Claude Code was the end result of all you fools who lost in Space Invaders

When I was home all the time because of the vid I turned into a slipper guy. A big part of this was I work in the basement which just has a concrete floor. Also I could take the trash out. Plus the whole Mister Rogers thing of coming into the house swapping the jacket for a sweater and the dress shoes for tennis shoes is appealing. But I will add now sitting in the lounge putting my feet up on the adjacent chair in just socks is also lit.

Influenced by my father’s interest (among some other important people) I also got interested in computers and programming which I love working on. Working on the internet on complex distributed systems I started to develop a skill for understanding the interelationships and solving very difficult problems. Much like House MD or the inspiration for that character Sherlock Holmes I found myself highly motivated by the rush of solving those problems. To the point that I sometimes regreted how much I liked it.

I still think my knowledge, skill, and experience doing that sort of work are extensive and I’m starting to think that I’d really like working on the intellectual challenge of creating an objective principle based system of problem solving. Maybe such a thing exists, but I don’t think so I think I would have seen it by now. As a matter of fact I think if it did exist in a completely objective form they’d require it as a basic course in the engineering colleges just like calculus.

I’m not changing my work by any means and have nothing to announce other than I’m going to start to experiment with some research in this area. I’m not fully convinced yet, but I think developing and then communicating something like this could become a central purpose for a decade or three. So I’m going to start looking into it as a sort of Troubleshooting on the Side for a little bit and see what I learn and share along the way.

Du les deux magots en Paris

In Amiens there is an enormous cathedral that is very impressive but walking around the city there was some crazy typeface choices for signage but nothing beat the comic sans especially where you can see it stretched to fit the space in the word Pharmacie.

My Grandfather was on the third wave at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944: D-Day he was a Staff Sargent in the 359th Infantry Regiment and was awarded the Silver Star, The Bronze Star, and other honors during his service. It’s long been a goal of my mom’s to make a visit to this place where he fought before he was married and had children. Just today we were able to do that and visit Utah Beach, Pointe du Hoc, Omaha Beach, an Omaha Beach museum, and The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial for the Flag lowering ceremony.

I’m glad I got to be there for this and given the threat to my Dziadziuś’ life in WWII I’m glad I got to be at all.

I’ve been training here with John Parr for 7 years. I’ve just recently gotten my diet right and am down 42 lbs since February and I’ve never been stronger. Including that 18 year old football player I used to be. He definitely recovered faster than me and had better close range and low contrast vision. But I highly recommend SuperSlow training with John.

If this works I have a full mobile blogging post system for posting images and additional comments using shortcuts, Cloudflare Images, Drafts with a custom Action, GitHub, and GitHub Actions

Let the images start flowing down the makeshift trash can slide!

My real goal here is to try and get some of the connection value I used to get out of Blogs and Twitter way back in the day. I know a ton of people continued writing their blogs and I’m hoping to re-enter that space with my boring takes.

I know this is a big mess, and probably there was no reason to use Angular other than I wanted to learn it. And I know there are broken links and posts everywhere and Blogs are dead, etc, etc. But I don’t care about any of that. I’m enjoying coding a side project. I know I’ll learn from it and I’m enjoying at least the prospect of some connection.

So I moved this off of SquareSpace. They were fine, but I wasn’t motivated to use it. Instead now that I have ownership of so much of the data and machinery in my Rube GoldBlog that I’m excited about it. If you have an interest in telling me I spelled something wrong, or the way I’m using typescript is terrible. (See the code here: mclazarus/logicaldisconnect) or any of the other things you’re dying to correct me on, simply tell me on The FediVerse. I hope to eventually support comments in this angular app, maybe they’ll post to Fedi or something. You can find me here: @mclazarus@jawns.club.

This post is what I call a two-fer. I post something and I also find out of the Drafts Action I wrote to post it works. If so I’ll be able to quick post from Drafts from my phone and that will be super fun.

But it’s much more complex than that isn’t it? When I started working at CoreDial my oldest, Alli, was not even one year old, my second child, Ash, was not yet on the way. I had been married for just two years. Heck I was twenty nine years old. One of the reasons I’ve been drawn to startups and small companies is I enjoy learning, and I learn best and fastest by trying to do things uncertain of how I’ll actually do it. So over sixteen years I learned so much, in so many different ways.

During that time my purpose was to help make CoreDial a success in anyway possible. Since I worked on the technology systems this was mostly making it so things worked, so things could scale, so service would be reliable and predictable. I never thought about what was next or what I was working toward because it was obvious. Our vision was set and adjusted as necessary by Alan, my friend and the company CEO. I just had to figure out how to accomplish certain things, learn, and solve impossible problems. As an engineer these are the things I like doing most.

There were hard times, things I learned about myself, and things that made me hate the job sometimes. But I worked my way through it and found a way to negotiate with those around me to make it what I wanted and still provide value. I was never seriously tempted to leave and work anywhere else. You can tell this by my LinkedIn that is a there as a joke to satisfy some friends who said I needed to have a profile there.

After the purchase I must admit I felt a little lost. I mean the day to day work didn’t change much there were still impossible problems to solve and fun technology to learn but the core purpose was gone. There is a scene in the movie Forrest Gump during the time when Forrest is running back and forth across the US that encapsulates how I felt perfectly. A group of people started following him on his journey and he stops and turns to the crowd and says, “I’m pretty tired. Think I’ll go home now.” The crowd parts to let him walk through and one person yells in frustration, “Now what are we supposed to do?!”

I spent time trying to figure out my purpose and have some ideas and am continuing to this day. I am using ideas and techniques learned from Jean Moroney’s Thinking Lab to help me here. One of the things I’ve learned is that the more complex the work I’m trying to do the more I need to just dive in and try and figure it out as I go. This makes many people I’ve worked with uncomfortable but I’m more uncomfortable trying to rationalize a full detailed plan based on no information learned from trying. In my experience the plan will be proven wrong very early in the work and you will need to adjust. So I go in assuming adjustments will be needed and plan by doing.

This planning by doing is part of what’s going on here. I think in the years of my work I’ve proven myself as a technology troubleshooter. Digging in on impossible problems and finding the answer is something I love doing and I continually try to improve at it. I think something I can do as a 10 year style project is to come up with and write down objective principles of troubleshooting. Helping teach people new skills and ideas is appealing to me and learning how to communicate the ideas makes me learn them even more deeply.

Great so I want to try writing a book on how to troubleshoot. That seems like an objective goal that can be taken on. But how to start?

Well I have to improve my writing and communicaiton which means practice. I also have to explore my ideas and experiment to find good ways to find the principles. Also if I want people to know about it having an audience will be important.

When CoreDial started Twitter didn’t exist, Facebook wasn’t available to the general public, and I had been writing on a blog for around two years and fairly regularly. I enjoyed Twitter at first but I sort of hate it now. With notable exceptions the ideas shared are shallow and the reasoning specious but for some reason alleged pillars of the public discourse take these thought snacks seriously and everyone seems to like to pretend that by arguing here they’re doing something of substance. Also there is a new movement where complex and controversial topics are being “fact checked” by the platform and the government.

So trying to build an audience on the social media platforms to me seems like it would be awful. There is too much temptation to buy into the gaming of the machine to get likes or “eyeballs.” And I want to focus on the ideas.

Additionally part of what I lked about blogging and the web when I first learned about it in the mid 90s was that you could customize these things to be exactly what you wanted. To share the information how you wanted.

So what I’m planning to do is openly build my own personal platform for sharing information about my ideas and evolve it as I go and learn. This will have the added benefit of giving me more technology to troubleshoot, an opportunity to learn even more about modern web and other techonologies, and an excuse to write and share software.

Also I’ll own the output unlike the weird relationship where the social media platforms use your ideas to attract more attention and users and potentially revenue. I’m not opposed to this business model in general but I don’t see how it benefits me over years of playing with it.

So sure I’ll be missing the opportunity to have lots more eyeballs see my information but I think as it grows and becomes useful the people I want to see it will find it and engage with it. I’m not playing a numbers game I’m trying to learn and grow and if by writing these things out I learn then I’ve accomplished my goal. If other people see these ideas and engage and ask questions or point out errors then I’ll benefit even further.

I started this on May 21, 2022 and finished the core writing on May 22, 2022. We’ll see how long it takes before this gets publicly accessible.

A friend of mine teaches middle school and wanted some help. He was looking for volunteers to be interviewed by students in his 8th grade class. His goal was to teach communication skill and to give the students an opportunity to learn about possible careers. The method was we would exchange letters, the student would then craft questions for the interview.

The letter shared by my paired student was a perfect jolt of spiritual fuel at just the time I could use it.

Over the past year or so I’ve been feeling bombarded by negativity from many online places I used to enjoy spending some time and attention. I’d even started to consider—like many others—that social media and the internet at large are terrible.

The thing is I’ve spent a good portion of my life working on, learning, and enjoying the ways we can connect using the internet. So I was reluctant to give it up or consider it bad but the evidence was srtong. Or so I thought.

The teacher knowing I’m an engineer paired me with a student who is very interested in electronics and video games. In his introductory letter he shared with me three youtube videos of him doing electronics work, modifying and repairing a broken Nintendo DS, modifying his Game Boy Advance, and building a handheld RetroPie setup in an altoids tin. The spark of curiosity and desire to overcome his obstacles as he worked through his project were intoxicating. And his willingness to share it with the world confident that in the same way he found other people’s work and exploration useful others may find the same from him. Finally the pride of accomplishment of a goal achieved were amazing to witness.

Seeing this at the same time I was to write a return letter about my career made me realize how important the Internet has been in my career and life overall and it helped me conceptualize why the thoguhts dwelling on how terrible a place it can be were really bringing me down.

Plus I could see what is possible to a young person intersted in electronics today. I took apart plenty of technology when I was middle school aged but I didn’t have youtube to help me learn what it was I was looking at and to share my findings so readily.

And I say the timing couldn’t be more perfect. I read this letter and wrote my response last night right before the scheduled presidential debate with two people I disagree with on many levels were going to put on a show and be adulated by the supporters for things I find horrifying.

What I saw, what I’ve known for years, but can forget at times. People with a real thirst to pursue values and to achieve are what is important. And the rest, the suffering, and the pain: “We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?”

Unfortunately for me and you and her that is somewhat limited but I think I can clear up a few things and then leave the rest to my wife who is the expert.

The Money

Well now the real issue is how does this work? How does the travel agent get paid?

At least for Michelle the deal is that she gets paid by the vendor. This means if you book a Disney trip, or Universal package, or cruise she gets a commission.

So this of course must drive up the cost to you. Well it turns out that it doesn’t. The deals are the same if you book them or if an agent books them. And this makes sense because the commission is worth it to the people providing the trips and experiences just to get business. This may be counterintuitive to you but my company has been very successful by enabling the channel. Which is basically what you call aligning the interests between multiple parties so one does a bunch of the selling.

Why Bother

Well okay fine it’s not going to cost you anything but why should you bother?

The best reason is expertise. Some of these trips can be quite complicated. If you’re going to do Walt Disney World there are many options, which lead to further choices and finally deadlines which are difficult to navigate unless you have a lot of experience.

Okay maybe you like the puzzle of figuring out all this stuff and optimizing your experience. Great! An agent can give you the relevant facts and do research to ensure you are getting everything you want out of your vacation.

Finally. You’re already paying for it. So no matter what deal you get you can have someone help you without any additional cost. Basically you’re choosing to leave free help on the table.

Why Michelle

Michelle is the smartest and hardest working person I’ve ever met. She is hungry to earn your business and your referrals.

So go like her Facebook page and look for a deal or reach out and just start figuring out what your next adventure will be.

I’ve mostly avoided looking at this for years. I assumed the neglect would make me feel bad. But I enjoyed paging through a few of the things I’ve written. And since social media seems to be a disaster lately but I still want an outlet for this sort of self-indulgent stuff I think I’ll try using this again.

Heck maybe I’ll even fire up an RSS reader too. I used to really enjoy the Internet.

Wonder if Alli & Ash will help me by updating the logo and making some other drawings.

Alli doodled the drawing to the left in about 30 seconds to try out my new pencil and iPad. She didn’t give me permission to post it but hopefully she won’t mind.

I want to be better at my work. I want to be physically stronger, faster, and have more endurance. I often have to prioritize in my pursuit of values and I don’t bemoan this as a necessary evil, I try to embrace the limitations of time and attention and fill them with only the best things.

However I’m noticing an area that is extremely value dense but I often neglect for the comfort of the busyness of other things. Items of reflection and introspection.  

I happened to notice afew of the photos and videos I took the week of Christmas and spent a few moments looking at them.

And I think I’d like to find a way for regular purposeful organization of my thoughts, photos, videos, and whatever else.

I know I have limited time and attention but I want to make sure I continually practice focusing it on the most important things.

The last year especially has felt extremely hectic at times and I think one of the things I’ll focus on in the beginning of 2015 is trying to minimize that. To drop the comfort of busy and be even more ruthless in my priorities. And finally to regularly reflect on how things are going.

I’ve had a great twenty fourteen. Twenty fifteen will be great too.

Lights out!

I noticed partway through that there were some slight issues. I think I was doing too much gym leading to a flare up of plantar fasciitis and there were a few days where I needed a break. Finally I have a tendancy to backslide into eating sugary snacks after sustained exercise routines, rationalizing that I’ve earned it.

I decided to take a week off from the gym to let me recover a bit and refocus on the non-snacking since it undermines my primary goal.

The primary number: I lost 31 lbs. Down from 254 lbs to 223. This is basically my pre-marriage, pre-child weight back when I was studying Kempo after losing about 80 lbs between 11/2001 - 5/2002.

I’m going to take 5-7 days off from the gym and then get back to work. My goal is to get to 190 lbs and emboldened by my recent success, I think I can do it by my birthday.

I’d put in a count of gym visits but Lift appears to be down, but as a guess I think I went to the gym about 75 out of 90 days. Probably too much, but it pumps me full of energy and I enjoy it.

Here’s what I mean

Some time ago an awesome co-worker was planning a twenty-seven hour day involving at least five acts of heroism. Something like getting in early and preparing for a late-night maintenance, then travelling to another office for some meetings and then going back to finalize preparations before going home to eat and then to come back and participate in the overnight work. I think this was the plan.

I didn’t come up with this plan so I wasn’t invested. I couldn’t understand why the meetings were important because I didn’t promise to be there. It seemed crazy. So we threw out all the time-wasting stuff and made that day a little less painful.

I was certain I would have come up with the same plan.

Fine, but what about being yelled at by your boss?

I watched it happen. There was no yelling. There was a challenging question. The kind of collaborative question you’d use to find a flaw in a plan and make it better. And it was asked by the boss. The room went still. Everyone stiffened. The answers that followed were defensive, meant to shut down the challenge.

It was easy to see because I didn’t draw any conclusions about where the question was leading. I didn’t infer any judgment about my work. I wasn’t asked.

However, I know I never saw the benevolence and collaboration in this type of questions when I was asked. I would also go on defense.

How to stand by

How do I get to the essence of this? How do I wield this super-power of objectivity? How do I take myself out of the line of fire?

I don’t know.

But I think I can get way better at everything when I find out.

Rule 1: Sleep at least 7 hours Every night.

I’ve tried for a long time to “try and get around 8 hours of sleep a night,” forever. But I never picked a number and set it in stone and did everything I could to stick to it. Over the past 39 days I’ve accomplished this goal 38 times. (The morning after the Eagles Monday night game is my lone miss).

This was the hardest rule to follow and also I think the most beneficial. Because of rule 3 I was getting up early, so I had to make sure I was in bed going to sleep no later than 10:10, every night. In a hectic life working at a growing company and with a family, this means cutting out time where I can actually sit quietly and think or work on my own projects.

I think this has been the most beneficial. Getting sufficient sleep is like discovering a cognitive and emotional super power. I’m more effective and more relaxed.

Rule 2: Track everything I eat.

I use MyFitnessPal on my phone and I just put everything in there. I also set a calorie goal in there and try to hit it (ignoring exercise). The goal is a side-effect and natural consequence of tracking. I find myself incapable of tracking something and not trying to hit a goal.

This is because I really want to lose weight, and the only thing I’ve found to be effective is being very particular about what I eat. So I focus on hiting 1670 calories a day or fewer.

There have been a few times this was close to being missed. But I’ve done it every day since 9/2.

Rule 3: Go to the gym 6 days a week.

Now the rule is basically daily, because it’s easier to stick to. I work best when I try to do something every day. If I had it 3 or 4 days a week it wouldn’t work. I’ve gone 33 out of 39 days. So I’m right on track.

I enjoy working out, and feel much more energetic throughout the day when I do. The only way I can fit this into my life daily is to do it first thing in the morning. So I’ve been getting up at 5:10 almost every weekday and a bit later on the weekends (the LA Fitness gyms near me open at 7 or 8) and getting it in first thing. Also this does help with Rule 1, because I am usually tired by 10 anyway.

I’m seeing improvements in my numbers and feeling good.

So what?

I’m letting the hard structure of these three priorities drive my days. I need to fit everything in around them, and it’s very clarifying. And I’ve been ruthless doing it. Not succumbing to whim or letting anything else drive my decisions. I’ve lost 17 lbs in that time, and at almost 40 days in I feel like this is pretty sustainable.

I picked 90 not because I’ll magically stop then, but simply to have a goal. See what I accomplish in that time and then decide what I want to do next. At this point I’ll probably just sign up for another 90.

But it’s not been easy. Looking back, it feels easy. But I paid close attention to all the small decisions that I’ve had to make to keep up with this committment. And at each new decision in favor sticking with it, it does get easier. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s been hard work. I think someone who commits to a program like this can do it, but, it’s an ongoing process and not a single big decision.

n-tropy.com

Today I still do most of my fiction reading using Audible since I can do it during my commute, washing dishes, or any other mostly-mindless home maintenance task. So if you aren’t using Audible, I whole heartedly recommend signing up and taking advantage of their free trials.

This post is really for people who already are using Audible.

They currently are running a Super Sci-Fi Sale Through the end of the day May 10, 2014, where they have over 100 books available for $6.95 each. I paged through like I do many of their sales and found they had a number of books I want or that I’ve read and enjoyed and wanted to dash off something quick to recommend to others.

So here is the list, some of these I’ve read. Others are on my wishlist or I recognize the authors and think they might be worth looking at. Other than that grouping they are in no particular order:

Read

• Assignment in Eternity, Robert A. Heinlein: I always recommend everything Heinlein wrote, plus this was narrated by Balki
• A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller: good classic SciFi, read it years ago on advice of my father and enjoyed it.
• Diplomatic Immunity: A Miles Vorkosigan Novel, Lois McMaster Bujold: The Vorkosigan saga is very enjoyable. This is book 14 in the series so you have quite a bit of work to catch up to it, but you might as well grab this one inexpensively now! This is not one of those series that I suffer from sunk costs, I liked each book.
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley: A classic.
• Little Fuzzy, H. Beam Piper: I actually listened to the version of this that came with Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi and I hated the Scalzi retelling of the story, but found the original Piper version to be a much better telling, where the Scalzi story was crude and obvious and pumped full of a certain political view that all corporations and any selfishness is evil, the Piper story suffered none of this and actually told an interesting story.
• Reamde, Neal Stephenson: I thankfully never got hooked on World of Warcraft, but got to enjoy machine guns and intrigue surrounding a video game world in this book. It was crazy at times, but I enjoyed it.
• The Dreaming Void: Void Trilogy Book 1, Peter F. Hamilton: I listened to the Commonwealth Saga and The Void Trilogy and recommend them both. I’d probably listen to the Commonwealth Saga first, but you can start here if you’d like. I think this is what they call a space opera, and I approve.
• The Lost Fleet: Dauntless, Jack Campbell: The Lost Fleet series was another long series that if you like space nerdery, is awesome.

Haven’t Read

• Beowulf’s Children, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes: I haven’t read this, but read something else by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle called The Mote in God’s Eye and enjoyed it so I think this one is probably worth a shot.
• With the Ligtnings: RCN Series, Book 1, David Drake: I think I picked this up on a reliable friends recommendation, just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
• Stealing Light: Shoal, Book 1, Gary Gibson: In my wishlist and recommended to me, haven’t had a chance to pick it up yet. Probably will here.
• Firestar: Firestar Saga, Book 1, Michael Flynn: Another in my wishlist and I’m not sure who recommeneded it. But I’ll probably grab this one here too.

Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.

I considered it a challenge. Life is short, there are so many great things to do. As a result I’ve often taken on way more than I should. Aside from wearing myself down a bit from time to time—and needing a few days to recover and then dig out—the results have mostly been spectacular.

And although I want to do all the things, I’ve developed the skill of saying “no” to things that would distract me, things that would be a sacrifice. For the most part I’m able to do that, but I do make mistakes and once I have agreed to something it is nearly impossible for me to quit. My emotional reaction to stopping or scaling back is like I’m losing something invaluable. So I’ll double down and fight for it, this of course reinforces the idea that the thing I am fighting for is a tremendous value, and therefore makes the emotional reaction to giving up even stronger.

Through some of my work I’ve long known that I had parts of it that I did not enjoy, but I considered it an important part of the job. And I love my job, so like any other hard thing I’d face these are things I would learn about, improve my skill, and become an expert. And with mastery would come the joy.

Certain aspects of my job required me to invent, fight for and prioritize a wide range of activity and tasks which would be in competition for limited resources. This is known as management. And management is hard, I honestly can’t understand how people are able to do it. I think many engineers and software developers can’t, notice all the dance about getting business requirements and business decisions when they are building things. Because more often than not the business requirements make little sense to them at first so all the processes are built around just taking them as a given and trying to understand how to meet them. And apparently when your job title at the startup is Vice President, management is where you are headed when success hits whether it seems that way or not in the beginning.

Often I couldn’t fully understand all the moving parts of the things I needed to manage, but I thought to be successful that I must understand all of these things. The mind of the engineer needs to understand everything. Additionally the business and my boss would seemingly demand heroics as evidenced in my frustration driven post Disconnect the Batphone written in July last year. And I would oblige using the skills that had served me so well. Analyze and understand all the details and pitch in and work hard. Trade sleep, trade personal time, trade sanity.

And unfortunately it doesn’t fail immediately, as a matter of fact, it can look suspiciously like success. You look like you are on top of everything, until suddenly you can’t work hard enough to keep up. And what I’ve learned about scaling problems is that it’s not only the thing that pushed you past the limit that suffers, it’s everything and it’s all at once, even though it will often take a long time to figure out that all those things are suffering. You develop bad habits for skipping steps or dropping things that are urgent. You start to treat everything like crisis triage regardless of how important you know it is. The fact is you are so set-upon by everything that you don’t actually know it is important, your hierarchy of importance gets over-simplified and you start making some real bone-headed decisions.

There are of course management skills. But they most be learned and practiced and mastered. But for that to happen you need to be interested in actually mastering management.

I’ve always known I didn’t want to be a manager, at least not at a high level. I’ve been successful leading teams, but only ones where I’m in the trenches doing the work as well, and the management is less than 10% of the time. In most cases meta-work I would need to do anyway if I were doing it all alone. But somehow I didn’t know. Again there is the challenge, it goes with the title. You can pep-talk yourself with cool phrases like “stepping up.” And of course there is the money. In most cases management upside in money comes with significantly more money than that of even a team lead. So it’s easy to rationalize to yourself that it’s the best thing for you.

So here I am, VP of Engineering at a company having astounding growth, and I am completely out of control and hate my job. This is success? If we are doing so well, why aren’t I giddy with joy? What the hell is wrong with me? What do I do?

Eventually I tell my boss I can’t be VP, I want to continue working there, but I cannot do the job. I know it is an immediate step but a process of getting someone in place to do the work that I am failing to do, but already I feel tremendous relief.

How did I figure it out? I’m not entirely sure. It’s one of the reasons I’m writing this to explore that. I think I got pushed passed the point where it was obvious to even me when I was too busy to notice much of anything. But I think it was noticing the distinct lack of joy in my work.

I didn’t dread going to work, I don’t think. But I didn’t love it either. In fact for many more days than not, I hated every minute of it. I liked the work that was getting done, but I hated my role in it. It wasn’t clear to me always, and I would grab snatches of enjoyment which helped kept understanding out of my grasp.

So I was guided by a premise of duty to my family, and to achieving wealth, and in doing what was best for my employer, and the job I was doing. When I should have been seeking my happiness all along. There is no conflict of interest. I thought I understood these things before, but I understand them quite a bit better now, or will when I finish reviewing and introspecting how I let things get so difficult for myself. I’m not sure exactly what it was but my boss did say something to me in a conversation that helped me to realize I wasn’t happy.

My favorite book ever written is The Fountainhead and there is a certain quote early in that book that is apt here. The main character Roark is speaking with the Dean of the school of architecture where he was just expelled and says:

“But you see,” said Roark quietly, “I have, let’s say sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I’ve chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I’m only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards—and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”

I know the work that brings me joy, it’s time to get on with it.

I pride myself on understanding technical issues no matter how I learn of them. I’ll sit and think and re-read the ticket or bug. Or I’ll ask questions always building up the example in my head, going step-by-step and ensuring I am clear of the problem and my understanding of the technical system.

I recently have found myself jumping to conclusions and launching right into a response to people instead of careful consideration. This is most prevalent with email, but I’ve done it in face-to-face conversations and even on twitter. When I go back and read a tweet and realize all the context is actually there and my response was way off base it makes me realize some real slowing down is in order.

Additionally I read a friends blog post: Libtards, Teabaggers and other stuff which reminded me not to assume people I disagree with are idiots. And for now if I have the time and come across what appears to be a vitriolic comment somewhere by someone I know I may ask questions to learn the person’s position. It has been a nice change of pace today to ask a few questions especially in light of the highly charged conversation about Government shutdown and new health care laws.

Getting some reasonable answers made me feel a little less isolated and silently annoyed.

Any startup facing an existential threat from regulation should remember these stories. The laws of the land are not laws of physics: they can be changed.

Jason Crawford’s article is a good read to inspire you that some fights can be won.  Or discourage you that the creative people trying to make awesome things often have to waste their time and energy fighting regulations that should not exist.

blog.jasoncrawford.org

I read something that said being lost is not about not knowing where you are, but giving too much focus and anxiety to where you are not. I don’t have any idea what the origin of this was, maybe some quote in my High School yearbook.

I think often the sense of anxiety that accompanies being busy is about knowing all the things you aren’t doing and letting that fill up your mind. Or allowing your mind-reading of other people’s expectations to dictate how you feel about your life. These things all are awful ideas.

Anyway I’m feeling a inspired to spend a more of of my time trying to relax, be realistic, and have some fun.

Update: I read what I wrote and was completely confused, so I reworded some things. See I was tremendously busy yesterday and my brain doesn’t work anymore.

calnewport.com

We are in an incredible hurry building important things and have no time for nuance. We’re impatient. We’re busy. We want everything to move faster, so we make huge, comforting assumptions and slap easy to understand labels on complex concepts.

Though I’ve been thinking little about the idea of oversimplifying and therefore over or under estimating the contribution of a new employee. Rather the quoted section made me think about how much is often missed in the “incredible hurry” when building products and the systems and processes to support a business.

It would have resonated more with me if he had written the exact same article but if it were not about an employee, but a new technology being integrated into the same busy-worshiping company culture.

randsinrepose.com

This Radio Flyer was an excellent investment.

I would help my two little girls carefully climb into the seats. Make sure the stuffed friends, drinks and sunscreen were down in the ample room by their feet and we’d walk the half a mile to Roslyn Park and play on the playground. We’d make up chasing games where we’d be heroes protecting the park. And we’d order “Cherry Whipples” from the little counter under the climbing wall. All of this was probably four years ago.

Just recently I created a little spark of interest in X-Men reading to Ashley on the flight home from Disney and she has just fanned that spark into the full flame of obsession that today has even overtaken her sister. So after Michelle and I put the trampoline together today (in record time) we played X-Men all afternoon. Part of this somehow entailed squeezing some much larger little people into the Radio Flyer again.

And even though we’re all older—and all have many more super important things to do—somehow a playing all day like the wagon was still a perfect fit.

And it’s nothing huge that makes me say that. I suspect it would probably qualify as boring or at least plain evening for lots of folks. But I sat and read some X-Men comics with Ashley and then sat and read a chapter of Watership Down with Allison before they went to bed. And this is the type of stuff I couldn’t wait to do when they were born. Share my interests, discuss the various characters ask and answer questions.

It was a great night.

Get comfortable with the idea that you won’t know what’s good until it’s already happened.

It’s a very good article on working when you don’t have any idea what your doing.

It’s convinced me that I should be listening to the whole back catalog of Radiolab.

transom.org

Definitely worth a read.

thisblogisaploy.blogspot.ca

Maybe one of your many responsibilities is fixing broken technology. You can treat each incident as separate, start from scratch, and try to determine what things you need to know about the problem. Then you can hunt down evidence and follow the leads from the symptoms, take broken notes, and you will eventually build a solid mental picture of what is wrong and a possible solution. As an alternative, you could automatically do a standard workup, and get some crucial statistics about the problem like the equipment involved, time, software versions, and captures of log files. It would be as easy creating a form for yourself to fill out. This standard format for reporting your findings is good if you work as part of a team, but even if you don’t this can give you a head start on the problem and let you save your creative thinking for the hard part.

Or you wish you were a writer of some sort—be it books, blog posts or documentation. You could just sit down and write what catches your fancy when you feel like it. You might be pretty successful. Or you might never find yourself writing; especially if writing is your second, third, fourth or tenth job. You could decide it’s important enough to schedule 30 minutes every day to move it forward a little bit. You could formalize it further and create a rough outline of your writing process, developing a progression that starts at finding an idea and maps next steps to the end result. Then you can really use short bursts of work daily, because you have a framework to let you jump right into the actual work. For example, after not writing for years it was only by giving myself permission to write for a short block of time every day that I created this site.

You may rebel against this idea by thinking that working to a checklist is dooming yourself to boring bureaucratic work. Or maybe you see this as selling out and turning yourself from a creative person into a drone of a factory worker. If you don’t give yourself a checklist to follow, then you are choosing to waste your creative energy on a solved problem—a problem that you solved already. If you’ve come up with a way to write an article, why throw that away and start fresh with the next article? Why not start with that scaffolding in place next time to let your creativity soar in new ways you didn’t have room or energy for last time, because you were busy inventing the scaffolding? You are going to do the work in some way. Why not be serious and deliberately choose the way you are going to do it?

And the most important advantage to this type of approach is you can build on your framework. You can build gradual improvement into the way you do everything. If the next time you do some work you take a minute at the end and think about how you can do it better next time, you will be giving the future you a head-start. If you don’t do this, you are choosing to put a limit on your best by not recognizing and embracing the fact that you have a limit on your best that you can do in one sitting.

The only thing you need in order to take advantage of this idea immediately is a notebook that you know you’ll look at again. And the next time you finish a task, open that notebook, set a timer for 5 minutes and answer one question in full sentences, “how can I make this better next time?”

I don’t advise playing the game Sheryl Sandberg was playing trying to look like she was working more than she was, but I certainly understand the pressure.

Also really liked the idea attributed to Marrisa Meyer.

If you resent the fact that you don’t eat dinner every night at 8 then you will get burnout and your work will not be as good.

The fact is you can only do so much so you have to ruthlessly prioritize. And if you resent the fact that you can’t do everything with unrealisticly high quality you’ll just invite more pain and anxiety.

thegrindstone.com

threepanelsoul.com

I completely understand the need to continue working on an active problem—especially when all the distractions are gone. But I suspect he probably paid for that hard work in more ways than being insulted by a co-worker.

red-sweater.com

You lean back and close your eyes trying not to think about the call from your boss.

Look, I know it’s probably complex and hard but we really don’t care about the details, we just need it to work.

Facing a problem alone has never bothered you, but you’re not alone are you? Your wife and children are sleeping upstairs. If you can’t figure this out and the company collapses, then what happens to them? Certainly not that trip to Disney or the American Girl dolls for Christmas.

Opening your eyes you see it’s 2:37 AM. You’ve got nothing left and sleeping is better than feeling sorry for yourself. Standing, you reach for your mug.

The flash comes.

You’re back at the keyboard, leaning forward. You see the connection. You’re not sure yet. But you are sure—you’ve never been more sure of anything. You laugh. It’s so simple. You put the patch together and push it to production. It’s fixed. You were so stupid not to see it sooner, but that doesn’t matter, it only matters that it works. You write your triumphant email. Wired, you sit and watch it work. You finally head to bed after four.

Instead of a hero’s greeting when you enter the office you are ushered into a the conference room and grilled about the fix.

What makes you so sure it won’t happen again?

You are happy to explain. But no matter how clearly you explain the situation the hostility and uncertaintly remains. A wild thought occurs to you; they seem dissapointed that your fix hasn’t retroactively wiped the problem out of existence. You realize again—you don’t understand people.

So what is the status of your current project? We’ll need to catch that back up.

Current Project? You vaguely remember you were working on something else before the crisis. You promise to give people updates after you get your bearings. You go to your office and sit back and close your eyes, trying not to be annoyed at the idea that you are now behind on your project, or what is meant by “we.”

I’ve been here, more times than I care to think about. This is not a specific story in my life, but it is every heroic work story. An emergency creates clarity by forcing exclusive focus on a single goal. You can learn more about the way your systems work in one crisis than you might in a whole year. And it’s exhilirating beyond description to face down the stress of an impossible problem and come up with the answer. But the hard truth is, working this way is a huge mistake. You not only harm yourself, but you have made the company and the the product, which you’re willing to bleed for, worse.

Possibly you are that hero or you work at a company with one. Maybe you want to do the heroic things. It’s exciting and you get to break all the rules. And you seem to have a limitless supply of the confidence needed to relentlessly seek an answer. But there’s a reason you work with other people, and when heroic individual effort is always necessary to stave of disaster it’s a symptom of a greater sickness in the company.

Sure it’s great to watch superhero movies. But you certainly don’t want to live in Gotham City—that place is a real mess. If you are that hero, the best thing you can do is learn how to disconnect the Batphone; it will not only improve your own life, but it’s the only chance to save that company and really build something great.

This story will serve as the manifesto for Boldocity. For fifteen years I have strived to become the tragic hero depicted in this story. But recently I have started to understand that working this way is a mistake. The articles I write in the coming weeks will work on illustrating why I’ve made these claims. Hopefully as I am able to more fully explore the issue through writing I will learn and explain the right way to do heroic work.

Waking up and going about your day should not be drudgery, it should represent the thing you want to do more days than not.  If you find that is not true then, what are you waiting for, figure out why.  There are tons of people out there who will help you learn and cultivate the things you want, then the crucial thing is to make a plan to get there.  And don’t let anything stand in your way.  The only way things will change for you is if you change them.  So what I have to say in response to that sign. That’s god damn right!

This is all stuff that’s been said thousands of times in much better ways than that sign, that movie clip I linked to or this blog post.  But I think it’s helpful to have it pointed out in a variety of ways.  It can be surprisingly easy to go numb to things around you if you don’t remember how wonderful it is to be alive.

See what I did there with the bold.

We do things, we make decisions and choices without even considering the options.  Our subconscious not only can provide us with important facts, like all the words to the closing song of Gilligan’s Island, it also will bring up complex thoughts like the results of thinking or provide a course of action.  Don’t believe me?  Think of the last time you drove a car somewhere and had one of those realizations like, “Holy crap I’m driving a car and not paying attention to where I am or where I’m going!  How did I make it this far?”

Learning anything requires repetition, so does unlearning.  But before you start training yourself what you want to do, like Zippity the Zebra in Man vs. Beast you have to “realize it’s a race.”  The key there is to set yourself a standing order to notice when you do some physical thing . Go on, put that subconscious to work for you noticing you taking the phone out, or eating that 28th cookie.

Now you are at that crossroads, where you make the choice.  The thing you’ve done at up until this point over the last 87 times this choice came up, the thing you decided you wanted to change for some reason, will seem very compelling.  It may even seem crazy that you ever wanted to or could change.  Here is where you will need to have thought out the good reasons for why you will change, to overrule the habit and emotional response that is tied into taking that habitual action.  What you want to do here is put yourself in the right frame of mind to realize, that, yes there are actually other things you might want to do besides restock the floors in Tiny Tower.

The way I recently learned and am trying to do that is to have a nice little slogan, “WWID?”  This means, “What Would I Do? Where I, is me heroically taking into account my full hierarchy of values.”  This is a pretty general mindset, depending on the particular habit I’m trying to change I may just focus in on that one for a few weeks and have a different slogan to recall in my time of need.

So in summary, I plan to take certain things I don’t want to do anymore and notice when I’m doing them so I can wake myself up enough to know, “it’s time to make a choice,” and then put myself in a heroic frame of mind to make that choice.

I had initially planned an update every 9 days since it just happened that I was 108 days out from my goal when I started and being a geek I couldn’t help but see the evenly divided intervals.  But, alas, I have missed not only 99 days but also 90.  We now stand 86 days from my goal and this is my first update.

So from an eating perspective it’s been easy, I’ve been able to avoid all but a very small taste of sweets and all but a very small amount of grains.

I think it was easy because before starting I made an effort to pay attention to how crappy I felt.  How I was tired and always lacking something trying to find it in sugary snacks or in caffeine laden beverages.

And—I think this was stronger motivation—I also made an effort to actually imagine two alternate futures.  One where I now took responsibility for my health and one where I continued to drift eating and acting based on whim or emotion.

The first was me in 20 years, strong and healthy working with my daughters on some sort of outdoor project, maybe helping them build a new garden or shed in one of their homes, but here I was a man of 55 (the same age as my father when he died) doing hard physical work with my shirt off and not inappropriately.  Feeling temporarily winded from a recent extreme exertion and resting for a moment, taking a deep breath and feeling the exhilaration of being alive and reshaping existence to my will and paying with my effort.  And I was just at that moment before I plunge back in and continue at a hard task that will still take another hour or so after which I will enjoy a restful afternoon with good food and surrounded by loved ones.

The second I don’t like to think about, but I do anyway.  It was me in 20 years.  I can’t really picture myself like I can in the first vision, but I am able “…to guess by hints, to see everything through the greater intensity of implication."¹ And in this case I am looking out.  I see myself in the sterile hospital environment.  I am uncomfortable, I’ve just woken up and have been laying this way for a long time, a few hours, a few weeks? I am just so tired and sore I can barely muster the energy to move.  I finally notice that here again I am surrounded by loved ones.  But this time the looks on their faces are masks of tragedy.  In this imagining I really pictured my daughters as young adults, they were beautiful if they weren’t so sad.  I wanted to tell Allison that nothing could be so tragic as to put such a look on her face, and she tried to smile for me when she saw me awake, but the pity there was worse.  And Ashley never one to attempt to hide her emotions wouldn’t even smile and was barely able to look at me.  I reached out for them with a tremendous effort and saw the tubes snaking around my arms.  And my arms were thin, flabby and pale.  Then I saw Michelle and it the suffering she was obviously trying to hide from me was more than I could bear.

I didn’t bother to fill in details about what particular disease had put me in such a terrible condition.  But to concretize the threats to my future of living a lifestyle where I ignore what I’ve learned about nutrition has helped my motivation tremendously.

I’ve diverged a bit from my original intent of this article into that motivation that has made the choice on what to eat easy.  Now to sum up my update.  My two primary measures of the effectiveness of my health sprint are my weight and how I feel energy wise and general comfort level.

Over the past 18 days I’ve felt great.  I made a great effort to get plenty of sleep, and I can’t remember being better rested.  My energy level has been excellent.  I seem to wake up ready to take on the day and keep a more or less constant energy level until the end of the day when I start to get tired and ready for bed.  My creativity level has been high, and my stress level has been low.  I take surprises and emergencies at work well and have been less defensive when criticized or when I perceived criticism.  Also I’ve been very productive at work and in my personal projects making great strides toward my goals.  Finally I feel stronger.  I’ve been doing pushups occasionally at work and they’ve certainly gotten easier to do.

As far as the scale, well that is the millstone, and the challenge or opportunity.  I’ve only dropped about 2 pounds per the chart software I use.  In the past when I’ve done this I’ve dropped weight more rapidly.

Based on this I am going to tweak my approach in an attempt to speed things up a bit. My plan is:

1. Cut out dairy (I got a milk frother for my birthday and have been enjoying tea lattes so for now that will pause)
2. Go to the gym more often, I am going to target 1 trip every 3 days.

Other than that it’s no sugar, no grains as I stated at the outset.  I anticipate feeling great, stronger and being lighter.  I’ll plan another update in a few days.

Maybe on 81 days to go.

1. Borrowing a short quote from my favorite book of all time The Fountainhead. ↩

That probably needs an explanation. Pomodoro is a time-boxing technique that guides you to do 25 minutes of highly focused activity followed by a short 5 minute break. In the PDF the author suggests it should be a real break from any thinking about work. I found the transition from a hard thinking task to a state of mental relaxation to be very difficult to pull off, my mind–already warmed up to the topic–would wander back to the problem I was working on. So I decided to do a set of push-ups to help me relax.

So far I’ve gotten better at pushups, squats, and sit-ups. Oh, and I’m enjoying my productivity based primarily on the structure to my day. It helps me concretize the idea that I can only do so many things in a day and helps me at the hard task of prioritizing my time. It also helps me measure how long I take at certain tasks. Since I chronically underestimate I welcome the opportunity to improve my judgement.

I was clued into this fact by the various Paleo resources I’ve studied over the past few years particularly Robb Wolf’s, The Paleo Solution.  So I started paying attention to how I functioned on various levels of sleep.  I learned that I was able to think, act and feel much better when I was well rested.  I remember thinking, “Does anyone else know about this? It is actually possible to walk around with nearly super-human ability simply by consistently getting a full night of sleep!”

Now in my defense, I not only attended college but also have two young children and have worked primarily at technology start-ups throughout my career.  So sleep was scarce in my life and somehow I just had to find a way to get things done.

But it’s not super-human, it’s regular-human to sleep when tired, wake up well rested and feel alert and energetic during your days.  A good sign of trouble is you need chemicals to wake up and function at all and at bedtime you can’t figure out how to fall asleep.

So I failed to mention in my initial post on my plan to win at the game of life that one other thing that is going to help me meet my health goals is to get plenty of glorious sleep. You too should get plenty of sleep tonight, you deserve it!

1. Eat no sugar, eat no grains, which means a diet primarily made up of meat and vegetables.
2. Play hard.

That’s really all I have in mind.

I have two other parts of it, but they aren’t primary they are just ways to keep the motivation level high when faced with a stressful day and some tasty sugary grass cake.

I plan to weigh in every day, as it’s something that worked well for me when I starved myself on the Hacker’s Diet.  It’s motivational it ties my high level get healthy goal to a concrete I see every day.  The other part is I plan to write about my progress here.  At a minimum I will write every 9 - 10 days.  So there will be at least 12 posts up here about this.  Probably more at first because I have other stuff to talk about regarding changing habits.  And I’m planning to write more by writing 150 - 400 words at a pop.

Lot’s more to explain including the book Changing for Good, what I mean by play hard, and why do I think grains and sugar will mess me up.

Also along that front I’m thinking I should blog consistently about the things I do and learn while working on the game so it forces me to really solidify my understanding.

I’d also like to really get my health to a better place.  On Saturday Allison’s karate school, East West Karate, had a class for parents of new students to learn a few basics so we can experience some of what they are doing first hand.  It really made me miss my training.  Now I haven’t been to the gym or done any serious workout in months so I’ve been sore now for two days.  But on top of that I’ve gotten the best nights of sleep that I’ve had in recent memory due to actually using my body a bit.

So I’m considering joining their adult classes.  As I’ve already earned a black belt, they would allow me to wear it to their school and help me have an accelerated version of their curriculum.  But I have mixed feelings about that.  I did work hard and earn it, but I am severely out of practice and wouldn’t want to embarrass myself or the school who awarded me my black belt by showing up there next week.  Also I’d want to do it only if I really am sure I’m committed to it.  So I’m thinking I’ll set myself a target of June to get myself into better shape through a concentrated training program at the gym, and probably 2 or 3 days a week run myself through some exercises trying to recall and practice some of the martial arts skill that I had earned through hard work and let slip away.

Also I have plans to attend a Thinking Directions pilot class in New York City on Saturday from noon — 3, and I’m also very excited about that.  I’ll have to see if I know anyone in New York that wants to grab dinner before I catch the NJT back to Trenton.

BIG THINGS COMING YOUR WAY!  WATCH OUT!

Recently I unthinkingly upgraded MobileMe to the new Calendar. Which of course broke all of that for various reasons. And this turned out to be the best thing I could do, as now I have a much simpler solution that seems to accomplish the same goals and work more reliably.

Now my phone synchronizes with the Google calendar directly using ActiveSync. And my desktop and laptop BusyCal synchronize with Google calendar directly but only need to be running when I need a calendar there. So MobileMe solved my occasional calendar problems by becoming useless for me.

At this point I’ll have to evaluate if there is any point to keeping MobileMe at all or if I can simply use DropBox to keep the other things in sync that MobileMe does for me, and I certainly don’t need another email account, or IM account and their iDisk solution is a joke compared to the ease of Dropbox.

Is there any other value to this service I’m missing?

I was glad that I was able to identify the cause of the problem and repair it, in only a few hours.  But I was annoyed that my plans for the evening were shot, and I had an ugly and distorted sense that I’m never able to do the things I really want to do, but must always spend my time responding to emergencies that are my duty.  

I know this view is wrong, but over the prior 9 months or so I’d taken on so much more stuff than I ever had before that I had been wavering between resentment against the world at large and anxiety about not being able to achieve my goals.

I think this experience and my response was a big step on my recovery from going crazy. I reminded myself that to accept those thoughts, about never achieving my goals, would bring about a self-fulfilling prophecy.  And I reminded myself to see how the choices I make even in response to the unexpected emergencies are serving the values I want to achieve and keep.

It was at this time that I also realized I’d gotten impatient. And couldn’t remember having that problem since I was a wee tyke when I’d get pissed struggling to untie my shoes.

I think by repeatedly reinforcing a view that I should be getting more done than I was, and actually more than was possible was causing me to have an always present sense of impatience and frustration with myself and others.

I had decided that fulfilling my ambitions should be easy and when I couldn’t do it I’d damn the universe for being impossible and myself for not succeeding anyway.

In the end I had to challenge the bad premises by comparing them with reality, and clear out those thoughts that had been gumming up my life.

Oh and if your interested about the AC. I took it apart cleaned a bunch of nasty sludge that had accumulated in the drip pan under the coil. And then using an old wire as a snake, dislodged sludge from the upper part of the pipe. Finally hooking up a shop vac to the end of the condensate line and sucked out anything that would come. It worked fine the rest of the summer. And if there is a next time. First thing I’ll do is hook up the shop vac.

So, Anyone have recommendations for companies to clean and service HVAC units annually?

He gave me some great feedback. And Just that little experience pushed me into going to the most recent, and really just their second, Ship It Society meeting down at Indy Hall in Philly. I definitely plan to continue going to them and to go to the Philly Cocoaheads meetings as well and try to do something I rarely do, annoy the crap out of everyone with tons of questions.

So, it seems like I actually do like people sometimes.

Culver City Conmen

Ran into the Buzzsaw of the Rearden Steelers in week 6 and despite the despair of having played me still managed to get 43 points out of Darren McFadden the next week and a win.

Sedalia Sea Monkeys

Diana has been on a tear! Two wins and I think most importantly defeated Paul’s Geekpress Generals handily this past weekend.  I imagine that Chez Hsieh was a battleground and it’s probably better for Paul that he lost.

GeekPress Generals

Paul has somehow coaxed Greg Jennings into consistent play two weeks in a row, however he managed that he deserves to have won the championship.  Also if I failed to mention it, he lost an epic matchup to Diana.

Dr. Ego Spengler

Mike’s team won in week 6, but more importantly he lost in week 7.  Leaving literally nothing on the bench he was crushed by Amy’s Gentlemen, who was so confident in her ability to win she taunted her opponent by starting Arian Foster while on a bye and still scored 109 points!

Portland Agents Of Fortune

2 weeks, 2 wins, good team management nothing left on the bench and big scores.  I’m hoping this trend doesn’t continue.

KC Money Barons

Got the big first win of the season.  I think Corey has aspirations of going 7 - 6 the hard way.  Considering I’ll probably lose my next 6 we can finish the season tied!

Washington Oppressors

Dwayne Bowe showed up!

Connecticut BNS Brawlers

Too many Cincinnati players to win, even if they keep scoring points.  Marvin Lewis has suffered from this problem for years.

Fairport Diehards

Ugh, 79 points left on the bench this week, and a ton last week.  Sometimes fantasy is just like that.

Philadelphia Freeloaders

The last two weeks they’ve let their opponents score too many points.  Work on it!

Virginia Gentlemen

Amy can’t lose a game when she scores over 100 points.  Unfortunately when she scores under 100 she tends to lose by 6 points or less.

Next week

I promise to write stuff going forward on some schedule.  And I suspect it may be somewhat useless but I’ll enjoy it, and that’s what counts.

When I was a youngster my father had a Radio Shack TRS-80 and a cassette drive and somehow had acquired some games on cassette, he may have purchased them or dubbed them from someone in a club, I really have no idea I think I was somewhere between 8 - 10 years old.  I played some of the “You are in a dark cave ….” style games.  I tried my hand at writing some in Basic.  They were simplistic and pretty boring, even to me, after I got over the initial thrill of having created them.

Soon after I was given a C64 courtesy of my Uncle Jim.  And I had hundreds of video games on 5-1/4" floppy for it and it was then I started a seed that has been with me for all of my life.  I’ve always vaguely wanted to make games, but for some reason never took real steps to make any.

I mean I took some steps.  When I had the C64 I bought Gary Kitchen’s GameMaker, and went through some of the tutorials but never really committed to figuring it out.  I didn’t do much on that front for years, I was quite busy growing up, playing football, reading and really pursuing all sorts of other interests like earning some engineering degrees. But then after college at some point when a company I was working for wasn’t very interesting I decided once again to “pursue” video game making as a hobby.  I bought a book on .NET game development—I wasn’t going to fall into the trap of doing it in Linux my preferred environment at the time, I knew I couldn’t make a living with that.  As I read a bunch of the book, I saw this huge expanse of uncharted territory opening up before me.  It looked hard.  I knew I had lots of other things that were important, and although I told myself this was important, I hadn’t really decided that it was.  It was the sort of thing I could do later, like work out or learn to speak Spanish or learn how to play an instrument.  There was a vague floating abstraction in my mind of how it will be when I’m a “game programmer” sort of how people think about how it will be when they win the lottery.

I had that typical mindset of most people who fail at some goal or another.  I wanted buying the book or software to be the hard part.  I wanted the software or book to replace me as the driver on the way to my goal.

Now to cut myself a break, I was achieving other values the right way with me in the drivers seat, all this time.  But at some point I need to either let go of that floating ideal or decide what it really means, if I want it, and how and when I’ll get there.

When I started developing for the iPhone I of course thought of games but didn’t have any ideas, I looked at how to get that done a bit but I saw this huge undertaking ahead of me, most of it consisted of: understand OpenGL which although confident I could figure it out, was not motivating at all.  The cubes in all the examples don’t inspire confidence, neither does the linear algebra that I’ve more or less forgotten at this point.  And even if I could figure out openGL, I had no idea on how to tie that knowledge into whatever else I didn’t know about game programming.  It seemed like I stood on the edge of a vast unexplored wilderness and knowing that if I were committed I could plunge in and build a little industrial town along one of the rivers out there, but also looking at the fact that I given my current pursuits I could hope only to do maybe 8 hours a week on this dream and see that I’d never even have a vague idea what a game should look like (on the inside) for years.  So I plunged in on iPhone program with the idea for ReadingTree, which I never classified as a game, although I guess in some respects it is.  I knew what I wanted and I achieved it to some degree.  Which I thought was just awesome, and still do.  And I’ve been working on a few other apps in the mean time, having a great time.  But figuring that game programming was something I’d do later, I’d get rich with my other apps, and full time job and then have 5 unbroken years to learn how to do game programming and finally get down to it.

Well thanks primarily to Mike Daley and Rod Strougo my premise of requiring omniscience to become a game programmer has been shattered, as they have pulled aside the first layer of underbrush and shown me a general path toward the promised land of “Game Programming.”  And in just a few hours this weekend I cultivated some idea of what game programming would actually be, and more importantly decided that I will be launching a game in the Apple app store for an iOS device near you.

During the first day I, somewhat reluctantly, purchased Mike Daley’s book Learning iOS Game Programming.  I didn’t want to have another game programming book sitting around collecting dust, but I planned on attending the game programming sessions so figured maybe this was the lottery ticket I’d been waiting for.

Then on the second day in the morning Rod Strougo of Prop Group, LLC gave a great talk on using cocos2d to create games.  He made it seem very achievable and tied the concepts in his talk to a simple example game which he dissected throughout and demonstrated the effects of simple changes.  I left convinced I could do the things he demonstrated and actually package a cocos2d game.

Finally the last session of the day was by Mike Daley, of the blog 71Squared, gave my favorite presentation of all time called Moving to 3D.  The idea was making an OpenGL ES 1.1 app on an iPhone from scratch, so he introduced quite a bit of basics.  He created an app (source available) which put you in the center of a 3D world where you were subject to bombardment by ships flying overhead, you could use the gyroscope in the iPhone 4 to move the phone and change where you were looking in the world.  And tap the screen to fire missiles at your attackers.  His talk was basically an introductory walk through the essentials of making that game, diving into the code, jumping back up into theory when necessary, but only covering the absolute essentials in a way that was accessible to someone who is mostly clueless when it comes to this stuff.

Things that made zero sense to me before were clear.  I obviously know very little more now about actually creating a game, but I had built a conceptual framework of what was essential to know and how to begin learning what I needed to move ahead.  I am now very excited to have purchased his book and was brainstorming game ideas with my wife over breakfast.

I am going to dive into getting my current app finished and into the store as quickly as possible so I can get started on my game.

I recently went crazy, and then recovered. Not to belittle the other crazies out there because I wasn’t too crazy but I was very stressed out and unhealthy both physically and mentally but able to function fully although not enjoyably due to working through real emotional pain. Which is to say I was in continual internal conflict due to bad premises. The conflict had been building since the end of last summer, and reached unbearable levels sometime in April. At which point, I’m proud to say, I not only took steps to recover but at some level I knew that my crazy was just a problem like any other that had to be understood and corrected.

For now I’ll spare the details, although I have been itching to write a bit about them either publicly or privately just so I could have a more thorough reference manual to recovery if I ever make similar mistakes in the future and go crazy again. But it really came down to:

1. Trying to identify the emotional distress. 2. Trying to identify the thoughts leading to the emotional distress. 3. Reality checking those thoughts.

And really it was a set  of contradictions that caused my pain. I was giving myself orders that I knew to be impossible and holding myself accountable for not somehow doing it. Coming to face this and to deal with it has made me think long and hard about this line from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, “All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A.”

The good news was I found that I had let some errors creep in and corrected myself, and in many cases when I consciously corrected those errors I experienced immediate relief. And as I continued to be on the lookout for evidence supporting and integrating my new ideas I started to notice that things that bothered me before no longer did.

My primary mistakes had to do with personal expectations of what I should be doing and should be able to do. So I cut myself a break, and decided to conform my expectations to what is actually possible in reality.

The final step was fully committing myself to working on my physical health. I’m currently (since September 7) eating a Paleo diet as outlined in Robb Wolf’s excellent book, The Paleo Solution, focusing on getting sleep and usually working out 2 - 3 days or so a week. And this is going very well. I feel good and have lost 17 pounds.

And just have to thank one person: really the best support I had through my crazy was from my wife Michelle.  She kept me sane while I was going crazy.  And has also been doing a great job cooking me good food even though I make everything harder because I think wheat is poison.

So what the hell does all that have to do with the initial paragraph and title? Well all of these changes and revelations happened while I was still busy living a life. This is the idea that is characterized well, albeit malevolently, by a character on The Wire, Lester Freamon, “A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.”  So fixing the subconscious is like changing the tires on a moving car, or performing brain surgery on yourself.  It’s hard to know exactly when everything is working right again without drawing some lines and putting it to the test.

So ultimately over the past 3 - 5 weeks I’ve been confronted by some of the same stressors that in April I would have chosen to freak out or go binge on McDonald’s and Cokes and cookies. Some of them were pretty significant stresses.

And looking at them now, the idea that I would freak out about them is laughable. It is as if Professor Lupin had shown me these things are simply Boggarts and I must simply properly perform the “Riddikulus” charm to defeat them.

Thinking to how I would have reacted before is almost like watching a TV show, it’s hard to even understand what I thought the problem was.

Sure some are things I’ll choose to do or fix, I’ll just put them on my list to do or fix and decide when I want to do them. The other things you ask? What other things?

So I’m glad to say I’ve withstood the test to my resolve, and find it funny that I’d ever taken those other ideas seriously. To actually compare them to a punch to the solar plexus is actually wrong, a better comparison would be a wild haymaker thrown by a drunk that never had hope of hitting the mark. So to quote Atlas Shrugged again to close my post, “Of course I am all right, Professor. I had to be. A is A.”