(Previously)

http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/09/07/labor-day-challenge-wrestle-your-work-back-into-its-box/
So I was going to say more about this.

If you feel you need to wrestle your work back into its box, there’s no shortage of advice on the topic. The intriguing fad that is decluttering (a.k.a. simplifying your life) is just one approach — but what if you don’t feel exactly overwhelmed by commitments, demands or things outside of work?
Indeed, it seems that many people look beyond work and wonder what else is out there. Your friends are busy, you’re not good at sports, and you can’t afford a fancy art-school drawing class. So what is there?

I've forgotten what I was actually going to say. I've a feeling it was important, and I've lost it.
( things )
Does caring more about 'we' than 'I' make me crazy, or just unbalanced?

http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/09/07/labor-day-challenge-wrestle-your-work-back-into-its-box/

Most of the people I know who are willing to sacrifice downtime for uptime define themselves, to a large degree, by their work. They are their business, or their profession, or their role within their organization. Left without their RSS feeds, emails and task lists, they’re at a loss to identify with the person they actually are. Unless they’re responding to the latest email or tweeting about their new product launch, they feel they don’t exist.

I say often that I don't feel right unless I'm working on something. Reading this it feels right to narrow that down - If I'm not doing something, I feel like I don't exist.
( more more more )
~~~
Last time my rut ended at the edge of a cliff & for a short time I flew. Where did that feeling go?

Having an actual reason to get out of bed on time is good for me. In addition to helping N&N move furniture down & up stairs first thing I've also managed to knock a number of other outstanding tasks off my to-do list. I will have to take a nap before the party tonight tho'. Remember Mad Science starts at 7!

~~~
( some other introspective bits I've been meaning to post )

Followed a link from an RSS feed to a random blog.

What do you think my dream is? Do I even have one? (Pls answer before reading other comments, but I'm not screening. The FB post duplication limits the usefulness of that feature)

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/it-doesnt-hurt-to-ask.html

Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right.

Permission is a big reason I don't ask for things. It can be very hard to tell if you have permission. I try to err on the side of caution and still screw up.

It hurts to fail, too. Is the risk worth the potential reward?

Hot Water
I may have been compulsively checking the temperatures at frequent intervals to see what's going on. I hope that running the electric pump which moves the water to/from the solar collector is a lot more efficient than heating the water directly by element because otherwise all I've done is moved a lot of night-rate energy usage to day-rate.

I de-legalised the system yesterday - legally required there's a hot/cold mixer near the tank which is supposed to make sure that the water reaching the tap isn't more than 50something degC. But on a low-pressure system like I have here a significant amount of the pressure at-the-tap (or shower head!) comes from adding in cold at that point to bring the temperature down. So the effective water pressure suddenly started sucking.

Easily resolved by adjusting the mixer to let more hot through :)

~~~
NeverWinter
The party managed to trigger the whole complex into one big fight and made it through pretty much unscathed. I was very disappointed (but the players were happy). It didn't help that all the biggest spells I threw at them were countered by the Heroes Feast they'd eaten the previous session. I agree with a previous acquaintance that large-scale blanket immunities are as broken as Save-or-Die spells, and I think there will be some houseruling of spells going on before the next D&D campaign I run.

~~~
Work-related angst
I have multiple substantial projects on the go but I've been dealing (or rather, not) with a fair amount of angst over the fact that nothing I'm doing is really directed at bringing in paying work. It's not that I don't think I could bring value to - well, pretty much anything - or that I don't believe in what the web can do for a business, it's that I don't believe I have any more right to try and sell (effectively) random strangers of this value that the religious proselytisers that turn up on my doorstep every so often.

It's the exact same reason I lurk in online forums rather than posting - I don't believe that my opinion is any less valid or weaker than anyone else's but it's my opinion and I have absolutely no interest in trying to convince anyone else of its validity or the wrongness of theirs (on the rare occasion I actually think someone is 'wrong' rather than holding a valid alternative viewpoint).

Solar installation has been rescheduled for Monday on account of the weather. On the plus side, the consent has come through - this morning. (If the council hadn't stuffed it around I could have been using all that nice sunshine we just had.)

So I may go ahead and light the fire.

~~~
The chiropractor normally has a DVD playing in the waiting area - sometimes this is interesting biological stuff but more often it's power of positive thinking propaganda. Still there's the occasional gem, today I caught a bit which pointed out that making your goal 'get out of debt' doesn't work because you're still focusing on that 'debt' word, so debt you'll get.

I think something like 'pay off the mortgage' is sufficient, as long as you don't trick yourself into the idea that the way to do that is ... take on a different form of debt.

ie make 'without debt' implicit rather than explicit.

~~~
I need to get over this fear of doing people a bad turn by giving them wrong/poor/not-the-absolute-best advice especially when it comes to areas I actually know something about. It's not helping me be confident in my work, despite academically knowing I'm no slouch. The whole "you don't have to be the best in the world, you just have to be able to provide value to the people who don't have your skills" idea.

It would help if I could reconcile my concepts of value, time and money. I just don't feel right charging for all the time I spend getting things just right, even at what are my (academically again) 'low' rates.

Bear with me...

A few days ago I followed a link from one of the increasing number of RSS feeds that I follow to Chris Guillebeau's blog The Art of Nonconformity, specifically to his new free e-publication 279 Days to Overnight Success.

Reading it was enough to solidify some thoughts in my head, mostly about communication and blogging not being the focus of whatever it is I want to do, but online communication being a part of. So there's the link back it asks for :) , but it's not what this post is about.

I was more taken with Chris's earlier piece, A Brief Guide to World Domination. I think everyone should download and read this, but it's also not what this post is about.

This post is about a video linked to in the Guide, the last lecture given by one Professor Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon University after having being diagnosed with cancer and given a short time to live.

Now I've recently bitched in this journal about not being able to watch many online presentations because they chew through my data cap. This one is 1hr 16minutes, but I took the plunge anyway and it was worth every minute. It's one really good communicator and educator distilling the lessons learned from his life into one last show. The virtual reality work showcased is a bonus :D

Here's the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo . If you have the bandwidth, you have the time (maybe not immediately, but in the next few days). If you don't, ping me and I'll see what I can do.

In the related videos panel I see a lecture also done by Randy on time management. It's of similar length so I'm going to let the cap recover before I watch it, but I will watch it.

Got through some tapes. Will put a DVD on to burn when I go to bed, because the last time I tried that it tied up the machine for 4 hours.

The home movie of the muster from 1957 - a lot of it is just sheep running around the hills and over the river but really it's history.

For one thing those hills look a lot different today - all covered in scrub. DoC should take a look at it :(

The original Country Calendar episode seems to have been taped over by the first half hour of TV1's obituary for Princess Diana from 1997. Really lucky for us it was released as part of one of their compilations.
( Bewaring excellence )

Public Address is hosting a conversation on survival strategies for small businesses (part 1, part 2 so far) which I am following with great interest (in my usual lurker-like fashion).

This post is only tangentially related, in that one of the comments in the discussion struck a chord

I think we have an image of ourselves that is basically "do our job really well, and try not to be noticed".

I've seen this issue pointed out in a number of freelancing advice publications. It's one I particularly struggle with, as represented by [digs out career drivers profile] Expertise being my highest ranked driver while Status is one of the lowest.

I should do that test again, see if Creativity has gone up any.

Taking off on a tangent from a piece on the sudden unacceptability of consumerism in Noelle McCarthy's opinion column in the Herald.

And if I can't buy shoes, what can I do? To make things better, to do my bit, to help out? That may seem like a startlingly, maybe even offensively naive question, but you have to remember I come from a generation of consumers. That's what we do. We buy things, it's who we are. Without a takeaway coffee to clutch, or an iPhone to fiddle with, we're nothing. We love stuff. We know our taste.

My approach also tends to be look for ways I can throw money at issues. Not so much because I come from a generation of consumers, but because I self-identify as part of a culture of specialists.

This is probably best demonstrated by my approach to home renovation - I wouldn't have a clue where to start so rather than try (and do a shoddy job) I'll immediately default to hiring a professional. When I can afford it of course, which is possibly why the wallpaper, carpets and fittings in this house are the same as they were when I first moved here 15 years ago.

If I was prepared to attempt home renovation myself I'd no doubt have made some changes. But that's not my skill set, and it's not one I'm interested in deliberately pursuing. So far I've paid for tree-removal, driveway alterations, fences, insulation installation, new windows - eventually I'll get onto the interior.

For similar reasons (and others) rather than try and get involved with a community organisation or charity (about which I have no clue where to start) I would rather earn money and then give it to the people who actually (or theoretically if you're the cynical type) know what they're doing and best way to make use of it.

(I'd be open to using my existing skill sets directly, but there's that whole getting involved thing before I even find out if what I can do would be useful. (And the fear of the extended consequences of cocking up greater.) )

Really, the kernel of the nut of my desire for money is give it to other people to do stuff. (I mean, it's not useful for much else really.) Some of that stuff benefits me, but my "If I win Lotto" list contains more in the way of charitable donations, scholarship trusts, housing quality improvement projects and targeted seed/venture capital than it does travel/big houses/fast cars/fine food/bling.

It's not a very big nut. But it's an uncomfortable one when I'm kind of only making enough to get by myself.

( http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_american_dream_17_years_of_software_engineering.php )

But the entire experience was disappointing. I realized that at the end of the day it was not about building quality tools or doing the right thing. Political and slow, the software quality group also was known for its inability to build quality software on time. I felt that this was too hypocritical for me to stick around.

(emphasis mine as out of context of the paragraph the sentence could be taken the opposite way)

Both are things that factor heavily into how I like to work, but I'm feeling have token or less consideration by the people I'm working for.

Today I:
Went for a walk to get groceries
Sprayed the roses
Emptied the litterbox
Phoned K for a chat and catch up
Cleaned the shower etc
Blogged
Hopefully solved my mother's issue with hotmail, and showed her how to compose replies in notepad, because they're on rural dial up and there are ... connection issues.
Mentally cursed my sister for teaching my mother to use IE (and hotmail) when there is a perfectly good installation of firefox on the laptop.
Sat in on a very positive SAGA committee meeting, but failed to keep as quiet as I had planned.
- was indirectly complimented - it's not very often I'm legitimately "too old" for something :D . It was also a very good point.
Got some more groceries. The supermarket silly season hath started.
Bundled a bunch of information together and emailed it.
Watched an episode of what I guess is NZs current answer to Antiques Roadshow. Followed by an episode of the real thing. Followed by what was left of The Incredibles, which showed the difference in quality between Telstra Cable and Freeview nicely.

~~~
Significant amounts of the day were thus not spent blankly in front of the computer, which was good for me. For the moment I feel much happier.

Thinking about tomorrow though I think I'm feeling what ivoriephoenix has described as "the pre-monday fear". I can identify points why, and they're nuts - anyway there's nothing to do but deal with it for the moment.

Courtesy of yesterday I'm still one major point on the to-do list behind, but the deadline for that isn't until Tuesday evening so as long as I have both tomorrow and Tuesday afternoons (one may be enough) I'll be fine.

From my Freelance Switch feed:

One of the best productivity epiphanies I’ve had is to realize that you need to always be tackling rather than avoiding the elephant in the room — the #1 most important task on your plate. It’s often tempting to knock down small, easy, non-urgent tasks first, but while the elephant is still standing there, you won’t be able to let yourself off the hook.

Now I know what the elephants (there are at least three) are on my to-do list, but it stuck me that there might might be another way of looking at that, given my general inability to take time-out with no purpose.

So, those with an external perspective, what do you think the elephant might be in my life?

I contemplated making this post friends only, but I've settled for screening comments from non-friends.

Had a -bleh- couple of evenings monday/tuesday, with nothing in the projects list/cloud that grabbed me. Wound up killing time losing @ CivII and Spider. Watched Antiques Roadshow. Actually I'm wasting quite a lot of time (for me) in front of random TV recently. (AR is not random, I deliberately watch it if possible).

Last night I sort of settled into cleaning out my rss archives. There's a couple-thousand entries from before I settled on my current label/delete system.

Had a few introspective thoughts while I was there, about not getting out of the house and such. Realised that the reason I'm not interested in say learning a new language or some other course is because my learning itch is still being scratched by my job, and the other channels I have already set up. It's not something I want to do more of with my time.

Similarly an exercise regime is somethng I would have to schedule/plan/stick to, and it may be odd coming from the master of planning when he'll do something but I'm not looking for something else to schedule. I already have work and gaming in my week, along with all the little things like checking comics/forums/rss daily, and the rotating to-do list of major cleaning/yardwork jobs.

The best times I'm having at the moment are at Giants, when all I have to do is turn up and I know that entertainment will be provided :D I guess I'm looking for something interesting/fun to do that I don't have to organise or decide upon and can take or leave depending on my mood - ie unlike the rest of my life.

Actually I've been working on this post in my head for a good couple of weeks.

( You don't need to read this, goals & stuff )

While the curtain person is calculating the quote.

It's 15 years give or take a couple of weeks since my parents purchased this house to accomodate my grandmother and myself. I was just starting Uni - 17, so nearly half my life ago in pure passage of time. I have lived here all but two years of that.

The curtains I am replacing hung here for an unknown length time before that. I suspect the wallpaper is universally older than those curtains, not sure about the carpet - both are in need of replacement.

It takes me a while to get around to these things.

So far tonight I have managed to accidentally uninstall my sound drivers, and knocjk a glass off the bench into the cat-biscuits (with predictable results for both glass and biscuits).

On the plus side, reinstalling the drivers fixed the problem I was having getting the video editor to record sound. Also discovered the the video capture app which came with my Webcam works nicely with the new attachment as well.

So I have dug out my very first video tape, which I saved up for for -ages- (they were $10-15 each in those days). It seems somehow fitting that the old VCR I'm using is the same one my parents had at the time, and that some of this stuff was recorded with.

- none of that will be salvagable - the reception was quite snowy out in the mountains. Old Bugs-Bunny show, Sale of the Century. My ghod, Steve Parr's hair looks like it's devouring his head!

- it seems at some point I recorded part of a marine documentary of some sort on this tape, from a far better location. It seems to be focusing on sharks, so perhaps I or Tina were recording it for codym 10 or so years ago.

- Back to the old stuff - a speckly Lizi Minelli [sp?] performace

- OMG, Xanadu , or at least a couple of musical numbers from the movie. Might see if I can extract the audio from that.

- Some old music videos (from Pepsi RTR) and most of a combination animated/live version of Gulliver's Travels.

- some sort of prohibition era mobster flick with a character named "Noodles". Which I don't recall ever actually watching.

- Something else which might be a romantic comedy, ditto. Ahh, Long-Play, how much further you made a tape stretch.

- ahh, looks like I just left it running after recording something else.

Where did the evening go?

Continued to stay away from the office today. Wasn't completely unproductive though.

~~~
Since E-Day isn't coming to Chch, I finally got around to taking a load of obsolete computer bits to Molten Media. Including 3 monitors, the 486 and even PC-Model (lettng go of another piece of the past ... plenty to go ...).

The soundcard from my first ever computer was resident in PC-Model, and the HDD in the 486. I think the motherboard, videocard and processor are left, out at my parent's.

So anyway, that's freed up a bit of space.

I purchased a new joystick to replace the malfunctioning one that went in the odds and ends. So the accumulation begins anew.

I'm sure I'd promised to include someone else in my next trip, to molten, but I'm hapy to make a specific trip for whoever it was.
~~~

Following that I started on a task actually scheduled for the weekend just been - resorting and restacking the bookshelves. This led to thinning the collection of cardboard boxes int he hallway cupboard, as many of thier original contents had just been delivered to Molten. I was actually looking for shoeboxes to store books in - many of the ones that in all honesty I'm unlikely to get around to reading again.

I never thought I'd see the day where I'd say "I don't have enough shoeboxes".

So the first box was easy enough. A few even went aside to go in the charity book collection bins. Then I came to the main bookcase (which is actually only about 25% books). And I'm looking at all these books (OK, I have relatively few compared to many of my friends).

And I'm trying to remember when last I read any of them. Several may not ever have been opened, having been purchased more recently because I read and enjoyed the book years ago. Several were purchased as potential RPG source material and read once, then never revisited. Many are random or outdated RPG supplements or systems which will never see actual use in my hands, of real interest only to a collector (I'm merely a hoarder).

Some I own for their connections to my past, my family.

I'm tempted just to box the vast majority of them and stash them in the back of a cupboard, never again to see the light of day. It's less heartbreaking than disposing of them would be, but still feels wrong.

This is proving more difficult than anticipated.

I'm brutally reminded of similar projects I have waiting to be undertaken. Pruning all those VHS tapes I'll never watch again (or copy when I finally get a VCR-to-PC setup working) for example. Revisitng the archive CDs and burning something with just the stuff that isn't obsolete.

~~~
Take away the accumulation of my past, and you destroy the very foundation of me.

~~~
There's a pile of old MAD magazines and 2000AD comics in the lounge I could bear to just throw away.

Ultimately we can never be sure of our actions...

...only prepared to live with the consequences and wary of regret.