Allison sums up this beautiful day.
Quite a robust urinal apparatus. Seen at Stockton College at the
Gaelic Storm concert.
Listening to Leonard Peikoff's podcast #83 I really enjoyed the closing of his answer to someone who wrote to him, essentially, I agree with many of the principles of Objectivism but disagree with Ayn Rand on two ideas (I think it was architecture as art and something to do with her view on women), am I still an Objectivist? He said:
So I hope you don't think of: this and this and this is required for [Objectivism] … I wouldn't even think about what's required for Objectivism.
Just think about "what's true?" And then if Objectivists don't believe it, it's tough on them. You could say, Objectivism is good but it has this mistake.
You can't think, with the idea that the answers are in the back of the book given by Ayn Rand.
Catching up on some of my reading I came across an analysis of a Steve Jobs interview in Forbes. I agree with the analysis especially on Diana's last point. To succeed you hire the best, the most resourceful people you can find and give them goals to accomplish. You don't go hunting for those who you think will strictly obey your rules. To clarify, my point is not to discourage the use of checklists or standard ways of handling requests. Standard processes in handling repetitive tasks are very important not only when multiple members of a team are working together, but to avoid mistakes when doing infrequent or tedious work. It's the way the exceptions to this checklist are handled that separates the followers from achievers.
Working in small startups most of my career has made the difference between these two types of employees stark and easy to spot. One focuses on what they are supposed to do, the other wants to know what they are trying to accomplish.
If I understood the job well enough to write strict rules I'd just write software to do it, and not waste time recruiting or interviewing. This is the error the big service companies make when they put a 300 layer voice recognition system between you and their customer service reps.
I've been using MobileMe to keep some things, including calendar, in sync between my work's iMac, my macbook and my iPhone for over a year. Generally I've been pleased, but after upgrading my phone to 3.1 and my iMac to Snow Leopard I've encountered a very irritating problem where my "accounts" in the calendar on my phone had duplicated and seemed to spawn multiple constant synchronization threads, to the detriment of my using the phone or having the battery not drain. After screwing around with it today and finally getting some live chat help from the MobileMe support site I figured out how to clean it up and what is causing it. First the cause is the subscribed calendars I have on my desktop iCal. I have one calendar, but I subscribed to a handful of other calendars so I could quickly look at what a few other persons of interest were up to. I've had it this way a long time, but it was just during the last few days I noticed I could see the subscribed calendars on my iPhone. And then everything went wrong, and for every one subscribed calendar I had I ended up with a new calendar account.
The fix was found partially through reading this article the MobileMe support chat rep sent me, iPhone/iPod touch: Resolving duplicates and removing all contacts/calendars/bookmarks with MobileMe or Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, and having the problem resurface once I had "fixed" it once.
First turn off "Push" on my phone, then in iCal remove all subscribed calendars and sync it to MobileMe, this is only a minor annoyance for me as they are all google calendars and I can view them in that interface. And then on the phone toggle the calendar sync setting for the MobileMe account from on to off selecting to "delete" the calendar data from the phone each time, until finally left with a single account.
If I knew an easy way to report this bug to Apple I would, but I wasted enough time on it now and don't want to go hunting for a way to tell them.
I recently had a shock when my children's pediatrician announced she was closing her office. We love this doctor, she helped us through scary times and was always there with answers when we had medical questions or even seeking general advice about our children. She is closing her practice for financial reasons and those who know the philosophy I follow may assume I am going to blame the government or ObamaCare for this. Well I cannot, I don't have enough information to make that judgement in her circumstance. But I do have two points I'd like to make.
First if the government makes further incursions into healthcare as is proposed under ObamaCare which is currently embodied in the so called Baucus plan physicians will quit or close their practices, they've said so (I'll provide a link later).
Second, on a recent trip to get our daughters a flu vaccine, our pediatrician — upon first facing my wife since making her announcement to close her practice — asked her, "please don't yell at me." My wife was shocked, we were of course both saddened to hear she was closing but we would never berate her for it. I was appalled to learn that other parents thought they were right to yell and insult her for a decision that she made which was obviously painful for her. I think the idea that makes people think they were right to yell at this woman is very closely related to the idea that makes them think they are right to force the doctors, insurance companies and ultimately their neighbors to provide healthcare under government coercion. The idea is that the sick are entitled to some sort of medical treatment above all other considerations including who has to go broke or more importantly who has to be forced under threat of violence to provide it.
This all came to mind when I read Dr. Paul Hsieh's most recent, and quite excellent, op-ed published at Pajamas Media, titled Is Your Doctor getting ready to Quit? I recommend everybody read this as the proposed legislation will impact them.
If you are genuinely interested in the morality and practicality of so called Universal Healthcare — and not just partisan bickering or blatant lies — The Objective Standard has made several of Dr. Hsieh's other articles on the subject available to read online for free:
I like to think about things. I can spend hours trying to find the right way to solve any problem from serious to silly. This is one of the reasons I'll let myself get caught up in an email black hole. As I was this morning. Responding to or dealing with the tasks inside each email like it's the only thing in the world to work on is extremely silly as it takes the email and any embedded tasks completely out of context. So I am writing this to remind myself, that email isn't my job, it's a tool that is crucial in the small part of my job that has to do with communicating with others. And to turn Strict Filtering back on in front of the tasks I choose to work on. Also the strict separation between doing the tasks embedded in my inbox and the task that is processing my inbox.
It really shouldn’t take me more than 15 minutes to empty the email inbox. I should rifle through each message spending about 30 seconds to read, decide if it's actionable, what I'm going to do about it and file the action reminder appropriately. If it's an email that is longer than 30 seconds to ready, I can decide if I am ever going to read it and file the reminder to read it somewhere.
I'm in four fantasy football leagues this year. One is the real deal, the league I've been in with my wife for what seems like 3 or so years every year, but undoubtedly it's been at least 7 years, the TMCFL run by my brother, on a site that is getting increasingly crappy since being acquired by an NBC Sports affiliate.
The other is the John Galt League, where I am the acting commisioner, brought together by the common fact that we all are fans of Diana Hsieh's blog NoodleFood.
I also have played in Ryan Grier's league for the past few years where I tend to be terrible.
And finally as always I picked up a Yahoo public league in order to practice drafting before the TMCFL, although given the awesomeness of the ESPN mock drafts I may stop that after this year.
I am currently fantasizing the fame, fortune and prestige of winning both the JGL and the TMCFL as I watched my Eagles whup an overmatched Panthers and noticed my top pick in both of those leagues, Adrian Peterson, racking up the points. I am now convinced that he will score at least 3 touchdowns every week and I will dominate all of the competition.
Stay tuned for too frequent updates of my fantasy prowess or complete silence if my team collapses into disarray.
If somehow you missed it, a few weeks ago the Whitehouse thought it would be a good idea to encourage citizens to report on other citizens that were spreading "fishy" information about healthcare. I promptly reported myself and asked to be added to the list of political enemies because Healthcare is a legitimate need of man, but to declare it as a right is to destroy all rights, see Ayn Rand's essay Man's Rights for a detailed explanation. That email address for reporting citizens has since been discontinued. While in the circles I travel I didn't hear anyone excuse this action by the Whitehouse, I have a fear that the majority of American citizens find nothing wrong with it or see it as something worthy of a passing chuckle at those who were outraged by this action. I have nothing to say to the ones who would react in a laughing manner, meaning those that don't take ideas seriously, for the same reason I wouldn't try to teach a pig to sing. For those that honestly wonder why such a thing is worth getting worked up about, I'd encourage you to think about The Nature of Government, why it exists, and what effect such an entity would ultimately have on the spread of ideas while openly collecting a list of dissenters.
Governments are properly formed to secure rights, not to provide goods & services, spread ideas or prevent the spread of ideas. To see the dead-end on that road you need the ability to think in principles and only a passing familiarity with history.
If you know me you know of my damnable addiction to demonstrable fact as opposed to consensus opinion, mystical revelation, emotion, or necessarily oversimplified computer model. So you'll not be surprised that I find the shrill cries of doom from the environmentalist movement distasteful at best and life-threatening at their worst, that is once they start enrolling the government as the muscle enforcing their maniacal hatred of man. So I was interested to see, a unique perspective on the analysis of energy and the environment, an article by Dr. Keith Lockitch called Climate Vulnerability and the Indispensible Value of Capitalism, announced yesterday on the blog Voices for Reason.
He addresses the ideas from an interesting angle, rather than wade into the muck about the science of climate change he focuses on what other factors make us susceptible to harm by storms or other climate disasters, in his words:
Climate alarmists are trying to make people hysterical over the possibility of large-scale changes to the earth’s climate, which they claim will be a “planetary emergency.” But they ignore the fact that our susceptibility to climate-related threats depends on a lot more than what’s happening in the atmosphere. In particular, it depends on our political and economic conditions.
He shows that policies which stifle innovation and protect wilderness, for wilderness sake, make us ill equipped to prevent or react to storms, fires and other disasters. He also presents historical examples where industrialized countries fared much better in similar weather related disasters to countries that were pre-industrial or weighed down with statist controls.
I recommend reading it because it strikes a blow against the assumption that the solution to bad weather is outlaw industrial society and return to a "simpler" time.
I have just made an important discovery about my mental limitations and my response to them. I've confirmed something I had already known, that my mental stack for sub-tasks is finite. For a while I've been troubled occasionally by a nearly overwhelming emotional need to do anything else besides my current work. For a few months now I have been seeking, opportunistically, to understand this emotional state because it seemed completely at odds with my goals and my usual relentless need to understand things. The idea here is there are often tasks that have hidden or unrealized requirements. An example is you start out to vacuum the rug, and you need to clean up the clutter and move furniture, but when you move the furniture you discover that the leg on the chair is so loose that it is unsafe, so you go to repair it only to find that your out of wood glue and finishing nails. And to make it to the hardware store you need to stop and get gas and go to the ATM for cash. So when you originally set out to vacuum the rug you never would have said, okay well I'd better go get gas and some cash before I get started. I've heard that this phenomenon is referred to as [yak shaving](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving). But I think most people have experienced this, and typically the stacks of additional tasks don't get too deep. However, in my work it is nearly a daily occurrence that my projects uncover things I could never have known until the work was begun. Some block your progress and some don't, some are big, but some are small. I've found it's the small ones that block your progress that were really stacking up on me and causing a problem.
If it is a big problem, meaning a full project in it's own right, and is not blocking my current progress, I simply make a note that this new thing needs to be done too and continue on my way. Even if it blocks my progress, I'll go ahead and shelve the first task and take on the second one. But if it is a small problem and blocking my progress, I just switch to this new task, and try to mentally retain all the context that got me there. Generally this works, but, often my extra tasks go down so deep that I reach a point where it is impossible to retain the whole context. This mental overload is real, and painful, and I've been dealing with it all wrong.
When I reach this point of mental overload I run away screaming! Well not literally, but I certainly do try and do anything else. Suddenly it seems like checking my email, or going to get a coke at the vending machine is the most important thing in the world. I think there are other factors in play as well, such as, if the driving project behind these sub-tasks is something that is only mildly interesting or something I loathe then the threshold for the number of sub-tasks I am willing to endure is much smaller.
The breakthrough in my thinking was realizing that this overwhelming need to go find and clean my white tennis shoes was in direct response to learning I had yet another task to be pushed onto the stack. So the emotional response was because I was no longer able to hold the whole of my current task in my head, and I have now set up a contradiction.
I know the thing I am doing is important and more important than the new thing because it is bigger and implies the new thing, so to prevent myself from losing the broader context I will not work on the new sub-task so I don't lose any of the important details of the super task. But I also know that I cannot proceed on the broader task without working on the sub-task. As this contradiction leaves me nothing to actually do I might as well get a coke and avoid the whole irresolvable mess.
Now this has been a source of guilt and loss of productivity for me for a while because when in that mess I'm not making progress on my project. But from [David Allen](http://davidco.com/) and [Jean Moroney](http://thinkingdirections.com/) I've already learned the solution to mental overload. That is to write things down.
So the strategy I've just developed is when I recognize this feeling to stop and ask myself, "Are you overloaded?" If the answer is yes, then I simply need to write down the context I am in danger of losing. At this time I suspect that will consist of a list of the outstanding tasks that are standing in my mind.
If the answer to that question is not, yes, I have a backup question that has helped me with procrastination before that is, "What do you want?" I mean this in a broad way, basically, it helps me bring to mind the reasons behind undertaking the tasks in the first place.
Apparently keeping your old software up to date is important, if you still use it and it is publicly accessible. I noticed my brother's away site had a huge spam problem, which I thought odd, since I had installed a spam filter a long time ago.
I logged in and noticed the spam filter was missing in action. It wasn't just disabled or working wrong, it was gone. This combined with the fact that a few weeks back everyone who commented on the site was listed as "Anonymous" regardless of what information they entered finally clicked in that some script-kiddie nonsense was going on.
I saw that someone had managed to upload a handful of files into the /tmp directory I would guess compromising some well known flaw in WordPress version 1.5, and make an entry in the DB to activate their files as plugins. It turns out the filter wasn't actually gone just hidden from me and disabled.
No matter I just kept his data, installed the newest version of WordPress and I've fixed both of those annoying problems. Now I'll just have to remind myself to keep those sites up to date. I also took the opportunity to disable a couple of sites that I know aren't really functioning anymore but may have had code accessible to the outside world. So if you were counting on my test install of Trac for anything, tough luck.
Where I found the inspiration to respond to the tyrannical advances of the state which are trampling individual rights.
I've realized another perfectionist tendency that I've been letting defeat me. The result has been that the big hard (and interesting) tasks are starving for attention because the little tasks are being given center stage of the always elusive and much coveted big block of time. I've learned through my years of focusing on productivity with increasing responsibility that you aren't going to be able to sit and work on a problem for 10 hours straight without lots of other stuff just exploding. The obvious solution to this is to break things up from 10 hour tasks into smaller chunks. That way the chunks can be interleaved throughout your day, and you work in layers[^1].
The problem arrises is that some tasks can't be chunked up, they are hard, consequently they are the ones I enjoy the most. Sitting down and really thinking about a hard problem to come up with a clean solution is one of the things I enjoy most. But perversely I will resist starting the hard tasks.
The pain associated with being interrupted at such a task is real and is brutal. So I resist because I am certain I will be interrupted and I am not completely certain that there isn't something else more important to do. I have tons of snack-tasks[^2] that have piled up into a big-meal sized task. These snacks are very important to me and each can and must be taken care of quickly and efficiently. Often some need to be done before I can decide what big task I should work on. The problem is, to continue the snack metaphor, I have ruined my productive appetite for a big meal with snacks. The piled up snacks are now a big-meal task in their own right. So instead of quickly clearing the inbox from 9:00 - 9:15. I am doing a GTD style weekly review from 9:00 - 11:00. This leaves me only an hour before lunch, when I know I don't have enough time to make a proper start on one of my big tasks.
So I've realized the real problem is not that my queue of bite-sized tasks has reached meal size, but that I have implicitly decided that I need to eat the whole meal. I had properly queued the tasks when I was doing other things so as not to be distracted, but instead of just taking a few things or 15 minutes worth of things off the queue a few times a day. I have decided that I must empty the queue now before continuing or I will (*horror*) have left the task incomplete. This is the same problem as thinking you need to do the whole project in one sitting rather than just the next-action. The allure is these little tasks are usually easy to do, and if I'm interrupted easy to resume later.
So I've decided the solution is to not empty the queue every time I process the inbox, or go to read flagged articles. It's to use natural time limits, 4 minutes before a meeting, 10 minutes before lunch, 30 minutes before I need to take Allison to school, to get as many of them done as possible. Or set an artificial time limit at the outset of my chunk of time, process the queue until the time limit expires and reserve my big blocks of uninterruptible time for the big, fun and ugly tasks.
My hope is that by challenging the idea that I need to completely process every one of these queued up snack-tasks, I will be able to interrupt myself from them to realize I actually have an unbroken 2.5 hours ahead of me and I could stop snacking on almonds and dig in on a big juicy steak.
[^1]: The concept of working in layers is something I learned from Jean Moroney at [Thinking Directions](http://thinkingdirections.com/). I highly recommend her course on Thinking Tactics and am anxiously awaiting her book.
[^2]: By snack-task, I mean things like clearing my inbox, updating financial information, reading some articles I've flagged as interesting, having a quick phone call with a vendor or anything that can be done completely in a short amount of time, say between 2 and 30 minutes.
It's a shame that the great business producers continue to sanction completely irresponsible government. Read this in Warren Buffet's annual report for Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. "Whatever the downsides may be, strong and immediate action by government was essential last year if the financial system was to avoid a total breakdown."
Since we all know that sacrificing the strong to pay for the mistakes of the weak and then pretending there wasn't an underlying problem always fixes everything.
I read a post at [NoodleFood](http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/) this morning, [1 in 7 Americans functionally illiterate](http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2009/02/1-in-7-americans-functionally.shtml). And it reminded me of how grades are treated versus knowledge. The primary reason you go to school is to gain knowledge. Grades are simply a tool used by the educators to assess your grasp of what they are teaching. Contrary to their purpose the grades, degrees and diplomas seem to be seen by students as some magic stamp. They are trying to achieve the reverse of cause and effect. The students and parents want the effect which is the good grade and what that can mean for their life and careers, without enacting the cause which is learning the subject. My brother teaches writing at Temple University and he'll occasionally share the excuses and pleading that he receives from students and astoundingly, from their parents. He once had a students father ask him for a better grade, offering no valid reasons only the fact that she needed it. I would never have been able to ask my parents to plead for charity from a teacher. Had I tried my father would have given me hell and refused.
I always saw the line at the teacher after a grade was returned going to beg for points as an insane waste of time. Getting good grades was easy. I was there to learn, and they measured my knowledge of the subject matter to give me a grade. It all worked out really well.
The only time I remember going to the teacher after a test (not after it was graded) was when I found part of the test unfair. The mid-term had a question worth 40% of the grade on the test. The point tested by the question was covered, but only in two or three paragraphs out of many chapters in the reading. It was never addressed in the lectures or homework problems. I thought the proportion of the grade it represented was unjust. The point was not essential to the overall understanding of the course, but could represent a whole letter grade overall.
I went to explain my concern and was greeted with condescension and derision, possibly justified, as there was a group there to complain and, I assume, beg for a better grade a priori. He told me, "I'm sorry you didn't do well on the exam but I will not change it." I made an enemy for life when I told him, "I'm sure I got an A on the exam, I just thought the weight of that question was unfair." He then confirmed my name. I was not worried because I was not making an idle boast. I got a 96/100. He never liked me much after that which I had a hard time understanding. As I clearly met his criteria and respectfully was raising a valid point.
I didn't like him much after that either, because I saw him as a small person trying to prove his superior knowledge by slipping unfair questions into a mid-term. His superior knowledge was already acknowledged, why else would I listen to his lectures? He of course was abusing the idea behind grades as well, using them as a false measure of self-worth.
But although I judged him dishonest he was not overtly malicious and continued to give worthwhile lectures, which I continued to attend. I was there to learn, not to achieve friendships with professors or even letter grades. Those things were valuable, but secondary. So the point is, remember your purpose in school or in sending your children to school.
You send your children to school to learn, so help them learn. Help them to understand cause and effect. Don't cripple them by teaching them how to appeal to pity for better letter grades. They'll just end up not understanding the words "former" and "latter" in a college classroom somewhere.
And to reiterate what I took as Diana's point, if they are not able to learn because the school is not able to teach. Hold the teachers accountable. And attack everything that makes any incompetence on their part acceptable.
Ari Armstrong is planning a demonstration that it is possible to eat a healthy diet on a food stamp budget. [Low-Carb Diet, Food Stamp Budget](http://www.freecolorado.com/2009/02/low-carb-diet-food-stamp-budget.html). He is doing this not only to show that increases in the food stamp program are unnecessary, but in full protest of the entire program. This not only protests the evil of redistribution of wealth, but will prove useful to those who think are honestly trying to eat a healthy diet on the smallest imaginable budget. I look forward to tracking his choices closely as I could use some inexpensive ideas.
As a side note tomorrow will be a full month since I committed to greatly reducing refined carbs in my diet and I have lost 11 lbs. This is with never finishing a mealy hungry and with my only extra exercise being a few lunch time walks, going to the gym one time and some snow shoveling.
Apparently my feed has been broken since Sometime in November. At that time I upgraded wordpress, and possibly related was the merging of FeedBurner and Google. Anyway It should be working now. So for the 3 or 4 people who follow the feed, you will be delighted to know that I have been making an effort to add content regularly. And strangely you have a little bit of catching up to do. Unless you follow my tweets, then you probably already read all the posts.
I've received word of a promising new blog focused on economics from an Objectivist point of view called [Simply Capitalism](http://www.simplycapitalism.com/2009/01/welcome-to-simply-capitalism.html). It could prove a nice counterpoint of reason to the cacophony of shrill demands for increasing governmental control in our economic lives. Subscribe to [their RSS feed](http://feeds.feedburner.com/SimplyCapitalism) and see for yourself.