A friend sent me this info… today… on the day it was posted at Wordsmith.org.

perendinate

PRONUNCIATION:
(puh-REN-di-nayt)

Meaning:

verb tr. : To put off until the day after tomorrow.
verb intr.: To stay at a college for an extended time.

(Personally, I like that the day after tomorrow and being at college too long are somehow related!)

I’d like to think that this is not necessarily a bad thing… the putting off part, not the college part.  If I just don’t get around to something to day for some “whatever” reason, then I feel like a slug.

HOWEVER, if I decide that I can’t do it today, and tomorrow won’t work either, then I can perendinate on purpose. I can give myself a slight break from feeling guilty for putting the thing off and make a real plan to do it the day after.

The trick is to actually pat myself on the back for making the decision and then doing the thing.

We can hope, right?

Wanna lose weight? Couldn’t there just be one food you could eat that would fix it all? Buy a car? Some simple calculation to make the right decision?

A couple of years ago (actually way back in 1980) Dale Dauten wrote a book called Quitting, Knowing When to Leave…a job, a marriage, or any other unhappy spot you’re in.

I loved the simple process of evaluating the possibility of really being satisfied with a decision to quit something.

Basically he says, first you become aware that a decision must be made. Then you determine and weight the possibilities for the future, whether the decision is really in your own best interest and how certain you are about the necessity of the decision.

I loved the book!

And then this morning I read over at ScientificBlogging.com an article by Hank Campbell, Garth Sundem Makes Geeks Cool(er) Again.  The post at least starts out with a reference to Geek Logik: 50 Foolproof Equations for Everyday Life by Garth Sundam. Hank suggests it’s:

a way to quantify every important decision you may have wanted to make, from how many drinks at the company picnic you should have to how much sports you should watch today. The beauty of it was that by abdicating the decision you also abdicated responsibility – or so you thought. ‘Should I hit on that girl?’ calculations combined with errors in a ‘How many beers should I have?’ calculation probably took you to a bad place if you are married and no amount of pointing to his book was going to help.

The value of using equations to solve life’s dilemmas was verified time and again…

Check out the results of four geeks in a bar in the 5:44 minute video  here.

But in the end, it seems that making the right decision has less to do with the math and more to do with the evaluation that yields the confidence to move forward.

And really that cofidence in the choice is most important.

But today IEEE Spectrum reported from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the phone to make Dick Tracy proud!

LG has a prototype for a wristwatch phone! If Dick Tracy started using a phone on his wrist in the 30s and it took 70 years to become reality… well then, does that mean we’ll have flying cars in 2080?

Bet I won’t live to see it. But maybe–if i HAD grandchildren…. which I am NOT pining for–maybe I could promise THEM flying cars. Then they could be disappointed in me long after I’m gone.

What a way to start a day.

… Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions-but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.

“A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren’t based on conscious reasoning,” says Pouget. “You don’t consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with.”

I knew it! Don’t work so hard… Just freakin’ decide, already!

Further Pouget says:

If we had to wait until we’re 99 percent sure before we make a decision…then we would waste time accumulating data unnecessarily. If we only required a 51 percent certainty, then we might reach a decision before enough data has been collected.

Try it.  See what it feels like.

As long as no babies will die, you can always change your mind.

Check out my other articles on deciding.

Our old TV is starting to make noises like it might be time to replace it. So we’re just trying to determine SIZE TV will fit in the a nice-piece-of-furniture we bought a couple years ago to house the TV and all those other wires and components.

I know how big the box is. I know a TV should fit in there. We have one in there now.  But if the new TV is to be a different size–and this HD thing makes them ALL different sizes–then what is the largest size I can get?

WHY is this so freakin’ hard?

The reviews of the TV’s online tell me all kinds of crap that WOULD matter IF it fit in the box. But it is of NO value if it doesn’t fit in the box.

My husband explains to me that “All TVs are measured on the diagonal of the screen.”

Yea? Great but will that fit in my nice-piece-of-furniture?

Well, you have to do “big math.” You can’t just consider the aspect of 16:9 and figure 32 is to 19 as x is to 9    … blah blah blah. It requires square roots and squares.

I am a math major.  I COULD figure this out if I wanted to … but really, all I want is some TV manufacturer, or more likely another nice person, to make it clear that a 32″ screen comes on a TV that is this basically wide and this high. Therefore, I can judge whether or not it will, or will not,  fit in my nice-piece-of-furniture. (P.S. I know that no matter how wide they say the screen is, it will still not be as wide as the whole TV.  I lived in the 50s and 60s with console TVs that were as wide as trucks and that was a good thing!)

If Google will convert dollars to euros why can’t it as easily tell me how big the screen is in normal person numbers?  Then I can estimate if the case on the screen will fit in my nice-piece-of-furniture!

Oh, Wait! Google knows everything!

SO I searched (finally) on 16:9 calculator and Google returned up this great site where you can put in the diagonal TV size in inches, push a button and it gives you the screen size in width and height and compares it to a similar sized old style 4:3 ratio TV.

You can check it out for your house here: www.nicetaco.com/tv.aspx#calculator (Thank you, thank you nicetaco.com)

Now I have learned I’m gonna need a new TV AND  a new nice-piece-of-furniture.

Yippee?

This morning I stumbled upon this article “How to Fail: 25 Secrets Learned Though Failure”  over at UnstructuredAdventures.com

It’s an interesting list of learning opportunities. But I was particularly attracted to this one:

2. Postpone hard decisions until you have to make hard trade-offs.
Instead: Make decisions earlier to create options and build flexibility.

Make decisions before you think you need to. You’re probably too late if you come to the point where you realize you have to make a choice between hard trade-offs. By waiting to make a decision you’ve created trade-offs instead of options. Postponing decisions in the attempt to optimize your results is probably a waste of your resources in other ways.

The longer you wait to make a decision… well, probably some of your options are gone. So your choices are automatically narrowed down. Sometimes that’s not a bad way to make a decision , especially if it’s not a big one. Show up at the movie theater at 7:30 and watch what ever starts next.  No real decision. Can you think of stuff you decide that way?

But what about when it does matter: either for business or fun?

Can’t decide on seeing Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band in Baltimore or David Bromberg in Reading?  Wait long enough and you’ll miss the first concert. The decision is made.  Wait a little longer and you don’t have to decide at all.  The decision is made for you.

Sure, that’s easy.  But do you get what you want out of it? Or is it just easy?  Was it fun? Or just easy?

And may I just say that I did NOT wait to buy my tickets to either show!

Rev. Peyton was a nonstop rush of music and stage presence. The albums are great but in person, they’re even better.  Breezy could be my new measure of stage presence. On his MySpace page one review says  Rev Peyton sounds like:

“Robert Johnson on crack… they get one hell of a sound out of an acoustic guitar, washboard, and snare drum. It’s easy to see why they are big.”  according to Steve Hammer, in Nuvo Newsweekly

However, I probably did not need to buy my tickets two weeks in advance. The concert was, after all, on a Tuesday night and featured a rather obsure group. But I did not miss it!~

Tressa Prisbrey saw a structure at Knott’s Berry Farm and decided to try the construction method out for herself.   My own family visited KBF when I was in the 6th grade. and I did not see this! Anyway, Tressa used bottles… hundreds of thousands of bottles and concrete.  According to Reveries:

She collected most of her materials from the local dump, although her hard-drinking husband drained enough beer bottles to create an entire structure made of his empties alone. Her intent was to shame him but apparently this didn’t work.

Check out the rest of her story here.

And then, just for fun, check out the rest of THAT site. I found MORE of those bottle houses here.

One of my all time favorite movies is Why Man Creates released in 1968 by Saul and Elaine Bass. Is it animation, comedy, history or all of the above? The segment, The Edifice, is a particular favorite. Checkit out here.

This morning I stumbled on a funny little video chronicling  (less accurately) the development of electronic equipment,  technology and the internet from 1951 up to the present day.  Or sort of.

Anyway I liked it.. and when something  reminds me of my favorite things it’s a good way to start the day.

Check it out over on Geeks Are Sexy here.

Time management and prioritizing are two issues that many of my clients share. I’ve got two tips that might help:

Say I’ve got five things ToDo on my list. Yea, I can pick the most important one… but the others sometimes mush together. Here’s a little application that helps you sort through which of the five things on your list really IS the most important. You list the five things and then choose which one is more important a given “other one.” In the end, it spits out your ordered list. Check it out at the Idea-Sandbox.com

The other idea is about looking with a different perspective at managing your work schedule.

Traditionally, people advise blocking out time each day for the big project. “My prime work time is from 10 am til 2 pm. So I’ll work on the Johnson report today until it’s finished. I’ll worry about the Fredericks report next.” Or you block all the computer jobs together. It’s a very linear way of approaching tasks. And perhaps it works well for very linear people, which, of course, I am not.

I stumbled on this alternative method of arranging my days: Time Striping.

In time striping you look at a week at a time. I started to write an explanation, but it’s already so clear at lifehack.org. So what’s the point? Check it out here.

People with sleep apnea stop breathing while they sleep. According to SleepApnea.org, it could be hundreds of times during the night.

And your body, not wanting to DIE, wakes up a little to kick start the breathing.  You might not notice that little up-from-sleep place, but your day time performance could suffer.

My dad had apnea, although we didn’t know it back then. I just remember the stories about his snoring and then … stopping… So my mother would kick him to start breathing again.  Didn’t get her the best sleep either!

All kinds of things in life are worse with out sleep.

According to a report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and posted on the website of the National Sleep Foundation,

Less visible consequences of sleep conditions are far more prevalent, and they take a toll on nearly every key indicator of public health: mortality, morbidity, performance, accidents and injuries, functioning and quality of life, family well-being, and health care utilization.

And besides what you’d expect from not enough sleep–stuff like, oh, tiredness,no energy, irritabity and difficutly concentrating–it might also show up in  higher levels of depressed mood, anxiety, behavior problems, alcohol abuse.  And almost all those things might either look like ADHD when it’s not, or make your symptoms of ADHD much worse.

If you sleep with someone, ask if they think you might stop breating in the night.  If you snore, it might be easier to tell, but you might have apnea even if you don’t snore.

Check out the sleepapnea.org for more information. And ask your doctor if it might be a problem for you.