Here's what my most recent book binge looked like. This round is a little light on the fiction and heavier on good intention.

I've been guilty in the past of buying books that sounded like a good idea at the time, and then never reading them. I hope not to make that mistake again by taking a page from Dawn's reading habits and not dwelling too much on a book, not reading it as though there will be a quiz later. There isn't any reason, for example, to read the acknowledgments, or the edition's preface, or even the introduction unless you're really that interested. It isn't necessary to dwell on "filler" content when you come across it, for fear of missing some life changing nugget of knowledge.

I remember when my lung collapsed for the first time. I was in college and missed two or three weeks of classes. Ordinarily I would have simply canceled my classes for that semester. Unfortunately I had just canceled the previous semester of classes due to the drama of moving out of my parent's house and living on my own for the first time. I forget the details, but dropping a second semester of classes would have gotten me kicked out of the honors program or some such thing. So I went to each of my teachers, told them why I'd been out, and asked if I could try to catch up. One of the classes I was taking at the time was Calculus, which brings me to the point of this story. I read the stupid thing like it was a fiction book instead of a reference. (Though I did get end up getting a 'B'.)

Anyway, I'm curious to see if I actually make it through the negotiating book and two grammar books. I think I will though; they're written by the same people that write the Grammar Girl podcast, which I enjoy a lot. --In fact if you listen to podcasts, I can recommend this one to you. It's produced well and very educational. I could do without the sponsor announcement every single episode, especially sine they're rather short, but that's my only complaint.



Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In


Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)


Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing (Quick & Dirty Tips)


Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking


Emotional Intelligence 2.0


What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character


Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose



Darkness at Sethanon

The subject of momentum came up for me a couple times recently. Once was during a very good speech that I had the privilege of attending this weekend. And the second was while listening to a Lenswork podcast titled "The Value of Momentum". This particular Lenswork podcast is anecdote describing the author's childhood experience with his first car and some very good advice given to him by his father: It's easier to turn the wheel, to change direction, if you're moving forward even a little bit.

Maybe it's a coincidence, or maybe it's a sign. But it's certainly pertinent. Like sailing into a headwind, I've lost most of my momentum.

Just after (I quit) college I had a lot of fun traveling with the Renaissance Festival and then truck driving so that I could see the country. But as that got old, it was soon apparent that I needed a career. And more than that, I wanted to be really good at something. Computers were an obvious choice. The Internet was just becoming very mainstream, IT jobs were increasing in demand, and computers were in my blood. Heck, I started tinkering with programming on a Commodore 64 before I even knew the periodic table. (This particular comparison comes to mind because I actually learned the periodic elements via some educational software on the C-64 two or three years before it was introduced to me in school.)

It took just a couple tries to get my foot in the door with my first IT job. And then as Nik once said I "hit the ground running". I worked during the day, took courses some evenings, tinkered other evenings, and did more work over the weekends. I dedicated my life to learning, and it paid off. "I got good." My salary approximately doubled with each new job I took. And I didn't slow down at all until the dotcom company began to fail and started to burn out.

Really tough jobs are more than just long hours. They're fast paced, involve tough decisions, lots of responsibility, and brutal politics. That was the dotcom company. I've never had a job like that before or since. And I'd say that was probably the highlight of my career. I learned more there, about more things, than any other job. And I had mad momentum.

But as the company started to hit some very serious walls, I finally grew tired. I needed a break. And when they went under I was determined to take a break and not work for few months. That is also when someone first introduced me to EverQuest (EQ), the crack cocaine of video games at the time. (Currently replaced by World of Warcraft.) EverQuest was the kind of game that I might have wished for when I was really young, "Maybe in a hundred years from now they'll have a fantasy world where you can actually go!" The first time I played EQ, I played at least 40 hours straight. I remember there was at least an eight hour period where I didn't eat, drink, or go to the bathroom. I know this because I remember being very surprised when the sun had come up, and then being surprised again when the sun was going down. "Holy crap! We need to order pizza or something!"

These Massively Multiplayer Games (MMOs) were the first of two bad things to happen to me on the heels of my burnout. The second thing was my current job, which landed in my lap thanks to a friend. I was sleeping one afternoon when he called and asked, "What are you doing? Do you have time to talk to my manager?" I was more or less employeed later that afternoon, though it took several weeks for the paperwork to clear. I was tired, but my momentum was still going strong.

There is nothing inherently wrong with my current employer. In fact, there is quite a bit of prestige that comes from working there. But it was too comfortable: I got to work from home. I sometimes had weeks when there was very little to do. (Though those were offset by 60+ hour weeks.) And I no longer had to do anything myself. The job would have been just fine if I'd left for something better in two or three years, improved myself. Instead I stayed. I found myself in a comfy and unlikely position where I didn't have to improve. But like sailing into a headwind, my career was soon stalled. And worse, I haven't found it easy to course correct.

I could write pages and pages about my work situation. I've glossed over lots of details, nuances, and events. The last eight or nine years can't be summed up quite so simply. But those details really aren't important for this entry. In addition to the sailing analogy, I've often said my career is stalled like a whitewater rafter caught in a hole. I'm trapped, and I'm taking in water.

Perhaps though I'm being a little too hard on myself here saying that I have no momentum at all. I've picked up quite a bit of recognition in my new department. I've charted a new course in the company that I think may be fruitful if I can stay focused. And I have hopes of making a quantum leap with an external opportunities eventually. But I want to pick up some personal momentum as well.

I was reading the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman recently and was gobsmacked by how much he accomplished. Plus, in the article I was captivated by a description of him as an eccentric: "He was regarded as an eccentric and free spirit. He was a prankster, juggler, safecracker, proud amateur painter, and bongo player. He liked to pursue a variety of seemingly unrelated interests, such as art, percussion, Maya hieroglyphs, and lock picking." This is a guy that I would have loved to hang around. (Alas! If I only I could have taken physics at Caltech in the 60s instead of, well, not being born yet. I guess I was lazy even back then.) His biography makes me want to do more with my life.

I've been thinking that I want to go back to school for advanced math and to combine that with computer programming. I'd love to do research into artificial life, neural networks, and the like. I'm not sure how to do that in my current situation though. Nobody offers an online degree in mathematics. My current job is far too hectic to try to schedule a mid-day course for a couple days during the week. And actually my current too hectic to much else at all. I haven't even gone out to take pictures recently, or to shoot, and definitely not to exercise. Even my weekends are impacted at the moment. And for what it's worth, I wouldn't be allowed to leave my current position to pursue the new career path I've charted at work either. I'm definitely stuck in that whitewater-like hole.

I was actually hoping get laid off last month; severance packages are still being offered I think and that would allow me to go back to school. I thought about changing my tag line at work to "Choose me! Q1 2010!" But since it seemed unlikely I would get chopped (I can't be easily replaced at the moment), it seemed a garish thing.

Getting a sailboat out of a headwind involves a bit of current and some patience. (--In my limited experience.) And that's definitely how I feel right now. I let my ship stall and now I can't get it angled to pick up the wind. I'm stuck, waiting patiently. Hopefully I'll get turned around eventually to pick up the next wind; at least now I'm paying attention, watching for it.

I have a problem with hobbies and focus. I have too many, and I don't focus well at all. Over the years I've drifted in and out of various interests always promising that this time I'll stick with it. But the problem is I can't bring myself to give up several interests to just focus on a single hobby of choice.

I've tried to of course. At once point I was just going to play chess. And then I was just going to play piano. And then I was going to write every day. Then I was going focus on computer programming. I'm always telling myself that I'm going to exercise: for a while it was yoga and then it was swimming. (And never mind all the "maintenance" things that I should be doing every day like cleaning or organizing!) The bottom line is, I just can't contain my interests.

A few years ago it dawned me: that you can't have a large number of interests and do each one every single day. There aren't enough hours. So I came up with a system. I decided to make a list, which I laminated and used with dry erase marker, with the idea that I would work down the list until everyone was done at least once, and then I'd start it all over again. It didn't matter if it took 3 days or even a week to go down the list; at least I'd be getting to everything on a regular basis. And I would be making forward progress on my goals.

It takes about 10,000 hours or 10 years to get really good at something. That seems like a long time at first glance, but time flies quickly. And when six months, or a year, or a decade, screwing around and not working on something you love, you've done yourself a real disservice.

Peter Norvig wrote a fantastic eassy about this on his site. It focuses on learning to program computers, but the article could apply to anything: "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years". I've copied part of that text here:

Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Malcolm Gladwell reports that a study of students at the Berlin Academy of Music compared the top, middle, and bottom third of the class and asked them how much they had practiced:

"Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practiced roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practicing well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totaled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totaled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours."

So it may be that 10,000 hours, not 10 years, is the magic number. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought it took longer: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa, vita brevis", which is part of the longer quotation "Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile", which in English renders as "Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult." Although in Latin, can mean either art or craft, in the original Greek the word "techne" can only mean "skill", not "art".

Similarly Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner wrote, "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect."

I'm shocked and saddened to realize that it has been about ten years since I resumed piano lessons (with an outstanding teacher no less) only to end those lessons a few years later. I was pleased with my progress and really enjoying myself. But I let life get in the way. I was working at dotcom company burdened by the stresses of the moment. (And I was undisciplined.) But where is that company now? Gone. What were the emergencies of the moment? I can't remember. If only I'd set aside an hour a day to practice and continue my lessons...

Today I couldn't play a single piece on the piano. How nice it would have been to be at least a highly accomplished amateur. My face feels numb just thinking about and writing about this.

Going back to the system I created, it didn't work. The idea of having to cross everything off the list before returning to any particular activity was too rigid. And there was no way to track my efforts over time. Within a year I'd given up on the system as a complete failure.

This week however I have some renewed hope. I stumbled across a site called Joe's Goals that makes this kind of tracking very easy.



The idea and the mechanism are simple. In fact, I suppose you could do something similar with a spreadsheet. But I'm not going to take the time to put together a spreadsheet. And it won't look as nice or be as elegant. And besides, the site is funded with ad revenue (a cheap subscriptions gets rid of the ads), so there is hardly any reason not to use it or at least try it.

Basically you create a list of things you want to track. Then when you've done an item on your list a single click records it for the day. And the feedback you get from recording your activities helps you stay focused on the things that are important to you. (I learned the power of feedback when using the biofeedback lab in college. Information is a powerful tool!)

On my tracker I have a very long list including things like piano, chess, photography, photography editing, stretching, exercise, clearing, and so on. I'm not going to try to do everything on the same day. I might not even do everything on the same week. But when I start to neglect something, it will become apparent.

Of course, this isn't the only way to use the site. You can assign weights to different items. You can assign negative items in addition to positive items. (For example if you're trying to break a habit, I suppose.) And you can track your tasks in various ways to suit your taste:



There is a lot of flexibility here. And the simplicity of the tools makes it very usable.

Time will tell if this system increases my productivity and focus, but I think it will; I'm very excited about it. Just last week in my journal I was writing about the need come up with a new system for tracking goals, especially under the onslaught of my current work schedule. I'm pleasantly surprised that just days later I stumbled across just what I needed. Maybe that's the power of positive thinking? Hmm, maybe there's an app for that too!

Well, I'm exhausted. I just spent four of five hours "hack and slashing" my way through a blog update. A lot of features have been added. For example I created a GoodReads account. I've reestablished a Flickr account for personal photographs that I just want to share with friends or family. I linked back to Twitter; maybe I'll start using that again in fits and starts.

Long story short, I've been a little disappointed not to be writing, and I wanted to bring the blog back to life. I wanted a fresh look too. The result here mostly works I think. Though, I would have rather had someone actually design a logo and custom template for the blog. I'm impatient however, and hesitant to spend too much money on it right now. Instead I bought an image I liked off of iStockphoto and used that with this free template for a fair compromise.

I'm a little worried that I spent too much time on this tonight when I have real work to do. On the other hand, as distractions go, it's a hell of a lot better than surfing the Internet all night.

Well, I don't have an ulcer or tumor or any blockage. The doctor thinks I might have gastroparesis (also called a lazy stomch) because there was still food in my tummy when he did the endoscopy. After 9-10 hours of not eating, there shouldn't have been anything there.

But you know, I don't think I have gastroparesis. As I read about it online, symptoms such as feeling full right away are definitely, definitely not me. For example there is also usually some weight loss which, for better or worse, is not me.

Why then was there still some food/mucus in my stomach? I don't know.

Bu we're going to find out because he ordered a "gastric emptying study". Basically I'll be fed some food containing a "label", something like radioactive eggs with mayonnaise. You may have already had that at Denny's. If you'd also had some some sensitive film handy with which to document your stomach wrestling with said food, you could have done your own gastric emptying study!

(Egg picture borrowed from here and nuclear power plant picture borrowed from here. Great photography on both sites.)

So in a few weeks my stomach will perform a slow motion, gurgly, slightly radioactive race. Then we'll know for sure. I think it's something else, but who knows what.

All I do know is that I think I've had enough health problems for one lifetime, and as soon as I can trade this body in for a new one, I'm there.



Ghost In The Shell Movie Intro Credits

--One can of no-chicken noodle soup, two slices of bread, and a glass of water, which I finished exactly at midnight. Now I get to descend for nine hours into a hypoglycemic, ulcerous burning wonderland of no food.

I should really go to bed now, but I'm not tired. :-/

I'm more worried about not having food until 11am than I am about the EGD, which should be a walk in the park.