procrastination diagram - April 2005

I spent the weekend helping to move and put up a set for The MIT Gilbert & Sullivan Players production of The Yeomen of the Guard (or The Merryman and His Maid). Actually, an extended weekend; I took Monday off to continue putting up the set, and yesterday off to recover. I still didn't get as much done with the rest of my life as I really intended to. I think I did more of what I would call "actual work" this weekend than I have in the past four years of professional behavior. Anyway, If you happen to be in town this weekend or next weekend, you should catch a show; it's shaping up to being a well executed production of one of Gilbert and Sullivan's more highly regarded works. Also the set is kind of cool.

Now, if only I didn't have to go back to work today...

Actually, I think the change did me good; walking to dinner last night, I had a couple of interesting thoughts.

One, which I will share, is the perhaps obvious in retrospect observation that carrying a decent camera is probably a license to talk to attractive women that you see walking down the street (if you're, well, more outgoing than I am, anyway). I was walking down Massachusetts Avenue when a woman stepped between some parked cars and the evening sunlight caught her long dark hair so perfectly I actually forgot that I had my camera on me for a few seconds ("If only I had my camera... wait, I do"). I only realized after thinking for a bit that there was a reasonable chance that I could have gotten her to stand still, let me take the picture, strike up a conversation, and give me her email address (so I could send her the picture, of course). (I freely admit that I am assuming that an email address is equivalent to a phone number these days, especially in the umbra of MIT. Also, I am probably unfairly assuming that people in general are vain enough to be flattered when a random person asks if they can take their picture.)

So what would have stopped me? Well, I don't have enough practice with this camera at portraiture, and I just don't strike up conversations with people on the street. Actually, I suspect that if I were the kind of person to talk to people on the street, the inexperience with the camera wouldn't have stopped me. (What really stopped this time me was that I was thirty feet down the street before I even articulated the scenario.)

I'm pretty sure I have at least one reader that will read the above two paragraphs and say "Well, Duh".

To mostly change the topic, I have a question: If you come up with an idea (yes, the other one) for something that people didn't realize that they needed, and you could potentially build a free software business out of it (it's the sort of thing that would actually be somewhat harder to sell closed-source, but has a lot of integration and enhancement consulting opportunities as free software), does it make sense to blog about it before actually writing the software? What if you're lame enough that you're never going to write the software or start the company? What if you're just not sure?

In other news, googling for "Does this starship make me look fat?" (with the quotes) reassuringly finds no hits... yet.

Get tomorrow's terminology today at The Futurologian Congress (via LaughingMeme).

I'm sort of glad that I'm not going to have to worry about the coming RFID chips embedded in passports (via Beyond the Beyond) until 2012, by which time I suspect they will have come up with something a little less blatantly stupid.

Meanwhile, if patents were cheap, I think I'd patent the notion of RFID-seeking munitions before someone else does. Unfortunately, only large companies can afford to randomly patent ideas, so I will just publish it instead. If nothing else, the collateral damage at The Gap will be good for schadenfreude.

Until you consider that my linguistic habits haven't really changed much since I moved to Massachusetts...

(thanks to stuntviolist)

Hi. I can't sleep, so the obvious twenty-first century reaction is to write about it on the Internet. Over the past month had a week-long spot of what I will assert was the flu (although there was what seemed like a lot of coughing and sore throat) which has left me with a lot of time for ruminating and less ability for coherent thought or motivation to actually write any code or English.

It's not that I don't have anything to say; I have seven unfinished blog entries, counting three things which are merely titles as placeholders for things that live mostly in my head (one of them is about why that is a bad idea :-), and one political rant that I needed to get out of my head but likely will never show to anyone else, it's just that I am having my perennial difficulty in finding the time and words to say it.

Empirically, the many of the people who get ahead in white-collar careers such as professional computer-geekery do so more by their communication skills than anything else. Admittedly, a software engineer who can put out millions (hyperbole warning) of lines of bug-free code will also be highly valued, but those lines of code are less far useful than they could be if she can't coherently explain what they do. But the highly-paid, highly-respected alpha-geeks seem to universally good at getting the word out, at least the ones I've heard of (which I think is a relevant filter...)

So I need to learn to communicate more and better. At least partially, this blog/journal is a means to that end, as I have observed before. It should also be a vehicle for disseminating the occasional good idea that comes crawling out of my brain (and, to be sure, the bad ones, but then other people can filter them.) It should also eventually be my contribution to the global google attention economy, but it seems that I have to make posting links to things I come across on the web even easier than it is now if that's really going to happen.

With some of the technical stuff I'm wavering on whether I should use the code I wrote earlier to avoid posting it to livejournal (amusing that I had to write more code to not post it..) or just put the cut at the beginning to avoid boring people. I guess I'll burn that bridge once I've actually written something relevant.

We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require people to shake hands with each other.

I noticed that feedster somehow picked up the test blog on my old laptop, which causes me to look up the mechanism for claiming a feed. Since the host entry for my old laptop doesn't exist, I'm using my real blog to figure out whether it would be of any use to hack together enough to claim the test blog.

no need to click on this, claiming feed at Feedster

Also, I'm testing the feature I just added to bleater to let me not crosspost to livejournal. :-/