Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Jay: Playlist Challenge

Here are the titles of 25 songs in a random playlist.  The challenge is to identify as many artists as you can.  If there has been a remake of a song, mine is probably the original artist, or an early one if it’s a sufficiently old, well-covered song.  A few are easy, but I’d say not as many as normal, depending on your musical circles.

1 - Things I’d Like to Say
2 - Play Me
3 - Smile a Little Smile for Me
4 - Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)
5 - The End of the World
6 - Leader of the Pack
7 - Kid Dynamo
8 - Too Much of Nothing
9 - Five O’Clock World
10 - Jive Talkin’
11 - Double Shot of My Baby’s Love
12 - Run for the Roses
13 - We Got to get Out of This Place
14 - Rocky Mountain High
15 - Scarborough Fair
16 - Summer In The City
17 - What’s Going On
18 - McArthur Park
19 - Can’t Get It Out of My Head
20 - When a Man Loves a Woman
21 - I Love How You Love Me
22 - I Won’t Last a Day Without You
23 - Old Cape Cod
24 - Vehicle
25 - Pretty Lady


01:09 PM | Music • Quiz or Meme • (1) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Tech Blogging

So I have this tech blog, and it’s for business stuff too, to a lesser extent.  The two overlap surprisingly often.  It’s listed as part of the empire on the sidebar.

Weirdly, I go great lengths of time between posts there.

Well, I’m going to start trying to post daily.  Something.  Even just a link to something interesting in all the tech-related reading I have been pointedly doing each day.

Thus you might want to start checking it now and then if such things interest you at all.

Wayne is likely to find the latest post there especially interesting.

One thing the blog is not, as originally planned, is closely tied to the business.  Which makes me more interested in possibly getting co-bloggers or letting people guest post there.


09:47 AM | Blogging • Business • Geekery • (0) Comments • Permalink

Jay: Concentration is More Than a Game

I hate to but something above Deb’s most excellent post, so you should be sure to read that if you haven’t.

After that, via Rob comes this post of tips for concentration.

Some of this I already knew, because it’s part and parcel of good software project and programmer management.  If you don’t promote an environment where people can establish and maintain good stretches of concentration, you won’t have as productive, high quality development going on. 

I can attest to the time it takes to get into what we call the zone, and the ease with which that can be shattered, even by your own actions.  I often won’t even try to get back in, once I’m out.  I can also attest to the value of deadlines.  It generally makes me get done what is needed, and well, rather than letting it slide.  However, it sometimes makes me give up, or find a reason it can be ignored or extended.

Sometimes I think my worst work habits are a hangover from my education.  I’m one of those annoying people who can do well in most things almost effortlessly.  That should have meant I appreciated that there were fewer things I had to work hard at, and learned to apply myself effectively where needed.  It actually meant that I resented the things I had to work hard at, and generally didn’t.  That results in the A and F effect.

That and I work like an artist and a geek.  I rely on bouts of inspiration and creativity, I get bored and almost have to have more than one thing to work on concurrently, and I require zoning - heavy, undistracted concentration - for things some people might not.

But I digress.


08:06 AM | Business • Geekery • Totally Random • (0) Comments • Permalink

Deb: The Confusion of Causes and Cures

There’s a problem in the way that we’re framing discussions about just about everything right now, and what it is finally occurred to me this morning and seemed too simple to have not been pointed out before...and yet, I can’t remember having seen anybody talk about it, so I thought I would: we’re confusing causes and cures.  Sometimes knowing how you got from B to A can help you get from back to B, or even forward to C, but knowing you’re at B doesn’t necessarily tell you a damned thing about how you got there in the first place, so assuming that the path back to A is fixed can get you into serious trouble.

For example, if you’re in a financial bind, there’s no doubt that hard work, and lots of it, will be required to get you out of it.  This doesn’t necessarily imply, however, that laziness is what made you broke in the first place.  Also if you’re in a financial bind, there’s no doubt that being very careful with what money you have will be necessary to get you out of it.  This doesn’t necessarily imply, however, that spending like a drunken sailor is what got you there in the first place.

And yet it feels like most of the time our discussions of economic hardship center on how broke people are lazy, stupid, or both.

We do the same thing with health, which is even more disturbing because it’s even less under our control than our financial situations are.

We’ve lost respect for the random factors that take the best-made decisions and turn them into disasters.

I’m all about personal responsibility.  But I’m really tired of the politics that confuses the need for people to be responsible with the need to blame them for their problems.  It’s possible to work hard and still get laid off, and it’s possible to eat right, exercise, and still get sick.  Do you need to get a new job?  Yep.  Does that mean that you screwed up the old one?  Not at all.

I’ve said before that God has been replaced in our culture with a free-floating secular anxiety akin to superstition, and this is yet another manifestation.  If people go broke because they’re lazy and stupid, then people like us don’t have to worry, right?  If people die young because they’re lazy and stupid, then people like us will be in good health for a very long time, yes?  This attitude, this confusing of the need for people to take responsibility for fixing things with whether or not they caused the issue in the first place, is a warding-off.  It’s a modern ritual incantation against the randomness of the universe.  It’s profoundly religious, even as it contradicts what we think of as religion.

And it’s going to drive me nuts, because I’m both unhealthy and broke and really, really tired of hearing about what a lousy person I must be to have gotten that way.


07:24 AM | News • Politics • Stupidity • (1) Comments • Permalink
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