Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
I'm not in the market to sell my home, but thanks to the site Zillow I have a rough gauge of how my home is doing on the market. In the first year that I owned my home, I have reason to believe it appreciated between 1% and 2% of its value. More recently ... that's started to change for the worst.
Two months ago, according to Zillow's "zestimate", it had dropped 2% of its value.
Two days ago, it had dropped 10% of its value.
Today, it has dropped an additional 1% of its value.
Fun fun fun! I see "not moving anytime soon" in my immediate (and not-so-immediate) future.
-the Centaur
Apple updated the drivers on the Time Capsule, and for the past ~month it has done a good job of backing up my Mac. I was waiting to tell you guys because previously if you looked at the Time Capsue funny it broke down. But it survived the acid test: I went on a trip to Atlanta, and when I came back the backups resumed with no hiccups.
It still took me a whole evening's worth of work to get it running, but it is running. So you can go get one now, if you have a Mac and want trouble-free backups happening without you even having to think about it.
-The Centaur
P.S. In the first version of this post I called it a "Time Machine" ... that's actually the backup/restore software that writes to the Time Capsule. My bad.MacLife magazine for July 2008 has an article on "The 30 Best Mac Apps You've Never Heard Of". Out of these, three really stood out:
More news as I know how well these work...
-the Centaur
... we're over 30 posts in a month now. Mission accomplished, and without even using fake fill-me-up posts like this one.
There are a few topics left, but they can wait till June.
I can has novel writing now?
-the Centaur
... we're going back to the setting that makes Qumana put in extra line breaks.
Because if I leave that setting on, apparently Blogger reformats all of my old articles, removing the line breaks.
Not good enough. Not good enough at all. It's easier to fix the twenty or so Qumana articles and to use shift-breaks in future to accomplish my will than reformat all 200 previous entries in my blog, so Blogger wins.
So my buddy Gordon has beat me to the punch (yet again) by finding the site FaceStat, which does wisdom-of-the-crowds rating of pictures. His came out pretty good; I used one of my favorite pictures of myself, which turned out ... not so much.
Ok, so I already knew my beloved missing cat is more attractive than me. But did the crowds in their infinite wisdom have to put down "repulsive" for my level of attractiveness? Sure, maybe they're referring to the prominent surgery scar on my arm. But that doesn't explain why the crowds thought I was "definitely not to be trusted."
Stupid crowds. I didn't want your wisdom anyway.
-the Centaur
In my life, I've often found it necessary to work hard to get what I want. (Whether this is the right thing to do is another matter). But how much is too much, and how much is enough?
Sometimes I've been in startup and crunch mode where I had to work weeks or months on end, sometimes to good end, sometimes not. Once I even worked thirty-six hours straight when a surprise bug forced a rearchitecture of a key software component - but the work was clear to do, the results easy to test, and the deadline ultimately easy to meet. But you can't do that all the time, and from time to time I've had to look at what I'm doing and dial it back. I find if you're not working so you spend most of the time ready and refreshed, you don't have the jazz to go to crunch mode if you have to.
Other times I've had so much going on - recuperation from illness, moves, life issues - that I've had to look at my work and say: hey, buddy, you need to do more. I've never had a boss tell me that that I can recall; I try hard to figure out when to tell that to myself. In the end, I want my employer to feel like they're getting their dollar's worth, so they keep on giving me the dollars; and I don't want or need supervision in order to do that, I want my employer to get that level of performance for free.
But if you feel like you need to get more done, how do you do it? Go to crunch mode? And if you're in perpetual crunch mode, are you trapped there? Is there really no way out?
No, and no. In my experience, when things are going well at work --- when it's not an actual emergency --- you need to put out just a little more effort than you want to to really get things done That's it. Not a huge amount; not crunch mode, not ten hours a day. Actually not much at all. It might take you an hour - even just a few minutes - to:
If I take on a big task at the end of the day, I end up tired and drained and go home late, often defeated. You can actually create for yourself a perpetual crunch by wearing yourself out so much you make mistakes! If on the other hand --- right when I'm tired and worn out and want to call an early end to my day --- I instead hunt around for the small tasks, the little things I need to do but have been putting off, I find I can do two or three of them. Or maybe one, small, self-contained programming task. It usually takes between an hour or two to nail all of these things that I can.
The result? I feel energized, rejuvenated. Instead of leaving tired after seven hours feeling like a slacker, or defeated after ten hours feeling like a loser, I go out on a high note after eight to nine hours feeling like a winner. When you do this, you realize that no, there really isn't anything more you can do in the day, and that all the little grease-the-wheel tasks you just did just made your tomorrow clearer, cleaner and brighter. In fact, often those little tasks are much more useful to your work and everyone else's than if you started some "big task" that you wore yourself out on not making progress that you'd have to practically restart, exhausted in the morning. You become more responsive, more effective, and get more done.
All it takes is to realize:
I don't want to work any more today, but if I do just a little bit more, I won't have to work any more today.
Or maybe this should be phrased, do some more of the little bits. This strategy works far better than when I'd club myself in the head at the end of the day with big tasks so I could feel like I was "getting things done". Now, I am getting things done - leaving work today, for example, with eight former "Next Actions" now tossed over the cube wall to co-workers and comfortably sitting in the "Wait For" state, and two more sitting even more comfortably in "Done" --- and knowing I can come in to work Monday morning not worrying about my weekly report, all those emails or anything else; just the two or three big tasks on my plate, the way for which I cleared before I left today.
This isn't how Dad did it, but it has been working out pretty well so far. I'll keep you posted on how it goes in the future.
-the Centaur
One consequence of finishing a paper is that there's a bit of debris left over...
Fortunately, now that my library is more organized, it's easier to reshelve:
No, seriously! Take a look:
I wuv my library. It feeds my ego. Or do I mean my head? Or both...
-the Centaur
... on film at least:
Fortunately we have a tiger to keep us safe...
... but I'm not. I really respect what Messrs. Ford, Spielberg and Lucas pulled off and I really enjoyed it, so I shouldn't say anything bad. And as a couple of friends pointed out, they worked hard to make the movie accurate: they used the 48-star flag as was flying over America at the time of the movie; they used period-appropriate villains (Communists) and monsters (aliens) and I've even heard that they used shots more typical of a 50's B-movie.
But...
A friend who hates a lot of modern movies described the 48-star flag bit as "the only good thing in the film, if it can be called that." A lot of us made fun of him saying, of course he'll hate the movie ... but when The Last Crusade came out, he hated that movie right away, whereas I was lulled into enjoying it for at least 15 minutes - and that movie has aged very badly (more like milk than cheese, no offense to Messrs. Ford, Spielberg and Lucas).
On some fundamental level, I can take Raiders of the Lost Ark seriously ... and the rest of the movies, I can't. And I don't think it's just "saw it when I was young" or any such nonsense ... I will argue that the on-call troupe of swinging monkeys that appear in Crystal Skull are somehow goofier than anything that showed up in Raiders, and that cheapened the movie without aiding it. In fact Crystal Skull has oodles of the same X-marks-the-spot goofiness that makes Last Crusade so embarrassing to watch.
But at least it was a *pretty* movie and was nowhere near as astonishingly gawdawfully craptacular as the Temple of Dumb. And I had a lot of fun, and there are scenes in it which I will probably remember for the rest of my life, particularly the "this is how they should have done it in the Mummy Returns" ending.
But, I recall the snark I made before seeing Kingdom: "Wouldn't it be nice if they made another Indiana Jones movie? Cause they haven't made one yet." At this point, I tend to think, yes, at this point they have now indeed made a second Indiana Jones movie, and I'm glad. Maybe 15 minutes from now, I will go over to my buddy's side and think they still haven't.
Or maybe not. After all, I'm the guy who saw Phantom Menace 10 times in the theater, so what do I know from bad?
-the Centaur
... so do I blog or work on my next novel?
Sorry guys. Work calls.
-the Centaur
So on this last paper ... I spent a year and a half working on the project, six intensive weeks implementing our software doing a crash-course implementation on a testing platform only available for a short time, put the project on hold for a bit during that whole dot-com dancing, and then spent many evenings over the last six months ... and most of the evenings over the last month ... putting together a 10,000 word paper.
End result? I'm unsatisfied. I feel like I and my colleagues busted our balls to get this done, and I'm satisfied with the text of the paper qua being a paper ... but scientifically, I think we'd need to put out another 50% more effort to get it up to my standards of what's really "good". We needed to do many more evaluations (not that we could, as we lost our testbed) but even given that I think the whole paper needed to be more rigorous, more carefully thought out, more in depth.
It's like I had to work my ass off just to get it to the point where I could really see how far I had to go.
Depressing.
-the Centaur
SO I'm running out of [backup] hard disk space at home now that both my wife and I are computing, and I splurged and got a Time Capsule, Apple's svelte new wireless hard drive, on the theory that I could attach it to my existing wireless network but keep the physical box in a different room so it would be less likely to be stolen if we had a break in. After all, "you can rest assured that it works with other certified 802.11n draft 2.0 products. And it’s compatible with Macs and PCs that use 802.11a, b, or g technologies."
So,what's the problem? It doesn't work, that's the problem. The wireless part, that is. The Ethernet works fine, the hard drive works fine, the blinking light work fine ... except they picked amber and green as the working/not working colors! Gee, thanks, guys! I know those colors are supposed to be ok for most color blind people but really they look the same! You obviously three bulbs behind the light (amber, green, blue) ... would it have killed you to give all three their own window?
Fume ... so ANYWAY, the Time Capsule gives you three options: take over your wireless network, join an existing wireless network, or go wired. Well, I couldn't put it in a different room with option 1, and option 3 meant that I would physically have to be able to connect my laptop to the Time Capsule, so I went with option 2.
And every time I set it up on the network, the Time Capsule disappears.
After repeated retries, hard resets, and careful readings-over of the manual, the PDFs (identical) and the Apple support site (containing the identical PDFs) I figured out that if I hooked the Time Capsule up via Ethernet, I could still access it and debug the problems. And then I found that there were many problems, but that the software would not actually allow you to correct them - that is, you could change the settings of the Time Capsule in the Air Port Utility, but Air Port Utility would not actually communicate them to the Time Capsule when you tried to apply them; instead it would claim the problem was unresolved. So there was no way to actually fix the problems ... you could only hit Ignore instead.
Upon some more digging, I found this tidbit on the Apple web site:
Time Capsule doesn't like being part of an existing network (despite what the manual and online material suggests). I've just spend ages, including 75 minutes on the phone with Apple Support to finally work out that Time Capsule simply won't join my existing Apple Extreme network.
I'm lifelong Mac user. This is the first time I've been really disappointed by a Mac product... the product ships with out of date software, does not set up easily, and simply won't do what it says it's supposed to.
If it's not too late for you... don't buy one!
Half a dozen other messages seem to confirm that this is a real problem. Charming. If only I had listened to Tim Bray:
I ran out and bought a 1TB Apple Time Capsule, breaking a self-imposed rule: Never buy release 1.0 of anything from Apple. Now I’m being punished.
Well ... at least it has 1 terabyte of storage, and Time Machine, the accompanying backup software, appears to run flawlessly (not that I've tried it yet, so how would I know? But it looks pretty!)
[fixed forced grin]
-the Centaur
....finished with our chapter submission to the Handbook of Research on Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics. The book won't come out for another year and a half, AFAIK, but the due date for chapters was yesterday. Breaking my normal tradition, I'm not going to put up the abstract right now as the chapter is in for blind peer review. For the past month this has been ... well, you don't want to hear me whine. But trying to put out a scientific paper at the same time as blogging every day is ... bleah. Obviously, the paper had to win.
Now, back on track.
You're a tiger.
You hide
in the tall grass.
You're a tiger!
You hide
in the tall grass.
I scritch behind your ear
and you fidget for me
Can't I see
you have important work to do?
Go now,
defend our home
from the flitting birds
and the tiny lizard
tailless marauder
you bring home again and again
held delicately in your jaws.
-the Centaur
