Echo and Bounce

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

2008-10-07T15:49:00.002+11:00

Even if you don't care, this talk by Sir Ken Robinson is funny, raises some good points and is only about fifteen minutes long.

Attention

2008-10-05T12:18:00.002+11:00

I came across this quote the other day:

"Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece."
Nadia Boulanger

I think it's one of the most true things I've heard.

It also meshes nicely with Augustine's idea that the present is attention, or at least a projection of attention. On to what, I don't know — eternity?

F is for Film

2008-10-04T11:52:00.003+10:00

Ever wondered why Fight Club, The Fast and the Furious and Forgetting Sarah Marshall are so popular? Science may have the answer.

Getting an 'F" might no longer bear the sorry connotations of failure. A new study has just been published revealing that DVD titles starting with the letter "F" are up to seven times as popular as any other. "If this is true, Hollywood as we know it will be changed forever", says one industry observer.

Scientists conducted a survey over a wide variety of DVDs purchased by consumers, plotting the number of films purchased against the first letter of their title. Although they expected the graph to be flat, indicating that each letter was equally popular, they found that F was more popular by far. "We don't know how to explain it", lamented one researcher, "our best theory so far is that it's hard-wired into the brain".

The result has provoked a fierce reaction in the scientific community, with many criticizing the finding by blaming sloppy methods and a biased political agenda in an effort to discount the evidence. Others, however, are taking the news in stride, with Jerry Bruckheimer beginning work on a new film about three rabbits sent to colonize a new world, tentatively titled First, Fecund and Furred.

Like over-cooked steak

2008-10-03T20:48:00.002+10:00

Just finished a massive "Weekly Review", a time of going through all my notes, papers, flagged emails, desktop icons and processing them to see what they are and what I need to do about them. It's also a time for going through my reminder lists, getting them up-to-date and making sure everything is heading a long as normal.

This time, I spent about four hours. If I actually finished my GTD refresh last weekend, it would have taken less time. I don't feel particularly cleaner or more productive yet, but there are definitely fewer loose threads. I'm also surprised by how many good ideas I've had languishing inside my head: I'm itching for a weekend or two to spend hacking and writing.

Surprised by Envy

2008-10-03T17:42:00.003+10:00

I read Surprised by Joy the other night. Some reactions:

We learn nothing at school. Lewis went to university knowing Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian. It sounds like he didn't learn many of the sciences, but I would happily swap my knowledge of chemistry to be able to read The Divine Comedy in the original.
Lewis hated algebra. Score!
He dreaded the postman's knock. I wonder what he would have thought of email.
His "perfect day" only included about six hours of work. This work was uninterrupted (hah!), and punctuated by a leisurely lunch, a lengthy walk and tea. I wonder if he ever got away with it.
The past in a foreign country is a foreigner country.

The book actually has a point, of course — I'm still mulling it over.

Blough

2008-10-02T17:52:00.003+10:00

One day, perhaps a day far off, I would like to move to New Zealand and start my own town. I would call it Blough and I would be the Mayor of Blough.

Blough would be a special place because all eight correct pronunciations of its name would be correct. It's main trades would be poker, jazz music, wind farms and confused tourists. My favourite pronunciation would be "Blup".

Squashed!

2008-09-26T17:49:00.002+10:00

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

2008-09-25T11:08:00.001+10:00

"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

2008-09-19T10:29:00.000+10:00

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

2008-09-18T10:01:00.001+10:00

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

2008-09-14T19:00:00.000+10:00

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

2008-09-12T12:06:00.003+10:00

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

2008-09-11T09:29:00.003+10:00

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

2008-09-08T16:23:00.002+10:00

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

Brennan on Spirituality and Conscience

2008-09-06T14:41:00.003+10:00

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:

What is right for me?
What is right for those who ask my advice (e.g. my friends, my family, my church)?
What is the right social policy for a pluralistic democracy?
What is the right law?
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.

Readings

2008-08-30T12:53:00.003+10:00

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Woah. If you can, get the edition with the foreword by Dave Eggers.

Lud in the Mist, Hope Mirrlees
This charming little book lives in the same corner of Faerie as Tolkien's and Dunsany's works. The Other Realm touches on ours during moments of artistic transcendence, and the aristocracy show up and save us all from the merchant class.

Virginia Woolf describes the author as "a very self conscious, wilful, prickly and perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed and pretty, with a view of her own about books and style, an aristocratic and conservative tendency in opinion and a corresponding taste for the beautiful and elaborate in literature".

The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford
Roger Zelazny liked this book, but I don't. The author plays a fun What If? game with history but then bores us with his characters and plot. Of the four main characters, only one is interesting; another plays Ishmael to Richard of York's Ahab and the others are just dreary. Great concept, wasted potential, too many vampires.

Blogosphere

2008-08-28T09:40:00.003+10:00

This age groans under a surcharge of new books, that, though the many good ones lately published do much to balance the great swarms of ill, or at least needless ones; yet all men complain of the unnecessary charge and trouble many new books put them to: the truth of it is, printing is a trade, and the presses must be kept going[...]

— G Burnet, from the preface to "The Life of God in the Soul of Man", circa 1650.

Forget The Milk

2008-08-27T13:35:00.003+10:00

I'm officially giving up on Remember The Milk. I don't like it. It doesn't feel solid, the keyboard shortcuts are confusing, the animation bugs me and I can't really figure out how to get my 'system' in there.

It's really the feeling that gets to me. It somehow feels flaky, unpredictable. I think this is partly due to the way it handles item selection. It's never really clear what's selected and what's not. The impression I get is that they are trying to copy Gmail (a worthy goal) and not quite making it.

Instead, I'll be going back to Emacs (my text editor, kind of like an acid-breathing, gamma-radiated Notepad that has an adamantium skeleton and can walk through walls). It's not ideal, but I reckon it will be more effective than RTM. The ideal system would be fun to use, Emacs is merely not painful.

Do you have a suggestion for fun Linux task management software?

Got Internet

2008-08-27T08:21:00.000+10:00

iiNet have apparently hooked me up. What a pity I'm in Huonville.

Palmerston North Library

2008-08-23T12:50:00.004+10:00

I can imagine a librarian; call him Norris. Norris is sitting on a verandah, drinking an iced tea that's just started to sweat in the weekend sun. He's reading a book that re-interprets the reign of King Richard III in the light of a vampiric illness, but his eyes just move over the same few lines.

Norris is really thinking about how he can make his library a more pleasant place to be, somewhere people like to hang out. Perhaps a potplant or two? Maybe some artwork from local residents? We could even arrange some sort of special with the café downstairs. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Your problem, dear Norris, is that your library is built to house books. Everything about it is there to keep them organized, contained and available. It's a warehouse—nothing more. Adding a pot-plant will make it a warehouse with a pot-plant. In this way, books are worse than boxes. Books have a force of their own. Too many together in one space can become oppressive. Being in such a place is like standing at the edge of a great cliff, or sharing a cage with a tiger: awe-inspiring, exhilarating, terrifying; never comfortable. Face it Norris, it's too late for you and your library.

In another place, a place where the ducks rule and the traffic lights whistle, in a university town without a university, in a village where the square at night is home to racer boys and a fluorescent cross of many colours, there is a Library.

It's hard to say what makes this Library different. Other libraries feel like temples, or crypts; this one feels like a big lounge room. There's not the buzz of an urban café, but there's not the usual solemn quiet either. From the main floor you can see the CD and film area downstairs. Around the corner from the non-fiction area there's a public phone. The walls have reds and blues and yellows. On the north side there reading chairs next to large windows that look onto the town square and the town's duck lords. While I was there a boy played the piano part of Bohemian Rhapsody from memory. Anyone could easily spend a whole day here and reckon it pleasant one.

Obviously it was intended to be this way from the beginning. The comfort of the Library is partly because it is whole, not a few token efforts scraped together. The planners must have asked themselves "How can we make this a pleasant place to be" over and over. They had a core value by which all decisions could be measured. They have sacrificed some virtues—there are many fewer books than the space permits—in order to excel in this hospitality.

Perhaps poor Norris can take comfort in this. His library may never quite be the place that Palmerston North Library is, but it can certainly have more books. After all, what's a library for?

From iiNet

2008-08-23T12:13:00.002+10:00

I got this in the mail from iiNet.

Your payment has been processed.

If you are paying by direct debit, please allow up to 4 working days for this transaction to be approved by your bank.

Payment Date: Saturday 23 August 2008
Received from: Mr Jonathan Lange
Amount: $109.00
Payment Method: Automatic CC Debit
Receipt Number: XXXX
Invoice Number: YYYY ($109.00)
iiNet Limited ABN: ABN 48 068 628 937

It's confirmation of a late withdrawal fee. I have never withdrawn my application.

Is the incompetence or is it actually part of some malevolent plan? I miss Internode.

Internet, again.

2008-08-15T14:02:00.002+10:00

I applied to iiNet for my Naked DSL line on July the 7th. I still don't have Internet access at home. I won't have it, they say, until next week or the week after.

I'll be in Hobart for two weeks from Wednesday afternoon, so I will have waited two months for an Internet connection at my house. That's assuming nothing goes wrong.

Internet and Coffee?

2008-08-14T14:41:00.002+10:00

Dear Lazyweb,

Does anyone know of cafés on the North Shore of Sydney that provide free / cheap Internet and don't mind it if someone sits by themselves quietly spending money all day? The closer to Lindfield the better.

jml

Palmerston North

2008-08-12T17:02:00.002+10:00

Palmerston North is a strange town. There are three things that single it out from other towns, which I shall enumerate as follows:

1. No one between the age of 25 and 60 has a New Zealand accent.
2. The public library is the coolest place in town.
3. It is ruled entirely by ducks.

More later.

Tolerance

2008-08-01T10:47:00.001+10:00

Tolerance is all about acknowledging that some people, somewhere are allowed to say "different than" when they actually mean "different to".