The Grind

Working

The past few weeks, I have spent a tremendous amount of time in the office. Today is my 17th consecutive day in the office and I have had 6 hours of sleep in the past 58 hours. My mental acuity is suffering pretty badly and, as one would expect, my work product is suffering. And this situation is not unique. I have worked like this many, many times over the past few years.

I still do not really understand how law firms can be set up to expect and reward this pattern of working. Granted, I think that my case is not typical as I work in a particularly busy field in a particularly busy market. But it just does not make sense to drive people hard enough that they start doing a bad job, start getting unhealthy, start resenting the job they do.

What a bass-ackwards way of running a business....

I got a Mac

I have been "just about" to buy a Mac since late 1984 when a friend's parents bought him a newfangled thing called an "Apple Macintosh". 

Well, 23 years of being on the verge is just about enough.  A dinner with Mac users (thanks Gen, Dice and Jon!) finally pushed me over the edge and so I went out and finally made the commitment and bought a 15" MacBook Pro. 

Now I can finally see what all the fuss is about.

You've got to...

I heard this (Young Punx - "You've Got To...") in a recent episode of Daily Source Code.  What a fantastic, trippy, infectious track.

I can't stop listening to it. 

So I won't be moving to Texas....

OK, it is confirmed that I will not be moving my family to Texas anytime soon.  Just knowing that I could be within a few hundred miles of thousands of people complacent enough to vote in a dolt like Chisum is enough to make me write the place off, barring a pretty stong argument otherwise.  Sure, OK, Austin might be a "cool" place to live, but so are plenty of other places not wholly surrounded by fools.

"You ought to teach creation as well as the fact of evolution," Mr. Chisum said, though he said "all of those kinds of sciences have holes in them. ... But I'm not about teaching religion in schools."

Wow.  Can he be so ignorant that he really can't see the problem in this statement?

Thanks to Pharyngula for the heads-up. 

Mudbone

I just listened to a few of Richard Pryor's performances as Mudbone.  Based on this (and quite a  number of other performances), I cannot but think that Richard Pryor is, without a doubt, one of the most talented comedians in the history of stand-up.  The depth of his material goes so far beyond the norm that it is hard to compare him at all to most other stand-up-and-tell-a-stupid-joke comedians.  Absolutely brilliant.

And to think my first exposure to Pryor was through films like The Toy...

Dropping

Just an aside - motivated in part by Joi Ito's ETL diet and in part by a long-term realization that I need to cut weight, I actually did start a diet and exercise program from early January.  Kind of like a really lazy version of ETL with some running.  So far I am down 6.4 kg (14 lbs) in about 3 weeks.  This is the lightest I have been since about September 2003.  I am already halfway to my "realistic" goal of 90kg.

My jaw has dropped.

This reads like a joke.  Sometimes I think that two shards of the multiverse have overlapped in some sort of limited-scale Crisis on Infinite Earths - a world of reason and sanity (the one in which I live) and an interloper world of anti-factualism and lunacy.  I keep trying to pass this stuff off as the exception as both the world in which I live and the people with whom I interact are (to my knowledge) fairly far removed from Earth Crazy.  Is it really that bad out there?

Thanks to Rob Hyndman for the link.

Balancing passive and active participation in virtual worlds

In his blog, Kevin Werbach recently referred to an article by Helen Cheng - i'm a resident of second life wut?

I like the idea of her split between creator and consumer, though Kevin rightly notes that people are not simply one or the other.  That said, I do think the balance between the two favors "consuming" for the majority of people.

I would question the thinking behind a completely open-ended virtual world - one in which you logged on and were free to do whatever you wanted - for the simple reason that you would be drowned in choice.  Too open-ended means that there are too many paths open to you and unless you enter the world with an idea of what you want to do (i.e. a predetermined direction) the potential to do anything can make you want to do nothing.  Generally people want choice, but they also need that choice to be manageable - limited, really.  Not limited in what you can do, but in the number of options open to get to the desired end result.

Much more attractive to the general consumer is participation in a generally pre-determined world that allows for varying degrees of customization.  WoW, I think, comes at the low end of the customization that is possible within a fixed virtual world.  Being able to choose my avatar's hair color (from limited choices) is pretty...well...meh.  Customizing the UI through addons is much more important.  Though I don't develop addons myself, I do use them, and by using them I personalize the game - make it mine.  Which is what I think is the draw underlying the Second Life appeal to creators.

What I would love to see is a virtual world that successfully balances (A) a pre-determined world with solid structure (interface structure and content structure) - where the user takes a passive attitude towards creation - and (B) a world that allow the user to make the experience as personal as possible - where the user takes an active attitude towards creation.  Allowing user customization that affects only the user is fine, but if that customization is external within that world (i.e. affects other users) then the potential for game balance issues arises.  Still, I would love to see people tackle this.

Hyponotized

I am absolutely fascinated by this.

Jesus Camp

I want to see Jesus Camp, though I don't know when it will open (if ever) here in Japan.

I am not sure that the film will change anything about how I think (as safe assumption, based on YouTube clips I have seen).  However, I think that it is interesting that the film is advertised as "honest and impartial".  And I suppose that it is, given that the subject matter is so wholly repellent as to obviate the need for any input from the filmmaker.  Much the way that execution videos can be seen as honest and impartial - the content editorializes itself.

I can only hope that people like this are a significant minority in the US.