here is one of my favorite designers, and they make stuff in my size - lots of designers stop at 14.
You can tell that fall is coming because the beach stuff is hard to find at Target.
I'm completely full of fix-its this week. The latest: get an unpaid intern who would get college credit for working up my ideas.
Heck, I could keep 3 busy on the media insurance alone.
One of the questions that Dr. Phil asks in one of his thousandfold datacube-type quizzes is: are you a giver or a taker. Specifically, would your friends and family say that you are a giver or a taker. (I'm a fan of Dr. Phil, by the way, and my dh does a good impression too, assuming all consequences of course in the bedroom department afterwards. But I digress). Answering this question is hard, because we all know that it is BAD to be a taker and GOOD to be a giver. Although, if you press him on it, Dr. Phil will say "If you're a taker, that's OK, it's who you are," when of course what he really means is "The best way to start correcting this and become a giver is to face this problem head on, and I'm going to give you this line 'this is who you are' to jump start you on the way to correcting this." Nobody really believes that being a taker is better. Although you might enjoy a few dionysian pleasures more than others, only givers tend to
- be recognized at work for going above and beyond
- be thought of by friends and family as someone to rely on when things get rough
- always have that extra ounce of patience when someone else melts down
- keep their eye on the long haul and let the small stuff go by
The only drawback to being a giver, it seems, is saying "yes" to too many things and the resulting schedule, self-inattention, and sleep deprivation cliche.
One awful bind to get yourself in is to sign up for a task that you have no resources to complete. Therefore the failure rate for your every action needs to be zero. This happens in software development, in hobbies, in people starting weblogs for only a day, in social interactions. It's a tough dynamic which leads to a sense of rigidity and even tougher to change.
The way to bust out of the bind seems to be
1)
a) find a solid platform to stand on, so you can allow your failure rate to be > 0, and
b) start taking the necessary risks to acquire the resources to accomplish the task you had in mind.
Alternatively, you can choose door number
2) which is to disconnect emotionally, wrap up the loose ends as best you can, and quit.
Both of these courses are acceptable in my mind. What is unacceptable is to keep with the status quo and continue to let the untenable situation gnaw at you.
Let's look at why the status quo is so seductive.
- It seems like with the right support, you should be able to do x with only y resources. The problem isn't x related to y. The problem is the context, the rest of the world holding up the little math problem. It's seductive to think that if you knew more givers, this would prop up the failing math problem of your projects. But I don't live in a world of doormats and neither do you, seductive as it may sound, it wouldn't actually be a world worth completing x for anyway.
- Taking risks when you have no room for error is HARD. Some would say CRAZY. Take small risks instead. Try a new TV show, or a new recipe. Don't try a new job, house, or country, if you are unable to have any of those ventures fail. This kind of talk isn't overtly conscious, it's really a set of behaviors. Even though rigidity will predictably turn anyone into a robot, I don't have an answer for staying human within the rigid boundaries of an unsolvable x y math problem. Freedom on a small scale seems like an inevitable yet pitiful behavioral response. It's obvious that there needs to be some acceptable error rate for big risks, and this is the fertile place to look for a solution.
I have had two friends this week quit Microsoft. No, it's nobody you know. The reasons differ, but the similarities are that a large change is an acceptable risk if the reward can be a return to a life where becoming a giver is possible.
As a perpetual (it seems) job seeker, I occasionally think about my "brand." It's corny. I'm what, a Program Manager, a digital lifestyle maven, a petulant whiner who thinks she can spell but can't. A reluctant expert on out of the box InfoPath functionality. But these miss the mark (esp the spelling - sheesh I do OK don't I?) The thing that most hits home with regard to my personal brand this year is KIT. Keep it Together. And that's pretty sad, I say with a smirk. I'm quoting BowFinger, the movie with Eddie Murphy, who finally went to a self-help camp called "MindHead" which gave him that slogan. When anything happened in his world that would ordinarily cause him to lose it, he would repeat "KIT. Keep it Together." And, rather than fixing the problem, this made his presence in observing the problem funny - not just to him but to us as well - and gave back to the world in that little way. Right now I'm the expert on KIT, of taking a lose-it moment, observing how it works for the world, taking this self centered act of observation and turning it into a meal for the camera. That's fine, I might not hire me either, but that's what's been going on in this blog. It appears change might be around the corner if I can just laugh about it as I go.
Let's talk about going around the corner then. I want to be going the direction of other-focused, of drinking the kool-aid and launching something clever, fun, and useful on the world. I don't want to dwell on a mountain top waiting for the stars to align so I can act within my current rigid framework. (7-8:30am for "Creative Time?" $750 every 3 months for "Me stuff?" Please.) Of course I inevitably compare myself to my friends going the opposite way, of quitting their jobs to focus more internally, and think hmmm. If I only had the resources to complete x, this comparison would be completely different. But the fact is, right now I'm a taker and would be a kidder to think otherwise.
I mentioned above that there are two acceptable routes to loosening up this rigidity, and advocating for the kinds of internal change that would allow me to give back. (Or at least continue to be a taker, but in more of a high-value-look how far it's going kind of way). The first route I have the most hope for, which is to increase the acceptable error rate in any risk taking endeavor. This many eggs, this many baskets, you do the math. An example of getting more baskets is to have a little bit of savings, or to have a backup career in your pocket. A room in your house you can rent. Paper plates and frozen meals. Favors to call in. People in pivotal places. The other route is to throw away the eggs. You say: only one basket? Fine, then I'll only have one egg, and when I trip that will be the only loss. This is the quit-project option, of reeling in the scope of what you are trying to accomplish, and bringing things back to earth. Project inventory = 1. And as much of an anathema that sounds to my character, I have to remind myself that this is better than the rigid / no mistakes / no creativity status quo. It is better to scale back than to brute force through something that requires finesse. At least, in the scaled back state, you can be thought of as a giver. That's the theory anyway.
Best of wishes to the people (you're probably not reading this) who have chosen to scale back. You have my admiration. I may only have a few more chances to shoot the moon, but that's my world right now, my personality and my brand. I'll keep trying and keep in touch. As a taker, I need more givers around anyway.
Hello all. It's possible you noticed a key dynamic in this blog, aptly titled (I have decided) "reverse-engineering happiness." There has been a lot of noise about stuckness, and how to enjoy yourself anyway. One truism is that a geek will think all an unhappy person needs to turn around is a new tool. Another truism is it's more fun to buy running shoes than it is to go running. (Thx for 43 folders for that one). So of course I reach for OneNote, the ultimate fantasy program for things that don't quite yet exist.
The idea of this plan is to spend a year traveling, while using the miracle of technology to keep our jobs remotely, and the miracle of couch surfing to have a place to sleep. Each parent would get to fly or drive back home once every 6 weeks for personal projects and checking in with the man. Lots of themes tie together with this that you might notice. One is the idea of giving back. We can do this if we're more mobile. Another is to bring back some hobbies. Mobility helps that, by increasing social network and experiences. Plus without the big mortgage, that money can go to something else. Another dynamic is to not feel so stuck, that we are all truly living every moment. And I know as I have my face in the computer right now yet again, perhaps it is only a shadow of truly living, but hey, it'll just be harder in 2006 when junior starts school. So let's get moving. Plus, maybe I get to buy some cool gadgets, like a guitar. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
You all are privy to information I have yet to propose to anyone, including my dh in detail. So keep mum. We have to make it to Aug 1 and the end of some projects first. But what a big step this would be. I have always noticed I have to hit rock bottom in order to find my way out of some problems. I will post my rock bottom post next. At least you know there's a good ending!
P.S. OneNote Rocks! But where's the drag and drop stretchable calendar timeline? Where's the date picker popup? Ok I forgive you. But still, I had to copy this one from Outlook using PrtScreen. Oh, the humanity.
I'll discuss this image in the next entry or so if this works
It's time again to post something along the lines of "kids these days." Did'ya Ever Notice (Remember that comic strip?) how curmudgeonly we can all get after a certain age, or after a certain number of squashed dreams picked out from the soles of our sneakers. Well, I'm here to counteract curmudgeonliness (if not ill-advised spellings) by my usual method, linking to wired magazine articles you all have read anyway. But have some trust and keep reading, it will all work out OK.
Software development has a certain arc prescribed by guys from the 60s who wouldn't have gone to woodstock if you paid them. Thick glasses. Right guard every day, two sprays each side. They say, in software development there is the envisioning stage, then the construction stage, then build, then deployment. It's turned something that started out sexy into a process with all the allure of a DMV waiting room.
Software development? Sexy? Well, if you've never done it, you wouldn't know. For me, the appeal is getting it working, of knowing your tools well, of typing a procedure and watching the functionality getting added just as you asked it to, or of fooling one set of functionality into doing something it wasn't designed to, but golly works just as if it had. Face to the screen far into the night. All night long baby. It's real.
So in the spirit of nothing going out of style for long, there is a new way to develop software that doesn't come from the science of project management. And by new I mean old-new. Take the lab coat guys out of the picture, unless lab coats do it for you, put on your slinkiest jammies and pop open that text editor. This is a new way of working that the PMI would be scandalized to hear about. I refuse to coin it as a term, but it has something to do with the concatenation of open source, MODs, grassroots, and impulsive (responsive) development. The best term I can come up with is Flow, which has other meanings not unrelated either, but I'll use it for the purposes of this post just to make my point clear(er).
With Flow, your audience is your friends. You have no market. You want to do good work in the hopes of enjoying the experience of creating it, not for personal gain. If a few people pick it up and think "that's nice," then back to the drawing board. With a new idea every week, the drawing board is a very fertile place. If a few people pick it up and quit their jobs to create their own MODs of what you wrote, you win. Big business, big record companies, ea_spouse, that whole thing is out. Who cares what they think. Would that kind of culture have spawned strongbad, or spongebob for that matter, or the simpsons? How abotu bittorrent or IRC? It has to start out something you do that is borderline creepy, that nobody understands, and you'd do it even if you never get any support from anyone. Success or failure isn't in numbers of whatever sold, it's in quality execution of the idea. It's what the kids are doing these days. And no, it doesn't pay the rent.
I have a binary system of adopting people into my life. Some people have the halo, others don't. If you have the halo above your head, I will never wonder if you've lied to me, I will trust you completely and you will always have a purpose I will want to watch. If you don't have a halo, perhaps we know each other on a one-off basis, but it's unknown whether there is a lasting relationship of purpose and trust there. It's very exciting to see people get halos. I'm still out there kissing frogs just to keep the numbers going up.
Projects are like that too. If you are outsourcing a project to India with the feature set of "make this database scale to x or y conditions," then the lab coats guys will be your friend. You want to be in the place of status reports, of find/fix ratios, of specification approval and code lockdown. Nobody has halos. The trick is determining the projects that do have halos, where you can instead work in Flow and risk - yes it's a risk - your best work getting accomplished. You will have to have unconditional support. You will have to have a fallback source for the rent. You will have to be a better judge of character than of marketability of features. You will have to know when to leave the building for a week. Everyone you interact with needs to have halos, and thus the project itself needs to have this same credibility. But look at what you can gain:
- FAST development
- IMPASSIONED work
- CONSEQUENTIAL project
- SPINOFFS or cottage industries
- FREEDOM to do what you want with it
- RESPECT rather than discipline
- SHARING rather than isolation
Look, I don't know what to call it. But the way we work has to turn a page. I've never seen so many sour faces in all my life, and it's not your fault. We all need a basement lab (remember like the movie Pi) and nobody on our case except our adoring fans and helpful colleagues with new companion gadgets. The 20% needs to become 100% for a while. All the kids are doing it. We can go back to high discipline mode later.
The whole thing. It's tantalizing and perfect, but unsatisfying. It's less of a story than a character study. If you heard it was going to be like Episode III, well, perhaps that part is coming later: we are given the facts on the villain, but not the emotion and humanity behind them. If you heard it was going to be like Spider Man, that would be a little closer, especially with the graveside break-up at the end. Early in the book I was convinced that someone had impersonated Dumbeldore, and that was the cause of the flawed hand, and stiff speeches, the sudden lack of finesse and depth we are used to coming from him. I still have not changed my mind, as this alone exonerates Snape. Both of them definitely know something we don't. I continue to trust them both. We will see.
I looked at the new feature set for Microsoft Money. They are working very hard to solve my use-case. But connectivity is still not there. Let me explain.
- I have 7 categories of money for the month. 1 of those categories are split between me and my dh. 2 of them get replenished on the 1st and the 15th, the rest get replenished only on the 1st. The 6 "family" categories of money go into envelopes labeled for their purpose, and the 1 "individual" category stays in ye olde wallet. We only make purchases during our workday that come out of the "individual" category (our wallets).
Score:
Envelopes: 1
Money: 1
- We can look in the wallet to determine if we have enough money to do a particular thing. Say I want to get a lunchtime massage. (This never happens but we can dream). I look in my wallet and see, what $300 in there and since it's the 14th of the month I know I have plenty of $$ for the massage and off I go. More typically, I wonder if I can buy nasty eurest lunch or is it a can of store-brand slim fast for me. I look in my wallet and see $2 plus change, and decide I'd rather have coffee later, so it's Safeway Weight Loss Shake for me. The point I'm getting at is it's PREDICTIVE not at the point of sale, not after the point of sale, but actually helps you plan your activites to not screw up.
- Money has a feature to track your expenses by category. So if I use the cash card at eurest - which I can't do but that's beside the point - if I have gone over the $2 in my virtual wallet, I will get an e-mail. Great. Now I don't get to have coffee.
Envelopes: 1
Money: 0
- Let's take a bonus scenario where one of our categories has some money left in it at the end of the month. With envelopes, I can carry that money over to the next month. There is an inherent reward to thrift. With a checking account, all the money is in the same "place." This means that the extra money for home repair likely got eaten up in my 14th of the month lunch-escapades which I was e-mailed about. Not good enough.
Envelopes: 1
Money: 0
- Say I buy drugstore items at the supermarket. Money will keep track of the name of my supermarket as the payee, and know that this is for groceries. Money would be wrong. I would have to go back and correct this. With envelopes, I just pay for the drugstore items out of one envelope, and the food if any out of grocieries.
Envelopes: 1
Money: 0
Other than infinite connectivity on a portable device that won't go obsolete in 3 months, the other idea for making a Money solution workable for me is a hipster PDA card with the thermometers on it I can pencil in myself on the fly. I would have to use that system for a while to see what the drawbacks are. But no getting around the fact that it's paper.
Funny thing, I am seeing the occasional sympathetic chime on the compexities of taxonomy. This from Hugh. (Well, someone Hugh links to. I won't show you Hugh.)
And this from Winer, who is building perhaps a taxonomy data structure tool. I say perhaps because he refers to it as outlining. I don't regret this post of mine anymore then.
Yesterday I was looking at the InfoPath object model on msdn. Not sure why I didn't get this before, but I realized that these object models are all-inclusive. Let's take XDocument. Previously I thought that when I looked at this object model it was more of a set of suggestions, and surely XDocument was a parent for more than just DataObject objects. Pretend you are taking a picture of a branch. You can focus on the frontmost fronds or adjust the focus to bring the middle or back-most fronds into focus, but structurally all the fronds are still there as part of the branch. This is how I thought the object model was working visually, like it was selectively highlighting certain parts of the branch. But no, it seems like what you see is what you get.
Part of this assumption came from the fact that I *know* XDocument is more full featured than this.
Anyway, the topic continues. Perhaps it's nigh time to change the tagline of my weblog.
[Written later]: I spent all day with this object model and I can no longer hold by these earlier comments. I have no worldview to take its place however. So be gentle, those who might throw tomatoes.
I'm adding a slew of new links today. This is because I'm anticipating purging my subscription list. My goal is to be able to hit the "My Feeds" on Newsgator Online and have that list populate (that cool recursive thing it does), and not want to skim through anything. Right now this list would be impossible to read. Perhaps I can folder-ize the old feeds so as to not abandon everyone. We'll see.
This problem is similar to what I wrote about yesterday: we don't know what will be interesting to us. We can't cast the net wide enough and not have some waste. The dream of narrowcasting, of individuals living in their world which customizes information just to their interests has this major flaw.
Take the book I'm reading. Never would have known it existed if not for NPR. Same with my favorite CD of the moment. Would I trust something like Amazon's "More Like This" recommendations? Not even close. I checked out this material expecting to hate it - I was casting a wide net - and I got lucky. The point of blogging and the internet for that matter is we shouldn't need to be so lucky, but we're far off from that.
OK back to the links. I get very very sad listening to people talk about BlogHer. It just makes me want to delete my entire blog. Particularly, one blogger comments about how she is invisible, and another says that's because she reviews soft drinks. Let me reiterate: Women are far more sensitive to work life balance than men right now. And this makes them better product designers, more efficient at practically everything, and if that's not geeky I don't know what is. (Note all generalizations are there for the purposes of rebuttal, so have at it.) We should read people based on their personalities, not their content. We should hire people based on their personalities, not the number of acronyms on their resume. But hey, if I'm supposed to review cell phones in my blog so that I can fuel my AdSense and get some blogosphere street cred, then the medium has failed and we should all just go to conferences instead.
I kept playing around with this but until the following problems are fixed, I won't be able to start it up again.
* Trouble with funny characters. They're fine when I read them, but when an excerpt is extracted and posted it's a nightmare. No easy way of fixing this with my skills - someone else could write a pl script that watches the folder on the live site I suppose, but not me.
* I found value in posting the full post, as well as a clearly walled-off commentary from me "this is why I'm posting to this." Would be great if this commentary was related to my task list. We're in Outlook, aren't we? 99% of the time I would want to post something to the linkblog I would want it to be a soft to-do list.
* It just felt wrong, posting everybody's stuff. I don't know. Maybe we should use frames or something so they get the web hit anyway.
So, I'm blogging while drunk. (AGAIN, you say?) But I have a free moment and I need to put something else in the queue to help ye olde posts that I now regret to scroll on down the page. That's it little posts, scroll on down, buh-bye! Esp. that last one on taxonomy. Who is brave enough to provide proof that if anyone is alive on this earth at all, we would have to start with Abraham Lincoln at the top of the list. I am that brave. The brave blogger. I wish I was drunk writing that one, I'd have an excuse.
Some highlights of the past week:
* Attending the wedding shower of a dear friend who is finally getting her turn to be the bride. She is learning from my mistakes: be sure you are not allergic to the fancy makeup. Don't find out the day of.
* Feeling, perhaps, like the mean people are winning. This week at least. And not wanting to listen to any bystanders, reporters, analysts, or politicians put a "we are strong" sheen on it. What sucks, sucks. Thus a news blackout in the egrigg9000 household for a while.
* BBQ is on at 11am and going all day. Cheap sausage. Cheaper chicken. Expensive marinades. Then one $15 rib steak to share.
* I used Jscript to pop up a dialog from an InfoPath button, the results of which are returned back to the parent form. That's the good news. The bad news is I swore I wouldn't program for this job and once the compiler is open I might disappear for months. They seem to still like me though ;)
* Calendaring rant of the week. Improper scoping of your "is this a fit for my schedule at all" filter. Here is an example. You have three preschoolers and a full time job and need to write your dissertation. Then, someone calls you for a favor, such as "help me pick up flowers for the wedding" or "pick up Uncle Boby at the airport." Assuming you are over the age of 25 you probably have a well-tuned filter for saying yes to something. If it helps you with your preschoolers, your job, or your dissertation, you say yes to it. Otherwise it's no. All the books tell you this is a good way to handle things, that you will be a human living doormat if you say yes to anything outside your core matrix. I maintain this filter is incorrect. The logic for this filter should be
Only accept incoming appointment if it is
a) Part of the core matrix
OR
b) A one-time event
AND BOTH
1) For someone who would do the same for you
2) You are actually able to perform the task
Categorically saying no to everything just because it's not part of your core matrix is not only building up zero karma, it's closing off your world to your community. What looks like a ride to the airport on the surface is actually something much more complicated and beneficial. So while unflagging focus is admirable, it should not be the kind of stubborn focus that doesn't see anything.
And no, this isn't from personal experience.
* I'm reading this biography of Alexander Hamilton. I thought it would be boring. It is extraordinary.
* I'm listening to the piano renditions of Radiohead, singing in the car to myself at the top of my lungs.
I'm running a virus checker right now so I'm completely distracted. What better time than to spend with you all. Today I only had 30 minutes for my walk/run, so I couldn't complete my usual 1 hour loop. I tell myself: 15 minutes out, 15 minutes back. Jog at full speed until you stop breathing at a 5 count (rowers know what this is), or if you meet your mark. Walk for 20. Set a new mark and take off. It works pretty well, at least it did last time, but this time the teensy hill landed just before my mark, and I ended up with a pulled muscle. Nevertheless I am bothering to offer this item of interest.
Taxonomy is the result of setting up a categorization tree. The classic taxonomy is the natural world. If an animal, does it have a backbone. If it has a backbone, does it have gills. The result of a good decision making tree is an internally consistent taxonomy, where you don't have a creature that is both a vertebrate and an invertebrate.
A classic exercise when learning taxonomy in school is analyzing whether a car is alive. This is presented to students in order to explain what it means to have properties. It's meant to be amusing, and it is, unfortunately it's so completely more memorable than plankton that it tends to overshadow the rest of the lesson.
Suzie, come up to the board and write down all the things that makes something alive, the teacher says. Suzie is a bright girl and writes down, under the teacher's underlined capital letters ALIVE the following:
- eats
- sleeps
- breathes
- moves around
- is warm
- uses the potty (Suzie apparently is 4)
- has a mommy
Very good, Suzie. I think there are a few reptiles in the room who would take issue with your "is warm" criteria, but overall this is a great list. Now, Frankie, why don't you come up to the board and tell me all about what makes a thing a car.
Frankie looks confused.
I'll give you a head start, the teacher says. Under the underlined capitalized word CARS the teacher writes
- needs gas
and hands Frankie the chalk. Frankie gets it.
- wheels
- seats
- steering wheel
- exhaust
- goes someplace
- needs oil
- needs water
- built in a factory
The teacher would then explain that needing gasoline is a form of eating, going someplace is a form of moving around, and exhaust is a form of using the potty. The factory could even be the car's mommy.
Suzie raises her hand. Are you telling us that cars are alive? Well, the teacher answers, why don't you tell me why cars are NOT alive. What is the thing about the car that makes it not alive.
Well, she says after some time, you can take it apart and then put it back together again and it will be just as good. (Okay Suzie is not 4).
Hooray, Suzie. You have figured out the one reason why the car is not alive that we can observe. It can survive a complete disassembly into its constituent parts and then be re-assembled without being the worse for it. Try that with a flower, or a lizard, and it just won't be the same. In fact, it won't even be alive anymore. Despite lizards losing their tails and the occasional heart transplant, living creatures generally die if you take them apart like you would a watch.
The teacher gets to the point. The thing to figure out in creating a taxonomy is not what makes things similar. Rather, you need to figure out what is the precise thing that makes two groups different, such that the first group - such as the ALIVE group - will NEVER exhibit the property of safe disassembly, and the second group - such as the MACHINE group - will ALWAYS exhibit the property of safe disassembly. This is how you know you have a branch in your taxonomy. This is the reason why plants are not animals, and animals are not plants.
Usually at this point the rest of the year is taken up studying plankton and laughing at dead guys who used to think they were plants. Sigh.
But here I have a radical conjecture for you. Let's think about those dead guys some more. How about one famous dead guy in particular: Abraham Lincoln. I will conjecture that Abraham Lincoln is still alive. But more importantly, I will conjecture that when someone asks you if you "believe in the afterlife" what they are really asking is the opposite: do you "believe in death" and particularly, does your own internal taxonomy - at whatever its current level of sophistication - handle the case for someone being dead and gone as sharply and distinctly as Suzie handled the car. Does your view of what it means to be dead differ distinctively with your view of what it means to be alive in such a crisp way, that it is impossible to be in one group and share that branching quality with the other group? In the car example, the branching quality was safe disassembly. But what is our branching quality between people who are living or dead?
In fact, the more distinct branch should be between people who are remembered, and those who are forgotten. You can be remembered by your actions - in that, if you acted differently or were never born, the world would be inextricably going another place even by a hair's breadth. You can be remembered genetically. You can be remembered in terms of your own diapers from 1967 still not-rotting away somewhere in a big lump. You can be remembered in media, as long as it exists, or in public records. You can also be remembered in thought, such as folklore or tradition. Living and dead is a convenience we use to distinguish two groups of people for practical purposes. If you're dead, you check a certain different box on your 1040. It's just like being alive, really, in that there is only one box and they are right next to each other. But living and dead make a lousy taxonomy outside the bereavement industry. Certainly you could look at the above characteristics and think, wow, I guess Abraham Lincoln is alive in a certain way. Never really thought about it. For example, let's compare me, an alive person, with Honest Able who bit it so famously so long ago.
egrigg9000
* Actions are currently affecting others. I pay for coffee out of my wallet and it arrives.
* Genetic memory of kids, and the occasional clipped fingernail here or there
* Certainly I have contributed personally to my own section of the Yelm landfill
* Have this weblog, a box of demo cassettes from when I was a teenager, some pictures. A few shipped software products.
* Birth certificate etc
* Beck has a song about me on his new album: That one-eyed Girl. Just kidding. But what if he did? And people will always tell the story of me trying to make coffee in a hippie's house once.
Abraham Lincoln
* Still influencing grade schoolers everywhere in the latest haberdashery fashions
* Not sure if he had kids, actually. Certainly he clipped his nails.
* Probably did not have any waste products of any kind, other than a few failed congressional motions, which recycle quite nicely.
* I suppose if your face is on, like, THE PENNY, you will indeed be preserved in media even if you had no biographers at all.
* Swearing-in papers etc
* Most-memorized bit of national folklore for fourth graders everywhere.
So you can see, the guy holds up pretty well. But alive or dead is not the primary branching. It's remembered or forgotten. Out of all the remembered people, some are alive, others check the other box. Same with the forgotten ones. The reason why remembered is the primary branch is the alive/dead taxonomy results in too much overlap. You're looking for that unique distinguishing factor.
Makes it harder to laugh at the dead guys who thought they were plants, now, doesn't it?
For years, A Bug's Life has been in our lives. We saw it in the theaters in 1998 when it was released. I didn't want to go, I probably wanted to see a chick flick rather than a kid's movie. I remember the shot of the camera flying over the grass, like we were on a miniature helicopter over the little Hawaii they called Bug Island. It worked like a balm on my frazzled nerves of that time. So later, with our first kid, it was one of the first movies we played for him on video. He was probably 18 months. After reading about Blue's Clues on Malcolm Gladwell's book the Tipping Point, I figured some well designed shows couldn't do too much damage, especially in a small apartment with a fold-out bed. He seemed engaged, not just transfixed, and a little of both is just fine. Then I saw A Bug's Life in the library and figured why not.
Immediately on watching I realized why my efforts at writing a novel were failing. My novel was failing for every reason why A Bug's Life was succeeding. So I watched and watched, alongside my son, analyzing and gleaning. It got to be I joked about hosting events for other parents who have done the same. The event would take place anywhere there is a stage, and some improvised props. A school would do. The kids would sit in the audience while the parents re-enacted the entire movie, line for line. One parent would be flick, another would be princess Atta. I wanted to be Heimlich: Someday I will be a beautiful butterfly, and everything will be all better. (Takes another bite). A set of material becomes part of what we know as "The Classics" - you know, Moby Dick, Casablanca - not necessarily to bless it for educational purposes to ram down sleepy high schooler's throats, but rather for the unexpected benefit of providing material for future authors to model their own work. Knowing one of the classics extremely intimately - as in, you know the lines down to the verb tenses and inflections - helps solidify what to shoot for in your own work. Yet, while being optimistic that this is the case, should I ever attempt my novel again, the real take-home for me is a set of guesses on what will generate quality work.
Long since returned to the library, our babysitter recently bought the movie at a garage sale for us. We play it and for me it's like playing an old album, knowing all the words, and all the familiar things to look for in a work that complex. I realize years have gone by, and I have not created this quality work that occurred to me to create in 2001, 2002. I never picked up the pen again. So I sit down in the kitchen while it is playing in the next room and say:
"I don't know how to create quality work."
What I mean is, I don't know why I haven't done it yet.
Here are the set of guesses I have on what it would take to create something of similar quality to A Bug's Life, perhaps in the same or another similar medium.
1) Lots of people, lots of hats.
The nearest I can figure is quality work needs 12 people. Four people for parallel storylines. Four more for the major scenes that are pivotal to the story. Four to assign to the major characters, so you can get their backstory and everything they do and say makes sense. And four for the different levels of observation an audience might have: sidewalk view, street level view, city view, and nation view. This can be broken up differently. For a project like A Bug's Life, you would have one person on visual jokes exclusively. This would be the sidewalk view. Exclusive concentration on something like visual jokes allow for precious moments like Heimlich not being able to squeeze into the dust-crack, or the street mime in the big city. Remember the can of "low-fat lard?" This comes from someone where this can was their whole job for a while. Another person would be out in the world, farming for one-liners. This is the street view. This would allow for things like when PT yells "You're a walking stick! It's funny!" Or, "I can't help it, it's so beautiful." (The trailer comes back in Monster's Inc. as a placeholder scene going to the final version).
One thing that happens when you do all the work yourself is you're typing along, and then the inner critic starts. No, not that inner critic. This is the inner critic that actually has some credibility, which is even more upsetting when it starts up. "Wow, so everyone's on a road trip, but nobody says anything funny. That never happens." You rack your brain, but nothing funny comes up. That's because you've been working on a storyline, or a scene, and the one-liner guy is out for coffee. It's not your fault. It's not even your job. The one-liner guy will show up in a little while, and - this is important - if he sits in the same chair as the storyline guy, the storyline guy has to take a break. Otherwise things get a little amorous and nothing gets done. Tee hee. You know what I'm working up to: I conjecture that one author can be all these 12 people, which is convenient for us working sans budget, the one caveat being not to pull this one person = 12 people simultaneously.
2) Lots of story arcs of different sizes.
The 12 people will help you add a certain level of complexity to your work that falls under the category of "fancy aesthetic tricks." A simple event over a complex backdrop suddenly doesn't seem simple at all. This treatment works in all mediums, and relies on the viewer catching subtleties they didn't know they caught in the first place. Once there was a codec from Sony that relied on this quality of human perception. The codec actually calculated which sound events would be effectively indistinguishable from the same track playing minus that event, and they would remove that event digitally. A horn sound will obscure an electric piano, for example. I'm not sure exactly how it worked. But if it did work on the minutia level of bits, it certainly wouldn't work on a broader level. Complexity saves our skin many times, and this is where story arcs come into play.
You can look at A Bug's Life as many different arcs. The big one is similar to the Revolutionary War of 1776 etc, where the colonies overthrow the oppressive taxation rulers, complete with madcap gadget inventors. (And, if you listen to the soundtrack, this explains a lot, and you will see I'm not just making this 1776 thing up. Definite yankee doodle thing happening). In addition to this overriding plot there's also the coming of age story, not just for flick, but for atta, and dot, and even the queen goes through the menopausal hormone swing at the end "hubba hubba."
3) Feature driven release.
I don't have the reference, but I heard when producing Toy Story, that Pixar threw out the script and started again, because it didn't hold up to their standard. Schedule went out the window too. Don't set a date and meet it: this is irresponsible to your story. Once exception can be made for adaptations of existing works, where the parameters are better contained.
4) Characters reinforcing each other
The best way to increase a character's value is to have another character play off of the first. P.T. starts out as a visual gag, when he gets burned up in the opening performance of flaming death. But he gets much richer when he gets kidnapped by his performers. He sings on top of the wagon as they go back to the show "The streets will be paved with gold(en retrievers)... I'm the richest man in town" (PT is a flea, so hence the dog one-liner). Then the stick points and yells "Money!" Which PT believes. And over goes the sack. Did he think that money was just lying around? Which speaks to the extent of PT's fantasy life with the stuff. And now he is someone we all know. Stellar work.
5) Only showing a little of the depth that you have actually thought through
Lots of talk in the writing world goes into backstory. You have to have a backstory, they all say, condescendingly, as if that hasn't occurred to us. Most of us don't put work into backstory not because we're lazy, but because the work we have is not generative and we're lucky to get what we have so far. Generative work is like matches and propane, it's material that is so combustible that it creates its own backstory. The premise of X-files. The old show Moonlighting. The Taming of the Shrew. David Foster Wallace's excellent Infinite Jest. A generative premise - and I'm optimistic enough to believe I will meet one at the right point with pen in hand - will solve the backstory problem immediately. Then it will be painful to keep 80% of the material off the screen.
Here is a recent article on Pixar's commitment to quality.
href=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/dreamworks.html
And another sidebar on Brad Bird talking about his work with Pixar.
href=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/rave.html
In the Brad Bird article, I'd like to turn your attention to one quote. Under "Despair Remover" he says "When I see a really bad and cynically made film, I come out if it despairing for the medium." Because this is the quote that my dh brought up when I said that I didn't know how to create quality work. The point is that quality work requires optimism, and generosity. It requires being hosted almost, having a concierge-like environment where your glass is refilled for you, and it would be a big surprise if you were not able to succeed past your expectations, and have fun at the same time.
All I wanted, was to show in our documents that the styles we were using were consistent. For example, I didn't want people to have to wonder: is this Normal? Or, is this Normal + Indent blah blah. And wonder which one to use for a future document. It seemed as easy as naming the styles with a prefix, or a keyword, such as Happy. HappyNormal, HappyBold, HappyHeading1. Thus the poor reader would be comforted that all their styles were Happy styles, and their document would look just like others created for project Happy.
It led to a twisted adventure the likes of which have not been seen since the two-button mouse was invented. But I emerge unscathed, and with new knowledge. Granted, I am much too tired to actually bring the documents into the (now significantly compromised) Happy state I had envisioned. But I do know now how styles work in word. And I can share some headlines about that.
Wait, you are saying, I know how styles work in word too! But you don't. I used to be like you, never questioning what was in the task pane, always just finding what I wanted via the shortest mouse movement from my selection. Styles, so simple, they've been around forever, and if our admin can figure it out surely I already have. But I hadn't, and probably you haven't either. Where the status quo is with styles is similar to the status quo of obesity in this country. The people who are skinny are 99% naturally skinny, that is: they are doing all they can to be fat but for some reason the body doesn't budge. 1% of skinny people are trying to actually be skinny because they have to try - really try - in order to get there. The status quo is, everyone eats poorly and never exercises, and sure, some people are still skinny - just like some of your documents will exhibit no cosmic taxonomical style problems of epistemological proportions - but eventually you reach the age or size where you have to demand more. That's when you decide to really learn. And that's when you might catch yourself wandering around going "Normal (Web)! I swear I had nothing to do with Normal (Web)!"
Here is the first rule about using styles in word:
1) You are not crazy.
You have to understand that this is a complex feature, burdened with a century of overinstall and migration problems, and that many more compromises. Yes, they should throw out the code and write it again from scratch, but with the fractal nature of the SaveAs universe, I imagine no developer would want to bet their career that migration and downward compatibility would not be an issue. Any behavior you see, rather than stacking it up as evidence that you are losing your mind, or need more sleep or more coffee or a new computer, should instead be treated with compassion and forgiveness. See the styles as little wayward street orphans, occasionally sleeping with siblings they didn't know they had. Then put the whole thing in lockdown. More on that later.
More Rules.
Note that this refers to Word 2003.
2) Never use directly applied formatting.
You need to develop a thorough suspicion of all toolbar buttons and menus. Anytime you changed the look of the text in your document, and did not go through the process of editing or applying a style, you blew it. Directly applied formatting is the reason why "styles" (really formatting, but who can keep track) pop up out of nowhere with their own nomenclature into your precious "Formatting in Use" area of the task pane (really styles, but who can keep track). Instead of hitting the bold key, or Ctrl+B, go to New Style and create a Bold style. Too much trouble? That's what templates are for. Do this once and you'll always understand what's happening in your document.
3) Lock down Normal.dot.
All you need to do is delete the file, then next time you launch Word find the checkbox in options to prompt before writing to normal.dot. It's not like the old virus days when you had to declare normal.dot readonly in the file system (I remember that crashing word on occasion too). But you'd be surprised what actions need to store themselves in your precious Normal. The main reason for locking down Normal is, a) it's too hard to find every time to delete it every time you screw it up, and b) it's too easy to screw it up, and c) the built-in styles have special powers, so you will always be modifying them, and therefore b.
4) Sever Normal from the chain of command.
All styles you have are based on Normal. Instead, base the first one of these "HappyNormal" on No Style, and then derive all others from HappyNormal. You can modify a built-in style to do this without extinguishing their special powers.
5) Clear Formatting is not a Style.
Oh, but if it was! Nay, it is a command, and that command is to move the text to Normal. If you have followed the above you might decide to vow never to clear formatting this way.
6) With great power comes great responsibility. In the task pane.
Ever been tempted to select all 23 instances of Heading2? It is very easy to do this and then mistakenly apply another style to this selection, which is bad bad bad. Throws off numbering, upsets the chain of derived styles, messes up your index. Woe to you if you apply direct formatting to remedy the situation without realizing. Now, of course, since you have applied another style which presumably you like in another 20 places, you're stuck with selecting all 23 instances of HappySmallText you didn't intend manually - which is really really hard, instead of using the cool "select all 43 instances of HappySmallText" command. Just be careful.
7) Available styles contains a history.
This means styles creep up in here you aren't using. The word available is wrong. It should say Suggested. There is a complex matrix of events in the background and, if they think you will use the style again ever - such as with a different document - you will find it. It does not mean your document is tarnished.
8) Available formatting contains styles.
Because styles are a subset of all formatting - including directly applied formatting - you can see why styles would show up here. This is a bad option to set the task pane too, because you can't immediately tell the difference and you might use directly applied formatting instead of a style by accident.
9) Formatting In Use should be your favorite
Keep it set here, and monitor this list fervently. If you're following 2, then nothing new should creep up here unless you want it to. If it does, select all 14 instances and apply a real style.
10) Protect Styles.
This is adding a password that will allow future editors of this document the chance to add the style - if they know the password. Coolest software band-aid ever invented.
I'm going to leave it there. I have not gone into numbering and bullets, aka "numbered styles" because if you start with the built-in styles and always use edit styles to change your preferences, this will resolve itself. Note that it is impossible to fix a document that has messed up numbering past a certain point of complexity. If you're in a rush, then you can use "fast food" (directly-applied styles) to fix the problem visually, but structurally it is still broken and you will see the problem again.
Some of these links refer to Word97 as the "new version." Do not be sucked into making fun of these documents' age. This is just dinosaur marketing. You would be surprised at how many of the same behaviors you will see in 2003. And hey, they helped me out. Perhaps you as well.
AddBalance:
Microsoft Word FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions - Kenyon
Understanding Styles in Microsoft Word - A Tutorial in the Intermediate Users Guide to Microsoft Word
Faughnan
Microsoft Word Living with the Beast
EG: The first document to read in your quest and perhaps the best
Kenyon
Working with Microsoft Word Templates-The Foundation
McGhie
http--word.mvps.org-Downloads-WordsNumberingExplainedUSLetter.pdf
EG: Despite the fact that it says it's geeky, not required reading, and will not help you fix your document, I disagree with all 3 and those are the only things in the pdf I disagree with.
MikeWSS Windows SharePoint Services FAQ
Word Interaction - Propogation of Word Properties
EG: OK, this is off topic, but those of you who are also sharepoint users, did you know there's a "watch" out on these properties? Perhaps these would be the ones to use then in your authoring, yes?
MVPs
How to safely update a document's styles from its template without using the Organizer
EG: Just made me curious, what is the organizer and why is it bad. Conclusion that it's only still in there because people are habitual. Don't be fooled by its glamorous name.
How to save yourself hours by using Outline View properly
Tips and Gotchas for those who are new to Word
Shauna Kelly Microsoft Word Help FAQ.
How to create heading numbering and outline numbering in Microsoft Word
EG: Invaluable. That means valuable, right?
Why use Microsoft Word's built-in Heading styles
EG: Special powers revealed, and why the world will never go back to normal.