Squashed!

I played another game of squash with Martin yesterday. Last week, I got the better of the encounter. This week, he wiped the floor with me.

Am very much looking forward to a rematch.

"Should" sucks

"Should" is the worst word in the English language. "Gubernatorial" is kind of bad, but reminds me of peanut butter and jam sandwiches. "Envisage" and "utilize" are both terrible, but at least I know what they're getting at. "Should" is plain ambiguous.

Consider, if you will, a thirsty self:

Self: "When will my drink arrive?"
Other: "Your drink should come out with the mains, sir."

Now this obviously means "the drink will come out with the main meals unless something terrible and unexpected happens". In other words, Other expects it to come out with the mains, he anticipates it.

But there's another meaning,

Self: "When are drinks served?"
Other: "Drinks should be served with the mains."

See? This isn't anticipation, this is a moral imperative. Drinks should be served with mains, the nations should beat their swords into ploughshares, you should listen to what I have to say.

This comes up surprisingly often when talking about bugs and changes to software. I'm a little sick of it, but I don't have any good alternative.

Open Mic Night

If you are ever in Hobart on a Monday evening, it's worth dropping into Onba (just opposite the Republic) for their Open Mic Night.

Onba opened up some time after I left Hobart. It's a smallish place that does tapas, cocktails, wine, beer, live music, up-market cafe meals, free(ish) Internet access and decent coffee. The atmosphere is great and the whisky selection is small yet tasteful. Your average Sydney pub has nothing on this.

I didn't really know what to expect at the open mic session. I mean, I figured things would be pretty laid-back and friendly, but I wasn't sure about what kind of music they'd have, or how good it would be. First thing I see when I went up the stairs was my friend Alistair playing guitar accompanying two people on bongos and a chap on one of those hand-held things with keyboards that you blow into. I recognized one of the bongo players, since I had glared at him murderously the day before when he dared to play during my 2pm breakfast.

It was a bit more world / folk than I'm used to, but it was good for all that. After Al stepped down, the guy on the melodica (yay learning) swapped places with the non-breakfast bongo player and did some improv. That was fun.

The biggest surprise of the evening (except, perhaps, for the fact that Talisker costs $26 a glass) was hearing Al sing some of his own songs. I'd heard some of his stuff a few years back at the turn of the century and it was all well-polished and what-have-you, but since then... I don't know, I guess I was surprised at how much I enjoyed his music and how much it affected me. I could pull it all apart and say how his singing is much better and how he's obviously more relaxed and that live acoustic in a nice pub is more appropriate to the songs than a professionally mixed recording in an office—I could do that—but I'll leave that to the professionals.

Also, you've probably forgotten how good Prince is (was). This is OK, he's been dormant for a while and his recent stuff isn't great. Still, you should take yourself down to your record store and find something that has Raspberry Beret on it. One guy at Onba played a warm acoustic cover, good enough to make me shut up and listen.

the kind u find

Holiday

I'm going to spend the Labor Day long weekend away, with no laptop and my mobile switched off.

Looking forward to it so much.

Adventures in Custard

I've just made some custard from scratch. The flavour is a lot better than my previous attempt, which had way too much vanilla and sugar. Sadly, I overcooked this batch, which means there's lots of little lumps. I could strain them out, but I don't have a strainer.

Next time!

Off the Wagon

Mikey threw down the gauntlet to his fellow David Allen devotees. Are we staying organized? What's the first habit to go? I replied to his post, but thought my reply was chunky enough to re-post here.

The time has come for me to confess although GTD has strongly influenced the way I've thought, I've really fallen off the rails with it.

It's hard to pick up the precise point of failure, but here are some thoughts.

• I've switched implementations a few times (Emacs, GTiddlyWiki, Remember the Milk, Tomboy, iCal), and there's none that I really, really like.
• Most of my tasks are tracked in Launchpad. Copying them to a separate system seems wrong.
• Many, many, many ideas I've had have been pushed back because someone else sets my priorities. I don't really know how to best track these—someday/maybes perhaps.
• My set of contexts has shrunk drastically. I'm basically always at home, on my laptop with an internet connection and phone line able to do work stuff. Breaking stuff up into @home, @work, @online, @computer, @phone doesn't make any sense for me.
• I don't really feel support from my manager for maintaining the system, even though people appreciate my work "gardening the bug tracker". This makes me reluctant to spend Friday arvo or Monday morning doing a weekly review. This might be imagined.
  
• Things have been broken so long that I feel I need to have a two day reboot. Scheduling such a thing is hard.
• My collection habit has broken off. This is partly due to having crappy tools: the spiral notebooks irritate me, my pens keep disappearing and I can't always carry my moleskine around.
• I'm not in regular conversation with others who strive for a mind like water. Even the people I've spoken to who understand the system don't really seem to value it.
• Update: I get about 150 new email conversations in my inbox every day, and then probably get another 50-60 during the day, excluding spam. Most of these emails are totally irrelevant to me and my life, so I get into this groove of "Crap; Crap; Crap; Crap; Ooh, interesting; Crap; Crap; Crap etc" without doing any further processing. It takes ages to get back to actually reviewing the interesting emails and figuring out what I need to do. Then it takes more time to actual do it.
  

I miss the feeling of cleanliness and freedom that I had when I was doing GTD well. It wouldn't surprise me if there are real gaps in the system that I'll be able to understand better once I get back into it.

In any case, I'd love to know your thoughts.

Fun stuff

Finished playing Portal last night. Gosh it was fun. I wish the newspaper included a daily Portal puzzle instead of those silly sudoku things. Doubt they could match the script though — those words have power.

Listening to Never Mind the Bollocks... for the second time ever. More music like this please.

We mean it, man.

Parody

xkcd parodies House of Leaves, proving that Randall Munroe sometimes just doesn't get it.

Brennan on Spirituality and Conscience

While I was in Hobart, I went to see Frank Brennan speak at a regular event called "Spirituality in the Pub". He was given the topic "Spirituality and Conscience", which he interpreted as "talk about the stuff in your book and interesting things that you've done", which was alright with me.

I was expecting him to be a better orator. He was certainly clear, and his talk was definitely interesting, but he had a sing-song tone that I found distracting. It's a minor thing, of course. I mention it only because I was surprised: I've heard more engaging speakers at Free Software conferences.

In his talk, he outlined a few principles and peppered them with anecdotes. First, he said we have to realise that the following are five separate questions that might have five separate answers:

1. What is right for me?
2. What is right for those who ask my advice (e.g. my friends, my family, my church)?
3. What is the right social policy for a pluralistic democracy?
4. What is the right law?
5. How should such a law be administered?

As a conservative Christian who's socially liberal, I love this: it's a very clear framework for thinking about controversial issues such as abortion, stem-cell research and gay marriage. I personally had never thought about separating the last three points, which seems rather foolish in hindsight.

Brennan also emphasised that compromise in politics is perfectly acceptable and logically necessary. After all, what else is politics for? The upshot is that we need to be clear on what our principles are and on the process for compromise.

He also mentioned that it's important to think about what's achievable, and recalled a conversation he had with Philip Ruddock on the mandatory detention centres. Even though Brennan was against mandatory detention, he didn't argue against it in that conversation. Instead, he focused on something achievable: regular, independent, public scrutiny of the conditions in those centres.

Question time was fun. We had a bit of a chat about what it means to "acknowledge" the traditional owners of the land at public gatherings, and I copped a couple of dirty looks from some members of the audience by addressing him as "Frank" rather than "Father".

On the whole, I wish that he was my local MP. My current one is a little disappointing.