SO! Not a lot of blogging recently, because I've been focused on spending time with friends and family (or cleaning the house in preparation for spending time with friends and family) and, beyond that, I have a scientific paper due the fifteenth, PLUS I'm continuing to work on LEGACY OF THE EXTRA CREDIT PROJECT and am behind on my wordcount (I never seem to get a Nano-like challenge done in one of the non-Nano months, but, hey, there's a first time for everything, and I'm not THAT far behind).
So! In lieu of a long blog post, enjoy this festive tree, which I had set up elsewhere in the house as a permanent accent slash night light years ago, but which my wife snuck up to our bedroom closet and loaded with gifts while I slept in the night ... because, while she's not into Christmas, she knows I am.
Let's celebrate joyfully to thank God for Jesus, or as they say in the secular world ... Merry Christmas!
-the Centaur
Pictured: Our little Charlie Brown tree, and my wife with a surprise present.
As usual, Scott, and Marissa, don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
First, Scott.
Scott Adams spent 16 years working in big businesses, and hated it so much that he heroically burned the midnight (well, 4am) oil for several years, ultimately creating the beloved, insightful and world-renowned Dilbert cartoon upon which his reputation rests. Then Scott spun off into other political and philosophical ventures, some of which turned out well (such as his successful analysis of and prediction of the success of Donald Trump's first term) and others which did not (such as imagining that there was a "good chance Republicans be dead within a year if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election". But hey, he's a humorist, right, it's satirical, right, and not some motte-and-bailey play, right? Right?)
Scott, you've been right about many things, though I sincerely hope you were wrong about your illness and its unfavorable prognosis. I hope your prognosis improves and you get access to all the treatments that you and your doctors want, and that they are effective in improving your longevity and quality of life.
But about Google, you spent 16 years at banks and telecoms back in the last millennium. I have spent the past 26 years in the startup and dot-com space, including 17 years at Google, longer than your entire big-business career as reported. Your information is stale, your direct knowledge of Google's internals is virtually nonexistent, and so your arguments are invalid.
Now, Marissa.
Marissa Mayer was an executive at Google known in the Valley for "always ending meetings on time". Well, it turns out, her actual quote was "stick to the clock", which makes a little bit more sense in terms of flexibility, but still isn't accurate, because when she was meeting in the conference room directly across from my office in Building 43 of the Googleplex, she almost never ended meetings on time.
Marissa's meetings running over happened so often it got to be a joke, until it wasn't. The teams in nearby offices learned to try to schedule meetings in other conference rooms in case Marissa or another VP was running over. Until I, meeting with two Google New York visitors, had the uncomfortable experience of the two of them barging into the room where Marissa was still finishing up her meeting 5 minutes after the hour, not knowing that she was a VP, and just knowing that she was rude. Well, I guess they showed her.
Now, I could pick on her continued lateness at Yahoo, or her inappropriate focus on micro-details of user interface design - such as the rumor that she once tested 41 shades of blue on the Google home page. Now, if you don't know how statistics work, you might think that's data-driven design; however, if you do know how statistics work, you know that the test-retest reliability of different shades of blue in a complex user interface exposed to millions of users is likely to be very low over any appreciable span of time, and that Marissa was wasting engineer's time and Google's money just chasing noise.
But what I really want to pick on is her comments about 20% time.
Marissa, I'm sorry, but I don't have as much good to say about you as I do about Scott. I'm genuinely sorry your stint at Yahoo didn't work out, but to all external appearances it's a direct consequence of the toxic environment you helped create in the teams you worked with at Google. This goes beyond creating a hostile relationship between user interface and software engineering, something I had to contend with long after you left the company; this goes beyond pursuing a quixotic attention to micro-detail that is directly contradicted by researchers at Google itself (admittedly, long after you left).
It even goes beyond your toxic perfectionism, repeatedly killing development projects internally because their additions to the search results didn't reach some absurdly high degree of accuracy; this helped foster a Google-wide attitude of caution that meant internal teams couldn't develop certain products, and we had to buy external companies like (the very nice) Metaweb for millions upon millions of dollars - but hey, guess what? The external systems we acquired also didn't reach the same absurdly high degree of accuracy, and if we had just let our internal teams develop shit and iterate to perfect it, we would have built more, internally, and cheaper, with a more harmonious and less stressful internal culture.
No, it's because you don't know what the fuck you're talking about about how Google works. You worked for Google for 13 years, but I worked for Google for 17 years, and in the six years we overlapped at the company plus the previous year in which I was recruited, the perception you apparently acquired of how Google worked was directly contradicted by the available evidence, so your arguments are invalid.
Now.
Google's 20% time.
Google's 20% time, in case you don't know, enabled Google employees to spend up to one fifth of their time working on a personal project. It had to be for the company and your manager had to improve, but otherwise it was flexible. Google recruiters directly advertised 20% time as one of the perks of being at Google. I was allowed to directly interview Google employees who confirmed that it existed, though at least one of them said that they were so interested in their main project that they had no time for 20% efforts. When I joined Google, as far as I can recall, every manager I ever had was supportive of 20% time, and every team that I was on, and many of the teams that surrounded us, always had at least one person working on a 20% project, some of them quite substantial. I myself worked on a fair number of 20% projects. Most importantly, it was never something that you had to work 120% time to do in all the time I worked there.
On that point, most notably, robotics at Google began, as far as I personally know, at the 2010 Robotics 20% Taskforce, when about 20 engineers, user interface designers, and product managers pooled their banked up 20% time and got together for a couple of weeks to prototype robotics systems. That led to an early "Cloud Robotics" team robotics team that formed in late 2010 or early 2011, first presenting its work publicly at Google I/O in 2011. That project didn't survive, but the team did, and many of its alumni went on to other Robotics projects at Google, notably Replicant and later Robotics at Google.
During my time there, Google was heterogeneous in both time and space. There were many individuals, managers, teams and divisions that did not participate in or support 20% time. And there were many times that teams that did support it were engaged in full court press work that didn't leave time for 20% work.
But 20% time was an important part of most teams that I worked at and most teams that I worked with during my 17 years at the company, and while there were a few skeptics, it remained an important part of the company culture during my entire time there, making key contributions to Ads, News, and Robotics. As far as I know, it was still part of the company culture right up until when I was laid off in 2023. After that, the people I know working at Google are all in Google Gemini and are way too busy, so, who knows. But the layoffs and Gemini happened way after Scott's and Marissa's comments in 2015, so it isn't pertinent.
Or, put another way ... Marissa Mayer and Scott Adams didn't know what the fuck they were talking about when they tried to "debunk" Google's 20% time.
-the Centaur
P.S. The Wikipedia page on Google's implementation of "Side Project Time" says [citation needed] to "The creator of [Google News] was Krishna Bharat, who developed this software in his dedicated project time.
Well, you can fucking cite me and this blog post. Krishna Bharat was my second manager at Google, and he told me directly in one of our 1-1 conversations that he created Google News as a bunch of Perl scripts following the 9/11 attacks to help him keep up with the headlines. Krishna was a master of spinning up small things into something big, and turned that humble beginning into the product that became the world's largest news aggregator. I don't remember whether he mentioned it was developed in what we later called 20% time, but it wasn't his primary responsibility, Google obviously supported and encouraged his work on it, and the entire arc of his side work and subsequent development is precisely consistent with the use of 20% project time that made Google one of the most vibrant and creative companies in history.
Pictured is Lovi, the newest of our cats, a stray from San Jose which Sandi started feeding, then befriended, then adopted once she'd become dependent. Everything was going fine with Lovi even after the move, until she was introduced to the other cats. Loki did a double take when he saw her, but the kittens were more freaked out, and have gradually become more and more aggressive with her. Lovi started peeing on stuff, and I eventually deduced that the kittens were likely keeping Lovi from the litterboxes.
We separated them, and everyone calmed down. Apparently this backsliding is a thing that can happen when introducing cats, and you need to be willing to do a reset. But, despite the calming down, it took a week or so for Lovi to start warming back up again. She used to hop up on Sandi's lap, but quit that when she was introduced to the kittens. She refused to do that for me, and Sandi realized that the blanket we had on the chair where I read in the bedroom likely smelled of kitten. I replaced that cover with a new blanket, and within the day Lovi had hopped up on it and started making biscuits and rubbing on my hand.
So, mission accomplished. Here's hoping it lasts!
-the Centaur
Pictured: the new cat, on the new blanket, newly making biscuits.
Some days you just don't feel right. Other days you realize, you're not actually well.
So I found out late Friday that I've actually been sick - congestion, sore throat, and headaches kicked in pretty bad, followed by some pretty serious gastrointestinal upset most of the day Saturday. And, if I'm honest with myself, I haven't felt great since Thanksgiving, when I also thought I might have been coming down with something and then decided that I had fought it off. More or less likely I have been fighting it off the whole time, and was simply not paying close enough attention to my body.
Depressingly, I'm wont to do that.
So I took it easy Saturday afternoon once I knew what was going on, cutting back on my errands and trying to give my body a chance to relax. I did the same thing the next morning (breaking the illusion of the retro blogging, I know) and slept in rather than go to church. By the midafternoon, I was feeling better.
Sometimes you need to go easy on yourself, but it also requires paying attention to what your body needs.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A pair of tomato sandwiches I made at home, which itself was taking a break from my normal Saturday hit-Panera-then-run-errands routine.
So there's this rule I've developed to deal with cat food. If one cat doesn't eat some food that you just put down, that doesn't really mean anything: cats are finicky. If two cats don't eat some food that you just put down, that doesn't necessarily mean anything: it could be coincidence. But if three cats in a row don't eat some food that you just put down, it probably means the food is bad and you should toss it.
The food was bad. The replacement food was a hit.
-the Centaur
Pictured: food that three cats refused, and one of those three cats chowing down on its replacement.
Cats are so colorful and varied it's easy to forget that part of the function of coloring is camouflage. I almost didn't see this little gal sitting in our front foyer! But the camera never lies:
Meet Lovi(licious(ness)), the fifth member of our increasing series of L-named cats. This little lady started coming round our house in San Jose, and after Sandi started feeding her, she soon won her over (it is not clear who won whom over). Sandi welcomed her inside, where Lovi started using the litter box like a pro. We suspect she was someone's kitten who was scared away from their home by fireworks at the Fourth of July, and after unsuccessfully attempting to find her owners, Sandi brought her back to South Carolina.
Crazy cat people here we come.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um, I said it: our new cat, in our new foyer, trying, unsuccessfully, to hide.
No, not 1923: the numbers 19 and 23: the number of years my wife and I have been married, and together! We met on September 13, 2002 and married a smidge over four years later on September 16, 2006. I always love the fact that we got married so close to the date that we met (I argued we should hold it on the same date, but everyone told me "we're not attending a wedding in the middle of the week" so, eh, the 16th).
For our anniversary, we went to Asheville, North Carolina for the weekend, which we really enjoy due to its wide range of vegan restaurants, great bookstores, nearby hiking, and spectacularly walkable downtown. My wife and I really enjoy places where we can walk everywhere - New Orleans' French Quarter, San Diego's Gaslamp District, Montreal's Old Town, Monterey, even smaller places like Davis, and of course London.
So for the weekend, we walked, and walked, and walked, and walked. We visited all the bookstores and all the art galleries that we could, and looped around downtown maybe a dozen times. Unusually this visit, we chose to try to go hiking - we spent so much time our first five or six trips there in the downtown we rarely got out to do anything else. But we did the Blue Ridge Parkway and Catawba Falls, which has a truly epic staircase tracing its way to the top - 580 steps, which is more than enough to put a crimp in anyone's climb.
No, that's not computer generated, but it did feel like I was in some infinite stairwell in a computer game after a while - it just kept going up and up and up! There's a tall observation tower at roughly the middle, which triggered my latent fear of heights - something I haven't quite debugged; it triggered leaning out over the Hoover Dam but not standing at the Grand Canyon, and leaning over the rail of the observation tower, but not leaning over the rail of the staircase just a few feet away. I think it has something to do with my body detecting "there's a big drop and it might be behind you" - or perhaps I'm just worried I'll lose my hat.
Regardless, the food was the real standout on the weekend. At two of our favorite restaurants - Mountain Madre and Strada - we found there were way more vegan items than were listed on the menu, which enabled us to get some really great things we'd never tried before - vegan nachos at Mountain Madre and vegan bolognese at Strada, both excellent. The Smokin Onion was a great new find - we went there for breakfast before our hike, and liked it so much we went back on our way out of town. The pumpkin spice "cruffin" was superb - yes, decadently sweet, but actually also fluffy and not overpowering.
But the real anniversary dinner was at Plant, one of the best vegan restaurants we've been to - easily the equal of our favorite restaurant, Millennium in Oakland. At Millennium, we often get a high-top table near the front window, but at Plant, you can actually reserve a spot at the "mini-bar" - a two-top counter next to where the drinks are prepared, which feels really intimate even though it's right out in the middle of the restaurant. The waitress remembered us and hooked us up on our anniversary dessert!
Sometimes when I travel I include picture from my hotel room, but by chance my wife and I recognized and took a picture of our hotel room. It might not be immediately obvious to anyone else - except I'd looked out the window minutes before, we were one of the only hotel rooms with an open curtain in more or less the right place --- and, tellingly, I could see the same bags piled by the window. Even zoomed in it's pretty small, and I can't go and check right now to confirm --- my wife crashed out early while I took a West Coast church board meeting --- but as best I can reconstruct it, here's what I see in that window:
My laptop bag is what I call my "portable office" - containing the book(s) I'm reading, my writing notebook, my drawing notebook and tools and any reference materials, the top scientific folder and notebook I'm working on, and a bunch of laptop gegaws like a power supply and various USB plugs. I think this doesn't look like a laptop bag because my hiking shoes are piled atop that, but whatevz. The other half of the "portable office" is a stack of books and a clipboard with my "todo paper", a heavyweight copper parchment or blue linen paper I use to organize tasks, all shoved into a tote bag for easy transport.
Next to that are more creative piles - a tote with the portable music keyboard and some music theory books for my electronic music practice, and next to that is a larger tote with the "active pile" of the fiction, comic and technical books that are near the top of my pile. I don't always get to all those piles, but the longer I stay in any given place, the more glad I am that I've got that pile with me so I can quickly switch gears to whatever task that sparks my creativity in the moment.
All that seems a lot, but it's way downsized and organized compared to the stuff I used to carry around everywhere. Someone once said they thought I had some kind of caching system that I just can't quite turn off, and I agree - except the only way I seem to be able to do all the things that I do is to keep a big pile of stuff near me so I can turn spare minutes into accomplished tasks. I ... don't think I'm that great at it, honestly, but it does enable me to get closer to where I want to go, step by step, piece by piece.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um, I said it already: our hotel in downtown Asheville.
Back from Dragon Con, but still scrambling from thing to thing due to our upcoming 19th anniversary. So, in lieu of a serious update, I present one of "the Originals" ... one of our three recently adopted kittens:
I understand cats are boneless, but this is a bit much! How does this not break something?
Anyway, lots of news, and hopefully getting back to it next week ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: either Lily(pad(ski)), or Luna(tic(les)). Can't quite tell from this angle, but I think Luna.
Worldcon is over, and people are now returning to their lives. I've got a day and a half here to enjoy Seattle, but the funny thing is, right now I'm in the same hotel bar where the above die-hards were closing out Worldcon last night - it's got a great high-top table at the window, which is great for writing.
Which I need to do, after reading more of Dwight Swain's Techniques of the Selling Writer over breakfast. You'd think I'd have finished this book given that I lecture on Swain, but I got introduced to him through his audio lectures, so the lead up to my Worldcon talk was my first time to go through this book cover to cover, and even then I focused on the scene-and-sequel stuff that I was discussing. His discussion of openings - focusing on where, what's going on, and to whom, with what conflict, expressed with showing through immediate action - got my brain thinking about how to rework the opening of WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY. My room's being cleaned, so I decided to sit down and write my notes on these ideas right now.
Even though I'm a night owl, sometimes it's good to start the day with food for body and mind.
It can inspire you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The Fountain bar last night, the Fountain bar this morning, and yet another breakfast at Alder and Ash - smoked salmon omelet, dry toast and fresh fruit.
I'm a pack rat, and this tendency isn't helped by being an omnivorous author and researcher with a broad range of interests - nor is it helped by my tendency to let piles just pile up while I rabbithole on whatever major project I am working on at my primary work. But I'm between contracts right now, I survived the trio of ICRA-ConCarolinas-CVPR, and my wife's mother is moved into her new home, so I don't really have an excuse not to go through the piles and try to return them to some semblance of order.
Also, I'm tripping over stuff.
Now, I don't throw away things because other people want me to: I throw away things when I've decided to. Because my interests are, um, broad, and the projects I use to tackle these interests are even broader, I have a vast number of project folders and project stacks. But a stack isn't a pile: a stack is an organized collection of items of interest that enables you to make intellectual progress on a project, like the "storytelling and the sciences of mind" and "creative endurance" stacks I have to my left, the "mental models and explanation patterns" stack in front of me, and the "taido and jeet kune do" stack I have to my right.
A pile is something different - it's the detritus of "company's coming over and I gotta clear off this table" or "I need space to work on this important thing so these other projects gotta go on hold". Like the "robotics consulting" pile in front of me. It's not about robotics consulting. That's just the top action item on the pile. Below it are my theological studies folder, some bills, some items to file, Thinking Ink Press stuff, and more theology, which it looks like I put in the pile for this week's Saint Stephens in-the-Field Friday Journal entry that I have already written and submitted two days ago. It's a mess.
More specifically, a pile is a stack-like mess that hides its information and actionable content. You can't tell what you need to do to a pile just by looking at it the way you can a stack or a folder. (Folders are also dangerous for a similar reason if you're not strict about what you put into them, but that's a problem for another day). And so, the reason that I don't throw piles away without processing them is that it's all too easy to not realize what's in a pile, and to lose an opportunity - or even money - by chucking it prematurely. In the piles in the banner image, I found roughly $50 bucks in foreign currency and a stack of gift cards.
The rest was easy. 80% of that just needed to be filed (a less pack-ratty person would throw some of this stuff away, of course, but I genuinely enjoy reminiscing over keepsakes from old trips, especially abroad). 10% could be thrown away or recycled immediately. And only 10% or so were actually actionable items.
I learned a lot about my own past going through these piles. I recalled things I did, places I'd been, stores that had closed, people I talked to but had fallen out of contact with, people who had retired or died. The pile processing worked both against me and for me; there were a handful of "action" items that dated back to the last millennium, which was great to harvest for keepsakes, but meant that there literally were several inches of that particular pile that had repeatedly gone through a "company's coming, better move this aside" cycle over literal decades, yielding a stack that mostly just needed to be recycled or trashed.
There's a value to throwing stuff away. It keeps your environment clean so you can feel good about your space and focus on what's important. But if you're a pack-rat person, it's really important to make sure that the stuff you have around you are actual stacks and folders of actionable stuff, and not piles that have been piling on top of each other since the last millennium.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Remains of a pile spread across the kitchen table, exploded into stuff that will be filed into topical binders or trashed; and the sorted remains of the same pile spread over the nearby builtins, ready to be filed into my filing system (or trashed). Now I kinda wish I had also taken a picture of the pile itself ...
Almost fifteen years later, with a completely different set of cats who have not had a chance to learn these behaviors from the previous ones, it's somewhat comforting to see that cats do still remain cats.
Although the location of the malefactors has swapped from top to bottom ...
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki above, being awoken from sleep by harassing kittens below; Gabby above, about to harass the sleeping Caesar below.
So for a while all three of the kittens were a little skittish around me. Not that they didn't want to hang out, but especially when I would take a trip or something they'd get standoffish, hanging out more with my wife.
I do believe they have now "warmed up" to me.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Me taking a much-needed break from projects, and then attracting two (or three?) kittens. On that note, I was going to post this but got swarmed with work, taxes, writing, cleaning, and what have you, but I am not going to give up on posting every day this year, even if I have to backfill to get caught up.
Lily, the collared one, chose to hide when a friend came by today, so they never saw more than three cats at any one time. With apologies to Captain Picard, here is visual proof that there are, indeed, four cats.
One by one, trees and bushes on our property have been dying. The property is large - when we fled the fires in California during the pandemic, we lucked out in finding a large place that had been on the market for quite a while - so at first we thought that was simply par for the course. But they kept dying.
Eventually, what we discovered is that many of the trees on the property were planted without the removal of their transport cages. This can cause the roots to get choked, to turn back on themselves, and as the tree grows, the increasingly packed root ball topped by the increasingly heavy tree turns into a weighted ball bearing, waiting to tip over in heavy winds, heavy rain, or just from the tree's own starved weight.
But it's easier to not remove it, the problem is practically invisible, and the tree looks good for a while - and by the time the tree falls, it will be almost impossible to identify who made the initial mistake.
This is a beautiful house on beautiful land, but many of the things in this house are like that. Trees are planted with their transport cages still on, so they eventually fall over. Gutter drains were buried without covering them with fabric, so they fill with dirt. Soil pipes are buried without cleanouts. Drywall in access rooms has random holes punched in it.
And, most spectacularly, a door was installed in a storage room which was too small for the safe stored in that room to be removed. I mean, what were they thinking? I guess they weren't - or, perhaps that was a security feature, to prevent it from being stolen? Certainly, you can't sneak it out of the room, but, also, it likely weighs around a ton, so no-one can run off with it - they didn't need to wall it in.
But, regardless, hey! We get a safe.
Now, we were dealing with the problem with our drains, and the foreman told us he'd need to take up the last man standing in a row of bushes near one of the drains. These had been dying, one or two per year, since we arrived, and the last one was literally held together with zipties. So I agreed.
And when he dug it up, he found that it - and all the bushes in that row - had cages on their root barrels. You can see him holding one of these in the banner image from this post. The root system was so tight inside it that he was surprised that it had survived that long.
So my point, and I did have one, is that doing a job that looks right from the outside may not be doing it well enough for the job to be done right. And right, in this case, I define as not failing unexpectedly long before its time because someone simply didn't want to finish the work.
I suspect that the people who managed this properly previously were focused on forcing it, no matter how much money it took. As my wife put it, you put in a lawn, let it grow, then cut that growth and take all the nutrients that it harvested out of the soil away, forcing you to fertilize the lawn with chemicals to keep it alive. You can do that, but it's like driving down a mountain road at too high a speed, constantly riding the wheel, brakes and accelerator to keep yourself on the road. We prefer a healthier approach, where, when possible, things are left to biodegrade where they are, or you create compost out of the clipping.
That doesn't always work, and, in a way, it's a luxury all its own. But regardless of how you run your lawn, if you take the time to cut the root balls off and to properly wrap your drains, you'll find yourself spending less money in the long run fixing problems that should never have happened in the first place.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The cage that our foreman discovered once they dug up the bush, and the gutter downspout drain that our foreman replaced for us once we all figured out what drains needed to be replaced.
It's late and I've been up cleaning house, cat wrangling, working on Camp Nano for April, and trying to finish taxes, so I has the tired. Please enjoy the following "Mezcalita" from La Parrilla.
So I habitually bite off more than I can chew: at any given time I have 200 to 250 projects running, and no reasonable human being can keep on top of more than seven plus or minus two things at once.
Now, I know, I know, I know, I'm likely autistic, and am prompted to be WAY more explicit than most people about the projects that I'm ACTUALLY doing, whereas most people just fool themselves into thinking they're doing a few things when in reality they're relying on their well-trained autonomic adulting skills to keep on top of the dozens upon dozens of things they need to do to keep on top of just living. But, beyond, that, I have hundreds of creative projects that I want to tackle, so many that I often feel like I'm thrashing.
But if you focus - again, I know, I know, I know, I say I hate focus, and that focus is the enemy, but bear with me for a bit - I say, if you allow yourself to be creative, and imagine ALL the things you might be doing ... BUT then focus on a few of them at once, trying to make sure you make progress on just those, you can, step by step, move your way through those projects, get them done, and move on to the next ones.
I've been "reading and eating" for decades now as my way of consuming material, but only recently have I started using the "ten page rule," in which I break each chapter into ten page sections, and try to make sure I get through at least 5 pages of a section in each reading session (the whole ten, or to end of chapter, if the material is easy, or the book's pages are small, or the chapters are short; the five page grace period if it's a big fat textbook filled with details with which I am unfamiliar). But I've augmented that now - by focusing on the most important books first, promising myself I can read the others if I get through them. I'm almost done with Large Language Models: A Deep Dive, which has been very illuminating.
And now I've built on that, so at the end of the day, after reading my "chunk of the hard book at night with milk and pound cake" - which is usually a big fat textbook that requires reading and re-reading of sections over and over again until I get it - I say, after that, I pick up a by-the-bedstand novel and read a chapter. Just one chapter (again, less if it is big long fat chapters or something esoteric). I've gotten through The Cthulhu Casebook: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows and Cthulhu Passant that way and am now digging deeper into my novel backlog, promising myself I can by more books as I finish them.
The same thing has been going on with various of my research projects: I have been building out various pieces of software, sometimes with a lot of thrashing. But I stuck with a project I had been tempted to abandon, and today got it mostly working, all unit tests passing, all code checked in and pushed to Github. I still have more features I want to add before release ... but it felt good.
While I don't believe in "focus" for focus's sake, I do believe focus is a tool you can use effectively. And if you prioritize your highest-value, lowest-remaining-work projects, and focus on getting done the next thing you have to do, you can, over time, walk that path that starts with a single step, and find yourself a thousand miles later standing atop your mountain.
Normally Loki hates eating around the kittens, or they're so interested in his food that they ignore their own and cause him to stalk off in a huff - "Ruuude, duuude!"
But they're getting over it - I had to move a kitten, but after I did, the system remained stable for the remainder of the meal.
Baby steps are short, but they can carry you down a long road, if you just keep going.
So our older cat and our younger cats seem to be tolerating each other more. Actually, the kittens have loved Loki from the start, but he had been solitary for so long that he didn't want any new cats in his home, thank you very much. Now he willingly goes into areas which have kittens, which is a big improvement.
As I keep saying, sooner or later he's going to learn that nothing bad happens when he hangs out with kittens.
-Anthony
P.S. A blogpost a day late, but, eh, we'll get there.
