Month: November 2003

Aaron Swartz commented on The Procrastination Paradox yesterday. With some amusing links, he also asks the big question: what’s the root cause? He comes up with one answer:

There’s only one explanation that makes sense: it’s not anything intrinsic to the task, but the outside importance of the task that makes us procrastinate. But what possible reason could we have for putting off tasks that are important? It seems like a totally bizarre thing for our brains to do.

Aaron also asks for other ideas.

I have two ideas on the topic, and some would say I’m an expert. 😉

The first thought is that we can think faster than we can act. So, you can think through the raw outline of what needs to be done, and in what order, and you know how long it will take (or think it will take), and making the commitment to spending that time on that one task, and nothing else, is daunting.

The second motive behind procrastination is perfectionism, or, perhaps more accurately, the fear of screwing up. It’s easy to do something right in your head (or so we all like to believe), but the translation between thought and deed is rarely (never?) 100% accurate. Something is always lost in translation, so to protect yourself from embarrassment, it’s easier to avoid the comparison between thought and deed.

I have been notorious for this kind of delay, mostly in school, but I’m not going to pretend I’ve ‘recovered’ from these practices yet. I’ll be interested to see what other comments are sparked by Aaron’s post.

If you are on vacation, Monday sure feels different. Of course, still reading all my feeds via NetNewsWire first thing, and checking my email (mostly spam, caught by Apple’s Mail), and trying to juggle playing with the boy and a bit of computer time.

NYTimes article Getting a Job in the Valley Is Easy, if You’re Perfect really gets you excited about the ‘recovery.’ Witness:

Indeed, what qualifies as good news in the technology industry is not so much evidence of overall job gains, but signs that job losses have slowed considerably.

Great…

Adrian Holovaty shared the news on his blog that he and his wife were travelling to the West Coast, and he invited people to connect with him. I took him up on the invitation. Only had 25 minutes or so, in the middle of the workday, to welcome him at the office, but I enjoyed meeting a person behind a website I read regularly. It’s always informative to talk with others facing some of the same online news challenges. Lawrence.com and the other sites from World Online in Kansas are often cited as leaders in the space, and it’s impressive what a small team can do. There are advantages to size, of course, but nothing rocks like a small team all moving at the same fast pace. I don’t have any trips to Kansas planned in the near future, but at least Adrian and his wife got a sunny day here in San Francisco. Enjoy the rest of the vacation. I’ll also have to check out Simon Willison’s blog, as he’s on that World Online team, too.

The boy is alright, but we did have to go to the emergency room this evening. He sliced himself enough that we didn’t feel comfortable trying to handle it. He’ll be fine. As usual, the emergency room took some time… he wasn’t the most urgent case. Bumps in the road = being a parent.

I’m stealing the title from another blog (can’t remember which one), but here’s a host of links I’ve been meaning to record. This small bunch will clean out my inbox. I’ll leave my Safari bookmarks for another time.

• Tim Bray on OSCOM sessions, back in September, comments:
  

  The sessions (I thought) went well, and here’s a surprise: approximately two-thirds of the attendees, here at the world headquarters of publishing technology, were hearing about blogging and RSS for the first time. I obviously think that blogs and simple syndication are going to change the world; I hadn’t realized how early in the process we are.

• Metadata is nothing new, from Ned Batchelder (not sure where I got the link, since I’ve never read another word on his site), has a great overview, including this comment:
  

  Electronic data on the web has made metadata even more powerful: both the original data and the metadata about it are published in similar ways.

• Old column in Slate by Michael Lewis on why daddies don’t kill their babies, despite early, sleep-deprived inclinations that way. Part of an occasional series… I’ll have to go back and read the other columns.
• Megnut pulls out an interesting quote from an essay by a Berkeley professor about how political conservatives in the United States use language to control the conversation. Her comment at the end? “I guess if Republicans continue to relieve us of taxes, they’ll eventually relieve us of the infrastructure our taxes fund.”
• Before There Was Web, There Was ViewTron about one of the early online services. I remember my friend getting Prodigy back in the mid-1980s… his father worked for IBM, which was half-owner of the original service, with Sears (!), so almost a beta-tester. Blocky and slow. I also saw Minitel in France in 1991, for a few minutes, and the little I saw was more electronic directory than the ‘rose’ pages which were (I’ve read) more popular. Anyway, always good to know where you’ve been, as the author (Howard Finberg) points out at the end of his article with the inevitable Santayana quote.
• BBC article/interview with Jakob Nielsen on info pollution. “It is time to stop your computer deciding how your time is allocated.” But I like a clean in-box. 😉

I thought MyLastEmail.com sounded like a ridiculous idea. I beat Slashdot to this topic, where everyone except the original poster comes up with various reasons why this is a dumb idea. One area I hadn’t considered: how do you know the last email won’t be blocked as spam? Ouch.

Fun Flash presentation of Lego construction… the actual construction of the Legos themselves. [via Emergic, via Boing-Boing]

A friend gave me the Forgotten English calendar for 2003 last Christmas, and I’ve been enjoying several of the words. On Saturday September 28, the word of the day was nannick, which means “to play idly, to fidget.” However, I saved that day’s page not because of the word, but because of the tidbit about the date, as quoted in its entirety below.

On this date in 1801, Britain’s first census was begun. Eighty years later, a follow-up survey was conducted in which residents were asked to furnish their “rank, profession or occupation.” Verbatim responses, as preserved by the London Genealogical Society, included:

• Aritifical scone-maker
• Decayed publisher
• Emasculator
• Rust attendant at lavatory
• Proprietor of midgets
• Beef-twister
• Separated from head
• Fatuous pauper
• Fifty-two years an imbecile
• Examiner of underclothing
• Knocker-up of workpeople
• Supposed to be a lady
• Sampler of drugs
• Hand in Hartley’s Jam
• Turnip shepherd
• Gymnast to house painter

What do you tell people when they ask you what you do?

Was it THX or Dolby that first started running those short promotional clips before the movie started touting how incredible the sound system is? “The audience is listening” is my memory of one of the tag lines. (Per Google, it’s THX.) I still think my audience can be counted on two hands, but there’s at least one more reader in the ‘audience’… my father. Hello!

Who knew he was going to Google me? With a name like John Roberts, it’s close to Googling for John Doe, but it worked well enough, I guess. Not sure what terms he used, but he found me via my comments about Chuq Von Rospach’s note about a CNET.com review. Always good to get a reminder that anything you say is public if you put it on the web. I try and write that way most of the time, conscious of the possible misconceptions, but you can’t stop just because you’re worried. I stop — or, more accurately, don’t start — because it’s hard to justify the time for this against all the other things I’d like to be doing, or should be doing. Like updating my daughter’s website, for instance, rather than this journal.

But all the same… greetings to my father.

I also had lunch this week with a friend I haven’t seen for a few months, and we talked about blogs and business. I don’t connect those topics much in my writing here, but the appeal of making a blog work as a business (hint: not so simple) glitters like false gold, unless you’re going to work at it. Best of luck to Mark with HotelChatter.com, and to Vin with Sportscolumn.com, but micro-content is not micro-work. I’ve got a day job which gets me going, so I’ll just continue dabbling here, wandering about in the intersection of the personal, professional, and everything in between.