Recent Reads, Recent Thoughts

It's been a good end-of-year/start-of-year. I don't know if I'll ever "work" again, or have to, but I'm getting ready anyway. A guy has to do something with his time. I put that dangerous word "work" in quotes because "work-for-money" is definitely a different beast from "work-for-gain". They aren’t the same. I'm going with Plan B for Max Gain.

Being paid isn't necessarily a "gain", either. It's just money. Money is handy to have, and useful for many things but not for all things. Mostly I'm interested in becoming better, as in sharpening my thinking, improving my ability to understand, and being able to reliably tell which from what.

So, in keeping with the title of this post, here are my recent technical reads.

(1) "Ship It!: A Practical Guide To Successful Software Projects", by Jared R. Richardson, 2005. Unfortunately, there will never be an update since the author died in 2016, but it's still a great book, even after two more decades.

(2) "The Pragmatic Programmer, Your journey to mastery", 20th Anniversary Edition by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, 2020. New, fresh, even better than the original, which I re-read about two years ago.

(3) "Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change", by Kent Beck, 2005.

(4) Basecamp/3ySignals books...

• "Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application", by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, 2006.
• "Rework", by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, 2010.
• "Remote: Office Not Required", by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, 2013.
• "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work", by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, 2018.
• "Shape Up", by Ryan Singer, 2019

I was hoping to find a newer edition of the extreme programming book, but no. Too bad. It's surprisingly great, and reading it left me wondering what Kent Beck has rethought in the last 19 years. I guess he done wrote it all out the first time. Pretty good as-is anyway.

So — There are lots of things to chew on presented in these books, but mostly they boil down to paying attention, working together, and using the best available tools and processes to best advantage. And these days there are lots more tools, more-capable tools than there were 20 years back when I had to smile and keep eating shit, if I wanted to keep my job. And pound my head against the wall just to get some relief.

If I may over-summarize what I got from the above books, collectively:

• Get some input.
• Use that to create a working system right now.
• Put everything into version control.
• Create tests and run them constantly.
• Integrate constantly.
• Maintain a working system from day one.
• Be transparent.
• Review, collaborate, compare, rethink, revise, redo, repeat.

Some ideas, not all of them new, from the above authors, and from some other research I've done lately:

• BDD: Behavior Driven Development
• CD: Continuous Delivery
• CI: Continuous Integration
• CIT: Continuous Integration Testing
• DbC: Design by Contract
• DTD: Design Top Down
• ESA: Environment Setup Automation
• FBoxing: Feature-Boxing, aimed at getting specific features done
• FDD + WBS: Feature Driven Development + Work Breakdown Structure
• Jugaad: Humility, Openness, Frugality
• Linting: Random input stress testing
• Preemption: If it isn't going, kill it
• TBD: Tracer Bullet Development
• TBoxing: Time-Boxing
• TDD: Test Driven Development
• Value: Do the most important thing first

I hereby recommend all of these books, and all of the topics in the list directly above.

Yeah, so fun. It looks like fun, if I'm up to it. I have enough topics to keep me busy for as long as I can keep my eyes open and my heart beating.

Besides that, I'm now reading "Poor Charlie's Almanack" ("Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger" edited by Peter D. Kaufman, 2005.) Until just a few months ago, when he himself stopped breathing, Munger was Warren Buffett's longtime partner in Berkshire Hathaway. They did well. Together, and even separately. They knew lots.

This book contains my final kick in the butt, the push past the tipping point, the item that suddenly allowed me to consolidate all of my new thoughts.

Munger mentions the "Five Ws" (five dubble-youse): Who, What, Why, Where, When. And I now throw in a "How". I don't recall the context of Munger's use of these, but the concept has been around at least since ancient Greek philosophers began anciently, greekly, philosophizing. And it's been used, with a "How" added on, in journalism too, also from pretty far back.

Anyway, it came to me in a flash of at least reasonably bright illumination, considering the amount of intelligence that I'm capable of bringing to a subject, that this is the whole of software development, and a lot of other problem solving and engineering approaches as well: Who, What, Why, Where, When, and also How.

The "w" items set the stage. They're the user stories, the problem statements, the business rationale, the requirements, the documentation, the contracts, the law, and all that. They set the stage. And the "How" is the code that comes trotting along behind to make it all dance.

For a whole long time now I've been amazed that developers keep going on about just churning out code, "self-documenting" code even, as if that was even a thing, while completely ignoring the whole core of the issue. Code says "How", but the important parts, the central issues, are "What" and "Why". What the hell are we doing here and why in the hell are we bothering? How is actually pretty easy, even its hard parts. As a former co-worker of mine used to say "I can teach a chicken how to code. The important part is keeping the big picture in mind and solving the right problems."

The last job I had before giving up was in a completely dysfunctional state agency. (Go figure.) I was hired to work on a project rewriting a mainframe system as a client-server system. As usual, one of the first things that happened was that all the work went to contractors, and then it got worse from there, before it got worse, and then kept getting worse.

Back then, "UML" (Unified Modeling Language) and "RUP" (Rational Unified process) were state of the art, big-time practices as was hiring a person to sit at a computer and do manual testing, all day, every day, forever. But we didn't even do much along those lines, beyond management saying that we were doing it all. So things have come a long way. People actually follow actual processes now. Verifiable processes.

Even Kent Beck, with his 2005 book on XP (Extreme programming) was about 16 decades ahead of where we were, even though I quit that place in 2003, before the book, before "Agile" and "XP" even became common, though well after their principles had come into use here and there.

But I think I've got it now. After it's too late for my so-called career, of course, but my aim is understanding, rather than hoping for a someday promotion from Information Technology Applications Specialist 4 to Information Technology Applications Specialist 5 so I can qualify for higher retirement pay and just get the hell out.

It's not a competition between hotshot coders who say code is everything and documentation is unprofessional and a horde of buzzing bureaucrats intent on filling shelves with neatly-bound volumes that no one ever reads or can understand, documenting a system that was never actually built that way anyhow, but a cooperation of all involved, fully and completely understanding "Who", "What", "Why", "When", and "Where", as implemented by a working and fully functional, ever-improving "How". To get things done.

Yeah, so thanks, Charlie. I needed that. Decent kick in the ass. I'll keep these ideas in mind, whatever it is I happen to be doing from now on.

Now I need to get back at it, just for my own satisfaction and personal edification, maybe by starting with learning Go. We'll see. Maybe I still have enough time left to do something useful with my life.

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? As noted above, but maybe a little crazier.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

So Now I'm A Borgler

Borg. I did it.

I'm not sure why, but I guess I had to try.

I had and still have a good data backup system that I created on my own. I have had to restore whole directories from it, and it works. I trust it, but of course it isn't perfect.

The system that I wrote is slow and also redundant. In a way, those characteristics are positive, slow less so, but I can live with slow if that's what it takes to do it right.

Redundancy means safety. Because with redundancy I know that I have multiple copies of irreplaceable data, saved daily. I have the space to store multiple copies of my data, so the only real issue with my in-house data backup system is that writing four to five GB of data to external drives takes a bit of time, and I have been doing it twice a day.

But then I read about other ways to do this sort of thing, and there are several well-known systems, Borg probably being the best-known, so I just got a bit itchy to try something, and started with Borg because it looked like the most complete system and the one with the longest and best track record. Maybe I was most interested because Borg is a "de-duplicating" backup method. In other words, Borg does not re-copy the same data on each backup. If Borg has safely backed up a directory or file, and that directory or file has not changed, then Borg leaves it alone.

Learning about Borg was confusing though, and despite me having it working now, and working well, there are still some things that I cannot figure out. They're minor but annoying in that I spent a lot of time on them without getting to solutions.

The main issue is that in my original backup process, I created a list of directories to back up, and put that list into a file. When the process runs, it reads in turn from that file the name of each directory to back up. If I ever decide to add or delete a directory from the process, then all I need to do is to edit that file and the backup process follows the new instructions on its own without needing to be edited.

I could not get Borg to work this way. The best I could do was to get Borg to read the contents of my backup list file and back that up as a single line of data, and then quit. This was after trying everything that I could think of.

Part of the issue may be with bash. Bash is at best obtuse, with a heavy overlay of flat-out weird, and I will never be an expert. And I don't want to be one. Given that though, I have written a bunch of bash scripts to do various things, and my original backup process is written as a set of bash scripts, and it works. Borg resists.

My original process goes through my list of directories to back up and uses tar to put each directory into a separate tar file. That's the backup script itself. I have a second script for the second half of the process.

The second script pushes the backed-up data to whatever external drive is plugged in. All I need to do is to tell this second script which backup this is. I have separate external directories for Sunday through Saturday, another one for mid-month, and another for month-end. Other than that single instruction, entered numerically from a menu as a number from 1 through 9, everything is automatic.

Borg is even simpler and unbelievably faster, but I had to embed the list of directories to back up as literals into the Borg script. So to add, rename, or delete a directory from the Borg version of the backup process, I need to edit the Borg script and not just an external, read-only file.

This is annoying. I'm sure that there is a way to get Borg to read from an external file, but not here, not now, not by me, and no, it's not in the documentation. Not clearly enough to be recognizable and understandable by me.

I did test Borg's integrity by restoring a backup and comparing the total size of the restored data, and checking some of the filenames and file sizes.

That all looked good, but I've decided to keep using my original system for a monthly backup, and for a couple of weekly backups, like Wednesdays and Saturdays. Makes me feel safer. It can't hurt to have a little redundant data lying around, at least until I completely trust Borg, and restoring data from a Borg backup requires Borg to be installed. Restoring from tar backups requires only generic tar software, which is almost universally installed.

But, even given Borg's confusing and incomplete documentation, I do like it a lot.

Actual data backups usually take somewhere in the low hundredths of a second, and writing new data into my repositories takes only a couple of seconds more. I'm almost always done with a backup to one external drive within 15 seconds at most, and that includes connecting the drive, running my Borg script, and unplugging the drive again, even my very slow thumb drive.

Can't beat that one.

So for now, unless I need other features, and happen to find something else that is significantly better, I'm relying on Borg for my routine backup needs. Nothing else does look any better, and most tools look worse.

I did check Restic, which got a slightly higher rating on one review site, but Restic looks far more confusing, much more oriented toward business and server system backups, has even more confusing documentation, and is far less mature. Methinks I don't want to mess with it.

True, Restic is written in Go, while Borg is written in Python, so Restic may be much faster, and may be certifiably much faster, but Borg does my small backups so fast that I would never notice a difference. I don't have terabytes of data to wrangle. With a de-duplicating process, it's more like a few hundred kilobytes per day, if even that much.

So then. I was happy to give up trying to understand Restic at all, and decided to just stick with Borg, which I already had working.

I use Borg daily, it works, and there is no fussing around. Good enough.

Done.

 

Refs:
BorgBackup – Deduplicating archiver with compression and authenticated encryption
Borg Documentation Borg Documentation — Borg - Deduplicating Archiver 1.2.6 documentation
BorgBase - Simple and Secure Offsite Backups
borgmatic

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Temporarily feeling good about myself.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

What Is Pay, Really? This.

So here I am, about four months late, writing something I thought I'd be knocking off last October. Well I'm like that and I hope you are too, because then I get to feel just as smart and conscientious as you, and that way we can call it a draw.

What is pay? Sounds so obvious, so boring, like one of those things that everyone knows without thinking about it. One of those ideas you have bouncing around in your head every day and take as a thoroughly vetted, completely settled aspect of the universe that always was, always will be, and is therefore right and just.

Pay is complex but simple. Obvious but obscure. Definite but tenuous. Or the inverse.

Pay is not money.

Money enters into the world of pay but it is only part of the story, and a relatively minor part, even if you work only for the money. Because you don't. Even if you do.

And even if you are desperate for it, you aren't.

How arrogant am I? How stupid could I be if I only tried harder?

Hold on -- it's true.

What you need and what I need are those things that the terminally dense recite without thought. Because they are cliches: food, shelter, clothing. That's what money gets us, and a little more. Without a minimum to exist on things are ugly, but it takes very little to get by. More money, more food, your own house, more clothes, maybe a car or two, splashy vacation trips. Then more junk, bigger TV sets, golf lessons, a second story on the house. More stuff in the closet. And then more of the same. And then again more of the same. And then you're dead, but not happier, even just before you died.

"Our profits were above the average for our industry, and our financial statements showed every sign of health. We were growing at a rate of about 20% annually with sales that were strong in our home state. Our quality was high. We were respected in the community I was making a lot of money. And I had a knot in my stomach that wouldn't go away."

Those are the words of Ralph Stayer. They open his article in the Harvard Business Review of November 1990.

"What worried me more than the competition, however, was the gap between potential and performance. Our people didn't seem to care. Every day I came to work and saw people so bored by their jobs that they made thoughtless, dumb mistakes. They showed up in the morning, did halfheartedly what they were told to do, and then went home."

I've been there. Maybe you have too. Maybe you are now.

Mr. Stayer did something drastic. He raised everyone's pay, but not their paychecks.

"The image that best captured the organizational end state I had in mind for Johnsonville was a flock of geese on the wing. I didn't want an organizational chart with traditional lines and boxes, but a "V" of individuals who knew the common goal, took turns leading, and adjusted their structure to the task at hand. Each individual bird is responsible for its own performance."

OK, it's a metaphor. Whatever. Pay attention though. Somehow this business owner was able to realize that both he and his company had a problem, and that no obvious or traditional solution would be a solution.

Instead of cracking the whip or scraping off the lowest-performing 10% of staff every year, or just firing everyone and starting over, he did something else.

He turned the company over to the people who knew how to run it, who were the people who already worked there. They were the ones with the greatest stake in the company's success, because the company was the support for them and their families. Once they were in full charge they were truly responsible for their own destiny.

Years later Mr. Stayer was able evaluate his experiences.

"Everyone at Johnsonville discovered they could do considerably better and earn considerably more than they had imagined. Since they had little trouble meeting the accelerated production goals that they themselves had set, members raised the minimum acceptable performance criteria and began routinely to expect more of themselves and others. The cause of excitement at Johnsonville Sausage is not change itself but the process used in producing change. Learning and responsibility are invigorating, and aspirations make our hearts beat. For the last five years, my own aspiration has been to eliminate my job by creating such a crowd of self-starting, problem-solving, responsibility-grabbing, independent thinkers that Johnsonville would run itself."

That is a good description of pay.

Another person who followed approximately the same path was Ricardo Semler. His company is in Brazil. You can think of his approach this way: "We transfer responsibility to our people. We hand them their freedom."

He has written several books. The one I bought and read was "The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works."

His basic ideas run like this: If work is meaningful then people will do it because it has meaning. If work is fun then people will do it in order to have fun. If the workplace accommodates the lives of people then they will embrace the workplace as part of their lives. If people are allowed to take charge they will do much better than if they are told what to do. And the business will benefit as well.

His business is called Semco. Here is an example of how it runs differently than any place you and I may have worked: Employees set their own salaries.

There are five pieces of knowledge involved, three known by the company and two by the employee. The company has salary surveys so it knows what people outside the company earn. The company also knows what everyone inside the company earns. And the company knows current market conditions and what it can afford to pay.

The employees know what they want to make and what their coworkers make.

The company then shares its information with the employees so they can make informed decisions. The types of compensation available are salary, bonuses, profit sharing, commissions, royalties on sales, royalties on profits, commissions on gross margin, stock, stock options, initial public offerings, and sale of business units. (He explains all these in the book.)

How well does this work, then, really?

"The flexible reward system mirrors our philosophy that people will understand that it's in their best interest to choose compensation packages that maximize both their own pay and the company's returns." Because "if workers understand the big picture, they'll know how their salaries fit into it."

Occasionally someone has to leave the company to make what they think they're worth. Occasionally the company pays someone more than they think they're worth. Generally, all sides pretty well agree on it though.

There are several companies under the Semco umbrella. They have been sweetly profitable. Most of those who work there stay for decades. But, you may ask, if this is so good, why hasn't Semco taken over the world? Because they have more important things to do.

Because work and profit are not the most important things for Semco.

Not as important as weekends, for example. "If the workweek is going to slop over into the weekend -- and there's no hope of stopping that from happening -- why can't the weekend, with its precious restorative moments of playtime, my time, and our time, spill over into the workweek?"

If you have a job at Semco, and you need to do something outside of work, and you can schedule it, then you go, even if it's a movie on a Tuesday afternoon, or a day at the beach, just because you want to stick your toes into the sand and sit for a while. No one comes around to sniff your chair seat. No one touches it to see if it's still warm. You are expected to act like an adult, and so is the company.

What about the bad times, when you just have to ax people and ignore the blood? That happened too. They decided together. Meetings sometimes go on for weeks there, with people drifting in and out, and hashing and rehashing ideas until they find a reasonable consensus.

It was like that when the company hit the skids some years back. The conclusion for most was to take a 38% pay cut, and make it up later with an increased share of the profits. Some people were spun off with a grubstake to start their own businesses, some retired, some went elsewhere. But there were no massive layoffs.

There was no loss of valuable staff, no slow bleed until the company was brain dead. They all pulled together, and it was their decision as a group of adults. People is all any company has anyway. Staff is all any company is. Without people who know the business, its history and philosophy, there is no business. It's not the buildings or the advertising or the bank statements. It's all people, all the time.

To give you an idea of how much Semco respects people, the company devised a custom email system. It is impossible for the company to read staff email. It was so fundamentally important to them that they wanted to ensure that it could never happen even by accident and certainly not in secret, if anyone was ever tempted to peek.

They are strong cooperative individuals working together in good faith toward a common goal. People naturally want to do, and to do well, and to do well together. That is pay.

Don't believe it? Skeptical about a smallish sausage company and some foreigners you've never heard of?

They aren't alone. There is a good article in "Fast Company" magazine from a few years back, about a company you have heard of.

"Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one communication. He organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To promote this idea, he limited the size of teams to 150 to 200 people at most."

So what?

"Pound for pound, the most innovative company in America is W.L. Gore & Associates."

Listen to Diane Davidson. "I came from a very traditional business." At first she didn't know who did what.

"I wondered how anything got done here. It was driving me crazy."

"'Who's my boss?' she kept asking."

"'Stop using the B-word,' her sponsor replied."

"'Secretly, there are bosses, right?' she asked. There weren't. She eventually figured out that 'your team is your boss, because you don't want to let them down. Everyone's your boss, and no one's your boss.'"

At Gore people are free to communicate, collaborate, and to follow up on their own ideas, just because they want to, because something might come of it. The company mixes up people in diverse groups containing researchers, engineers, designers, production workers, sales people and others.

"You're supposed to morph your role over time to match your skills. You're not expected to fit into some preconceived box or standardized organizational niche. Your compensation is tied to your 'contribution' and decided by a committee. The company looks at your past and present performance as well as your future prospects, which takes away the potential disincentive for investing time and effort in speculative projects. Gore encourages risk taking."

People go there, people work there, people stay there, and people make the company successful because they get more than a paycheck. They get true rewards. They are fully paid.

"No one has to follow. You attract talented people who want to work with you. You draw them with your passion and the credibility that you've built over time." Just like that.

In 2004, Gore was a $1.6 billion company. They must know something.

How is your job?

 

References:

How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead, by Ralph Stayer, (online) and in book form

Ricardo Semler. His books: "Maverick!", "The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works", "Managing Without Managers"

"The Fabric of Creativity: At W.L. Gore, innovation is more than skin deep: The culture is as imaginative as the products.", by Alan Deutschman, Fast Company, Issue 89, December 2004

(This post originally published January 23, 2008.)

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Exceedingly not that important.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Good, Goodest, Or Goodenough?

Bruce Mau's "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth" lists 43 items.

Number two is "Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth."

In other words, if I may paraphrase, excellence is not guaranteed by consensus. Results are not even guaranteed by consensus. Working toward consensus may lead only to deadlock.

Take a post by primo web designer Douglas Bowman. In "Goodbye, Google", part one, he tells of his resignation, and of some reasons why. "Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

Sounds like a good reason to leave, even for Twitter, which is where he went.

Some things cannot be decided by committee no matter how much time is put in.

In my own life I've seen a clear example of this.

First I lived in a state capital, where I was closely involved with a bicycling club. At that time my life was mainly bicycling. Day, night, weekends, and holidays. I lived for three years without a car.

When something needed doing, the club talked about it and then appointed a committee to study it.

I moved to another city, one not associated with government. I drifted into the bike club there to have some human contact, and although I was not a member, and not involved in running the organization as I had been in the first city, I noticed a difference.

It was obvious.

In this second place, when the bicycle club had an issue to confront, they'd discuss it for a few minutes, and then someone would say "I'll handle it." And it was done, and it was good. And it was settled.

True. This is different from creating a design for something, but the idea transfers.

Bruce Mau Design uses the power and promise of design to create an ethical sustainable future for our studio, our employees, our clients, our community and the world in which we live; for us, it is not about the world of design, but the design of the world.

It's like speech. Free speech. Which everyone is for until it is exercised.

Free speech is what no one wants to hear, but must hear. If you aren't offended or upset or opposed to what words muss your hair and run through your ears, then you aren't in the free speech zone. Free speech is what you don't want to hear, not what you agree with.

The same goes for "acceptable", "good", "excellent", and "Oh my effin god!!!!".

Committees do not surprise. They stupefy.

Keep thinking this: "Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth."

It might even hurt, but it's worth it.

 

Refs:
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
alt Mau link
Goodbye, Google
alt Bowman link

 

---

Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Not as smart as you think you are.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Squish!

Oops. Someone just stepped on my brain.

I once had a job.

At a place.

That knew nothing.

About getting things done.

And I remember. The day. I had. My performance review.

Me. All I wanted. Was to do. What I was paid for. Really, really bad.

I wanted to scream with excellence. To soar. To create.

My boss. Said I should schmooze more.

He didn't like it. That I focused. So much. On work. At my desk.

I no longer work there.

And he. Went elsewhere. And then was fired.

Two down.

I have never worked at a place that valued the only thing it has.

People.

Truly all a business has.

Life. The essence of business.

Today? What do you see? All over?

Well.

Recently, a guy moved to a poor country. He likes it.

Because life is slower, and things are more personal. More real. Less complex.

And now, what he wants. Is easier online shopping.

That is, he wants to destroy the life he sought.

Because it would be. More convenient. To buy things. That way.

The story of modernity.

I like the internet. A lot. The internet is my friend. We get along. I read all day.

But in some ways the internet? You know? It's like rebreathing air.

A person wants something. An idea, an image, whatever. What then?

Just do the internet. Copy it. Stick it on the side of whatever you have. And pass it on.

There are businesses looking at this.

For copyright violations.

For theft of ideas.

For defending the look of the feel and the feel of the look.

People are all antsy all over.

The world is now about fighting over details and ensuring dues.

Are paid.

Exactly.

There is another principle.

"Be alive".

It is not about shopping, or suing.

Someone steals your jacket, your hairstyle, the words in your poem?

OK.

They can't steal your imagination or your style.

Right. Apple. Bitchin company. In many ways. They have smarts and style and keep moving.

And they'll sue you until you are only a bitter-tasting, discolored rancid spot. Too.

They do both.

But the keys.

Are intelligence and life. They has 'em.

Be creative, and real, and the pirates. Will be stealing. Only your shadow.

Never catching. You.

Because you are alive. And you move. On.

You are new and fresh. Always. And they dress in your old clothes. And look it.

So a company that destroys its creativity? Destroys itself.

And that creativity is not the company's. Or "in" the company. Or owned by it.

It belongs to life. To those who work there.

Every few months a new compendium of web trends comes out. Logos. Graphics. Page designs. Usability. Feel. Tricks.

You notice?

You also notice? That these continue coming out? Every few months?

Because things keep changing?

Because things keep changing.

They do.

That's life.

That's creativity.

That's what you've got, if you've got it.

Someone steals a facsimile of what you sort of once looked like or did or sold.

What's that? Then. Only that. It is not now.

You own now.

They can't steal who you are. Or what you are.

If you think independently. If you act independently.

If you are alive. If your company is.

If you are the people and the people is you.

If you let no one step on your brain.

Circulating around the office being seen between coffee breaks isn't enough.

Nor searching for better shopping.

Nor following the rules.

As a person.

As a being.

As a creator.

Nor is the role of hunter-killer, for a company trying. To work the system. By suing the world.

You have to do.

You have to be.

You have to make.

To create.

Then you've got something. You have it.

Move.

 

From when I thought I'd start a business. But I retired instead. Good choice.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff+nosey@nullabigmail.com
Me? Still not working.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

It's About Time

So far it's working.

I'm timing myself.

I have a giant todo list that has its own pet todo lists, and sometimes they fight. Sometimes not, but anyway it's a real mess, and mostly I have been ignoring it except to add more things and feel guilty about it all. That's unproductive.

Really, though, I don't need to be productive. I answer to no one no more, nohow, aside from paying my rent on time. Once I do that I can go back to trimming my nose hairs and napping, but. But. But it ain't a life, and I need one.

So one thing I'm doing is sitting here with the intention of relearning/seriously learning "Computer Science", that mis-named discipline. For something to do. Because when you get to the point that you don't need to have anything to do, you do. Life has to have a purpose of some kind, so I invented one. It's a thing. Lots of people find out about it once they've reached their goal in life. "So what now, eh?" You need something. You can't just stand there and wait.

I heard an interview with John McPhee not that long ago, in which he said that he's got a project started that will out live him, that when you get to a certain age and a certain mostly-independent time of life, you need that. Something monumental, a mission that gives you something to struggle with and against. Something that you can't possibly finish in the time you have. So you can feel right and proper about yourself and about life.

What you do is to find something you are seriously interested in, and commit, and see if you can, in any way possible, complete the task even though it's impossible. That way you never need to worry about what you're going to do today or why you're still here, or what the meaning of life is, or whether you should have a third beer with lunch and sleep away yet another afternoon because now you have A Plan and can't get away with aimless drifting any more. You have a goal, a mission, a purpose, a challenge.

Stuff like that.

And then I saw Plan, do, learn: My admittedly hardcore work routine
by Channing Allen. Bingo. Now I've got a thing. A mission and a thing. A thing that has been helping me to have fun and also to be focused. So far it's working.

Every day, instead of looking at my todo list and feeling that it's becoming more and more like a predator and more like I'm the prey, I decide on three or four things that Must Get Done today if I'm to have any self-respect and deal with whatever it is that needs attention, and not just my personal goal-things, but things that really do need attention. (Taxes, voting, other financial items, and so on.)

So I decide on several of today's things, guess how long they'll take, and set aside time. For things that cannot possibly be finished today, I at least will have scheduled a definite amount of work time to devote to them.

Then I start.

I pick one item and set a timer. I see how far I can get in the amount of time I have, and when the timer goes off I stop. Stop and take a break and go on to the next thing, and, and. And I'm getting more done, and making more progress on those things that can't get done today but which need attention.

OK so far. Worth a look.

 

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See tabs at the top for definitions and books.
Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff+nosey@nullabigmail.com
Me? Bought a three-stringed nose. Planning on taking up picking.