Curious Creature

It’s great having a nice stash of good beer down in the basement while working on various stuff.  And when I say good I mean high quality, relatively high alcohol content

Happy New Year!

I’ve spent my whole New Year’s Eve moving my blog ;)  I actually have several blogs out there covering various things and it’s too hard to keep them all up to date.   So they’re all being moved here but really the only one I had been updating at all recently was brainfreezeblog.com so all of that content is here now with redirects set up so that links in Google come here.

Why the new blog?  I got tired of the old title.  I think the new title better represents that I want everything I’m interested in writing about here in one location.   I’m curious about lots of different things.  After all the world is an interesting place.

I’ve got various things planned like graphic updates and such but for now its all the same set up as brainfreezeblog.com.  That will work for now

Still in shock that the various curiouscreature domains were available.  Thought for sure they’d have been taken but I grabbed .net, .com, and .org.  Good thing for me

Maybe the title is exaggerating things just a bit but the idea is floating out there that the Golden Era of lifehacks is in the past and we are left with nothing more than productivity porn. And who is out front in saying this? None other than the productivity porn king himself Merlin Mann!

On September 10th of this year Merlin wrote in a post titled “43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work”:

Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here.

Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to finishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but flawed adult with a mind are dead to me. Pour a forty on ‘em.

The first time I read this I laughed. After all Merlin Mann pioneered productivity porn. To hear him complaining about how many sites are now out there peddling the stuff of his making was laughable. At the same time the guy has a point. In that article he describes, quite correctly, the problems with the productivity blogosphere today. Too much noise and not enough signal and I found myself agreeing with him to the point that I cut all of it out of my life.

Well, that and a big chunk of other time-wasting material. I trimmed about 2/3rd of the subscriptions I had going in FeedDemon/NetNewWire. I’ve all but given up political blogs which have been my other, massive, black hole of time. I’ve got a lot to do and not enough time to do it all. The cognitive dissonance being created by all of that reading without any real purpose behind it was becoming deafening so no more.

And honestly the best part of his post was the discussion of “conversation” and “community” :

Stupid, venal, ignorant, self-linking comments from people who couldn’t be troubled to actually read the article. Angry forum posts full of personal attacks, giant avatars of Manga characters, and 4-vertical-inch signatures about which Golden Girl you are. Nonsense tagging, meta-commenting, ass-kissing, trolling, and…oooo!…video responses….neato! Please. It’s nuts and it’s pointless and it’s really cynical on the part of almost every publisher that allows that crap to go on.

Right on. My blog hasn’t hit the popularity curve the same way 43 Folders has Not yet anyhow but this is my blog. I’ll say what I want, when I want to say it. If you have something to say to me email me but I got sick of tools like this on my own site. If you like what I have to say please keep reading. If you don’t keep reading or leave. The decision is yours but I’m not going to justify myself to anyone else let alone turds pretending to be people like I mentioned above.

Thanks for the whining Merlin. I feel a bit lighter now myself

I’m pretty scatter-brained these days.  I think years and years of “multi-tasking” hasn’t done a whole lot for my powers of concentration.  Today I decided while eating lunch to only eat lunch…live in the moment as it were.  No books.  No computer.  No radio.  Nothing.  Just the simple act of eating.

I suppose in some ways that is similar to meditation and it was really damn hard.   My mind kept flitting all over the place.  I had to restrain myself from moving over to the computer to read something or send a friend an instant message.  I’ve been slowly weaning myself from various sources of information that have been nothing but time sinks.  Today was a quick plunge into the cold waters of single-tasking and boy…definitely not a simple thing.

Time for a bit of reflection and time with family and friends as we approach the end of another year.

Happy Holidays to everyone.  Peace and prosperity to everyone in the new year.

Pegoraro writing in his Washington Post personal technology column points us to the various “technology duds” to avoid this holiday season.   Writing about satellite radio:

Satellite radio. The merger of former competitors Sirius and XM has mainly yielded confusion and anger, as customers have found favorite channels disappearing from these still-separate programming lineups with no notice. The company says it’s giving each service’s listeners a chance to enjoy channels once confined to the other, but in the process, good, original programs have gone silent and familiar DJs have been kicked to the curb.

A receiver that could tune in to both Sirius and XM broadcasts would address this problem, but no such thing is in stores. Until this company puts one on the market, stops gutting its programming and starts communicating its plans clearly to customers, why reward it with your money?

Does Pegoraro not realize that when companies merge they merge their offerings and when that merge happens some things get dropped while others don’t?  It is ridiculous to think that Sirius XM isn’t going to cut costs by merging programming especially given the state of their stock at the moment (closed at $0.17/share yesterday) and the state of the US economy in general.

And which company does he think is going to spend R&D money on a dual receiver when the company in question is in serious (no pun intended) financial distress?  Hint: none.

I tend to agree that the programming choices that have been made are pretty poor.  A good example is the loss of the XM Vox channel while replacing it with the Met Opera channel from Sirius.  Vox was vastly superior and the Met Channel couldn’t have been that big of an income source.  To top it off the guy responsible for programming Vox is still with Sirius XM on their Symphony Hall channel so it’s not likely they saved money.

I think Pegoraro’s overall statement is ridiculous given the current economic climate and even more ridiculous when considering how most business mergers work.  Consolidation always happens.  Thats the whole point.

I’m really frustrated by an ongoing issue with iCalendar feeds coming from my lists at Remember the Milk being consumed improperly by Google Calendar.  And the thing that is most frustrating?  They don’t seem to give a damn that the problem may very well be on their end.

Have a look at the help forum posting here.  The conversation gets real interesting when user wernst starts to do some digging into why the feeds aren’t working.  What he uncovers is that the RTM iCalendar feeds contain an excessive amount of timezone information.   He even sets up a new account, removes everything from the lists so that there are no to-dos and no events, and then grabs the feed.  That feed also contains excessive amounts of timezone information even though it has no events associated with it.   Emily from RTM insists its all about the timezones:

(for anyone curious, those lines describe the timezone; extremely important for ensuring your tasks display at the correct time!)

That’s all well and good but why is the timezone being described, in detail back to the year 1918, for a feed that has no events?  As wernst points out the feeds coming from AirSet, which can parse the RTM feeds, and which he then forwards to Google Calendar, don’t have all of that timezone information and, *gasp*, Google Calendar reads them properly.

So it very well might be an issue on Google’s end but I think it’s pretty clear that RTM is generating feeds, that while valid, don’t work properly everywhere.   I could probably form some valid XML that not all parsers can deal with.  That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t fix the XML to make it easier to parse.  RTMs position is that since Google is grabbing the feeds regularly the issue is out of their hands.   Google may very well be getting the feeds in a timely manner.  That doesn’t mean they’re parsing them properly.

To the folks at RTM:  your customer service in this instance sucks.  I can’t be much more blunt than that.  You had a paying customer do a lot of work for you and you’re passing it off like you can’t possibly have anything to do with the problem since Google manages to at least grab the feeds OK.  BOOO!!!!

I love your application but you guys need some work on the customer service front.  Sheesh.  Google is the 800lb gorilla here.  You’d do well to work with them to figure out what the hell is happening for the many users of both your service and theirs.  Just insisting that the calendar feeds are valid and then closing the posting certainly isn’t going to fix anything.

Obama is President-elect.  I can’t believe it.  Just can’t believe it.   Not much else to say at the moment.  Have to witness this amazing moment in history.

The History Channel just aired a 2-hour program about the Dust Bowl in the 1930s in the central United States called Black Blizzard.  What struck me most during the program was the description of a series of massive storms that hit on April 14th, 1935 known as “Black Sunday”.  The History Channel had computer recreations of what this looked like.  Here is an image from the show (and the History Channel website) showing one of the storms approaching.  Inside the car are a reporter and photographer who, after stopping and taking pictures of the approaching storm, are trying to outrun the storm.

During the show they also showed several real photographs of the storms of Black Sunday and doing a quick search on Wikipedia produced one spectacular photograph of a storm as it approached Spearman, Texas:

Here is another photograph of a storm as it approaches Stratford, Texas.  This photo is perhaps even better than the one above as the buildings are closer to the camera and give a better scale to the size of the storm:

According to DirecTV’s listing there is another showing of this program on 10/25 at 2:00PM Central Time.  It is definitely worth watching.