Pizza Discovery
Garbage person? Maybe. Loving life? No question.
Funny stories for thinking people
Yesterday I got up around 4:30 in the morning because of…we’ll just say a combination of parenting and entrepreneurial passion (expressed, respectively, in a baby squawk around 3 a.m. and an ensuing mental swirl of irrepressible goals and ideas).
Oddly, I found myself rather enjoying it. I listened to a great talk or two I’d been meaning to get to, showered, made myself a pot of tea, and then spent an hour or two working on Frobisher. I made the last couple connections that solved my months-long stuckness on the ending—picture me dancing with glee in my fuzzy slippers in my basement at 5 a.m. I got a jump on the day.
A few days ago, after a similarly sleepless night, I still ended up staying up until 1 a.m. plugging away at Clickworks tasks. It was one of the highest-impact productive time I’ve spent lately. In short order I hammered out two medium-sized projects that have been nagging at me for months. In addition to the quiet and solitude, I think the sleepiness took the edge off my perfectionism and helped me just plow ahead.
For all that, the sleepless nights have also pummeled my mental acuity. I drifted rather a lot. I poked around at Facebook for way too long even though I had no real interest in it. That night after a group meeting I wandered the darkening streets for 45 minutes, trying to remember where I’d parked, and berating myself for not thinking to wear more than a t-shirt. The following morning I searched the house unsuccessfully before realizing I had worn my hoodie, but forgotten it at the meeting. Irony. Then my wife found my hoodie in the stroller.
So now I’ve got a debate going in my head. Up too early (or, as the case may be, too late) yields solitude, extra time, and generally a good flow state. Lack of sleep apparently breaks my brain, which is about what you’d expect. Worth it? What say you?
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
While this book is a little scattered both in format and subject material, it has some very helpful ideas about reframing your approach to life in ways that are likely to maximize your chances of success overall and your happiness even in the meantime.
Some of my big takeaways:
“…if you like interesting personalities, hidden depths, deep emotions, determined artists, and hilarious dialog, this is the book for you.”
Check out the full review below!
I’ve been thinking about rest lately. Having a fitful 4-month-old will do that.
Strangely, what got me thinking wasn’t the many sleepless nights. It was when we collectively conked out one Saturday and did pretty much nothing but family movies, Wii games, convenience foods, and (finally!) solid naps for everyone, including the grown-ups.
And it was good to veg out and all, but really it wasn’t that good. By the end I felt more sluggish than energized, even though it was all the “relaxation” I could cram into one day. Instead it brought into focus a question that has been bugging me for a while now: Just how much “relaxing” do I really need?
Put differently, when do I expect that I’m going to put down my phone and actually do all the life-giving but effort-requiring things I’m remembering I love but rarely do these days? Will I ever touch Latin again? Write good theology? Read actual books like a gentleman?
There’s some part of me that assumes that once I rest up and feel a little less zombie-ish I’ll start digging in on those things. And that’s probably kind of true, at least for the ones I already do sometimes, but really what’s going to make the difference is better free time routines. I want to stop being someone who defaults to smartphone-poking-while-“watching”-Netflix in my free moments.
A few early discoveries on this path:
One way I’m applying that last one, incidentally, is to shorten my books-in-progress list. I’m generally in the middle of, say, eight books at a time (which is probably not industry best practice anyway). Instead of a page of this and a page of that, I’ve started plowing through one book at a time (or one fiction and one non-fiction) until it’s done, and I’m now down to maybe four books in progress instead of eight or ten. It’s been surprisingly freeing. I hadn’t realized how much brainspace books-in-progress take.
What about you? What have you found truly restful and life-giving?
Cheers!
–Ben
I am beginning to seriously groove on AutoHotkey. It’s a free open-source program that lets you automate things on your computer. A pretty common application appears to be making up your own keyboard shortcuts and/or autoreplace rules.
I initially found it early in my vim kick–a kick which, for the record, is gamely stumbling on as I continue to insist to myself that one day I will learn enough to make vim so magically, brilliantly super-efficient that it will…well, make up for the dozens to hundreds of hours I will have spent learning stuff about vim, I guess.
Anyway, I was getting all excited about vim and learned that many power users remap their keyboards so that CapsLock becomes Esc and vice versa, because vim involves hitting Esc a lot and the CapsLock key is closer and easier, and so I charged ahead and found a little program (the aforementioned AHK) that would let me remap the keys in a fairly straightforward, untechnical way, and I did, and I thought little more of it except for putting in a mental pin to remind me to look more into AHK’s capabilities at some point.
That point was a couple days ago, and boy are my arms tired! Wait, different joke.
Anyway, I started reading up on AutoHotkey a little more and it’s amazing what it can do! It’s really a full-blown scripting…thing. (Application? Tool? Sorry, The Giver. No precision of language here.)
I once jokingly told a colleague that I wasn’t satisfied with the fact that I’d semi-automated a report to where I could run one query, paste the results into one spot in Excel, hit refresh, and send it out. I wanted a single button that would run the query, paste the results, and send the report for me. And then I wanted a machine that would push that button for me every day.
It appears that AutoHotkey is that button. And maybe also that machine. Time will tell.
For now one of my favorite uses I’ve put it to is creating keyboard shortcuts that pull up ‘dashboards’ of all the websites and/or files and/or folders I need to monitor or work on a particular project, task, or topic. It cuts out the friction that slows me down from getting to work (on, say, writing) because I’d have to open the story and the planning document and my music and my tracker and whatever. Or whatever.
I’m sure there will be more on this later, but just as an appetizer, install AutoHotkey and run a script containing the following code, then hit Ctrl-Shift-A. You’re welcome.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;Fun Dashboard Ctrl-Shift-A
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
^+A::
navOpenInNewTab := 0x800
navOpenInBackgroundTab := 0x1000sites:=”www.reddit.com|www.xkcd.com|
www.smbc-comics.com|www.penny-
arcade.com/comic”
ie := comobjcreate
(“InternetExplorer.Application”)
ie.visible := trueLoop, Parse, sites, |
if A_Index = 1
ie.navigate(A_LoopField)
else
ie.navigate(A_LoopField,navOpenInNewTab)
return
Today another Clickworks Press author discusses Kickstarter for authors (and illustrators), the value of fairy tales, and writing in community.
Keep reading: Bill Hoard
If you’ve ever dreamed of quitting your day job to have adventures with friends, this book is for you. Or if you’re an aspiring technomage. That’s cool, too.
Keep reading: Author Interview: Ben Y. Faroe
Today we get a look at a historical fantasy retelling of the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, described as a “kinder, gentler Game of Thrones.”
Keep reading: Author interview: Christina Ochs