Author: clock

The irony isn’t lost on me here. David Allen’s Getting Things Done (paperback) has been on my “to blog” list for several weeks. Finishing the book took several months, too, because I didn’t want to race through it, and I didn’t want to pretend to absorb it, or why read it? I’ve hardly studied it, but I have read the entire book, and even tried to put a few methods into place to change the way I organize my “to do” items. The Internet is full of resources and tools for applying GTD techniques, and I’ve chased after a few.

I will say that I like the simplicity of the framework, and I’ve become more and more a keeper of lists, because I cherish the idea of avoiding “open loops,” where the mind cycles over something again and again because you don’t write it down and give yourself a break about where it really fits. Urgent? Important? Do you have all the prerequisites handled? For simply sanity, those reminders are welcome, and (literally) a load off my mind.

The “next action” bit, though, doesn’t advance my work tremendously. I can spend a lot of time planning instead of doing. No matter how much I believe in the value of thinking before acting, sometimes acting helps your thinking. I have a piece of paper somewhere with a favorite quote of my friend Courtney, and it’s a reminder that when you come to a crossroads, you must keep moving. It’s more eloquent in its original formulation, but it boils down to the more popular “When you see a fork in the road, take it.” The discipline of “next action” imagines that you really can scout ahead and consider all avenues. It probably helps to do what planning you can, even knowing you’ll be surprised and change course, but it’s hard to do something like this halfway.

If you feel like you’re in a rut, GTD does give you some ideas and a sense of tangible accomplishments, however small — and that’s not bad. I am keeping my inboxes cleaner, and several to do lists, some of which are life lists. Writing it down somewhere does help, even if it’s acknowledging the unlikelihood of the effort.

At least this post is one more thing to cross off the list. 😉

I kept the boy from noticing the title of my most recent book, Dinosaur in a Haystack, by Stephen Jay Gould. Just as well…I didn’t really want to read these out loud. The boy is reading, but Gould revels in employing each bon mot just so, and he stretches my vocabulary and cultural acumen often enough. For the under-six reader (even the “I want to be a paleontologist” under-six reader), such strutting leads to frustration and confusion. The last thing I want to do right now is disrupt the voracious interest in everything he sees. Or maybe the challenge would only fire him up…

But back to the book…this is a collection of essays from Gould’s lengthy, impressive run of such in Natural History. In fact, we’re told in the prologue, this is the seventh collection of such essays. Reading them once a month, as they arrived, must have been a treat. In the aggregate, I was a bit done earlier than the end, although I did plow on to complete even the final essay about Erasmus Darwin’s literary antecedents to his grandson’s Charles’ revolutionary work.

Gould was a professorial star, in part because of these essays and other prolific writing which brought him beyond the academy, in part because of his science. “Punctuated equilibrium” is a term you cannot miss…at least if you’re reading Gould himself. (He was not shy about his accomplishments.) His CV gives a sense of the recognition he earned. Wikipedia has more, of course. He died of mesothelioma, one of those cancers which has become such a valuable pay-per-click keyword. From his wide-ranging interests, I’m sure he would have commented on this phenomenon, although in what context I cannot imagine.

I took one course from Gould, one of those “everyman science” courses which fills a large theater…when everyone attends. I can’t remember the course title, but it was broadly about evolution, and I was not in regular attendance (not proud of that, just a fact). I did finally read The Origin of Species a few years ago, going through my one real legacy of that class.

These essays make science approachable, but he does not dumb anything down — they are wonderful in that regard. I just wouldn’t read more than a half-dozen at once, and then come back for intellectual sustenance later.

I haven’t been in school for years, but I’m surrounded by the school calendar. And, honestly, I’ve never really let go. With Labor Day only hours past, summer feels officially over, even if San Francisco weather is never quite so convincing in its transitions.

Today, the girl goes to school for the first time, the boy starts his second week (don’t get me started on schools starting before Labor Day…), and the wife teaches her first class of the semester. I simply go to work, where I’m learning a lot most every day.

Monday Night Football (regular season) hasn’t started yet, and book group is going on in the other room, so time for me to clean out the inbox with the various links I’ve been meaning to comment on.

• Jakob on log-log charts didn’t live up to the interesting headline “Data Visualization of Web Stats: Logarithmic Charts and the Drooping Tail.”
• Adults in DVR Households Read More, Surf More and Watch TV More (August 17, 2006) – Headline says it all, but there’s more data there. FYI, we’re a TiVo Nielsen household, although I’m not supposed to mention that. I hope our off-schedule viewing of Premier League soccer, Dora the Explorer, Life on Mars (great new show from the BBC), Grey’s Anatomy, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and Sharpe’s Waterloo throws their statisticians for a loop.
• David Foster Wallace (of Infinite Jest fame) in the NYTimes on “Federer As Religious Experience” is already behind the pay-wall. But maybe I should re-read Infinite Jest at some point.
• The intro post to Project Anvil intrigues me. My slowness in actually reading the long-saved link until now means that the August-long project is nearing completion, so I have an entire month to catch up on. Not tonight.
• Actual lessons from Kiko, which I’m reading after all the hype and the (unbelievable) news that someone seems to have paid more than $250K for the remnants of Kiko. Like everyone else, I’ll be curious to learn the buyer, and how much of the purchase was simply for a four-character domain name. Otherwise… code without the developers??
• Someone else learns the glory of reading John McPhee. I want to read his newest, on delivery companies.
• Have not checked yet to see whether our battery is subject to recall.
• Pageviews are obsolete (for me, via David Galbraith, although I saw it elsewhere later) — Measurement in the most data-intensive media environment the world has ever known still hasn’t settled down.
• I’ve paid for a Fastmail membership, but I haven’t yet moved my MX records over for pencoyd.com. The point? Better webmail, for me and my wife. Guess which is more important?

“You don’t talk because of Friedrich Nietzsche.”

Steve Carell playing a suicidal homosexual Proust scholar in Little Miss Sunshine is funny, and he makes that line almost a howler. Trust me. He’s not alone in sparking laughs from material which by rights should not be so humorous. See this movie. The 78 from Metacritic feels spot on.

I’m noting this on Wednesday, but I occasionally get to the Kezar Stadium track on Tuesday mornings, if my friend Billy provides external motivation. Yesterday, 3x1200m and then 3x1000m. Felt good as I ran the first five at a very controlled pace with the group, so I went after the last one with the intention of negative splitting each 200m. I came pretty close, which left me satisfied.

3:32 for the full 1000m, for an average of 42.41 per 200m

45.29 = first 200m
42.97 = second 200m
43.01 = third 200m
41.01 = fourth 200m
39.79 = fifth 200m

The “precision” of hundredths of a second is false, of course, but it’s what I have, and it is directional. I’m not very consistent about recording my workouts, but I’ll be curious to see what I think of this workout’s final piece in a year’s time. Or five.

I wanted summer reading, and I found it in Robin Cook’s Marker. Beyond focusing a broadside at managed care, Cook mostly skips right along with a semi-thriller. Not having read any of the multiple bestsellers Cook has written before, I don’t know if all of them are medical. I suspect so, since he touts his medical training. Michael Crichton was trained as a doctor, too, and in using a thriller to make a political point, Marker felt like State of Fear. Neither one is a great read, unfortunately.

When I saw the title Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control in my coming Netflix queue, I thought it was a Vin Diesel type movie. I couldn’t remember why I had put it in the queue, but I was ready for a light film.

Oops…wrong movie. The movie was on my list because of The Fog of War, the fantastic documentary about the Vietnam War through the recollections of one of the United States’ leaders in the conflict, Robert McNamara. Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control even stranger if the expert was naked. Morris’s signature interview style, where the subject is speaking straight into the camera, filling the screen, really works. The music, too, somehow weaves things together. The intercutting of old science footage and pulp movies, though, was a leap. Overall, I liked watching these folks explain their passions, but I’m glad it was only 80 minutes.

Note: I watched this movie in two airports, Oakland and Boston’s Logan Airport, since I wasn’t willing to waste money on Wi-Fi as I filled the hours waiting. And waiting… long layover in Boston 11 days ago.

My one-week vacation gave me a chance to finish off some books, mostly during the travel to and fro.

I picked up The Quiet American by Graham Greene in a used book store on Polk Street in San Francisco, while killing time a couple of weeks ago. I knew very little about it, beyond the general respect accorded the book and the author.

To be honest, I bought the thin volume in part because it was a thin volume. It’s harder to commit to an unknown if it’s going to be a lengthy commitment. I know very little about Greene, and as I type this, I haven’t yet read the introduction to this paperback edition tied to Greene’s birth 100 years ago (from the date of re-publication in 2004, for the 1955 original). I didn’t want to bias my view of the book by learning more, much as I try to avoid reviews of movies I want to see.

What a stunning book. I found all of the following in 180 brief pages: intelligence, voice, plot, turn of phrase, outlined characters whose foibles and fears and depths stain the book as it reveals its surprising (yet inevitable) conclusion, and a sense of tragedy and resignation.

Set in Vietnam in the 1950s, as the French are fully enmeshed in “Indochina” (but already with a sense of loss), The Quiet American reports through the eyes of an almost nameless English journalist, Fowler. His portrait of the American idealist (Pyle… a reference to Gomer?) trying to manipulate political events with a cheerful arrogance and certainty of purpose. While not quite a mystery in tone, Greene (through Fowler) plays with time and sequence wonderfully. It never hurts to start with a murder… and then educate the reader about who died, and why.

This is also a deeply personal story. Fowler exposes a glimpse of his unfortunate history with women in an exchange of letters with his ex-wife, but there’s only a brief flash of his love, shown only by his regret and visual memory of the woman he loved and left.

The Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong embodies the practical nature of the country in her relationships with Fowler and Pyle, simply trying to adapt between past colonial leaders and the engagement of the new world power, the United States. The parallels between personal and political are clear, but subtly shared, only telling in the overall story. One wonders if political methods have changed. I think the United States has become less subtle about its interventions abroad — which is good, given the example presented in this book. But I fear our political intentions are not clearly considered from the “recipient’s” point of view. Think of Pyle’s certainty of purpose as we endeavour to spread democracy. It’s never quite that simple, of course, but clearly some themes are lasting.

I will read the introduction to this book, and learn a bit more about Greene. I believe this novel is his best known, so I’m not sure whether I should jump in anew — but I can’t ignore how much I enjoyed this book.

I see from Wikipedia that two films have been made from the book. Any considered opinions out there on either of them?

I caught An Inconvenient Truth on Sunday. It met my expectations, which were high. Metacritic score of 74. It’s a well-crafted documentary, and you get a feel for how to tell a story. Al Gore says in the film that he’s given this presentation well over 1,000 times. The key? He remembers that every time is the first time for this audience, so he doesn’t let himself get bored with the same old, same old.

One tech note: Gore’s position as a member of the Apple board of directors certainly showed in this movie. I’ve never seen so much many shots of a software program as I saw of Keynote during this film. And the PowerBook is a co-star.