tales from the rock

caught the 1986 blockbuster (not really) Lucas tonight.  that’s some pretty good second tier smack from the 80’s man.  most lesser fans will only be able to recall the winona ryder, corey haim, and charlie sheen appearances, but the hardcore also know this is one of the great jeremy piven’s first roles.  that guy has about 80 roles in between ’spike’ and the current ari gold, and let me tell you, he hasn’t had much hair on his head for any of them.lucas is really the original rudy, and the end scene, while not a tear jerker, is a nice sports related feel good moment.also present in that sequence, the first appearance of ‘menacing asian guy’ - very rarely seen in the mid 80s. 

communication is an art, and like a more traditional art like say, painting, when practiced by an amateur, it is painfully obvious.  take written communication.  I for one, clearly have no passion for it, hence, the large breaks between posts here - a place where I was supposed to be practicing how to communicate.  I still send 50 emails a day, but they often looks like this:

• “yep, sounds good.”
• “let me get back to you”
• “…..” (ignored email)

spoken communication is even trickier, because so much of it is made up of context, and subtleties that are expressed through other means.  intonation, rising and falling pitch, excitable gestures, etc.

 for example, the word “conflict” takes 2 basic forms.  the first is that of a noun, (a fight, battle, or war).  it’s easy to pick this usage out due to the accent and extension of the first syllable;  CONflict.

the other form is that of intransitive verb, (competitive or opposing action of incompatibles : antagonistic state or action (as of divergent ideas, interests, or persons) b: mental struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes, or external or internal demands.)  again, fairly easy to pick out due to the accent on the second syllable;  conFLICT.

you would think this is straighforward enough for any reasonably skilled adult to handle - doesn’t take Tony Robbins to pull this one off in front of a crowd.

however

if you are the fucking hack bitch that insists on saying the fucking word the same way in either usage (conFLICT), especially when you mostly use it as a noun, then the fucking act of sound coming out of your god damn mouth inflicts pain on every other person in the room as we are forced to translate english from your mother tongue of dumbfuck because you keep saying things like, “the conFLICT between the vendor and us is mostly due to a previous conFLICT that involved another person, and that conFLICT is what is causing this new conFLICT….”

like a needle through the ear into my brain.

check out this article on finding passion in your job.

Tom pretty much lives his life by those 5 steps, and as we all know, he is the most passionate man on the planet.

wow - one month blows by.  just goes to show you how easy it is to fall off the wagon.  once you allow the weakness to take over, it’s a snowball effect.  the 10:00 am tickler on the calendar hasn’t been working this summer, since that happens to be the time where everyone is finally in work mode, so stuff starts to happen.  I think I’ll have to try an earlier time.

topic to get me going again was this dude.  5 years from Poland, he gets into every single Ivy league school (MIT turned him down.)  doesn’t say if he goes to a private school, but he does pretty much imply the school itself wasn’t that tough compared to the gulag he was in before.

now, contrary to some beliefs, this is not the goal for the baby - not the sole goal anyway.  there’s a lot of life to live after college, and being accepted into a bunch of ivys becomes irrelevant on day 1 of whichever school you go to.  we’re looking for ways to prep her for life, and hopefully success and greatness throughout.  one side effect of working for the P, is seeing more than a few wasted $500,000 educations (k-college).

however, that’s  not the amazing thing about the article.  the amazing thing, is that some editor thought that this pronunciation guide  - Lukasz Zbylut (pronounced Loo-KASH Zbeh-LOOT) - was going to clear anything up.  maybe I is not properly edukatid enough to know how to pronounce ‘ZBEH.’

see - public school sucks.

been a little while.  I’m so busy with work & life, I just choose to not write my thoughts down.  this actually runs counter to the GTD approach I’m trying to take to managing my life, so today I push some work aside, and insert this task.

I’m also trying to twitter - maybe even with jott.  I’m not sure I’ll continue though, since one of the main points of this was to practice writing, and the sms approach doesn’t really support that.  it may help with brevity, but in the long run, I don’t want to devolve into lolcat speak.

the problem though, is that with yet another open loop in my head, I’m starting to lose my mind.  add fatigue from not enough sleep, and some basic OCD tendencies, and some mornings I go absolutely batty.

for example, in the shower, I often forget where I’m at in the washing process.  often as in probably 2 times a week at least.  more than that if I’m in a especially hectic state, but rarely less.

my evening shower is pretty routine.  get wet, wash hair, wash face, wash body, rinse off, exit.  hard to fuck that up.  for some reason though, when I get to the ‘wash body’ step (or when I think I’m there), I start to second guess myself, and wonder if I already washed my face.  this would not have been a problem in the past, since I used 1 bar of soap for all skin, but for whatever reason, I now use face soap, so I can’t just go extra crazy with the dove.

anyway, so to help solve the mystery of the clean face, I have to investigate - I look for clues like soap on the wall, or just feel my face for ‘cleanness.’  when this starts to happen, I will often see no soap at all on the walls, so now I wonder if I even washed my hair.  I’m back to square 1!!  let me tell you, this is some maddening shit.

I’ve tried lots of things to help me out - moving soap dispensers out of the shower after I use them, etc., but that only helps if I’m lucid going in.  If I’m already tired, and start showering before moving the dispensers IN, then I have no idea if I’m coming or going.

the final slap in the face is the rewash - when you wash your hair or face a second time, it’s immediately obvious that you’ve already done it, usually through some combination of feel, or because he motion of my hands brings the memory back (doesn’t work with empty hands - tried it.)  I will also say that I’m almost sure I’ve ALWAYS rewashed - I’ve never actually skipped a step.  almost sure, because if I actually did forget, HOW THE FUCK WILL I KNOW!  it’s like deja vu in reverse.

this is the pain of my life.

so the baby has been in school for almost a year, and it’s amazing how quickly she learns by playing with all these other bright kids.  some of it is no so goo, but some things are diabolically cute.

part of the daily ritual of school, is the daily progress report.  mostly just a 1 sentence recap of the day’s activities, but also a breakdown of mealtime - how much was eaten of each food category (entree, veg, starch, fruit, milk, juice, etc.)  the baby usually does a bad job at vegetables, but she makes up for it at home, so we don’t really pay too much attention to it.

at some point, she would occasionally get a star drawn near the food section, and she started reporting that she was a ’star eater’.  I guess coincidentally,  we probably noticed on days when most or all of the vegetables were eaten.  Because she was a star eater, we’d treat her to something - maybe some jumba juice, or french fries - whatever.  (maybe not such a great idea to reward good eating habits with junk food!)

anyway, since I usually do the pickup, I also noticed there wasn’t much of a consistency to the star eater award, although the baby ALWAYS knew she had a star on her report.  Sometimes only ‘few’ vegetables were eaten and a star was rewarded, sometimes EVERYTHING was eaten, but no start.  I thought maybe there was a behavioral component, or maybe the effort exuded in conquering a tough food item was given extra credit.  her actual teacher isn’t always there when I pick up, and since it wasn’t such a big deal, when she was, I would forget to ask.

so I was picking up the other day and happened to pull out her report next to a mom whose son is in the same class, and while they had the exact same eating boxes checked, my report had a star, and hers didn’t.   I asked if she knew the criteria, and she claims to have NEVER received a star.  this now concerns the mom, because when you are using this kind of pre-school to inject your kid into a private school, the last thing you want to be is short on stars!

the teacher happened to be there, so we went in to resolve the mystery of the ’star eater’ once and for all!  so I basically ask, what’s the criteria for being a ’star eater?’

and teacher responds, “the kids ask me to draw stars on their papers, so I do…”

these diabolical 2 and 3 year olds MADE THE WHOLE THING UP!  there is no ’star eater’ award.   seems like it’s mostly the girls (which is why the other mom had never seen a star), and when a teacher is sitting near them at lunch (they will sit in different spots every day), they ask them to draw the stars, and they call themselves star eaters!

the teachers thought it was hilarious of course, since we have been basically using this as a reason for praise for the entire year - kind of typical of the private school parent neurosis, over analyzing everything the kids do.  they had just thought it was innocent fun the whole time.

we haven’t really broken it to the baby that the gig is up, but she is having a tougher time now when she is a ’smiley face eater’, or a ‘christmas tree eater’, and not just a star eater.

although part of me thinks she deserves just as much reward for manufacturing this scam all on her own….

french fries for everyone!

btw - this was front page news on MSNBC.com.

2 questions

1. where the fuck are Revs. Jackson and Sharpton? this situation is cantankerously unacceptable!
2. I’d like to know what role those devious kids at the P had in this!

I was going to write about my day yesterday, and how I had 1 great experience, and 1 awful one, but it turns out the awful one was actually not so awful, so instead, I will just give you the rundown.

the good part happened early (thankfully), and in case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is.  I love a great story about sports, and sportsmanship stories are unfortunately few and far between.  I can’t help to wonder though if it would have still happened on a mens team.  there still might have been a great story, but it would have probably been about the runner gutting it out somehow, taking 20 minutes to drag himself around the bases, permanently disfiguring himself in the process.  certainly no giggling involved.

and not to be a debbie downer, but let’s not gloss over the fact that a)  if you pay attention, you wouldn’t have missed a base, and b) if the ball was out of the park, how fast do you really need to run?  certainly not so fast that a hard stop would fuck up your knee.

the awful part was going to be about my afternoon at a Microsoft launch event.  I like to attend these things for the free schwag (nice insulated lunch bag - thank you Mr. Gates), and also because the evangelist demos are usually pretty good.  while they tend to be oversimplified, and cover areas I don’t work in, it’s good to see a scripted demo that purposely takes advantage of the key features of a product.

unfortunately, all the demo yesterday did was hurt my brain.

there is a new Visual Studio coming out, and while the new features aren’t really language extensions to make say, C# any better, they are great productivity enhancers, and if you are using visual studio, you’re doing it because of things like Intellisense, code formatting, etc.  maybe this guy (or his script writer) was overthinking it when they put this demo together and assumed all us ‘hard core techies’ didn’t want to see a demo of such fluffy features, but it would have been much better than what they did put on.

first of all, they went into this whole thing about ‘what is AJAX’ - certainly something that shouldn’t take longer than 3 seconds for us ‘133t h@x0r5′.  they managed to take 30 minutes to do that, while also including such incorrect gems as ‘AJAX reduces number of requests the server has to handle.’

then they went into a demo with VS08 that basically used products and features available in VS05 - totally glossing over javascript intellisense, code formatting, etc.  Even the split screen editor windows and CSS management (which is really great) was given just a word mention.  now, I understand you can only talk so much about intellisense, but the culmination of the demo (2 hrs later) was the dude trying to fit 75 minutes of real useful development (windows workflow construction) into 10 minutes of time - what a fucking waste.  they should have focused on the big construction, and maybe added some bits to showcase new features that wouldn’t have otherwise been covered.

on top of all of that, everytime the guy would declare a variable, he would say, “OK, I’ll ‘dimension’ this integer.”  I kept thinking he was moron, since DIM means “Declare In Memory.”  personally, once someone makes a gaffe like this, it destroys their credibility (especially since he kept saying it out loud!)  it’s like the convention I was at last week, where one person was talking about the next version of the product - version 4, but kept saying version EYE VEE, since the version was denoted with roman numerals (IV), or the people that insist on a strict grammatical use of the word data (plural of datum), and create sentences that are correct, but not commonly heard, fucking up most of the room - “your data are corrupted.”  once you have identified a speaker as one of these jokers, everything else they say is static, and subject to mocking.   it didn’t help that I was there with PG, and that guy loves to make fun of every speaker that isn’t him.

anyway, I did make sure to check myself on this, and it turns out, maybe the dude was wrong at all.  in VB (all BASICs really), DIM does stand for Dimension - has to do with array declaration.  Declare In Memory is an assembler term (which proves SOME of what I learned in that class has been retained).  I’m quite sure this dude doesn’t know assembler though (like me), and was probably saying ‘dimension’, just to bait someone (like me) to challenge his use so he could show everyone how smart he was.  ultimately,  he’s not a moron, just a pretentious ass.

so the moral of the story is, always check your facts and assumptions.

and be a good sport.

and if you gave away an XBox during the morning session, but don’t plan on giving away one in the afternoon session, please say something, so the people just waiting for the xbox giveaway to happen don’t leave even ANGRIER than they already were, free insulated tote or not.

wah wah wee wah!  he is finally broken.

most of the people I associate with are successful due to effort.  everyone is bright, but I think we all carry a certain old school work ethic, have pride in our work, and work that is associated with us, and also have good perspective on our impact as part of the grander scheme.

coincidentally, no one is particulary driven, so while our efforts fuel comfortable lives, it doesn’t appear that anyone is going to be in an significant positions of power or control.

one of the reasons I certainly don’t/can’t/won’t light that fire, is that realistically, my talents are pretty limited.  I cover this by painting with a broad brush, but in any one discipline, I’m really a hack.  now, at this point, my broad experience allows my voice to carry a certain sophistication, but it doesn’t make me any better at what I actually do.  the effort I would have to invest to masquerade as someone better than myself is just too great.

I’ve also worked with a handful of people who are truly skilled.  it’s not that they could see solutions to complex problems, or even execute them - not a functional skill;  it’s that the solutions they see have a certain elegance - they reduce the overall complexity of system when executed.  this can manifest in many different ways, but to boil it down, it’s the difference between doing a job as a craft (which is what I think I am), or as an art.

a craftsman is no less skilled, or important in whatever trade you want to use as your example.  a carpenter for example is a classic craftsman.  as you learn your trade, it becomes more and more natural.  as you see and solve problems, they are no longer hinderances in accomplishing your objective.

and that may be where the line is drawn.  as an artist, you work less towards defined objectives as part of a task, and more toward some idea you want to achieve or express.  it’s not carpenter vs architect though, it’s really more like that master stairbuilder, who can build a solid path from floor to floor, and the builder of the Loretto Staircase, whose stairs seem to be a byproduct of some other vision.

so what’s the point?  those of us on the outside looking in often will think that “if I had that kind of talent, I would ….”, with the “…” usually refering to solving some profound issue that has plagued us for some time.  unfortunately, a lot of these potential ‘artists’ seem content to expend just enough energy to be no better than anyone else they work with!  classic underachiever (relative to personal potential), without the Bart Simpson like antics.  sometimes flying just under the radar, popping up every now and then to remind everyone what they ‘could have been.’

it drives me mad to have to work with someone who cannot get excited about what they are doing when they are clearly very skilled at doing in.  some even go so far as to treat their talent like a curse that traps them in the position they hold.  usually though, it’s enough that they just take the easy way out, milking drops of their greatness and cashing in for gallons of praise.  jealousy?  maybe.  in fact, yes. 

I’m jealous because “if I had that kind of talent…”, the effort I already expend would have that much more impact.  my comfort and satisfaction comes from knowing that I work hard, and have positive impact.  holding anything back gives me nothing, and usually just sabotages the work you do - it’s like lying, where the problems only get worse, except in this case, you are lying to yourself.

some people can’t be motivated.  if it’s not worth it to themselves, then I just can’t waste time and money trying to make it so.  ultimately, they will just fuck you when you need them the most.

so folks, find something to do where you can drink the kool-aid - it will be worth it to be where you should be, and definitely worth it to not be where you shouldn’t.