The key issue that comes up again and again to bite me when I get lazy about todo items is one discussed at some length into GTD, and with good reason: telling the difference between a todo item and a project. In theory, it’s simple. A todo item is, well, one thing. A project is multiple things. (And furthermore, it’s not necessarily just a single list of things. It’s a graph. Most often it’s a DAG. Anyway.)

In practice, though, it can be pretty deceptive. Let me give you today’s example. I dropped by the accountant’s office to pick up my copy of my tax return, including an authorization form my wife and I need to sign and give back so that I can actually get my taxes filed. I made a point to somehow not forget this on the way back to my office and dutifully added a todo item for doing that to my todo management on Hiveminder. All’s well and good, right? No? Did you catch my mistake? It took me a while to notice it myself.

Simple enough: that’s not one item. It’s two. (More, conceivably, but for my purposes it’s at least two.) First we have to sign the form. Then I have to return it. What makes this separation critical is that they can’t be done in the same contexts; signing the paper is something that is in practice going to have to get done at home, since we both have to sign it. (In fact, this is another place that could be broken into two items — me signing it and her signing it. This is what I mean by not a simple list — those two items are independent. But taking the form back depends on them both.) But I can’t take the form back at home. I have to do so while out during the day.

A small thing, perhaps, but it’s mistakes like these that can lead to todo items that just sit and rot because they always appear to be out of context or too big to do right now or whatever. One of the things I like about Hiveminder is the ability to put todo items into a dependency graph like I’ve been hinting at — I’ll never see the item “take the form back” until I’ve checked off the item “sign it.” No reason for me to look at items I can’t do. A related feature is the ability to hide todo items until a future date — perhaps because they can’t be started until then, or perhaps, as is often the case, I’ve just decided they aren’t a priority right now compared to other things and I’m deliberately procrasting in a controlled fashion. In fact, I use this feature for a third scenario: when I’m waiting on a response or action on someone else’s part. I hide the item until, say, next Monday, at which point it’ll reappear on my list and I can decide if I need to nudge the appropriate party or whatever. This feature is roughly analogous to the tickler folders in GTD, but much less embarrassingly named.

Anyway, my point here is not necessarily to plug Hiveminder, although I do find it exceedingly well thought out for the above reasons and a few more. My real point is this: if you are overwhelmed by your todo items, it may be because your list is actually full of projects. You can’t do a project. You can only do what GTD calls the Next Action (although, as I say, in reality there may be more than one per project.) And if you’re staring all the time at all the things you can’t reasonably do right now, you’re only making yourself feel more overwhelmed. People look at me aghast when I say that I’m looking at my todo list and it has three items. Don’t be confused; there are many more than that — I’m just not looking at them.

Something to consider if you’re a fellow listmaker, or thing you might need to be.

R

Much of the debate is technical, if you will, but I think there are some larger considerations that make a lot of the drama — let’s face it, all of the drama — unnecessary. So here’s what I said over in the livejournal of part-time author Haddayr Copley-Woods, while fervently agreeing with her, distilled into something that makes sense on its own.

You probably know what I look like. If you don’t, you aren’t trying very hard, as my photo appears on my Livejournal, my Facebook, and the About page of this blog. My appearance has caused some speculation, including internally, all my life, about what ethnic backgrounds might be included in my family tree. My vain genealogical investigations haven’t come up with anything except an Irish branch (and very like an English one.) But you know, whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Because I am WHITE, baby, WHITE. There’s no question about it. With all the upsides, with all the occasional embarrassment of having those upsides, and yes, with all the downsides such as exist. When I check a checkbox, I check white. (Or Caucasian. You know what I mean.) It may turn out that I’m X% Latino (as some have suggested), but I don’t know the first thing about the Latino experience. I may be Y% Native American (as some have suggested), but I don’t know anything about the Native American experience. Maybe I’m a little bit Semitic, maybe I’m a little bit black, maybe something else, but it doesn’t matter, because what I know is what it’s like to be a white man in the United States of America. That doesn’t make me proud. It doesn’t make me ashamed. It doesn’t make me guilty nor does it make me defensive. It just is what it is, man. Why is that so tough?

Here’s a couple of lessons it seems to me that some of my white brothers, and probably sisters, to an extent, need to absorb: Know who you are. Live with it. Don’t use it as an excuse to jerk other people around. And know that not everybody is going to approve of everything we do and we are neither entitled to that nor should we go out of our minds over it. Everybody else is used to that; only privilege ever insists on being loved and approved of by everyone.

Thanks to those who I could name and those I couldn’t whose comments and observations over years and years have helped form these imperfect ideas. And to those currently throwing hissy fits because someone didn’t like something they said, wrote, or did: I worry that you are going to have trouble in anything you do, the moreso in writing and publication, a vocation where you put more of yourself out there than almost any other I can think of. Please, learn to be comfortable in your own skin, learn to be comfortable with others being in theirs, and stop thinking that the world revolves around you and your comfort level. Do your thing. Let the rest sort itself out.

Yours,

R

Okay, I realize some number of you don’t know from social mudding, or any other mudding, so here’s a brief description before I list out my points. Muds were and are, in general, text-based multi-user games where people can both interact and, sometimes, do other things. What things vary. Think of them as the grandparents of MMORPGs and you’re not entirely far off; social muds, of course, didn’t really have the roleplaying much less the combat and so are, I guess, the grandparents of Second Life. That’s something of an ugly thought. Which doesn’t make it inaccurate.

Anyway, the analogy will, I hope, become clear as I describe DinoMUSH, which is what essentially replaced the last of my own muds many years ago. It has evolved a certain way of doing things, and I’m going to ignore the trivia (like humorous abuse of your friends and acquaintances) that don’t relate to what I’m getting at, and focus on the routine that does.

When I log into DinoMUSH and enter the “hangout” I have done the equivalent of pulled up a social networking site: Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, whatever. I’ve gone where the communication is. I’m now in the thick of it and as people say things I will see each new item. Clear enough so far, hopefully.

Now, the first thing I do is check the private message system (a “robot” named Xandra, but never mind that) for new messages. And indeed, ideally this should be the first thing I see on a social networking site. And yet it almost never is; I’ve entirely overlooked the little number count for new messages on Facebook, Twitter likewise shunts it off to the side, and Livejournal doesn’t bloody tell you at all if you go straight to your Friends page as many do (and this is why I don’t.) All three rely on email to notify you of the private messages, which may or may not make sense and I’m willing to hear arguments either way. On the one hand, I don’t want these sites in my email, but on the other hand, it does seem reasonable to notify me ASAP about private messages. Still, if someone wants to get to me before I check the social site, why not just email me in the first place?

Next thing, I check the MRD, which stands for something like Magic Recording Device. It’s basically just a logger; I check it and it shows me the last several lines (10, by default, I think) and I know what’s generally going on right now. Notice that I don’t have it show me, say, all the lines since the last time I was logged in. And yet that’s often how we use social networking, I think — try to follow it all, going back page after page after page. If I need something farther back for context, I’ll search for in the MRD. Searching for specific content on many social networking sites is terrible, and frankly, they should be embarrassed about it. It needs to be fixed.

If I stay idle for too long, perhaps while eating lunch, a lot of output may stack up waiting for me to read it. (My client I use to mud has a built in paging function so it doesn’t all scroll by.) Frankly, I don’t want to read it. I use the client’s ability to skip past it all, and start with just what’s still on my screen. Once again, why would I do differently with social networking — say, Twitter, for example? No need to feel obliged to catch up the 38 tweets that went by while I was busy. Just check the current list and let it flow from there.

This analogy feels liberating, at least if I choose to apply it. In addition the above, there are ideas like “gagging” content I don’t want to see, “highlighting” content I particularly want to see, and so on. One theme that runs throughout is not sweating it if I don’t see everything. It’s okay. No lives depend on seeing every tweet, every facebook status update, every livejournal post. They’re just there for some communication — but not too much communication.

Mudding. It’s the way of the future, I tell you.

R

You see, I am one of the earliest adopters of TiVo. I won one of their first model in a sort of essay contest promotion they did and I’ve had one ever since — probably on my fifth or sixth now, I honestly forget. (Not all broken down, there were various reasons, upgrades, that sort of thing.) But really, TiVo seems to me to be about done, at least for the tech edge folks. Charging $13 per month after charging hundreds of dollars for the box and then you want to find new ways to stuff ads in? Never mind the way they treat the Series 2 folks deliberately poorly to encourage springing for yet another model. Nah. It was one thing when I was a 500 channels sort, but nowadays I don’t even have extended cable — just the local channels via an inexpensive analog cable package because I haven’t gotten around to getting a huge whacking OTA antenna that I’d need to get TV stations from 60 miles away. Yet.

So I spent part of the evening contemplating (again) building my own using MythTV or something like that. I have a spare machine right now, even, not anything very new to be sure but probably up to the job under the right circumstances and with the right hardware. But it just started to look like more and more hassle and uncertainty and honestly, given how inclined I am to just watch something on Hulu or Netflix it later or whatever, I lost interest. But that reminded me of Boxee.

In brief, Boxee’s sort of the opposite thing — it’s for showing streaming video on your TV. It can do Hulu, Comedy Central, CBS, YouTube, a bazillion other things I’m not thinking of, stuff from your shared drives, and so on. Boxee’s in alpha, sure, but plenty of people using it, and this month they started letting anyone in on it, not just the private signed up folks. So I figured it was time to give it a shot. All I’d need for the machine in question is a wifi card (I had to swipe the one it used to have for something else) and a hard drive as the one that’s in it is dead, which is why it’s unused right now. Then I realized I also need a monitor. (And a keyboard and mouse, but I probably can scare those up, plus they’re dirt cheap.) I started looking at solutions for hooking it to the TV in the bedroom, which seemed nice, but that started seeming kind of awful, too. (It becomes easy when we shell out $500 for an HDTV, which I guess we eventually will, but you know, this is just an experiment, for crying out loud.)

Now, at this point I should mention Boxee runs on really two platforms: Ubuntu Linux and Apple’s OS X. (The latter includes the AppleTV unit, which is interesting indeed, although it’s missing a few things like the Netflix streaming, as it’s not powerful enough. Of course, the Linux port is also missing the Netflix streaming for other reasons, so…) While they’re working on a Windows version, you, well, can’t have it right now. So I remember that I was thinking of trying Ubuntu on my laptop anyway, although with my move to Chrome as a browser I’m losing enthusiasm for that. Still, there are several ways to run Ubuntu without wiping out Windows, so why not? Well, the answer to that turns out to be: because the chipset my Dell Inspiron B130’s wireless uses is a known troublemaker where Ubuntu is concerned, so it doesn’t work out of the box. This can be sorted out if you use a wired connection for a while; if only I had one available…

So, it’s basically that kind of night. Lots of ideas. None of them panned out. I’m still keen to give Boxee a twirl and see if it matches up with my idea of the future of watching television. I’m just not sure what’s going to be the soft approach to trying it out right now.

Maybe I should just read a book instead.

R

Mr. Reardon, aka Cole Adams, is a writer with some publications in his portfolio, which would seemingly be to his credit. Sadly, he appears to be fairly sensitive about said publications, as he chose to respond to an off-hand mention by an anthology editor discussing what stories from another anthology he would and would not use by, well, publically encouraging the editor in question to commit suicide, then again to kill his cat while commiting suicide, and eventually allegedly threatening said editor’s life.

So, bad form, that, I think we could all agree.

What is it about the Internet that brings this stuff out? Gabe of Penny Arcade has a theory which I will paraphrase in order to keep the language strictly family friendly. We’ll call it the Greater Internet Idiot Theory, stated as a formula: NORMAL PERSON + ANONYMITY + AUDIENCE = TOTAL IDIOT. (If you want to read the original, and you’ve been warned about the language, Google on “greater internet theory” and you’ll find it.) And what provides anonymity along with audience like Internet access?

While Gabe was making a specific reference to online gaming, there’s clearly ample evidence that this goes for blogging and other online communication. One of the reasons I have all but abandoned anonymity online personally is to keep myself honest about this sort of thing, hoping that perhaps by removing ANONYMITY from the above equation I can stave off, well, TOTAL IDIOCY. What makes Mr. Reardon special is that, when called out for his behavior, he dropped all vestiges of anonymity as well, but only plunged further into the TOTAL IDIOCY. Arguably this is evidence that NORMAL PERSON was never in the equation in the first place, yes?

Anyway. The moral of today’s story is “don’t do this,” or even “don’t do this in particular if you want to stay off of editorial blacklists,” or even “don’t do this if you don’t want Google hits on your name to all become articles about how you threatened an editor’s life” — a wonderful irony, since Reardon’s actual gripe was, in part, that Google directed people to the original offhand editor’s comment. Irony, it’s a wonderful thing.

I hesitate to give people who behave in an undeserving way the notoriety that speaking about them provides (what little-to-none would come from me speaking about someone, anyway), but this kind of thing deserves the light of day on it. I am a strong proponent of online privacy and, if one desires, anonymity, but an old guy in a comic once told me that with great power comes great responsibility. And the Internet has given us all great power to communicate. Use it well.

R

Listening to NPR on the way back from lunch, I heard a discussion of the new Congress working to pass SCHIP’s extension, now that it won’t be vetoed straightaway despite having sweeping bipartisan support. This new opportunity came with, well, more opportunities, in this case for change to the bill by Congressional Democrats who no longer need any help passing this thing, since the incoming President will, as I say, sign it. This has Congressional Republicans miffed, partly, I’m sure, because they’re feeling a little irrelevant, but that’s not what interested me so much as one specific complaint.

Apparently the temporary extension included some rules essentially requiring applicants for the Medicare arm of things (for their kids, that being what the bill’s about) to present a bunch of original documentation establishing their citizenship, obviously to make sure illegal immigrants don’t get in on the deal. Whether or not you think that’s a priority, you might be willing to accept that a logical thing to do about it would, in fact, be to require such documentation.

But you would be wrong.

It turns out that independent studies have observed that these rules haven’t done a whole lot about illegal immigrants coming out to get some health coverage (however much there ever may have been in the first place), but it’s done a heck of a lot about legitimate applicants. Specifically, it’s caused them to not get the benefits, for one reason or another. So instead of presumably helping legal citizens by keeping the illegals out of their pie, it’s, well, No Pie For You.

This is how things can work in the real world. Just because something is simple and obvious doesn’t mean it actually works, and worse, it doesn’t mean that the Law of Unintended Consequences won’t bite you hard. Has DRM prevented music piracy? Not a whit, but it HAS inconvenienced a bunch of actual paying customers. Same story for any copy protection ever, really. There are plenty of independent studies that show abstinence-only education areas have an increased incidence of teen pregnancy, as it appears to not only fail to convince a significant fraction of teenagers to save it for marriage but also has the side effect of making sure that when they do fail to save it, they don’t know what to do to be safe about it.

This effect is something we should take seriously, and should insist our representatives in government (leaders, feh) should take seriously. Does drug prohibition actually work? (Alcohol prohibition sure didn’t.) Would firearm bans? Would banning abortion? What are, or might be, the unintended side effects of such policies? Have I given you enough examples on either side of the aisle to convince you this isn’t a partisan matter, but a greater one of being rational regardless of your purpose?

You may hear a lot about how you should trust your gut, but for crying out loud, go with what Ronald Reagan once said: Trust, but verify. Your gut tends to go with the obvious solution. And that just might be the totally wrong one.

Yours rationally,
R

I like rhythm games. I like them quite a bit. I own three different Dance Dance Revolution games, two Karaoke Revolution, six Guitar Hero and, let’s see, five Rock Band, now, all told. I’ll list them at the bottom so as not to get off track. Anyway, I get to hear a lot from otherwise entirely sensible people about how dumb games like Guitar Hero are, as people play them and think they’re having a great time but of course it’s not really like a real guitar and they aren’t learning to really play guitar, so it’s all very futile.

Well, I’m sorry, but that’s a pretty dumb thing to say.

Seriously, let’s think this through. Do I expect Left4Dead to train me to fire a shotgun at zombies? Did Wing Commander III prepare me for battling the Kilrathi in space? (Sorry, dated reference, but I’m old.) How about Diablo II, is that a training simulation to churn out barbarians to battle super-powerful demons? Why the heck should we expect these games to be anything more than what they purport to be: games?

As it happens, there are a few side benefits to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, I think, for an aspiring musician: drumming on Rock Band and the new Guitar Hero World Tour has at least a loose connection to actual drumming inasmuch as you’re, you know, drumming on surfaces with sticks; the guitar playing isn’t the worst hand exercise I’ve ever done for being able to reach and press with my pinky and in general stretch to hit chords; and of course, they are rhythm games, so you might suppose that they help you with, well, rhythm. But really, in the end they are games. Very fun games. In the case of the newer band-style games, pretty good party games. Why demand more of them?

Having said that, now the boring bits, such as what I’m up to: I decided I’d take a guitar tour of all of my guitar-controller games, in some arbitrary order, all non-bonus songs, probably. Having established to my bemusement that not only Easy but also Medium are simple enough for me that it’s not challenging (I five-starred all of Guitar Hero Aerosmith on the first try for every song), I’m doing so in Hard mode. This may actually explain a lot of why I like them so much: I never play games on hard difficulty. Or medium difficulty. Or any difficulty above the most trivial they’ll give me, because frankly I’m not very good at most video games. I’m too slow for twitch and I’m too impatient for strategy or complex puzzles. I just want to duck in and have a laugh. Boom Blox for the Wii is good for this, as a side note, but it kills my elbow, sadly. Back to Guitar Hero and its ilk — I’m actually good enough at them to do this. (And all it took me was years of band and self-taught music, if you choose to believe that helps any.)

Finally, here’s that boring list. All, in my case, are Playstation 2 versions:
Guitar Hero
Guitar Hero 2
Guitar Hero Rocks the 80s
Guitar Hero 3
Rock Band
Rock Band Track Pack Volume 1
Guitar Hero Aerosmith
Rock Band Track Pack AC/DC Live
Rock Band Track Pack Volume 2
Guitar Hero World Tour
Rock Band 2

I worked out that it’s about 440 songs or thereabouts, which is… quite a few. (Actually, there are some redundancies, but never mind.) Should give me quite a bit of entertainment as I try to rock my way through.

R

P.S. As for my actual guitar, ThinkGeek has a gadget I’m looking at really hard: the amPlug VOX Mini Guitar Amp, which is a little module that plugs into your pickup, then you plug in your headphones, and you’re good to go, complete with processing that sounds like one of a few different amp setups. It also has an auxiliary in so you can mix in whatever it is you want to rock along with. Yes, I do have a small amp, but this would be awfully portable and maybe encourage me to actually try playing with music of choice. Pull up some tablature on a laptop screen, maybe…

Tomorrow I will try to be up early enough to have a (very) low carb breakfast with some solid food to it, and perhaps go back to this until dinnertime.  Frankly, that might not be a bad daily plan in general; lunchtime is when I often eat the worst, spend ridiculous money doing so, and use up a bunch of time away from the office that could be spent in the gym and the coffee shop. (Yes, that costs money, too, but far less than lunch and they have free wifi while I drink my bottomless coffee.  Panera — I can’t eat their food, but I still like their establishment.)

Tomorrow, though, cautious, incremental changes.  My blood glucose level at this moment (I stopped writing this to check it) reads as a perfect — absolutely perfect — 83 mg/dL.  I’d like to see a lot more of that.

Oh, if you’re interested in what the Bernstein folks call the WOE (I always find that an unfortunate acronym, myself) — the Way of Eating (as opposed to dieting) — done dead right in photo diary form, do check out Sara’s blog for just that purpose.  She has the enthusiasm and discipline of the newly converted, to be sure, but hopefully she’ll stick with it and be an excellent model for diabetics and “prediabetics” (there’s really no difference, and Sara explains how that is) alike. I know I’ve been following it and asking myself why I got so far off track.


Good eating,

R

Fasting is, according to Wikipedia, “primarily the act of willingly abstaining from some or all food, drink, or both, for a period of time. A fast may be total or partial concerning that from which one fasts, and may be prolonged or intermittent as to the period of fasting. Fasting practices may preclude sexual activity as well as food, in addition to refraining from eating certain types or groups of foods; for example, one might refrain from eating meat. A complete fast in its traditional definition is abstinence of all food and liquids except for water.”  We’ll go with that.  It may be religious (or at least spiritual), or it may not.  In my current case, it depends on what you consider spiritual.  Let me go ahead and address the question of what I’m up to.

The first point is to give my system some time to recover from whatever I’ve been beating it up with.  This seems fairly obvious, perhaps, but actually there’s some fairly interesting recent research behind the notion that goes farther than you might suppose.  The general idea is that eating, and in particular eating more than is strictly necessary, can over the long term lead to inflammation and oxidative stress and, well, you’d rather not have those, as they lead to things like the deterioration we associate with age.  Let me interject now that I am not a scientist and I am not pretending to be one; what you get here is what little I’ve been able to make sense of myself.  Where was I?  Right, eating more than one needs, and in particular of what we pass off as food, tough on the system.  (I’m diabetic, so a lot more of it is a lot tougher on me, but even so.)  And so we get the notion of not eating — or fasting — to recover from those stressors. There are quite a number of people keen on intermittent fasting, wherein they do something along the lines of eat every other day, or eat only during a five-hour period each day, or whatever.  I have toyed with it a bit myself but it’s never stuck, and I’m not specifically trying to do it now.  I’m just trying to give my body a breather.

The second point is a little more ethereal, perhaps; it is very important that I control my eating, instead of letting my eating control me.  Very, very important.  Life or death important. One way to exert control over eating, or so it seems to me, is to decline to do it. If I can not eat, then that’s the first step to eating exactly as I must, not however the urge strikes me. It is by no means an easy move from one to the other, but it’s a start.  So that’s also on my mind — doing a little mind over matter, if you will.

So, am I going without food and drink?  No.  For one thing, you can only go without drink for a relatively short period. I recall hearing once the rule of threes — three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food. Sounds overly general, but still, one gets the point. I don’t know that I’m going to be trying to do this for a few days straight, but no sense taking chances. Also, I think hydration is pretty important. (Not the ridiculous half gallon of water a day or whatever, but, you know, some.) And frankly, the point here is not austerity. So beverages that don’t have significant calories (and certainly no sugar, but that probably goes without saying) are in. Diet Coke (even mine with Splenda) is, however, out, because it contains, well, things I don’t even know from. The one thing with noteworthy calories I will be having for the duration is whey protein drinks, probably but not necessarily at mealtimes. They’re about 120 calories, as I recall, but it’s very nearly all protein, so that the body is not entirely without fuel. If you like, you might consider it serious calorie restriction. Whatever.

Enjoying food (particularly if it’s actually, you know, food) within the boundaries of good sense is a fine thing. Being ruled by food, or by any other desire, really, is not. Not physically, not emotionally, and not, I think, morally. (And not religiously, for that matter.)

So. Enjoy your weekend, and I plan to enjoy mine. Just not facedown in food.

R

Ignoring the issues of Livejournal, why’s that?  I’m hoping it’ll get me back in more of an essay mode and less of a, well, twitter mode (after all, I already USE twitter.)  Writing things about things.  Doesn’t mean it’ll be all serious and formal.  Just, perhaps, a little less conversational.  For Livejournal addicts, that sounds like a bad thing, perhaps, but I’m about conversed out on the Internet, between the semi-private social mud group that I’ve been with for, eh, coming up on 20 years (phew), twitter, Facebook, IM, email… well.  Probably the real indicator is that comments are turned off on the blog.

That said, this blog is being mirrored to Livejournal and imported into Facebook; I’ll see comments in either place, so have at it if you feel the urge.  Or, you know, twitter.  Or email.  Or IM…

More about something else soon, hopefully.  Tired of talking about it and ready to just do it.

R

P.S. Apologies, of course, for all the initial bumps in the road there’s bound to be.  I’ll sort it out eventually, I’m sure.