“schemes for selfcontrol”
19 posts under this tag.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m lousy keeping my public commitments. The thing is, they really help me clear my head and get some focus, and most of the time, even if I don’t finish on schedule, public shame makes me finish all I originally intended eventually (though usually pretty late). So I’m still a big fan of public commitments but this time I’ll add a novel feature to my schedule: incentives for me to finish on time.
Some background is in order: As I was saying yesterday, there is a big project (the biggest yet!) on the horizon, but before I can tackle it I need to give Imagery the much-promised revamping I’ve been talking about for 49 days now (!). I’ve several things to blame, of course, but by and large it’s the same lack as always: focus.
Anyway, many ideas have come to me in the meanwhile. To begin with, I definitely want Imagery to have a memorable, easy-to-pronounce dotcom name and after much brain-racking my creative-assistant-cum-sis, Chef, came up with domburi.comWHOIS, which I loved and was surprisingly available. DomburiWP (usually spelled donburi) is an extremely popular, delicious, and simple japanese dish that has been my top food for three weeks now (when it toppled Pad ThaiWP). The name’s short, memorable, easy to pronounce, and cool. It’ll be Imagery’s new identity. The next step now is to clone Imagery to Domburi and experiment there so that I don’t disturb Imagery searchers (how oh-so-cool to have a user base!). Imagery was always meant as an alpha application and has far outstretched itself already. A major polish is in order (not a rewrite from scratch, mind you!) and you’ll be able to track it from domburi.com (though the page will of course be unstable).
The other important idea was to create something of a brand house for Imagery Domburi and all the related interface projects that are to come. My first candidate for a name was the Interface Institute, which was dotcom available and seemed like fun (considering it’s a one-man enterprise), but I wanted something more risky, more challenging, and that’s how I ended up with  .net—after, of course, that famous quote from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire,
I don’t want reality, I want magic.
seen under the light of this other quote—that might as well be the new company’s mission statement—from Steven Johnson’s indispensable Interface Culture,
The real magic of graphic computers derives from the fact that they’re not tied to the old, analog world of objects. They can mimic much of that world of course, but they’re also capable of adopting new identities and performing new tasks that have no real-world equivalent whatsoever. People who get hooked on computers get hooked for this reason. They don’t become high-tech junkies because their machines remind them of their Rolodexes; they’re junkies because their machines do things they never thought possible. Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility.
I’m tremendously excited about . Once, not long ago, I somewhat secretly decided that I’d someday work at virtual reality, the possibilities of which seem truly mind-boggling (some of you might remember my incoherent ramblings on the subject). To my mind, this seems like a weird early step in that direction—in virtual reality, everything is interface.
But that’s enough intro, here, finally, is my road map:
Start of Project Domburi!—29 July (Chef’s bday!)
Main Goal: Make Domburi IE and Opera compatible.
Punctuality Premium: If I do finish with the above task, I get to buy Getting Real, the book.
End of 1st Week—5 August
Main Goal: Add Yahoo! & Flickr to the list of Domburi engines and do interesting things like split screens and such with them.
End of 2nd Week—12 August
Main Goal: Implement Bento & Disjoint (Cool Domburi surprise features—you’ll see!). Begin writing copy (presentation, FAQ, help, requirements).
End of 3rd Week—19 August
Main Goal: Polishing, beta-testing, polishing. Rinse and repeat. Special attention to things like responsiveness, interaction, smoothness, design, performance, stability. Finish writing copy.
End of 4th Week—23 August
Main Goal: Publicity, more polishing, and more publicity. The hope here is a mention from
TechCrunch.
Tentative Finish—29 August
Project Domburi would be successfully finished now if the website had attained 10 thousand visitors per day, for more than 3 days (not necessarily in a row). If the challenge’s met I earn the Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep promoting and polishing the website fulltime.
Punctuality Premium: Read Replay, Machinery of Freedom, Artful Sentences and the week’s Economist—all told, my idea of nirvana.
End of 1st Cushion Week—2 September
The same review of the previous week: Domburi should have had 3 days with a 10-thousand-visitors-traffic by now. If it does, I earn a (big) Punctuality Premium, if not, I keep at it.
Punctuality Premium: Read Peter Watson’s massive Ideas: a history of thought and invention—with 750 pages (and big sheets at that, with the smallest of margins) it promises to be even more absorbing and challenging (and fun!) than The Modern Mind. Implement quick versions of 3 simple projects: a textviewer, a timetool, and an interface to RAE.
End of 2nd Cushion Week and Definitive Finish of Project Domburi—9 September
Domburi really should have had at least five 10,000-visitors days by now, but if it doesn’t I’ll move (shamefully) to the next project…
Start of Project Maki!—10 September
As always, any help keeping me on track (a simple message or comment or email) would be very very very appreciated. Being a human-timer is easy and fast, and yet rewards with lavish praise. ;)
Idling at the pool with my sister Chepe I came up with a 3-question test I specially liked. I have no psychological training whatsoever (nor do I believe in much of it) so I don’t have any ready-made answers at the ready if you do decide to answer it. But I promise it will be interesting and make you think (and that’s as good a yardstick for doing something as any).
Pay special attention to the wording and the intended meaning. It is not whether you would rather be intelligent or empathic, is whether you would prefer to have some more intelligence or some more empathy than what you already have.
3-question test
(1) Would you rather have more intelligence or more empathy?
(2) Would you rather have more 1) or more self-confidence?
(3) Would you rather have more 2) or more self-control?
My answers btw, are empathy, empathy, and self-control.
I should tattoo myself these words. Somewhere prominent and unforgettable.
In my lifetime, I’ve had more than a dozen managers. It’s safe to say that many of them were forgettable, and some were awful. But the few that I admired or wanted to emulate took time to earn my trust. They wanted me to do my best work, and they knew that this was possible only if I could rely on them on a daily basis. This didn’t mean they’d do whatever I asked or yield to my opinions by default. But it did mean that their behavior was predictable. More often than not they were up front with me about their commitments, motivations, and expectations. I knew where I stood, what my and their roles were, and how much support was available from them for what I needed to do.
As a leader or significant contributor to a team, everything depends on what assumptions people can make of you. When you say “I will get this done by tomorrow” or “I will talk to Sally and get her to agree with this,” the other people in the room will make silent calculations, perhaps subconsciously, about the probability that what you say will turn out to be true. Over time, if you serve your team well, those odds should be very high. They will take you at your word and place their trust in you.
Although movies and television shows often portray leadership as a high-drama activity with heroes running into burning buildings or bravely fighting alone against hordes of enemies, real leadership is about very simple, practical things. Do what you say and say what you mean. Admit when you’re wrong. Enlist the opinions and ideas of others in decisions that impact them. If you can do these things more often than not, you will earn the trust of the people you work with. When a time comes where you must ask them to do something unpleasant or that they don’t agree with, their trust in you will make your leadership possible.
This implies that to be a good leader, you do not need to be the best programmer, planner, architect, communicator, joke teller, designer, or anything else. All that is required is that you make trust an important thing to cultivate, and go out of your way to share it with the people around you.% Therefore, to be a good leader, (pink)you must learn how to find, build, earn, and grant trust to others as well as learn how to cultivate trust in yourself.*
...but I’m not. Let’s walk the biosphere while we still have it. I hear they’re gonna read Borges out loud tomorrow in the park. Yey!
“Once long ago, when Japan was still struggling to enter the modern age, we let ourselves be ruled by our military. Soldiers were our masters, and they led us into an evil war, to conquer nations that had done us no wrong.”
“We paid for our crimes when atomic bombs fell on our islands.”
“Paid?” cried Aimaina. “What is to pay or not to pay? Are we suddenly Christians, who pay for sins? No. The Yamato way is not to pay for error, but to learn from it.”
Children of the Mind, Orson Scott Card
I’m hungry for Japan.
Btw, Children of the Mind is the 4th book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga. Card noticeably risks a whole lot more than in previous books, too much at times and he often fails, but at others, he really shines.
I’m sick (and oh-so-very-tired) of this clueless, absent-minded, bumbling persona of mine. I’m sick of knowing nothing about the rw (that’s the real word), of always getting lost, of always forgetting stuff, of never having my cell phone around, of people patronizing me, of stupid little mistakes like today’s. It’s time to start paying attention, to notice my surroundings, to stop forgetting in the shower whether I already shampooed my head or not. I’m becoming (to some degree at least) a worldly person as of this moment. This is my official skin shed of the silly-clumsy-absent-minded-professor-persona. So long.
“Attention,” the articulate oboe was calling. “Attention.”
“Attention to what?” he asked, in the hope of eliciting a more enlightening
answer than the one he had received from Mary Sarojini.
“To attention,” said Dr. MacPhail.
Island, Aldous Huxley
Some more good quotes from the book here
...so please let me write this and sleep afterwards:
It comes down to learning to be a little bit better in life, to expect less and cope with more, and that brings it back to the craft, all the time.
Pat Martino, as it appears in The VirtuosoAM, by Ken Carbone.
To publish before the heat death of the universe:
- I Fell In Love With Yoga
- Me, Myself, and Exercise
- Why Reading Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies Got Me Out of a Math Degree (And How Paul Graham Held My Hand Later On)
- How to Use Firefox as a Text-Reader.
- How I Finally Got Criticism with Interface Culture & Understanding Comics
- In Defense of Prejudices
- Paean to Contraceptives
- On Premarital Sex
- How to Use Winamp with Flair
- Prefiero Lo Fresa
- The Perry Bible Fellowship: The weirdest comics you’ll ever, ever read
- No amamos a nuestros amantes por su belleza
- Secrets of Language Learning
- A List of Fruits
- A Wikipedia Feature Proposal
- Analogies
- Music Search and the Future of Google
- How to Learn Esperanto
- Azureus’ 3d View: a Beautiful, Dense, Self-Explanatory Example of Information Design
- On Youth (and Foolish Ambition)
- A Personal Theory of Love
- Urban Sensibility. Media Enjoyment.
- I Used to Fly
- The Synaptic Mesh That Is My Mind Seems To Have Reached a Link Tipping Point. The Same Goes For The Web.
- Reasons to Love Web Design
- Mejor, la Verdad
- Una Introduccion a Fernando Delgadillo
- Como Todas las Mañanas
- Sobre el Peje y Cosas Peores
- Memetic Alert!
- Those Pfizer Ads Are Pure eemadges!
- I Want To Be Selfish
- City Driving
- Art Definition
- Una Introduccion a Akwid
- Doug Engelbart’s Stages of Mankind
- Borges, The Information Fetishist
- Ghosts, A Novel
- A Summary of Summaries
- Conceptual Blending
- A Dictionary of Language Extensions
- 18 Pages of True Math (Or Why Minus Times Minus Yields Positive)
- Discographies and Sturgeon’s Law
- Internet & Electricity
- Ten Reasons to Drop Out
- Systems (My Kind)
Things have been slow lately and, as is my nature, I’ve crafted a small weird plan to get things moving once again. This week I’ll…
- publish Erasmo’s novel on Wednesday;
- take Hatha Yoga classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday;
- get myself a medical certificate saying I can swim and enroll at Acalli;
- swim on Thursday;
- go every morning,
7AM to 1PM, 8AM to 2PM, to Starbucks Mariano Otero Providencia Minerva to read and write;
- read Andrew Hunt and David Thomas’s The Pragmatic Programmer, Erich Fromm’s El Arte de Amar and O. C. Ferrell, Geoffrey A. Hirt, and Linda Ferrell’s Business: (a fascinating textbook from my sister Paulina);
- reread Strunk and White’s Elements of Style;
- finally finish my Notes On WikiCriticism, the exploratory essay I’ve been painting for too long already.
There’s sadly too little programming in here, but I need to find out how good the WikiCriticism idea really is before I can start to move on. Wish me luck!
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