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.”

In a matchup where Vince Young outscored Matt Schaub by 13 points and Mike Tolbert outscored Arian Foster by 5 points there is no other way for it to end except by being decided by 1 point.  The worst part for Amy, manager of the Gentlemen, is that if she had not started a Defense she would have won the match.  But I agree that the Rams looked to be a great start against the Lions.

Fairport Diehards (3-2) 85, Sedalia Seamonkeys (2-3) 78

And Diana’s Seamonkeys get exactly what they want out of Ray Rice, finally, but when your second leading scorer is your Kicker it’s hard to finish with the W.  And running into an on-again Chris Johnson and hated (by me) Cowboy QB who was racking up points playing from behind meant that Tom Stone’s Diehards took the win.  Both teams can look at the high bench production and play that age old Fantasy football game of second guessing yourself.

Connecticut BNS Brawlers (3-2) 77, GeekPress Generals (3-2) 58

The Brawlers victory gives me the opportunity to talk about my favorite subject and that is me winning fantasy football games.  Because his victory and mine came in lockstep due to the huge day by Malcom Floyd which necessitated a huge day by my QB.  Paul’s Generals who have been solid all season, had the typical fantasy week where almost nothing goes right which was capped by Aaron Rodgers going down with a concussion at the end of the game.

Dr. Ego Spengler (4-1) 69, Washington Oppressors (1-4) 53

The good Dr. Spengler led by Mike King has been the most consistent JGLer over the past two years.  But this is ridiculous to get a victory where the top scorer is TE Marcedes Lewis with 17 is illegal, and I plan to use my commissioner powers to correct this miscarriage of Justice.  However I will insist that John Britely’s Oppressors still retain their loss as well due to the fact that he snagged LeSean McCoy on waivers on Sunday morning when I am the one who’s supposed to have the best player on my favorite team.  Unfortunately for the Oppressors in the best possible week to defeat the Ego got nothing from their team.

Portland Agents Of Fortune (2-3) 109, Culver City Conmen (2-3) 88

In true fantasy football fashion the Conmen have a solid week from many of their starters even with 4 players on BYE, but still manage to run into a team that had an even a better week.  As Brian Reich’s Agents managed to put together huge numbers despite starting my least favorite Manning.  Yes I must admit Cooper is my favorite Manning.

Rearden Steelers (5-0) 99, KC Money Barons (0-5) 74

I am considering changing both of my daughters names to Philip Rivers as his consistency this season is the main reason I am 5 - 0, also a timely Falcons pickup before last weeks games helped me quite a bit here.  All I can say to Corey and his Money Barons is the winner of the league last year had a losing record, so anything can happen.  Also to illustrate this I’m 1 - 4 in the fantasy league my brother runs.

Virginia Gentlemen 116, Culver City Conmen 109

In week 3 the Conmen put up a solid 109 with good performances from most of their players. Only the Patriots D (1) and Matt Forte (3) underperforming. Unfortunately their opponent the Virginia Gentlemen had great performances particularly 31 from Adrian Peterson who ran all over the Lions. Here the Conmen were handed their first loss. This was the Gentlemen’s first win.

Fairport Diehards 106, Connecticut BNS Brawlers 73

A huge game by Anquan Boldin, and great performances by Romo and Chris Johnson vaulted the Diehards to a win over the Brawlers despite their Cedric Benson’s big week and Mike Wallace having a huge game down in Tampa. The Brawlers unfortunately left Peyton Hillis on the bench for his huge game not having to share any carries with Jerome Harrison and LeSean McCoy had his worst game of the season so far.

Sedalia Sea Monkeys 65, KC Money Barons 51

The Money Barons continue to have a hard time manufacturing points where Colston, Celek, DeAngelo Williams and Steve Smith (Carolina) are all not producing consistent with where they needed to be drafted. Drew Brees is the only bright spot this week as the Barons fall to 0 - 3. The Sea Monkeys get a huge game from Dustin Keller and manage to scrape together enough points to top the Barons bringing them to 1- 2.

GeekPress Generals 114, Portland Agents Of Fortune 66

The Generals put up big performances from Collie, Mendenhall, Rogers and the Steelers Defense to post huge numbers in week 3, which was more than enough to top the Agents of Fortune who aside from Michael Vick and Steven Jackson couldn’t get anyone else in double digits. The pair of Calvin Johnson and Larry Fitz who strike fear in the heart of fantasy opponents continue to frustrate.

Washington Oppressors 75, Philadelphia Freeloaders 59

The Oppressors had solid performances from Turner, Charles, Bowe and Cutler riding the Chiefs 3 - 0 record and overcoming a bad outing by their Bucs defense to their first win of the season. The Freeloaders who grabbed the Chiefs defense and were rewarded by a good game were hurt by their reliance on the Houston passing game and Schaub, Walter and Andre Johnson that didn’t post big numbers this week.

Rearden Steelers 105, Dr. Ego Spengler 92

In a high scoring matchup the Steelers got good performances from Rivers, Maclin, Bradshaw and their newly added Cardinals D, to offset strong performances from Peyton, LT and DeSean Jackson. Luckily the Chiefs were able to hold Frank Gore down to 14 points and help the Steelers to their 3 - 0 record and hand Dr. Spengler his only loss.

Additionally the Steelers are 3 - 0 against doctors this season.

Week 4 The First week of byes, which leads to all sorts of scarcity and fun in trying to decide who to start or pickup.

GeekPress Generals (3 - 1) 87, Culver City Conmen (2 - 2) 79

In week 4 the Conmen had a solid performance from their Defense but put up goose-eggs from the Moss tandem at WR as Washington had success running on my Eagles and had no reason to even look at Santana and Randy was on the outs in New England. Two zeros in a line up when playing a consistently solid GeekPress Generals usual spells disaster and this week it made the Conmen fall to 2 and 2.

Philadelphia Freeloaders (2 - 2) 66, Fairport Diehards (2- 2) 57

Oddly the second game of the week where a team posted nil from the wide receivers, but in this case they managed to win as the Freeloaders got solid performances from Mike Tolbert, Matt Schaub and Zack Miller. And the Diehards were only able to get double-digit points from Flacco and Ryan Matthews as Denver was able to hold Chris Johnson to only 4 points

Virginia Gentlemen (2 - 2) 106, Connecticut BNS Brawlers (2 - 2) 74

And you can tell it’s a bye week as yet another team manages to post a pair of zeroes, but even more impressively the Gentlemen still manage to put out 106 points as they are the top scorer this week. Helped by a combined 56 points from Antonio Gates and Arian Foster (who took 1 quarter off for missing a team meeting). The Brawlers who did have some solid performances from Carson Palmer and Peyton Hillis but also had the misfortune of running into the 2nd highest scoring team in the league.

Sedalia Sea Monkeys (2 - 2) 90, Washington Oppressors (1 - 3) 46

The Sea Monkeys continue to get good performances from Dustin Keller and finally their other players posted some solid numbers as well as they finally hit on a QB that was going to give solid numbers as Sanchez put up 14 and Reggie Wayne and Joseph Addai turned in good weeks. The Oppressors hurt by byes and missed updating their lineup and started the out Pierre Thomas and Shiancoe on a bye only managed 46 points and Jay Cutler was absolutely manhandled by the Giants posting a -3.

Dr. Ego Spengler (3 - 1) 76, KC Money Baroons (0 - 4) 70

Spengler riding a huge game by LT against the Bills was able to hang on for a 6 point victory over the Money Barons who were hurt by an oddly ineffective Drew Brees at home against the Panthers and Steve Smith who went out with an injury.

Rearden Steelers (4- 0) 92, Portland Agents Of Fortune (1 - 3) 63

MJD finally put up some big numbers to justify his pick at #3 overall, and got consistently good numbers from Philip Rivers and Roddy White putting together another solid game to go to 4 - 0. The Agents of Fortune got a huge game from Calvin Johnson but Vick going out with an injury held him to two points and Mike Sims-Walker continues to disappoint with a 0 point week.

In the closest game of the week the Steelers got strong performances from Philip Rivers and Roddy White for the second straight week and are concerned about MJD who managed only 2 points and 12 for the season.  The Generals got solid performances from most players although the Rodgers to Jennings combo has yet to really pay off.  This came down to the Sunday night matchup between New York and Indianapolis, where both Dallas Clark and Austin Collie scored TDs for the Generals but it wasn’t enough to overcome Ahmad Bradshaw’s points helped by a Brandon Jacobs benching for an awful run followed by a temper tantrum where his helmet ended up in the crowd.

Dr. Ego Spengler 90 Sedalia Sea Monkeys 64

While the Sea Monkeys got many solid performances, they had no outstanding performances and are having a real problem at Quarterback with Kolb injured and now benched in favor of Vick and Garrard having a very rough game at San Diego.  The good Doctor Spengler got huge games from from Gore, Manning and DeSean Jackson which offset some lesser performances by the rest of his squad putting him over the top.

Portland AgentsOfFortune 98 Virginia Gentlemen 92

In a close matchup this week the Gentlemen had good numbers across the board hurt by poor QB play from the veteran Favre who is finally showing his age against an underrated Miami Defense.  Unfortunately the Gentlemen this week’s third highest scorer had the misfortune to face the AgentsOfFortune who were this weeks second highest scorer.  Helped by my favorite team, the Eagles, who are apparently unable to tackle anyone when Stewart Bradley is off the field which gave Jahvid Best a huge 40 point week. Also cashing in on that Eagles v. Lions game Calvin Johnson finally scored a TD that counted helping the Agents to a big win.

Philadelphia Freeloaders 106 KC Money Barons 42

The Freeloaders rode Houston’s massive game against the Redskin’s where Matt Schaub and Andre Johnson combined for 50 points.  Also worthy of note is the Freeloaders had Kevin Walter on the Bench who also had a giant game and those three players combined would have been enough to beat 4 other starting lineups this week.  The Money Barons had the game that nightmare game that every fantasy owner can count on, where nothing goes right.  Totaling only 42 points for the week and going into Monday night (with 2 players left) had only 18 points.  They did have a few solid performances and I expect they’ll turn it around going forward.

Culver City Conmen 68 Fairport Diehards 54

The Conmen improved to 2 - 0 on the season despite the tough game their patriots had in New York.  Putting together a handful of good performances and Darren McFadden trying to answer critics with a big game was enough to top the Diehards who had a tough week with nobody in the starting lineup finding the end zone and Chris Johnson being held in check by the Pittsburgh defense.

Connecticut BNS Brawlers 83 Washington Oppressors 75

The Brawlers are another team that cashed in on the Eagles-Lions game where LeSean McCoy went off racking up 30 points and making up for a handful of low scoring Bengals in his lineup.  The Oppressors fall to 0 - 2 despite some good performances from Jay Cutler, Dez Bryant and seeing Shiancoe and Pierre Thomas be real workhorses for their teams.

Transactions

The Steelers were frustrated by their 2 - 0 record on the waiver wire this week being unable to grab Tolbert or the Dolphins Defense due to the waiver priority enjoyed by other savvy owners who snagged these players.  A few teams worked the waiver wire to bolster their teams, I think the top one being Tolbert who looked solid in Ryan Matthew’s absence and whoever owned Michael Turner last year will know the dreaded high-ankle sprain is not an exciting injury for a top RB on your team to have.

My Steelers pulled out a 73 - 61 victory over Diana’s Sea Monkeys while I was sleeping but Phillip Rivers was going strong, overcoming a solid WR showing by the Sea Monkeys but zeroes from the injured Wells and Kolb who left early held them back in the lowest scoring match of the week.

The reigning champs the Geekpress Generals managed to be the only team that broke three digits even with posting a zero from Darren Sproles as they defeated the Virginia Gentlemen 110 - 79, an inconsistent performance from the Gentlemen’s starters and drawing a tough matchup put Arian Foster’s monster week to waste.

Peyton Maning was playing from behind all day and was forced to throw which helped push Dr. Egon Spengler ahead of the Philly Freeloaders 77 -73 who despite a great performance from Miles Austin but had too few players find the end zone in week 1.

The Fairport Diehards benefited from the Jets CB Daryl Revis, first in having his defense post big numbers but in forcing Flacco to look away from Mason and find Anquan Boldin for a high scoring week netting him 87, the Agents Of Fortune couldn’t keep up, as too many top guys didn’t deliver and they only managed 69 points.

The BNS Brawlers and Money Barrons fought the tightest contest of the week each getting some solid performances but a low scoring opening NFL game meant Brees couldn’t come up wtih the numbers to overcome Palmer’s garbage time stats playing from behind after getting blown out by New England, the Brawlers won 78 - 76.

Finally the Culver City Conmen had some huge plays out of Matt Forte, and lots of points from his beloved Patriots which gave him more than enough to overcome the Washington Oppressors, who suffered the biggest injury of the week losing Ryan Grant for the season.  Despite some solid performances from Jay Cutler and Pierre Thomas the Conmen prevailed 93 - 72.

Week 2 News and Preview

Despite the fact that the commissioner forgot to send a waiver reminder a few teams put in claims, the Agents of Fortune snagged Vick for a favorable matchup and The Oppressors laid claim to Brandon Jackson the expected replacement for his lost Ryan Grant.  Next week get your waiver claims in Wednesday night because early AM (ET) ESPN will process claim requests based on priority order.

Most of the match-ups (based on current lineups as of 10:30 PM on Friday) are fairly even based on the ESPN projections except for the BNS Brawlers and The Oppressors where the 0-1 Oppressors are currently favored by a whopping 59 points.

So everyone get your lineups in, check your injuries and enjoy week two of the John Galt League.

In my typical fashion I decided I would write a software tool that would be quick and easy to enter tasks, what job that task was related to and how long I’d spent on the task.  Then I realized I don’t have time to do my job every day let alone write some other tool, and this seems like one of those tools that some smart web 2.0 style kids would have built ages ago.  So I Googled time tracking and came up with toggl.com.  It was everything I wanted, from very quick task entry, pie charts showing percentage of time on each project and for my purposes it was free, as I’m not trying to use it to bill clients.

I’ve been using it now consistently for 3 weeks.  I decided for “Project” I wouldn’t try to track my time on projects in the GTD style, but rather against what David Allen calls your Area’s of Responsibility, or in other words the big bullet points in your job description.  After 3 weeks I have 14 different “Projects” on the list and an able to see at a glance where I’m choosing to spend my time.  It has helped me emotionally in seeing that these things are necessary for accomplishing my job, and to be able to block out time for areas that need extra attention, and to know that means that other slices of the pie will suffer and I must account for that.  Also for giving me a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day and a way to sum up what I’ve done.

Also it’s a great tool for driving conversations with my employer.  “Hey, I’m the only person in the company working on X, that means if you want me to do more of it or move it faster you’ll need to help me obtain resources or reset expectations for W, Y and Z.”

As far as using it, I’ve not spent more than 15 minutes in a day on it.  I’ve tried before to track my tasks but have always failed.  Knowing that I went in determined to record only essentials but get a complete picture of the day.  So I don’t record every mundane task but will record something as small as 10 minutes if it’s on a job that I think will add up over time.  So I’ll typically record somewhere between 5 and 20 tasks on it in a day and be able to then get the perspective I need on my work to make longer range plans and decisions.

Ashley stops Michelle singing saying, “Wait! You forgot to put Minnie in my song.”

Michelle: “I put her in, I said Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy and Pluto”

Ashley: “Oh! I thought you meant Pluto the planet.”

Allison: (immediately and with obvious exasperation) Ash, Pluto’s not even a planet!"

Allison sums up this beautiful day.

Quite a robust urinal apparatus. Seen at Stockton College at the
Gaelic Storm concert.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• Moral Health Care vs. “Universal Health Care”
• Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America
• How the Freedom to Contract Protects Insurability

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 and Jean Moroney 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.

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.

As is typical when I receive such self-glorying proclamations from my elected representatives I take a moment and compose a letter responding to them and encouraging them to uphold individual rights as an absolute as is the necessary and only purpose of a rational and moral government.

I began writing my response somewhat lethargically but when I organized my thoughts it brought to mind a particular passage from Atlas Shrugged which provided the fuel to complete task. I decided then to look it up and to share it here.

I could say to you that you do not serve the public good–that nobody’s good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices–that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation–as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own–I would refuse, I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being’s right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!

Hank is the man!

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. 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.

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 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.

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.

Here are a couple Inquirer and Daily News stories that are praising the destruction of wealth and productivity as good things:

• Will billions fix what ails us?
• Editorial: Greenhouse Gas Emissions

We are setting up for a perfect storm. Inflationary policies caused the dot-com bubble, the solution was of course to redouble the easy money policies to get out of the emergency which has caused the housing bubble. The solution to this is now apparently to deal with the emergency by looting even more money to spread around and solve the problem. Combine this with the arbitrary assertion of global warming, or climate change if you prefer, and the government will not only steal every dollar produced by our businesses but also make it illegal for them to produce because it is allegedly destroying the planet.

The answers are not hard to come by, just apparently hard to accept. The government exists to protect individual rights, and that is it. When it tries to cure any, let alone every, social and economic problem it necessarily violates some peoples rights in favor of others.

The article shows giants of production, like PepsiCo, are sacrificing their time and ability calculating and reducing carbon emissions in an attempt to avoid being a victim of governmental mandates.

You may wonder at the nature of the atrocity committed by PepsiCo that would require governmental retribution and demands such atonement. They are cowering in fear because they have committed the only mortal sin recognized by environmentalists, they produce life sustaining nourishment for man. While their efforts at reconciliation are to be applauded, they are insufficient.

The highest virtue and grace of environmentalism can only be achieved by the complete sacrifice of man and his values to the pure untouched wilds of nature.

* When in doubt eat meat (*BACON!*) and vegetables, protein and fat are good. * Make a special effort to eat high quality food. [^1] * Avoid Refined carbs (sugar, grain, tastycakes, Pez, ColdStone) * Avoid most vegetable oils (olive oil is good stuff) * Mostly avoid artificial sweeteners (I had been consuming quite a bit daily)

These “rules” came out of research and out of experimentation that started in late September of 2008. The first observation that came from avoiding refined carbs was to avoid the energy roller coaster. Although this term doesn’t quite capture the feeling I had. I had never felt like I have had too much energy, the extremes I felt were enough energy to survive, and I can’t keep my head up. After a few painful days at the outset where I dealt with headaches and a general feeling of disorientation, I have noticed a good general level of energy all of the time. I have run many experiments and spent time finding foods I enjoy, and seeing the effect on my mood, energy level, and stomach. This was the time I came up with those rules. And then I decided to apply them rigorously in 2009 starting on the 5th.

The most noteworthy result is in that time I have lost 6 lbs, have been to the gym once, and have eaten as much as I wanted. This can’t be overstated. I am experienced at weightloss and I have never lost any without feeling hungry and dissatisfied at the end of most of my meals, having frequent headaches and suffering through frequent boring repetitive workouts.

I have noted a few other immediate benefits as well. I have discovered a whole host of foods I really enjoy. I have saved some money by packing my lunch more frequently than usual. I have surprisingly and quickly reached a point where I don’t have the emotional desire to eat sugary foods. And best of all, I feel good, and I can see that I will start to feel even better when I get my workout integrated into my routine.

[^1]: I’ll give links and explanation of what high quality food is, in a future post. For now you can satisfy yourself with the idea that it is less processed, less chemically treated.

The other idea I really clung to is, “obedience is not a virtue.” I like to look at parenting as training my replacement. They start out small and helpless, and parents need to do everything for them. But the goal from the outset is for them to grow into full independent people capable of selecting and achieving their own values. This is part of the reason I am a maniac on the answering of “Why?”

The other new tool I have been experimenting with for months now is “Thinking on Paper” as presented by Jean Moroney. I’d recommend it to anyone who needs to accomplish vague goals in any aspect of their life, or in David Allen’s words, people who need to “make it up and make it happen.” The benefits explained here:

“Thinking on Paper” is a general purpose thinking tactic you can use to help you:

• concentrate
• hold in mind the wider context
• guide thinking purposefully toward the goal
• quickly return to a train of thought after an interruption
• stay calm and in control, even when the subject seems overwhelming

I’ve found it particularly useful as a quick tool to deal with interruptions. When working and a co-worker comes in, with full marching band in tow, to trample your thought process. I ask them to wait one minute, I dump my state to paper or an editor. Typically this is writing 2 or 3 **full** sentences about what I am thinking or what **exactly** I was planning to do next.

Now I can give my full attention to the new problem of herding everyone out of my office as quickly and efficiently as possible. When I return to my work, I can regain my prior mental state by simply reading the sentences I had written. It beats groping blindly, for all the scattered threads of thought, by a mile.

> “The Internet is a world-wide system that does not belong to any one operator, whether providing access lines or backbone transport.”

> And without the individual operators, who built, operate and own their parts of the network where would your world-wide system be?

> Taking away the use and disposal benefits while retaining the pretense of private ownership is socialistic, immoral and wrong.

> And if the moralistic view is to abstract, then consider, who will bother to innovate and create the networks of the future when eventually some mob is going to claim their collective non-contractual “rights” over this innovation. Especially now that we are all officially on notice that, “the Commission is watching, that it understands that the Internet involves a new set of technical challenges, and that the Commission is willing to act in a way that reinforces the success of the Internet as a whole.”

> Or in other words, some bureaucrats have decided what the Internet is today, it shall be forever, and they are willing to use force to sacrifice any individual who gets out of line to the collective.

It is currently being held for moderation. I of course agree with his right to control the content of his site. I will not be harmed if he holds it for moderation indefinitely or rejects it. I can have no expectation to exert control on his property. But I thought this a nice object lesson.

Following to the logical end of the Network Neutrality debate, Dr. Reed, should have allowed my comment immediately even if he finds it offensive. And this is because my expectations of blogs that solicit comments is that they have no rights with which to deny my ideas, even if it means broadcasting ideas that are distasteful to their “operators[^1] .”

The only and final word in the Network Neutrality debate is that the networks that Comcast and others have built are theirs and theirs alone. They should not only have the responsibility of ownership and ownership in name. They should have the right to use and dispose of that property as they see fit.

Would it be unfortunate if they decided to block emails with the word ’the’ in them and try and hold Google ransom? Yes. Undoubtedly. What is to guard us against this terrible thing, certainly not their benevolence.

What should guard us against this is a free market that allows competition to spring up to fill a need. If Comcast thought it could squeeze $300/mo for broadband but really could run a profitable business at $50/mo then as long as there is no stifling legislation[^2] in the way a competitor is born the next minute after Comcast announces their price increase.

And what if this Capitalist utopia doesn’t happen? What if no competition springs up, and no one can ever get to Google.com from Comcast forever and ever? What if the internet becomes completely fractured and you have to pay tolls for everything?

My answer: a resounding too bad. There is no right to internet service at all, let alone internet service of your choosing. There can be no right to any good or service that must be produced by someone else. If I have a right to a service, then who is the slave that must provide it? Once you embrace artificial rights, you destroy the real McCoy.

[^1]: Notice how even the terms used in the neutrality debate deny property rights. They are not the owners but the operators, the managers of a public trust, the caretakers of *our* property. Yuck! As someone who knows what effort it takes to build and run a network it makes me sick that those who could not or will not try to dictate terms on the producers. [^2]: The problem **is** government interference at all. Not which form is right.

When thinking of yesterday, I remember the greatness, the courage, the independent judgment of a man.

With the economic controls and the sacrifice of individual rights to the nation, we are putting a motor on our drift from freedom to fascism.

Any idea what this is used for?

This doesn’t only include reaching into your home and setting your thermostat for you, or deciding how many cars you can own or what type of home or business you can build, it also extends to the food supply as commented by the USDA on page 67 of the ANPR:

> … many of the emissions are the result of natural biological processes that are as old as agriculture itself. For instance, technology does not currently exist to prevent the methane produced by enteric fermentation associated with the digestive processes in cows and the cultivation of rice crops; the nitrous oxide produced from the tillage of soils used to grow crops; and the carbon dioxide produced by soil and animal agricultural respiratory processes. **The only means of controlling such emissions would be through limiting production, which would result in decreased food supply and radical changes in human diets**.

This amount of control will effect you, this is not just an additional tax on the rich, or other such nonsense. These are real proposals that will limit your ability to live your life. The idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant is factually wrong. As a matter of fact high concentrations of CO2 are required for plant life, our food supply, to flourish. Bureaucratic control of where you set your thermostat, or if you are allotted enough energy to take two hot showers a day, or what types of food you can purchase is absolutely antithetical to freedom and the life of humans who depend on their reason and judgment to survive.

The EPA is now accepting feedback on this until November 11th. Now is the opportunity to make your voice heard.

There is information on how to submit on the EPA site, or distilled along with example letters and arguments here.

*[EPA]: Environmental Protection Agency *[ANPR]: Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking *[USDA]: United States Department of Agriculture *[CO2]: Carbon Dioxide

I have also worked to improve my business life. I have been classified as a “pusher” by some for my efforts to promote David Allen’s GTD. But I am having some impact, three of my coworkers have purchased Getting Things Done, and to the extent any of his advice is incorporated into their daily routine it will benefit me greatly.

There is a need for good ideas in our culture. It is this intellectual vacuum that allows bad ideas to become so prevalent so quickly. So my advice is to know reality as well as possible and then be vocal in your judgment of the works and ideas of man. “Judge, and prepare to be judged.”

*[LTEs]: Letters To the Editor *[GTD]: Getting Things Done

When I first watched a trailer the setting struck me as terrible. I saw a barren earth populated only by one robot and trash and thought, “Okay so the environmentalist movement has taken over Pixar, and it is an agitprop film that is anti-man.” I had trouble reconciling this view with all of my other experience with Pixar, so based on their reputation of excellence I looked into it a little more. I found I was still annoyed by the background, but the WALL•E character and the excellent animation and sound effects that showed through in a handful of trailers, along with the fact that the negative points seemed to be secondary and not part of the main plot I decided to go ahead and check it out.

Allison was very excited leading up to July 6th, when we chose to go see it. We watched the trailers a few times to hype it up a bit and she couldn’t wait to go see this big screen. I think she also really liked the idea of going out with both Mommy and Daddy and leaving her younger sister with Mom-mom. Once we got there she was very interested in the theater experience including the lighted walkways, the seat and especially the popcorn. Once the popcorn was finished the film held her attention pretty well despite the fact that the storyline was a bit complex for a 3 and 1/2 year old. She stood at the rail for about 40 minutes during the show, and only had her interest waver slightly. We have talked about the film a few times since going and I have been able to clarify the whys and whatfors of specific points for her (1). I was satisfied with the wait and the choice we made of when to take her.

As for me, once I got a glimpse of “Buy N Large” and saw the were to *blame* for the wreckage of Earth, I was very annoyed. And then I got a look at the big fat humans that were too stupid and lazy to take care of their bodies but were able to create space cities which can transport thousands of people in ultimate comfort. They can create robots that are very sophisticated and can carry out complex tasks but can’t figure out how to dispose of waste properly or grow a plant. I was more than annoyed. However, I was able to just block out these parts that I disagreed with as I intended to go author a scathing review which exposed Pixar for the irrational capitalism haters that they were. As I was enjoying watching a film with Allison I tried to enjoy the story as well.

I found the plot compelling the characters likable and excellently done. I liked the story despite the obvious background flaws. I left it feeling very annoyed at the contradictions in the film. On one hand man can create wonders and can rise up and act heroically, but on the other hand they were unable to walk or not cover every square foot of the planet with 5 feet deep of trash.

So in trying to find the essential flaw in the film, the main root of the insanity, I kept running into the fact that I liked it and it had many good points. I couldn’t reconcile the flaws with the strengths. It wasn’t until I happened across a review by Jennifer Snow that she pointed out my problem. I was trying to judge the work by non-essentials, by the background, by the fact that it was set in a man made trash heap.

Upon understanding this I relived the experience in my head and saw all the heroic acts by WALL•E as he identified his goals and gave everything he could to achieve them. I saw the other robots that gained consciousness and worked and fought to gain their values, and the parallel to the humans on the ship that gained consciousness when WALL•E crossed their paths and woke them up. I saw the contrast of the actions by the “broken” reject robots compared to the mindless dogmatic robots like the autopilot. I saw the stylistic way the robots were made more real with visual detail than the cartoonish humans by the artists. I saw how the background and how it got that way wasn’t the focus, but just where the action happened to take place.

It was after this realization it was possible to write down my thoughts. There was no overt contradiction, I just needed to check my premises. I went there looking for flaws and I sure found them. But if my focus is on flaws then what good can I find or offer? While I would have preferred a different back story, the heroic journey by WALL•E and all of the people and other robots in the movie is well done and is definitely worth seeing.

1. Why? and What for? are just about my favorite questions that my kids ask. It certainly can be tedious at times and I will often challenge them to come up with their own reasons behind things. But I think the asking of these questions might be the most important developmental milestone for a child.

Previously Logical Disconnect served as a diary of rants and various diatribes of no particular purpose and with no cohesive theme. Often it had, as most blogs, come off as complaints and sometimes information that was too personal to be of much use to anyone even those who know me. Primarily it was a personal outlet for unformed notions I wanted to share but with no one in particular.

In some sense the personal nature will continue, however, I have recently decided to use the writing here as a means to further my study of Objectivism.

My plan is to use it to write in order to learn. It became explicit to me when listening to Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s lecture series The Philosophy of Education that writing is a tremendously valuable cognitive tool. It forces you to slow down your thought process and make well reasoned arguments. If you don’t want the concrete, the writing, to be utter nonsense then you must understand and mentally organize the subject. And by doing this it requires you to integrate the concepts, you wish to write about, into your own hierarchy of knowledge. To really understand the ideas in order to convey them. This is to be part of my defense against any kind of dogmatism or other irrationality in my study of philosophy.

This is analogous to the “trick” I used in college to give focus to study. When it became generally well known that I was doing well, I was often asked for help by other students in my classes. By agreeing to help others I was required to understand the material well enough to convey it to them. And if you have ever tried to teach, especially someone who is honestly seeking to learn, you can’t fake this understanding. After spending time teaching the concepts to others, my understanding of the material was unshakable. This activity greatly focused my effort and diminished my need for additional independent study.

By making the writing public I could be subject to criticism or counterarguments which may help me refine my ideas. It will provide additional context to those I have been having frequent philosophic discussions with recently. And will also further my wife’s growing understanding that she has chosen a very unique individual to share life with.

I also plan to use the writing here as a tool for introspection and as a secondary value I would like my children to be able to have this as a concrete reference for knowing about their Father. I know reading a copy of a single letter I discovered, which my father wrote years ago at work[1] gave me a different and unexpected perspective and even greater admiration for him.

Yes this is a very selfish motive and personal collection of articles. I intend to derive great value from writing them.

1. Yes letter, not email. I said years ago.

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Kevin McAllister
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Kevin McAllister
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