❮❮prevnext❯❯

All Trump ever wanted to do was make engaging television, and by that standard it's been a wildly successful presidency.

This is going to be great television, I will say that.

"By one recent count, Trump has appointed 21 Fox News personalities to his staff--many, like Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, at the highest levels of his administration."

---

The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation was awarded a huge research grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The results were uniformly disastrous. All the 'people' and 'personalities' turned out to be amalgams of characteristics that simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life forms. Most of them were just poor pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous because they didn't ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no one spotted the danger

The most dangerous of all were three identical ones--they were put in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe. They are not evil, in fact they are rather simple and charming. But they are the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is nothing they will not do if allowed, and nothing they will not be allowed to do...

Does your business card hold a crease? Do you know how to pack a suitcase?

---

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.

I just hope they like us as much as we like doggos.

---

Bad breath is better than no breath at all

---

I was trying to think of why I sometimes launch myself into angst-y procrastination rather than tackling items on my TODO list. If I track down that feeling, it's a bit of an anxiety response. But why? Most of the individual items are very manageable, only a few have that "oh this might being tougher than you think it should be for you, and therefore batter the old ego-laden self-image." I guess overall, it's just the sense that, as satisfying as it can be to knock things off the TODO into the DONE list, the process never ends. So it's like a fear of the endless grind, the awareness that I'll never get to the end of the pile.

It made me think of this quote - I couldn't locate the image I originally saw it with but it was something like this.

The goal of setting yourself tasks isn't to have a pile of useful things to do that ideally is whittled down to zero just before you kick it (not talking hospice situations, obviously, where sometimes the goal is to make space to let things unwind.) The goal is absolutely the journey, the process of doing worthwhile stuff and taking on that pile of TODOs day after day, and not beating yourself up too much on any given day about what is waiting 'til tomorrow... or what just ends up not being worth ever getting around to.

There is so much so in sorrow.

Yes, I would like some scrambled eggs, but where would you reappear?

---

I always say that people at the end of their lives have one foot in heaven and one foot on earth. Folks who are dying can see things I cannot. To deny their reality is a huge mistake. It is so important that anyone sitting at the bedside of someone who is dying be willing to hear and affirm the person's reality. Stay silent and be present. I even cry with the guys in the hospice units in prison. I gave up on all I learned about not crying. I just think a life is worth crying over -- most of them have not had their lives cried over.

These 3 quotes are from "Words at the Threshold", about what people say in the run up to death. The book takes a turn to the mystical, and brings forth a few anecdotes that, if fully believed, would seem to refute the materialist estimates of the soul and self - the estimates that claim soul and self are fundamentally rooted in our physical brain, that any hope to for life after death or out of our bodies is merely poetic, living on in the influence we had on others and as ripples we made in the physical universe during our lives.

I'm not sure always sure what to make of it all. On the one hand, I do tend to hold to that materialist viewpoint, and some of the counter-evidence anecdotes - the knowledge of the moment someone else's death despite long distance, say - seems to be a bit of wish-fulfillment thinking, or how we remember the statistically unusual cases and forget the rest. And frankly some of the final, invisible-to-others scenes described by the dying seem very similar to those twists on reality and brain chemistry of folks using psychedelics.

I feel like both death and drugs can hold a spiritual aspect - but the question will always be is that spirituality 'merely' some kind of transcendence that emerges from the base stuff of our normal physical reality, or is there some kind supernatural soul stuff out there?

The faith built for me as a kid, or that I built for myself, turned out to be fragile, because it insisted on being universal and so was readily refuted by the existence of other faiths and by my skepticism that only "my crew" was getting it right. But what if faiths in general aren't just social constructs, but a set of extremely murky mirrors of... something. I mean from here it's easy to get into half-baked woo-woo about quantum entanglement and how a system being observed / interacting seems fundamental in determining what it actually is - events that challenge the very edifice of "cause and effect" that so much of the logic- and evidence-based view of the world is based on.

Sigh. From here it's easy to see the path of early-1900s spiritualism looking to bridge these gaps in understanding... and how easily they were taken in by charlatans and outright flimflammery.

---

consume the art
don't even chew

A Hidden Brain podcast on "The Cowboy Philosopher" Riley Shepard referenced a song "Atomic Power". There are two songs with similar names, similar brothers-named groups playing similar bluegrass styles, similar mixes of American patriotism about atomic weapons and apocalyptic thinking, similar amounts of present-day Google juice and increasing order of terribleness, about 6 years apart:

Oh this world is at a tremble with its strength and mighty power
There sending up to heaven to get the brimstone fire
Take warning my dear brother, be careful how you plan
You're working with the power of God's own holy hand

CHORUS:
Atomic power, atomic power
Was given by the mighty hand of God
Atomic power, atomic power
It was given by the mighty hand of God

You remember two great cities in a distant foreign land
When scorched from the face of earth the power of Japan
Be careful my dear brother, don't take away the joy
But use it for the good of man and never to destroy

(CHORUS)

Hiroshima, Nagasaki paid a big price for their sins
When scorched from the face of earth their battles could not win
But on that day of judgment when comes a greater power
We will not know the minute and we'll not know the hour

(CHORUS)

So it's kind of all over the place, presuming divine intervention for the atomic bombs the USA dropped, and sort of gloating about Hiroshima and Nagasaki but then admonishing folks to use this power for good and not to destroy? But the final reference to the apocalypse as laid out in the book of Revelation was tangential and relative... unlike this next song:

Do you fear this man's invention that they call atomic power?
Are we all in great confusion, do we know the time or hour
When a terrible explosion may ring down upon our land
Leaving horrible destruction blotting out the works of man

CHORUS:
Are you ready for that great atomic power?
Will you rise and meet your Savior in the end?
Will you shout or will you cry when the fire rains from on high?
Are you ready for that great atomic power?

There is one way to escape and be prepared to meet the Lord
Give your heart and soul to Jesus, He will be your shield and sword
He will surely stand beside and you'll never taste of death
For your soul will fly to safety and eternal peace and rest

(CHORUS)

There's an army who can conquer all the enemy's great bands
It's a regiment of Christians guided by the Savior's hand
When the mushroom of destruction falls and all its fury great
God will surely save His children from this awful, awful fate

(CHORUS)

So, pretty direct assumption of atomic weapons being THE instrument of the End Times as put out in the Bible. Both songs predate civilian use of nuclear energy, so the "Atomic Power" of the titles seems like it would be referring to the military type. However, the USSR got the atomic bomb in between the recording of these two songs, which may explain some of the shift of tone.

Of course the latter song leans pretty heavily into my least favorite form of Christian apocalypse thinking - "Pre-Trib", the idea that God must (totes obvs, right?) love his believers so much that the drawing up of them to heaven is BEFORE the excrement truly hits the air conditioning, vs a more straight-forward reading of the texts that has believers enduring some bad stuff. (The "post-trib" and "mid-trib" views).

I resent "pre-trib" thinking strongly, with it's "get out of apocalypse free!" card, in part because if that's what you believe you're that much less likely to be a good steward of the planet! I mean why bother? It must feel frickin' awesome to try to be an instrument of bringing forth God's plan, because it's not your ass on the line, or your families, and everyone who suffers - must be a sinner.

The whole assumption that Revelation is a guide to upcoming events... (and not predicting the fall of an empire 1500 years ago... look up Preterism for an interesting take that that stuff happened) -- why try to make a sustainable planet at all? Plus you can always fit horrible current events into this kind of prophecy, so the end must be around the corner. It's the worst kind of semi-self-fulfilling prophecy possible, and an alarming number of American politicians in the highest offices have this mentality.

(And the whole "Left Behind" series rides on that, albeit with weirdly righteous people able to get kind of a second chance.)

Partially I'm bitter - on a trip to DC I sat in a slightly too old for me Sunday School class when I was 8 or so, taught by my Aunt Ruth, and there was a drawing of a Christian facing a firing squad for his beliefs... scared the bejeebers out of me. So it feels like people who are serious about their faith shouldn't cling to this milquetoast belief that they're too good for God to let suffer.

But still- in MOST media, the people trying to bring on the end of the world-- they're the bad guys. That's part of how you tell they're the bad guys. I think the same thing holds true in real life. My best attempt to explain something that's been on my mind a lot lately:
click for draft 1 - draft 2 - draft 3 - draft 4
Lately my work went over the DiSC personality assessment. At one point we got to discussing the "Conscientiousness" type. Our session leader's assumption that I, as someone who desperately tries to see things from all angles, would be a "C"-type, since they are so urgent that things are correct, and therefore would have done their due-diligence. I disagreed that I was that type - I think what is critical is that the "C"-type folk have FOUND what they believe to be the best answer, and are then content to enforce that as best practice, while I tend to think there IS a best practice but we can never be certain we are aligned with it- but it's important that we give people the freedom to figure out their best guess as well.

So the critical factors seem to be - is there a singular best truth, and how certain can we be that we've gotten there? I think that makes a 4-quadrant spectrum, as shown here.

I know I am deeply in "Second Guesser" territory. I have this near unshakable suspicion that a transcendent truth exists - and while it's not "unknowable", we can never be certain that we've arrived at knowledge and so need to be interested in all viewpoints - all viewpoints from people of good intentions are valid signposts to what is "really" true.

The opposite view I'm calling "Self-Authoritative" until I think of a better name. There is no out-of-system truth in this view - but there are some patterns that are "clearly" better than others, and we can be confident in the superior qualities of our own subjective viewpoint.

"Believer" is my name for the top-right -- there is truth, and (possibly through special revelation) we can have faith in the accuracy of our beliefs.

Probably my most liberty-taking name is "Existentialist" -- all truth is subjective, and we'll never be positive about what's best, so every person is free to work things out for themself, and you don't have to be too anxious that other people aren't believing the "right" thing.

So does this ring true for anyone else? (asks the second guesser) Any improvements for quadrant names, or other axes that might be more useful in an epistemological kind of way?

Followup: it bums me out that Facebook is my best avenue for dialog these days (I crosspost nearly everything here and on that site) but the convo on this diagram with threads with Wendi and David was pretty good.

Followup 2: Similar to the DiSC assessment, but more resonant to me, Grentchen's Rubin's Four Tendencies model seems true to me. That link is the quiz, but the summary you get at the end goes:

I'm a questioner - though again, this taxonomy misses the epistemology of it. A questioner who is certain of themselves because of their own authority is different than one who is certain of themselves because of their image of an external objective standard. And I probably am closer to upholder because I respect the potential of other people's views of that objective truth.

---

Sigh. Getting to Inbox Zero / Todo Zero, or failing to (even when the "zero" just applies to the categories marked as relevant") is feeling like such a daily grind.

---

Franklin Lloyd Wright liked the term "Usonia" for the United States (of North America). I wish it had caught on (even with the gratuitous "i" to make it more euphonious) - it answers two problems: "United States" or "USA" is more of a description than a name, and it stops us from grabbing the name of two continents ("America!") to make up for the first problem.

(That said, I don't think "America" is THAT oppressive, since a person actually referring to the continents would says "Americas" or specify "North America"... mostly I prefer Usonia as a pleasant sounding name, vs a technical description.) Porn is not the worst thing on Musical.ly. Yikes. Parents, be there. That "u r beautiful plz dont kill urself im only 10 but i will b ur friend." is f'in heartbreaking.

---

[skydiving on 1st date]

ME: [shouting] Hey, I guess we're really 'falling' for each other lol

HER: [continues falling and never opens chute]

On the second day of my goofy diet "plan", CAW -- one somwhat unrestricted meal (lunch, usually) combined with a more spartan array of apples (and other handfruit, I've decided) and zero or low calorie beverages, and sugarless gum, is meant to limit my body's perception of available tasty snacks. The body is kind of your frenemy when it comes to dieting, right? It really wants to keep you nice and round as a hedge against and presumption of future scarcity. Some bodies respond to a lack of diversity by sulking and making the person miserable, mine seems able to accept it as discipline and doesn't play a lot of games with cravings.

For me, any diet plan not based on my current food availability environment (meaning both a plan for declining the glorious abundance of tasty snacks at work as well as my total laziness in getting or preparing food) is at extreme risk and will likely fail. Conversely, a customized "way of eating" CAN leverage the way I'm not super hungry in the morning (but will otherwise gladly cram my gullet with tasty, carby entries from DD) or, oddly, in the evening, where sometimes just a few bites of something here and there will suffice 'til I go to bed.

Overall CAW-1 is probably not as good as what worked so well last year, a Sweetgreen salad for lunch and rigid calorie counting, and if there was a great salad place near the Galleria (some place that featured premade mixes (so I don't have to decide so much) of known calorie counts (so I don't have to weigh and guestimate and add so much) I might even disregard the catered lunch at work. But I don't think I have that, so CAW-1 feels like the most realistic workable option for now. "Trying to be good" in my new food environment alone has had me gain about eight pounds in three months, and I don't want to consider that acceptable.

---

Whoa.
(Also here) Smarter than average talk about Trump, but maybe because the bar for that is kind of low.

---

Here is a much simpler explanation for Donald Trump: Republicans have fed the country ideas about decline, betrayal and treason. They have encouraged the forces of anti-intellectualism, obstructionism and populism. They have flirted with bigotry and racism. Trump merely chose to unashamedly embrace all of it, saying plainly what they were hinting at for years. In doing so, he hit a jackpot.

Gingrich's "Contract on with America" was rhetorically brilliant, and it came bundled with the nasty disrespectful spin cycle that we have so much with us today.

---

Oral History of "The Golden Girls" - A little of the history of a delightful show.

---

I was worried I was getting old and pedestrian about sex... and you know I pride myself on my sexual openness. What I lack in skill I make up for in EXTREME curiosity.

I decided to tear directly into the second Second "Science of Discworld" book when I realized it deals heavily with matters of mind and consciousness. It also talks about magic (here, in the Arthur C Clarke "indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology" sense) but ties in "magical" technology with the poor understanding of cause and effect we all tend to have as children:

Parents and carers are always transmuting the child's expressed desires into actions and objects, from food appearing on the table when the child is hungry to toys and other birthday and Christmas gifts. We surround these simple verbal requests with 'magical' ritual. We require the spell to begin with 'please', and its execution to be recognised by 'thank you'.
[...]
Coming home in the car and clicking the garage open, clicking the infrared remote to open or lock the car, changing TV channels - even switching on the light by the wall switch - are just that kind of magic. Unlike our Victorian forebears, we like to hide the machinery and pretend it's not there. So Clarke's dictum is not at all surprising. What it means is that this ape keeps trying, with incredible ingenuity, to get back into the nursery, when everything was done for it.

(Later they point out that you don't need high technology to continue this "making wishes" form of life, just lots of money -- "Feudal societies have a baronial class, who are in many respects allowed to remain in their nursery personas by being surrounded by servants and slaves and other parent-surrogates.")

I liked the reminder that the Victorians liked to expose the workings and fine engineering cleverness. But more than that, I was struck with how my preferences in software development are Victorian, in that sense. I prefer systems that "show their work" and expose the plumbing. That doesn't seem to be the dominant trend in the industry, however. In the late-90s, early-00s it was "Unix vs Microsoft" in development style, the latter giving you very powerful toolsets that a developer might not ever quite understand the flow of. Things "just worked" and coder life was productive and grand. Or they didn't, and coder life was misery and suffering. That Microsoft style seems to be seeping more and more into the stack that is still more at home on Unix-like systems, despite the culture those systems came from, the culture of relatively easy to understand and decoupled parts communicating, ideally via pipes.

There's a reductio ad absurdum of this, of course, that says why should I be uncomfortable with this kind of abstraction in technology when I accept so many others underneath it? I took some elementary assembly language in college, and even programmed an Atari game... but the amount of abstraction embedded in this laptop I'm writing this on is unfathomable. Just thinking about what's going on to get pixels glowing on the screen, the number of interlocked electronic subsystems in constant communication, a weird dance of impulse and intent... but, it's pretty reliable! It's acceptable to me because it hardly ever fails in subtle ways - or at all, for that matter. This is in contrast to these newer "framework of the months" for software development... if I'm coding with my preferred Imperative style of simple code, libraries for the tough stuff, stack traces that make sense... I know I can do pretty much anything a browser can allow. When using one of these magical frameworks, I have to see if the framework permits it, or if I'll be given the extra burden of working around it to meet the specification.

But, I persevere. Because these tools are powerful, and when I take enough time to really learn and get to know a toolkit, I'm empowered. Also, because my real goals are to do make interesting things, and a lot of the people with interesting things for me to make (and the budgets to pay me to make them) love these toolkits, and I want to be easy to work with.

Anyway.

The book extends some related ideas that to my ear starts leaning to Taoism:

A Spinozan view of child development sees the opposite of wish-fulfilment. There are rules, constraints, that limit what we can do. The child learns, as she grows, to modify her plans as she perceives more of the rules. Initially, she might attempt to cross the room assuming that the chair is not an obstacle; when it doesn't move out of her way, she will feel frustration , a 'passion'. And throws a paddy. Later, as she constructs her path to avoid the chair, more of her plans will peaceably, and successfully, come to fruition. As she grows and learns more of the rules - God's Will or the warp and woof of universal causation - this progressive success will produce a calm acceptance of constraints: peace rather than passion.

(I had to confirm I knew what "throwing a paddy" meant from context... and like I feared, it's a bit racist.)

I hadn't heard as much about Spinoza in a while, I think I dig that kind of pantheistic outlook.

Magic!

---

march blender of love Possibly foolishly when sleepless Thursday night for a work hackathon. Great sunrise from the office though.
An infographic from this Boston Magazine article puts Tufts' Jumbo as the champion, of all the local mascots duking it out: click for full
--via

---

RT @j_zimms: Never has the word "pedant" seemed so impoverished. Finnish word for pedant, pilkunnussija, translates as 'comma fucker'

---

http://live.gdgt.com/live-apple-ipad-3-event-coverage/#sort=asc I enjoy that this photo-rich Apple coverage allows "latest at bottom" sorting. Plus: does anyone love/rely on Siri?

---

Huh. Apple gave up coming up with new form factors, AND new names for the iPad? Odd.

---

Seriously, dunno if the "new iPad" moniker is genius in mindspace, or incredibly stupid, making it harder to talk (and boast) about.

---

http://www.moongadget.com/origins/ -- an appreciative view of what George Lucas likely cribbed from in making Star Wars.
via

---

Hungary Uses iPad To Draft New Constitution -- this must seem like sacrilege to so many Americans, who take their government as they take their religion, from static old tomes, "holy (and wholly) writ"

---

"Are you in, genius? Are you in, capable? In, solent? In, describable? In, bearable?" I'm weirdly captivated by the "makes me a big deal. Ha ha." part of this add for Palm at South Station.


In a similar note, I'm both amused and alarmed at what I've been teaching my iPhone auto-correct...


I went with Amber and Kjersten to see the Alice in Wonderland. The "lightshow" they do beforehand is kind of boring (but where else is one going to hear Big Bad Voodoo Daddy these days?) so we made our own fun with pictures.


Kjersten apparently had a lot of trouble getting just the right shot of me and Amber so I made a montage of this series...



smal gif cinema version:

---

fanpop.com is gaming Google! Google (no quotes) "wikipedia alice in wonderland" - the 1st link that says (2010 movie) (3rd in all) is fanpop

---

I know I'm tempting Murphy and His Law but- the sandals are back!

---

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

---

It's kind of weird how every Oscar is "for" someone else, at least according to the person receiving it.

--Ashley Quigg, from What if Woody Allen Had Directed Watchmen? he and Dan Kois speculate on "How other directors might have filmed the comics classic."

---

Just reread "Watchmen" because I wasn't getting all the jokes going around. Speaking of... if there's one thing this movie release is demonstrating, it's that the only way to make the word "wang" funnier is to precede it with "enormous blue".

---

http://gods4suckers.net/archives/2009/03/03/good-stuff-2/ - What if god disappeared? (tongue in cheek disguised atheist rant)

---

Republicans love to harp on "what if healthcare becomes like the local DMV"? What a cheap and facile shot-- I don't even think the DMV is that bad.

---

Ha what to do with an old Windows XP laptop that works, IF you use a rubber band to hold the power connection up and in.

---

http://www.moonmilk.com/2009/02/ - heh, Ranjit is on All Things Considered - he made an instrument a day in Feb, the Mobius Musicbox is genius.

---

One scifi idea from George R R Martin's "Tuf Voyaging" (great read) that's stuck with me is an overpopulated planet using the "calorie" as currency.

---

Everybody talks first draft.

---

The Internet would be 0.09% cooler if Youtube embedded the title of videos in the links, rather than random strings. Ah, the economy.

I'm nervous by nature, and so frankly was a bit surprised at how well 2005 and 2006 seemed to go, economically-speaking. Now it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost.

I know some of this is a side effect of my general financial good fortune and lack of family to support, but sometimes I have trouble deeply understanding how as a country we have a negative savings rate. I don't think this is an international phenomenon; it's us.

What is it about us? A screwed up job market that tends to be bottom- and top-heavy? A culture so addled with materialism that people make an endless series of dumb purchasing decisions? As my Libertarian friends would probably argue, too darn much taxation?

But spending seems to be what our economy is based on! Is it some giant shell game? I remember listening to public radio when I was sick, some commentator who kind of contradicted herself without blinking an eye, on the one hand saying this downturn was going to be rough because consumers can't spend their way out of it, on the other hand chastising Americans for spending this way to begin with.

For a lot of us it all comes down to employment. If your job situation stays good you should be more less OK. If not, it's going to be a scary struggle. But even if you're in the first category, man, it's tough not to let this stuff dominate your thinking and outlook in general.

Heh, maybe working for a European company will help. I wouldn't count on it, I've been burnt by that kind of thinking before, thinking that being sheltered under the Thomson umbrella would help my subsidiary muddle through, but it turns out when you work for one part of a giant company and your part is doing pretty well, they may still look to economize on your part just to help out the other sections.

Woo, ramble-heavy posts as of late!

So, the commute is a tad longer than I figured, a solid hour each way.

But it's an hour of reading, which is much more satisfying (and cheaper) than a halfhour drive with talk radio or NPR.

Yesterday I was legitimately startled to find myself at Alewife station, the end of the subway ride, since I had zero recollection of transferring from the green line to the red. (Doubly startling because I didn't think my book was all that engrossing.) I could remember noticing how those damn "Metro Daily"s were caught on the wheel area of the green line train, pushing a Red Bull can along, and with a great force of will, I could kind of recall finding a seat on the red line, but only sort of.

I used to get lost in books when I was a kid... I remember times in sixth grade when I wouldn't even respond to my name being called, not to mention developing the ability to navigate the halls with my nose in a book. I thought I had lost that tendency, but now I'm not so sure.

I remember seeing some propoganda for kids about how reading builds powers of concentration. Do you think that's the case? Does reading as a discipline form a better mind in and of itself, or is it more dependent on the quality of the ideas embedded?

---

Passage of the Moment

I walked beside the reflecting pool that more than doubles the majesty of the Lincoln Memorial. It's a genuinely impressive sight. I walked up the steps, through the colonnade and into the Doric temple-inspired building to see the 20-foot marble statute of Lincoln. He looked pretty much as he had done when he showed up in Star Trek. Only taller. And more marbly.

A gently funny kind of book. For me some of the amusement came from it being a reference to one of the few original Trek episodes I hadn't seen, but still caught from a reference to the episode in some god-awful Star Trek comic. (I think the aliens from the historical figures planet were fighting it out with the guys who made it so the Federation and the Klingons couldn't fight. (Heh, trivia note from the first link: At one point the Excalbian posing as Lincoln says, "There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There's nothing good in war except its ending." This quote is often erroneously attributed to the real-life Abraham Lincoln)

I'm try speed-dating tonight. Somehow, I don't think I should bring up the whole "oh yeah remember that episode where the aliens beamed up Abe Lincoln to the Enterprise I didn't see it but I read about it in a comic it was pretty cool."

This image was slightly funnier in my head

---

Random Links of the Moment
I found a strange little frisson of satisfaction in both of these stories: A "smart" computer program has been busted for practicing law without a license, and one of my favorite songs Tom's Diner was the target song during the creation of the .MP3 music format.

I miss Napster. I didn't use it much, mostly to track down obscure tracks, so its replacements that offer a similar kind of bulk but without the obscure tracks just miss the point for me.

Kirkminutiae of the Moment
Ways I've had of organizing my ToDos, ending with a new system I'm particularly pleased with...

Stickies and Spindle

I'd right things on stickies, and then stick them on a spindle when they were complete.
PROS: Visceral pleasure of impaling stickies, can use physical placement of stickies to makes subasks or to re-arrange priority, have tangible record of what was done.
CONS: stickies don't stick to cube walls that well, so I had to designate deskspace as "sticky land". Also, generally disorganized looking, and it got pretty easy to loose stickies.

PalmPilot

I do tend to keep my personal ToDos on Palm, and a while back I thought about what my Ideal Palm ToDo app would be like
PROS: With me all the time. Very neat and orderly.
CONS: Old tasks tend to linger-- too low of a "nag" factor, and not much to show other people. Clunky reordering, and no concept of "subtasks". Plus, completed tasks pretty much go away when you "purge completed tasks".

Whiteboard

PROS: Kind of fun, and you can be very expressive in terms of priority.
CONS: Tough to reorder. Bad marker smell. Old tasks tend to accumulate, surprisingly. Almost a little too visible to coworkers. And at my previous job, I didn't even have my own whiteboard, though maybe I could have asked for one.

Small .txt files and notepad.exe

Sometimes I'll still use this when I have a lot of things to do during a weekend: creating a list, and then cutting and pasting from a TODO section to a TODONE section so I can feel good about getting through stuff. (In fact, I posted an example a while back.)
PROS: Readily available, easy to put in priority order and then re-arrange on the fly
CONS: Doesn't travel very well, too easy to forget to save file.

Graph Paper a Day

The latest and my current favorite. Originally I was stealing printer paper, but graph paper has some advantages as described by this Book of Ratings entry. For over a week now I've been starting the day with a fresh sheet, dating it, transfering any previous undone tasks to it. (On the previous day's sheet, I circle things that were undone but passed forward.) Then as I get things done I cross 'em off with a big bold stroke of the pen.
PROS: Many! Each day is a bit of a blank slate, unlike the whiteboard, but the discupline of transferring undone things urges me not to let them linger. You can group things into subtasks. Plus I have a nice historical reference, good for both personal satisfaction as well as having to record "hours worked". More viscerally satisfying than the electronic based systems. CONS: Not much...sometimes I come close to running out of room on a single sheet.

Any one else have a system they want to share?

Fortune Cookie of the Moment

Don't expect romantic attachments to       be strictly logical or rational!    Lucky Numbers 6, 7, 26, 27, 36, 37

--Fortune Cookie Fortune that I've been carrying in my wallet for a while, I transcribed it for the latest issue of the Blender of Love Digest.

---

Article of the Moment
Slate.com on the staying power of Dunkin Donuts. I admit I've always kind of liked its blue collar vibe...there was a time when Mo and I would head out, she'd get something from Starbucks, and I'd get something from the Dunkin Donuts two doors down. The article is right about the crap-tacular ambience of DD, but misses the way that for a lot of people, it's strictly a "To Go" kind of place...I'm pretty sure the car is the predominant dining area for the chain.

Ksenia mentioned some rumor that Dunkin Donuts adds hormones to make their product more addictive or something. I couldn't find any talk about this idea on Google, though I wonder if non-hormone-free cream for the coffee counts...

---

Link of the Moment
FoSO's SO MoSO reminded me of Superdickery.com, proof positive that Superman is such a dick.

Invitation of the Moment
So I'm turning 30 at the end of the month. I decided on a three part party format: video games in the afternoon, then dinner at Summer Shack near Alewife, than back to my place for the booze and shmooze. I was pretty proud of the ebiteevite (nice typo!) I came up with, kind of a Godzilla-theme. (His decade-birthday is coming up as well.) I mentioned that there would be dancing, and then provided this link to a preview of the dancing.

So if you're a Boston-area friend of Kirk and didn't get an evite, let me know, I probably just got your email wrong...

---

Link of the Moment
Brooke reminded me of Fenslerfilm, primarily old GI Joe Public Service Announcements redubbed and remixed into absurdist theater. The first one PSA01 is pretty representative, and PSA17 made me laugh for a while... Quote of the Moment

"I'm not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them."

He then goes on to add "And that's not funny."

---

Economics of the Moment
The black art of setting prices. Helps explain why airline pricing is so wacky.

---

Quote of a Past Moment

"To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero."

Oh, but I guess it's ok now 'cause 9/11 changes everything. (thanks Bill)

---

Conspiracy of the Moment
More X-Files Vibing: 8march2003.com...tune into tomorrow. The Metafilter crew is a bit skeptical. Palm Toy of the Moment
In the things that are cooler in idea than implementation department, it's Tap, a program for the Palm (they have a screen saver version as well.) It comes in male and female dancer varieties, and the webpage talks about some high falutin' ideas of public and private spaces, artificial intelligence, and data exchange, but in the end it ends up like a lame form of tamagotchi.

---

Quote of the Moment

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.

---

News of the Moment
Wow...who would've thought Co-Ed Naked Bungee actually exists? (Some neat photos, none all that revealing.) I hate the snow. At least I can feel macho shoving Mo's car directly through snowbanks... or that's what it feels like I'm doing. If I'm still living in a place with this kind of weather when I get my next car, I'm going for something with 4WD.

---

Link of the Moment
Salon.com had a story on Chuck Barris, the guy who gave us the Newlywed Game and the Gong Show. The author paints those shows as precursors to today's "reality programming". He's a very interesting guy.

---

Line of the Moment

"I doubt my getting fired from the Dairy Queen is a bellwether of recession, but it sure is a bellwether of I stuck my wang in the butterscotch."