Consuming well

I tend to draw a line between consumptive and productive pleasures. You can get enjoyment out of eating an ice cream sundae, watching a movie, or painting a painting, but I feel like the first two are very different from the last. Obviously there's the effect (after one you have a beautiful artwork, and after the other you have less money and more ice cream in your body) but it also just feels weaker. Anyone can eat a food and have fun, but to paint and have fun you have to work at it. Get into a flow state, not just a passive consumption state.

I'm still reading "The Evolving Self", which posits that the way to ... happiness? improvement? general goodness? ... is to cultivate "complexity", in which you become a creature of many parts that work together as a unified whole. Differentiate and integrate. Being highly evolved is better, and being highly evolved means being complex. Sounds like Ken Wilber. And I still pretty much agree with it.

(aside: "complexity" is a loaded word; I wish he had picked something else, because by "complex" he doesn't mean "complicated". I like simplicity. But I think I like the simplicity of a very well-made watch: a lot going on, but it's easy to use and all the abstractions are hidden from you. This watch would be a very complex thing, but still simple, not complicated.)

Consumptive pleasures often don't increase complexity. Productive ones often do. But I think the key is the "often"; sometimes you can consume something in a way that adds complexity. And I guess, given that we consume anyway, might as well consume in complex ways.

Case in point: Jonah Lehrer (Radiolab! That's what he's on.) recently wrote a post about why it's worth being an oenophile, even though cheap wine regularly beats expensive wine in blind taste tests. Take away the blindness, let people see the price tag, and expensive wine always wins. So if you don't know wine, your enjoyment goes up with price. But if you do, you can start to pick out other good things in the wine besides the price. That's complex consumption.

I still think it's a siren's call: there are only a few steps from "complex consumption can improve your life" to "you can just sip wine all day, get a job as a sommelier, live the easy life, and it'll be great". But there's nothing basically wrong with connoisseurship.

Okay, we already knew this, right? Sheesh. tl;dr: nothing to see here.

Nah check it out, HERE is a business card

Okay I guess one last blog/buzz about business cards. 

There it is. Woo!

How to make one yourself:
1. Find a QR code generator. I like this one because it lets you set error correction levels.
2. Set error correction as high as possible (that is, it'll have more dots, some of which are redundant in case some fool smudges or tears or writes all over the middle of it.)
3. Input what you want to pop up when someone scans it. If you want the code to represent just a bit of text or a URL, fine. But if you want more structured data (like a bunch of contact info) you can use specially formatted strings. Here's a guide to the types. And if you want contact info in particular, you can use the MECARD format (details here). So, for example, the text embedded in that QR code is:
MECARD:N:Tasse,Dan;;;EMAIL:dan.tasse@gmail.com;URL:http://www.dantasse.com;
(kinda think some of those ;'s are unnecessary)
4. Write all over the middle of it. Seriously, just in Paint or GIMP or something.
5. Make sure it still works.
Here's another person's guide that says the same things.

I would really love your feedback on my business card.

I'm going to a conference for the first time ever. I will probably meet a lot of people. Maybe I would like some of them to remember me. So I made a business card.

Quick:
- what's my email address?
- what are you thinking about?
- intrigued or annoyed?

Also, I am particularly interested in your thoughts on:
- font choice. IANAFN, but I like fonts sometimes. I basically want the feel of just writing this in courier, but I don't want people to think I'm a computer-cluster linux-kernel-hacker long-hair nerd-rager. I considered Futura (but it was too art-deco retro or something), Frutiger (less interesting and I couldn't find it for download in 5 minutes), Gill Sans (for some reason I thought it was associated with macs?), and Yanone Kaffeesatz (too narrow to fill the space). I went with Droid Sans, as it seemed at least as good as anything else to my untrained eye, and it might subtly make people think Android. If they do think Android, that's good; I dig Android (and Google)'s philosophy (obviously), and anything I do will probably involve using Android a lot.

- spacing between "dan" and "tasse". I was going to try to make it a half-space or something, squash the words together a bit, because otherwise people might wonder "is it dan_tasse@gmail or something?" but that was not trivial to do, so I skipped it.

- spacing and borders in general. Anything look too close or far from the borders of the card? (note that it  will not have a border; if you see a double line around it, that's an artifact of blogger)

- should I leave off the twitter? I use it wayyy less than gmail, and right now all it does is post when I blog a new research blog. But I'd like to start using it for research/business/etc more, as it seems a good tool for that.

Cleveland, you spoil me!

Every time I touch down in CLE, I spend a week surrounded by people who love me. Okay, of course, going home to visit family and friends is nice. Dear Future Dan (one of the main readers of this blog): remember this week, it was really great!

Dear all the other readers of this blog: you are probably less interested in my reminiscing about family-and-friends-time. So instead, I'll point out some great things about Cleveland that you might get a chance to experience someday if you're lucky enough to visit here:

- theater at the Hanna, where my parents and I saw Two Gentlemen of Verona, and despite the play being generally not an awesome Shakespeare play, the performance was really well done!

- dinner at Lola, where now-famous chef Michael Symon got his start (I think?). Anyway, calf heart: surprisingly not weird, and surprisingly good. And pork belly too. Wow. (vegetarians beware.)

- drinks at the Velvet Tango Room, okay this place was kinda underwhelming when I live so close to Sun Liquor, Tavern Law, and Zig Zag, but it's at least in the same league, albeit more expensive.

- whoops forgot a drink in the middle at the Paganfest promotional show at Maple Grove in Maple Heights. Sometimes these things happen. Cleveland!

- 30+ kinds of olive oil and balsamic vinegar at the Olive Scene, and lunch at Tartine, in Rocky River. Check out the Olive Scene. Disclaimer: friends' parents own it. But it's great.

- another great lunch, this time at some bar I don't remember but it was on TV or something, I don't know these things it was tasty

- still got to stop at the West Side Market, which is still also wonderful.

I mean, this is right out of an airplane magazine "36 hours in Cleveland" deal. There is a lot going on there. I think I will not dump on Cleveland so much. It's got a lot of issues (cars cars cars) but it also has a lot to offer. I like to think about the latter. (more on that later!)

EDIT: whoops, I guess I didn't click Publish when I wrote this? So I published it later. Editing the date now to fit it back within the squiggly-wiggly timey-wimey continuum. (btw, new Who season: super great!)

Hot brain, cold brain

Cold brain = the part of you that thinks like a computer.

Hot brain = emotions, gut feelings, instincts, procedural memory, the stuff that guides your actions.

Is there a better term for this? If not, I'm going to start using the terms "hot brain"/"cold brain" a lot. It really concisely describes something I often want to talk about. For example, it's easy to learn in your cold brain that smoking causes cancer and that you should quit smoking. But it's hard to convince your hot brain, which is why quitting smoking is hard. Or, it's easy to learn vocabulary in a foreign language (cold brain) but hard to come up with it as you speak (hot brain).

And if you like barbecue chips, maybe you also like barbecue sauce.

So here I rail against people using their phones when they're hanging out with friends. (in general with the "multitasking is bad" thing.) And then I'm at a bar, and I realize I could help settle a dispute between some other friends, but I don't remember what exactly the dispute is. So I pull out my phone and Twitter and go to see what it was. My friends who I'm with mock me a little bit. I go "yeah, you're right" and put it away (but not before seeing what the dispute was).

Then I find my bit of data and go to report it back to said friends (the ones who aren't there)... by pulling out my phone and firing up the Twitter again. I am again mocked. This time I really deserve it.

All I'm saying is, don't judge people.

What drives you?

- need? Do you do the things you do because you must in order to survive?
- guilt?
- duty? (you feel like you have to, for one reason or another)
- compulsion/automaticity?
- excitement?
- ... mindfulness?

In case you can't tell, I'm trying to set up a progression or hierarchy, kind of like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. (Maybe this is the same thing.)

At any rate, I've recently gone rather a lot to a compulsion and excitement driven life. I take all the "dumb things I gotta do" and put them in a compulsion queue (like put things on my desk, or messages in my inbox; I'll clean them out eventually because I have a compulsion to clean things), and the rest of the time I spend on exciting things.

It feels like they all have relative values: A need-driven life is probably not great. A guilt-driven life is also terrible. I'm not sure about duty and compulsion. Excitement is pretty good, and whatever drives a monk on a mountain (supreme consciousness?) is probably the best.

I used to live pretty guilt-driven. It was behind a lot of my "environmentalism"; I felt like a Bad Rich White Person for pretty much trashing everything unconsciously, so I'd try to "minimize my footprint" left and right. I don't really get any big kicks out of composting, but it makes me feel less bad.

This is why I'm not sold on environmentalism now: what's behind it? If you really enjoy it, rock on! If it's a negligible cost, well, that's fine. But if you're making your life worse to reduce your waste from 84 units to 82... I kinda think we'd all be better off if you redirected your energy into something positive instead. And I mean "positive" in the sense that the question you're answering should be "how can I make _____ more good?" instead of "how can I make _____ less bad?"

And while I'm prescribing how you should live your life (pff!): quit living so duty-driven. But that's for another post.

Edit: I should say, too, that while this was spurred on by a conversation with Beej and Becky, I don't mean to snipe at them from the internet. I think we had this debate about the value of reducing your footprint and agreed to disagree; I'm posting it to record my thoughts at this point in time, and also to maybe provoke a further conversation if y'all want. (And also to tell everyone on the internet how to live their lives.)

Recording things for the future

I've got a couple of projects I'm working on now. Both are mobile apps.

I think I'll try standing desks some more. I'm intrigued. Some of my Google coworkers liked them. I came across this article. And I haven't heard anyone say they're bad.

Actually I got that article from this article (p1) (p2). Man! I guess I will also:
- brush my teeth before meals, or way after them
- cool down my showers to lukewarm, and work on getting down to cold (this has other benefits, including helping me be happier at hotels/guesthouses/hostels that don't have hot water. makes me generally lower-maintenance. that is nice.)
- try to squat. hope not to fall over.
These all seem easy to implement and no-downside. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

More difficult to implement although probably helpful:
- always sleep enough (I'm working on this still) and sleep with the seasons (just infeasible)
- always stomach breathe
So I will not commit to either of these.

Mihaly, don't let me down!

Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is one of the more influential books in my life. So I got The Evolving Self, Csikszentmihalyi's follow-up book. I am a chapter and a half in and already I have strong feelings about it.

The premise so far is: in this third millennium, we've mostly realized that the ol' Christian God sitting on a cloud with angels (or Greek Gods on Olympus or whatever) is false, but we're still searching for meaning and "happiness", whatever that means. Mihaly, I am with you so far!

But then, page 15: "But evolution has introduced a buffer between determining forces and human action. ... consciousness enables those who use it to disengage themselves occasionally from the pressure of relentless drives so as to make their own decisions."

What? How? Who are "those who use it"? How do they have a choice to "disengage themselves"?

On page 23 I'm back with him. He cuts through the "homunculus" image, in which we're each governed by a little man in our head who pulls the levers, and then cuts through the "traffic cop" image, where we're each governed by a bunch of signals but there's one guy saying which signals win. "Instead, consciousness is more like a magnetic field, an aura, or a harmonic tone resulting from the myriad separate sensations collecting in the brain."

So my question is: Mihaly, do we have souls? "Divine spark" or determinism? (or determinism + quantum/whatever randomness, which is just as good as determinism) I don't see a third path. You seem to say determinism, that consciousness is just a word that we use to talk about our minds the same way we say a computer "has vision", that there is not even any "we" to talk about "our minds", but you seem uncomfortable actually saying it.

Other minor quibbles:

Page 19: "The only value that all human beings can readily share is the continuation of life on earth."

... err, I don't share that. If all the existing humans just stopped having kids and eventually died out, as far as I'm concerned, that would be pretty okay. (modulo a few rough years for the last few living ones.)

By page 33, he's talking about how our minds are generally chaotic and unhappy when we have "free time"; we always want to accomplish the next goal. Then he says "There is a reasonable evolutionary explanation for this condition, too. If we could be contented just sitting by ourselves and thinking pleasant thoughts, who would be out chasing the saber-toothed tiger?"... doing that pop-cultural evolutionary thinking thing, where you dream up some explanation for how something could have been an evolutionary benefit and then conclude that it was an evolutionary benefit.

But on the plus side:

Page 40: "We think like computers whenever we think like computers. But certainly this particular function represents only a small aspect of how we think." This is a pretty concise way to talk about an idea that's been buzzing in my head for a while.

Mihaly, man, you're pushing all my buttons! In great and frustrating ways! If the determinism-or-not question remains an issue, I may get kinda annoyed. However, I have high hopes that you'll either pick a side or reveal to me some new side to that debate, or else we'll just put it aside and talk about more specific things.

Continuing with the Buddhism, I had some good meditation two days ago

I think I got a taste of what mindfulness tastes like. My main focus was my rising and falling stomach. I caught most every thought that came up (and there were a LOT of them) and said "okay, that's 'planning'" or "worrying" or "being excited" (a lot of them were "excited" because I was all like "oh man I'm finally doing meditation right*") or whatever, and then I saw them as if they were photos in a slide show, they'd go to the right and soon fade.

This lasted maybe a few minutes. But I think I learned a few things:
1. what it feels like to "do it right*"
2. how important it is, really, to be gentle with yourself the whole time, really; this feels more likely than anything else to get you somewhere.
3. how easy it is, once you've done it right*, to get super attached to reproducing that same state**

* I know I know, all meditation is good, it's not right/wrong/etc, no seriously, the rest of this meditation I've been doing (and maybe any meditation that you're doing that seems unproductive) is not wrong

** okay I want to keep this post short so I won't go into any more detail, but whenever I read a book about meditation and it talks about some of the more advanced mental states, it's really interesting. maybe I'll talk about this later.

It's about to get real Buddhist up in here, but don't worry, I'll talk about girls too so at least that's interesting

First, short thought: when you are not-doing, that too is a thing you are doing. You cannot do more or less. All you can do is redirect energy from one thing to another. Hmm. This is a half-formed thought; let's let it bake while exploring:

A longer thought. A section I liked in Noble Truth #2 part 2 of "Dancing with Life" by Philip Moffitt.:

"How do you know that you know?"

So he's talking about how to avoid clinging/addiction/unhelpful desires, and a student says "It seems to me that I have let loose of clinging... but then a little voice of doubt inside me asks 'How do I know that I am not just in denial of my clinging and am fooling myself?'"
Moffitt answers: if you've actually abandoned clinging to a thing, you'll feel it, in three ways.
1. You experience a distinct felt sense of spaciousness, well-being, and lightness. Depending on your nature, you will feel it more strongly in either your body or your mind.
2. You have a felt sense that something is over and that something new awaits you.
3. When you reflect back, you can see how your clinging was making a bad situation worse.

Let's look at things that I used to desire that I've not been desiring much (like these) and see if I'm abandoning clinging or just shoving it under the rug!
1. Being known as a master chef. I cooked some in college. Some people said I cooked well. It went to my head, I got the idea that I wanted people to think I was a super cook. Today, I don't really care.
- spaciousness/lightness: sure! it's nice to just make food to stay alive, and explore new things for fun!
- something is over, something new awaits: in a sense, yeah. I'm not sure what new awaits, but I guess "cooking with anxiety" has been replaced by "cooking and enjoying it more."
- clinging was making a bad situation worse: I think so. I used to think real hard, like think till I explode, or at least get real anxious, about what to cook.
Verdict: probably mostly abandoned clinging. Hooray!

2. Food advocacy. I used to think I would be some sort of social crusader, particularly in the area of food. Funny how little I think about it now.
- lightness: yes. well, it's one less thing to worry about.
- old thing out, new thing in: also yes. Now I concentrate on one cause, which is my work. It will help the world. Good enough for me.
- bad situation worse: yeah. I couldn't really do anything about it, or I wasn't willing to put in the time to do anything about it. So all my food advocacy thinking was just making me feel bad.
Verdict: also abandoned clinging. Also hooray! (note that these hoorays are completely unclingy hoorays. of course.)

3. Being a musician. I used to want to be a musician. Like a guitarist, like a cool guy, but I didn't want to play guitar because everyone does. So I figured I'd play trombone a lot. Like a cool guy. I do not have time or energy to play trombone. I suppose I'm not a cool guy.
I'll skip the details, but it feels like a weight lifted. Another clinging gone. Check me out, I'm practically in a cave on a mountain already.

4. Meeting a nice lady friend. I just have not had any inclination to try to do this for the past few months! I did a bit last year, but nothing worked out very easily, and I became busy with other things. So have I transcended even the desire to go on dates? It would help on that becoming-a-monk thing.
- lightness: not really. I guess not dating means one less thing to do, but dating wasn't a burden.
- old thing out, new thing in: nope. It's not like that energy translates into more energy for something else.
- this desire was making a bad situation worse: well, no.
Verdict: not abandoned! Just pushed under the rug. Well, that is not ideal.

5. Languages. I keep saying I want to learn languages, and then I keep not learning languages.
(moment of reflection)
Okay, well I still want to learn languages. I guess I'm not very effective at abandoning OR denying this one yet.

No Mac Java: are you kidding?

Jesus Christ. I just heard about Mac deprecating Java.

Java is English. Not the best language, but a pretty okay language that a lot of the world (like Android and, recently, InPulse) speaks pretty well. Shutting out English is misguided at best and a calculated ploy at worst.

I find myself sometimes trying to articulate to non-programmers why Mac is increasingly evil and why my next computer will be Linux, and the best I can come up with is: As the Apple programming world becomes more separate from the rest of the programming world, developers will increasingly have to choose between learning Apple/iPhone/iPad and everything else. Apple entices users to its walled garden with shiny toys. Apple entices developers to its walled garden by having lots of users. (especially lots of rich users.)

And once developers are Apple wizards (at the expense of their non-Apple skills), they're at Apple's mercy. They have to play by the rules of the App Store, like it or not. They have to deal with ridiculous languages and frameworks, no matter how they change, like it or not. And so, consumers: with Apple you get shiny toys in the short term, but in the long term developers gets stifled, squeezed and bled dry. And then nobody wins except a certain black-turtlenecked figurehead.

God damn. I'm so glad that I've spent the past 2.5 years working for a company that is actually making the world a better place.

Fully externalizing memory

Thoughts in your head exist in a wonderful state. Each thought is like a whole tree of spindly little branches and leaves connecting to other thoughts and providing context. When you write down a thought or bookmark a site, it's like just getting the trunk.

Sometimes you can get more. When I write down a thing to do on a future date on my calendar, it's accessible in a nice state. If I take a photo of a memory, it's often easier to remember the full context of the memory than it is if I just write it down. But you can never get the full memory tree.

But you do get two benefits from externalizing memory. First, (semi-)permanence. Especially when it's in The Cloud. My blog will last at least as long as Google. (maybe longer, if I back it up myself too.) This is useful even in the short term: the other day, I forgot that I blogged this article, and then I found it again, and now I'm starting a new post based on EEGs and wakefulness.

Anyway, the second benefit to externalizing memory is the ability to quit worrying about it. Working memory is crucial to everything, and tiny (that old "7 +/- 2"). Say I have "remember to do this thing next Saturday" holding up one chunk of memory, now I'm down to 6 +/- 2. Losing a chunk of working memory is like losing a finger. So I write it down on Google Calendar, tell it to email me a reminder, and then I get my finger back.

So I feel like I'm down a few fingers. Here are some things I'd like to externalize:

- Instead of worrying about "creating jobs" and making more work, let's use our prosperity to work less. Or redefine "work". Hell yes! I imagine a world where people work because they want to, not because they need to survive. Post-scarcity world. I'm pretty friggin' lucky enough to live there now. What happens when everyone does? Could the US, big as it is, survive this transition? Could any country?

- I continue to dig Alex Pang's Contemplative Computing blog. Quote from the Buddha: "The Buddha's laboratory was himself, and he generalized his findings to cover all human beings." Follow the link to "program of weight loss"; it's pretty good. Well researched, yet readable, and touches on a lot of things I'm interested in.

- Another link off that, this time to "What Actually Was the Stone Age Diet?", maybe the best explanation of "caveman/paleo/etc" diets. It's somewhat professional, remarkably free of histrionics, not affiliated with anyone who wants to sell his own book, and boils down to:
1. There was no one "Stone Age Diet." Over the last couple hundred thousand years, humans ate roots and berries and meat, or cooked roots and tubers, or a wide range of plants and some meat, or a ton of meat.
2. The only things that we certainly haven't eaten for more than ~5000 years are cereal grains and milk.
3. Even then, we don't know how long it takes our body to adapt to a new diet.
My conclusions remain mostly the same: I'm not interested in counting carbs vs. proteins, but I remain open to the possibility that grains aren't awesome for us. Still gotta run that next experiment. (my plans are to do this in April, when my life has stabilized a bit.)

- arg side note on food which is disappointing because I had a great segue to get back into talking about self-monitoring. I don't know where or why I picked up Josh Whiton's blog in my Google Reader, but it's great. He talks about food here; I'm intrigued. (he just wrote about monks too. Always cool.)

- arg arg side note about monks: if I were that 93 year old 70-year monk, I feel like I'd be sort of upset about my life! I'm sure he's not. But still! This is why I'm feeling the "worldly AND monkly success" path instead of the "mountaintop" one. (possibly I am brilliant; more likely I am too naive and restless.)

- okay back to self monitoring/experimenting. It's hitting the mainstream. Also led me to Seth Roberts, who might be crazy (ad hominem alert!), but has written some stuff that's inspiring about research I care about anyway.

- incidentally, Readability is a breath of fresh air in the smoggy Beijing of the internet.

Cross posting my Goodreads: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

Here's the link, and I provide it so that you can friend me if you also use Goodreads.

I won't do this often either, but my modes of putting info on the internet are a bit fragmented: when I read a book, I post about it in Goodreads, but when I get to thinking, I blog. When I read a book and it gets me thinking, that's a pickle.

So I read this book (free pdf/kindlebook/etc! time management book from 1910 England!) and here's what it got me thinking:


This guy is quite a baller. "What I suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know)..." "'I hate all the arts!' you say. My dear sir, I respect you more and more." and a lot more badass quotes that I forgot to write down.

But also, he's an example that proves that this "lifestyle design" or even "time management" stuff wasn't born yesterday. He's writing this for the common middle-class you or me, who wishes to "accomplish something outside [his] formal programme." He points out how, in 1910, a bunch of people went to work, came home, and twiddled away their time, while growing upset that they're wasting their lives.

His solution, part 1, is to set aside 90 minutes 3x/week and dedicate them to learning in depth about something. Literature if you like (poetry, not novels); other arts if you don't; or just a sense of in-depth knowledge and wonder in all things. The whole thing smacks of being very English: "Just Try Harder!" But at the same time, there are a lot of Buddhist undertones:
"You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose."
"When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no matter what, to begin with). You will not have gone ten yards before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is larking round the corner with another subject. Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station you will have brought it back about forty times. Do not despair. Continue."
"The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect- in other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe"
"Let the pace of the first lap be even absurdly slow, but let it be as regular as possible."

It's a spot of enlightened jelly wrapped in a doughnut of stiff-upper-lip. Well, better than most Englishness, which doesn't even have the jelly.

Great idea of the day

Quick: name a tablet computer! Name 3! (err, Galaxy Tab, Xoom, grumble grumble Ipad)
Say you tell me that I should get a Vortex Nebula tablet. I've never heard of Vortex Nebula tablets. Immediately I know that this is either:
- a very new tablet
- a specialized tablet (and I'd expect you to give more reasoning as to why I would like it particularly)
- a bad recommendation

Okay, now name a cognitive architecture. I can think of one, ACT-R, and it helps that my undergrad Cog Sci advisor at CMU was its inventor, and that I spent a summer working on tools based on it.

I'm not currently working with cognitive architectures. But say I wanted to get into the field. You can imagine how it'd be useful to have this sense of "what's kinda standard" before I start.

Why do I know "what's kinda standard" in tablets, but not in cognitive architectures? I'm going to guess it's advertising. Even though they're totally brain dead and content free, ads for these things are around you all the time, so you get to know at least what the mainstream is using.

So here's the great idea: you have Adblock in your browser, right? What if, instead of removing ads, it just replaced each ad with the title of a paper you care about instead? (specifically, you give it a field, and it throws in paper names in that field, randomly according to how often they're cited, say. or author names.) You'd get to absorb useful names instead of ads! Instant sense of "what's kinda standard"!

Career is only one letter away from Careen

Life can go all sorts of ways! Here are a few I'm thinking of, in descending order of preference.

1. the Dynamo. Love your job. Do something interesting, get expert at it, rock around the clock. Examples: Herb Simon, Cal Newport, anyone who works at a nonprofit. Sometimes these people are academics or doctors. They're always driven.

Upsides: you're Making A Difference. It's widely socially accepted. If you're an expert, you probably won't have trouble making money. The hours you're at work are wonderful.

Downsides: work might consume your life. Family and friends will require some effort. Unless you really work on developing your attention, mindfulness, and compassion, you might become a one-dimensional scatterbrained pencilhead. Also, the academic life is not easy.

2. the New Rich. Examples: Tim Ferriss, Chris Guillebeau, any number of bloggers and internet businessmen. Make some money somehow. Do it using the least effort possible. (beat the system a bit maybe.) Now that you have enough money to survive comfortably, spend the rest of your time pursuing any passion you want.

Upsides: how does this not sound great? This, not the 40-hours-for-40-years grind, is the standard of the new world. You still get to be your own boss. Making A Difference is overrated anyway.

Downsides: other people might try to drag you down. It's not as easy as it sounds. The hours you spend at work might be crummy. You might wonder why you're selling Pokemon Beanie Babies instead of Making A Difference. You have to keep up your personal development in your free time, because what is life if you're not somehow learning?

3. the Mercenary. Examples: a couple friends I won't name b/c y'know the internet. Travel around, get a job, make some money, quit your job, live for a while, when you're out of money get another job.

Upsides: as a softwareman, this is totally feasible. It's like plan #2 except when you're not working, you're totally not working.

Downsides: you might spend your life implementing a points-and-badges system for someone's social Web 2.0 AJAX mobile local foursquare twitter blatz. You have to lie to others because not liking your job is generally socially frowned upon. If you start to take it too seriously, you may have to lie to yourself to stay sane. 

4. the Monk. Examples: some travel bloggers I guess? Oh and maybe the Buddha but that was like 2600 years ago. Whether you actually become a monk or just start wandering for a long time is up to you. This is always a remote possibility that I will probably never have the guts to actually pull off.

Upsides: Enlightenment!

Downsides: don't be an idiot. (honestly. I don't mean this sarcastically. It's a legit choice, at least for a while. But you'd have to take extra care not to be an idiot.)

5. other kinds of specialized lives. Like say you're a lawyer; you'll undoubtedly have different paths than this. Or a field linguist or a veterinarian or whatever. 

6. the 40x40. Put in your 40-hour work week for 40 years. Make a lot of money doing something you don't like. Get a gold watch when you retire.

Anyway, there is no great wisdom here besides that I like to organize things and give them names. I'm trying out Career Plan #1 right now; I feel like I could definitely hit it in the academic world. If it doesn't work out, let's give 2, 3, or 4 a try. I wonder if there are any big categories I'm missing.

Clearing out my Google reader

Somehow, even though I spend all my time staring at fluorescent rectangles, there's not enough time to organize and output all my thoughts. Here are four.

First, Tim Bray posts about making money in mobile, concluding that yeah, making money selling apps is tough, but there's a lot of other ways to make a ton of money here, and we have no idea how big this market will end up being. He links to Anil Dash's post about running "lifestyle businesses" on the web. My thoughts: this is awesome. This is really great. It supports the idea that, should my research dreams not work out, I could potentially support myself by doing internet things for myself without going crazy.

I've been wanting to write this post about speaking D-list languages for years. If you speak Spanish, and you meet another Spanish speaker, great, you can communicate. But if you speak y'know Ukrainian or something, and you meet another Ukrainian speaker: instant friends! This is most of why I want to learn Dutch. Also, it applies to more than languages: if your favorite food is pizza, and someone else's favorite food is pizza, meh. But hey, if you like herring, let me know, because then we are chums.

Tim Bray again! About input. I agree. Wish I could vomit words into a computer faster. Particularly when doing things like transcribing a dream journal. (one of my coworkers' responses to this was: 90 WPM isn't fast enough for you? Nope.)

I follow a lot of blogs about "lifestyle design or whatever." I find them exciting. And it's great to think that a lot of people are sculpting their own lives in this Internet Age of Change All the Time, instead of just falling into predictable (damaging) ruts. The downside is that a lot of times this overlaps with "making money on the internet" in sort of annoying ways. (and, god forbid, "social media.") So I'm excited to hear about this change-of-mind from one of these lifestyle-design-or-whatever bloggers.

Word games

So there are "board games". Unfortunately, when you say "board games", somehow Scrabble, Monopoly, Settlers, Risk, Bang!, Betrayal, and Catch Phrase all get lumped into this same category. This makes it hard to disambiguate sometimes. I think there should be at least 4 very different categories:

1. Party Games: Catch Phrase, Identity Crisis, Scattergories, and I guess Cranium and Apples to Apples
2. Card Games: Bang, Bohnanza, maybe even Dominion
3. Strategy Games: Settlers, Puerto Rico, Agricola
Now these are on a pretty easy axis: complication (aka nerdiness). Puerto Rico is good to play with your programmer bros, Catch Phrase is good to play with 12 random people at a party and/or your family. And that's the defining characteristic of each category. The card/board distinction seems somewhat coincidental (although maybe not but I'll get into this later).

But the fourth category is word games: Scrabble, Boggle, Bananagrams, Snatch It. The defining characteristic of these games is that they depend on how well you've memorized the English dictionary. And in how many forms you've memorized it: can you come up with an 8-letter word that starts with W? How about a 5 letter word that includes C, A, T, and 2 other letters? (and how quickly?) And because these games are so focused on this one skill, it's hard to place them accurately on the complication axis. Some really nerdy folks don't like them, some totally non-nerdy folks do.

(I like them a lot. They make me feel flowy, and like I'm really honing a skill. If strategy board games are like weightlifting and party games are like running, word games are like pole vaulting. Or learning a language.)

So if the question is "do you like board games?" I think my best answer is "yeah, I'm about a 2.2 on the complication scale, and I love word games." Incidentally, if you ever want to play word games, I'm down.

Wow, lucid 4, in which I have a somewhat ominous and disappointing convo with Mr. Rogers

A day after lucid dream 3 (so, night before last) came lucid dream 4. A day! As with programming, rapid iteration == fun.

In this one, I realized I was lucid, and looked at my hands. They didn't look quite right; one of my thumbs was half gone. So I thought "that's not right", and the thumb disappeared completely. I thought "that's still not right," and it reappeared fully. Nice.

Then I said, okay, I want to meet some dream people again. But this whole lucid dreaming thing is still a little freaky, so... who should I see? How about the least freaky person ever: Mr. Rogers. So I said "I'll close my eyes, and when I open them, Mr. Rogers will be here." No luck. Again. Still no luck. I "realized" that of course that won't work, I should go to Mr. Rogers's house. So I said I'd close my eyes, open them, and be at Mr. Rogers's house. Success! I think.

I don't know what Mr. Rogers's house looks like. Maybe this was it. And when Mr. Rogers came to the door, he didn't look or act just like Mr. Rogers from the show- but then, of course he's a little different when he's not on TV. Here's how our conversation went:

Me: Who are you?
Him: Mr. Rogers.
Me: What do you represent?
Him: (no response)
Me: (thinking, well, here he is, might as well get some advice. but I didn't plan any questions in the waking life. so...) Okay, what should I do about my career?
Him: (still no response)
Me: What should I be?
Him: Well, you could always be a carbonmaker.
Me: a what?
Him: a carbonmaker.
Me: huh?
Him: well, you wanted some prescient advice, there it is. (in the tone of "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.")
Me: okay... what about the ladies? (I think I meant "should I get married someday?" although I might have just been asking Mr. Rogers how to pick up chicks, which is hilarious.)
Him: I don't know what to tell you, I'm single.
Me: what? I thought you were married.
Him (and this I remember is an exact quote): I have no hope for you, boy.

Afterthought: I don't feel totally in control of lucid-me, which is why I still come up with random stuff sometimes. For the record, both lucid-me and the subconscious Mr. Rogers that I conjured up are great. Also, after this dream I felt a little dumb, like I just forced some random situation and then filled in the blanks with the way I think Mr. Rogers would act, and I asked stupid questions and got stupid answers. I think, next dream, I'll do a bit more looking around, and play with the dream world that I get, instead of deciding which dream world I want.

More lucid oh boy

- I was flying around the galaxy, until I realized I wanted to talk to some people, so I said "the great thing about all these stars and galaxies is that they're really... a pizza!" Then I was standing on a planets-and-stars carpet in a basement. (of course by "pizza" I meant "carpet".)
- I met a person! I got to talk to him! There were a bunch of us dancing in a circle, singing a song, until I said to one youngish fellow with a terrible bowl haircut, "Wait. Who are you? What do you represent?" I wrote down who he said he was (don't remember now), I didn't remember what he represented, and then I said "do you have a name?" and he said no.
- my heart started beating really hard and I woke up.

Dream people! There are dream people! They act meaningfully!