Thanks to Seth‘s much-appreciated intervention, tadhg.com is now up again. Feeds, comments, graphics, etc. seem to be working fine. I’m still having some mail trouble, but I should be able to fix that over the next few days.
Although the Pacific Time timestamp will show this as early, it’s almost five hours into 2007 here, so: Happy New Year all!
I don’t feel like doing a big recap of the year. That would be painful to write, and possibly painful (in a variety of ways) to read.
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It doesn’t look like a palace. It is a network of interconnected villas. A sense of peace permeates throughout. The mountainside it is built on is sparsely forested, and gets only light snow in the winter.
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I spent most of today at my friend Deirdre’s wedding to Jason. (No photos, but I suspect I’ll be able to grab some from any number of people for posting at a later date.)
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I’ve always had a tough time with it. I can see that it’s funny, but it’s also just painful. I can only take so much of it before having to stop.
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His eyes snapped open. He was sitting down, slowly rotating. He was strapped into a chair at an amusement park, chintzy music echoing around him.
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I tend to be underwhelmed by the winter holiday season. It’s not my favorite time of year, and plenty of its aspects irk me. (Not least: the cold and dark.) There are some wonderful things too, but I’m not feeling them as strongly as the rest, right now.
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Recently NASA announced plans to build a permanent base on the moon, and Stephen Hawking said that reaching space is critical to human survival. Is it time to invest in getting off-planet, or is the whole thing a wasteful boondoggle?
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You see the tree as dusk is taking the light from the sky. It is the only tree you have seen for days. No others are visible in any direction.
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The death of the ruler of Turkmenistan prompts the question: how do people get away with this shit?
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Typing is a skill that didn’t seem that important to me in the past, but seems critical in a bedrock way to me now. As someone who is impatient for computers to do what I want, and who uses keyboard shortcuts as much as possible, this makes sense. But for most of my time as a serious computer user, I couldn’t touch type.
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I’ve had this item on my to-do list for a while: come up with list of instructions to self for getting into/out of certain emotional states. This mainly applies to creativity, motivation, and productivity (all of which are related).
The first one, creativity, I touched on in my post about inspiration. I think it should be possible to deliberately put myself into a mode where I’m going to either come up with ideas or do things with the ideas I already have. (This seems a more optimistic approach than simply waiting for inspiration to “strike”.)
And if that’s possible, it should be possible to push myself into other active mental states as well. By “active” I mean action-oriented—I have my doubts about moving into something like “happiness” with this kind of exercise. (An extended version of this kind of thing might qualify as “meditation”, however, and it appears likely that various forms of happiness can be aided significantly through meditation.) For the moment, I’m concerned with putting myself into a good state to do specific things.
The first one of these I actually came up with, and which gave me the idea for the others, was “consideration steps”. This could also be called “how to make a decision”. I found myself with a bunch of things to do like “Consider mootools (<http://mootools.net/download/release>)” and “consider [some] directory structure”, and found that I was shying away from those, so I came up with these steps:
Nothing radical there, just a checklist for considering something and coming up with some kind of decision. The important thing appears to be deciding to make the decision, actually… and these steps help with that in the standard “delineated small things are easier to achieve than undifferentiated big things” way. At the least, I think these will get me in the right state of mind for decision-making. They’ve worked so far—except that I don’t always apply them. Decisions tend to go better when I do.
One I’ve only tried a couple of times, and which I’m superstitiously leery of using more often (something I want to get over by using it more often), and which I haven’t codified until now, is for getting inspiration, or getting into a creative mindset. What I note below is something I’ve never used (except in unconnected bits), and which I intend to try out.
(Obviously, substitute whatever works for you here. The Yeats is just something that seems to do it for me.)
Obviously, I can’t really *recommend* this, as I haven’t tried it as a whole! But I’ll use it for all my blog posts (and possibly my work on my novel) in the next week, and then report back on how it goes. (Update: I used it, it went very well, I now recommend it.)
Lots of people, especially those from Southern California, deride San Francisco’s weather. These people should spend time in Ireland, as that would give them an appreciation of just how good SF weather is.
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I’ve been getting more and more of it. Eventually I might have to resort to a captcha system, or to WP Hashcash. For the moment, though, all new commenters have to be verified by me before their posts show.
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I picked up K. J. Bishop’s debut novel in Stacey’s the other day, based on an employee recommendation, and started reading it on the flight. So far I’ve been very impressed, and the writing has made me sit up and take notice.
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My friend Brian, after reading Fear and Personal Radiation Detectors, read up on leading causes of death in the US and concluded that wasn’t really worth it to worry about radiation poisoning.
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I read a hostile review of The Root of All Evil, Richard Dawkins’ documentary, on the liberal website Alternet.org today.
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Niall sent me a large number of messages today about accidents resulting in radiation poisoning. Reading about completely unsafe practices and the escape of radioactive materials into the commercial scrap metal business made me feel rather unsafe.
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Anything involving group organization tends to be tricky. Any kind of logistical enterprise needs improvement and will breed some kind of discontent with at least some people. Sometimes this discontent brings better ideas, sometimes not. It continually surprises me, though, just how tough it can be to get right even small-group logistics. The example I have in mind is how to organize the pods for sfmagic.org drafting each week. How complicated can it be to get some drafts together on a Wednesday night?
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I had reason to use the JavaScript Function object, or rather its Function constructor, for the first time today. Using it helped me avoid using either global variables or eval() calls.
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A perennial area of interest for me is how one improves skills. The obvious answer is “practice”, but for a lot of things that’s not specific enough, and figuring out exactly what and how to practice can be quite difficult.
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Over the last few months I’ve done some midnight drives to Montara Beach, and today decided I’d find out what it looked like during the day. I arrived around sunset and took some photos.
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