2020 Hindsight

an interesting combination

The Friday Five is being replaced (or appended?) by something called That's Awfully Personal.

The question for this week is a good one for personal birthday-time journaling:

You wake up in a strange new world where everyone gets paid the same salary no matter what they do for a living, even if there's no obvious 'market' for it, and no matter how many hours a week they work at it. And everything costs 'whatever you can afford'. What would you do for a living? Is this something you're already good at, or something you'd like to *become* good at? What kind of people would you like to work with, or would you prefer to work alone? And what would you do with your new-found leisure time?

Combine that with this advice given to a(nother) generalist

by Hugh McLeod (you gotta scroll down into the comments to read)

1. Imagine your dream job.

2. Mentally break your dream job into 4-6 distinct parts.

3. Narrow your focus of your blog to just these 4-6 distinct parts. Create them as official categories, if you have to.

4. Blog like crazy about them. [Read More; Hugh posts his comments on his own site.]

Who knows where this will go?

Powell's.com interviews Karen Armstrong

Her new memoir, The Spiral Staircase follows her other books, A History of God, the Battle For God, Muhammed, Islam: A Short History, and Through the Narrow Gate (her memoir about leaving a Roman Catholic convent at age 24). The current memoir takes up from the point she left the convent. [via WannaWrite]

Her interview with Powell's ranges over all the religious topics she's covered, and her take on religious beliefs. In this excerpt, she's asked what kinds of questions keep coming up from people attending her book book tour readings and signings.

"Do you believe in God?" I point out that that's a very Christian question, a very Western, modern question. It's not actually the proper question, but nevertheless it's what people want to know. For them, that is the question.

Dave: And what is the question that you prefer to ask instead?

Armstrong: I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.

Lots of good stuff in the interview, go read it all.

Beautiful Blog Writing

Two breathtakingly beautiful essays, one by Real Live Preacher (aka Tom Bombadil) about a ring, and another one by John Perry Barlow about the death of a roommate. Go read them both, now.

(on a related note, Mark Pilgrim, who'd noted that good writers do three things: read every day, write every day, and X, posts replies by others about what X is. No matter what you think X is, Real Live Preacher and John Perry Barlow have --or do--X.)

Getting Things Done consultant Gets Blog Done

Jason Womak, who runs the free Barnes Noble University Getting Things Done class (which I just took, and sigh will take again) is blogging now, thanks to the urgings of Robert Scoble.

Previous times I've blogged my "road to hell is paved with efficient intentions" as concerns Getting Things Done:

here,

here,

here,

here,

here, and

here. Making more headway on it of late (hooray) and it's good to see others online who are doing the same. Mutual support and hand-holding is A Good Thing.

A Fine Summer Day in Early March

This may be the day where my little town gets to have the national high for the day. (er, the 8th. I'm technically posting this not long after midnight). USA Today's Weather Extreme page lists Santa Ana (at 93) as having the high for Sunday. It'll be a few hours before they post the high for Monday. It was 93 here today. Based on the last-temperatures in the last 24 hours chart, Monrovia (and downtown LA/USC) are almost neck-and-neck with Pierce College for the nation's high. UPDATE: Shoulda checked the Orange County NOAA info while I was at it. Santa Ana won the prize again, at 97 degrees.

Today defied "warm winter days" ... those are warm in the daytime, lulling one to wear shorts and shortsleeves. But after dark, winter (well, California winter) comes back to bite the unprepared who still are dressed in shorts. Not today. Today was a true summer day. It's midnight and a tanktop outdoors is only just the tiniest bit chilly, just like most summer nights in SoCal.

DNA research finds ancestral details

Take a swab of inside your cheek, send it off, and pay the fee to find out your genetic origins.

Scientists know that all people are 99.9 percent alike, genetically. But

it's that other 0.1 percent that can reveal clues, Frudakis says. DNA

Print's scientists identify markers or "signature characteristics" that vary

substantially by race and are passed down through the generations.

That test, which is so far unique, looks for "ancestry informative markers"

that reveal a person's proportions of four ancestries -- European, African,

Native American and East Asian. The company returns a certificate indicating

the consumer's "admixture," identifying the proportion of each ancestry.

Other companies sell more specific tests that compare Y chromosomes

inherited from male ancestors and mitochondrial DNA from females with

databases of DNA from people indigenous to specific continents and regions.

Is Goal Setting Bad For You?

Found this discussion thread in a moment of procrastination. Glad I did. (Context: people discussing Getting Things Done/Life Management Gurus and the importance of "setting goals") The person who started the thread describes how goals made him uneasy. Ensuing discussion pits (singleminded) goal setting in one corner, and A Balanced Life in the other.

Here's a highlight (from page 2 of thread, posted by zootski):

I started a small firm during the dotcom boom - I spoke to an older, perhaps jaded venture capitalist and he warned me he couldn't count how many people he had known over the years who had spent years of the most productive healthy parts of their lives determined to be successful entrepreneurs and failing. Of course, only a few can really succeed, and it's up to the individual to decide how far to take it.

For a few years I was working as a consultant to a local power utility. I noticed that a lot of the people doing some of the most boring jobs were in fact VERY INTERESTING PEOPLE. Why? Because they have a life. The CAD manager who is in fact an artist in her spare time and uses every minute of her holiday to pursue her art. The actor who has given up (we are all over 40) on becoming 'successful' and famous, and is spending his free time acting in local productions. I saw him and it was a moving experience - many 'not vey successful' artists of all stripes have a lot to say.

Seems to me that some of the most interesting people actually gravitate to some rather mundane jobs - and save their energy for the other part of their lives.

Interesting stuff.

Why can't we be friends

I've been playing around in Orkut.

I find I have a hard time quantifying and qualifying what it means to be (or have) a friend. Once I signed up, I didn't invite all my friends to join, just a few. (hey I'm just checking it out and right now my "c'mon everybody, let's all sign up!" instigator quotient ebbs low.)

And, once I'd gotten in and connected to a coupla friends, I found myself approached: So-n-so [whom I sorta know, or sorta maybe not know] has invited you to be a friend. Why do I pause over a one or two hypertext links that have thumbs up (yes, this person is my friend) and thumbs down (no, this person is not my friend)? Friend? Acquaintance? I hesitate to declare either way. Guess that's what was meant by comments I read (before being invited/joining/checking it out)-- Orkut forces binary (yes no) choices over something that's far more nuanced. Do we all have to re-define what "friendship" is to mean, well, acquaintanceship?

Uh oh: Orkut's a time sink. And I don't need that right now.

Warnings: What is Google doing with all this new data about humans? (something that keeps me from going hog-wild into it)

Cool things:

• Making new acquaintances, after getting past the "is this person a friend?" stumbling block. UPDATE: Jeneane Sessum blogs it too. : )
• Interests and Communities of people I sorta know from the blogosphere... finding out new areas of interests (the browse/search communities section of Orkut is clunky. Too many to browse, thinking up search terms cold (let's see, uh, how about.. oh, um, dang, drawing a blank!) is hard, but it gets easier once you see what other communities there are based on interests of other people
  

  (but, seriously, do I need to find any new interests?)

• New websites I've found thanks to Orkut

• 15 second pitch
• SIGIA Mailing List

Spalding Gray: On Death, uncertainty and grieving in public

Spalding Gray has been missing since January 11th. John Perry Barlow believes he committed suicide and writes three funereal posts about the man who was his close friend.

What is grief without finality? A terrible confusion and an opportunity to celebrate what one might still have.

It's a moving tribute, and, in response to some criticial comments (name-dropper; take this down for the sake of his family), Barlow reflects on a fundamental dishonesty about death.

Among the beliefs that he and I shared was a conviction that making public the intimately personal is a revolutionary act in an atomized society where many feel compelled to play so close to the chest that they can't read their own cards. Being emotionally naked before strangers extends to them a permission for self-revelation they badly need if they are to loosen the shackles of their own quiet desperations. It is a blow against the pursuit of loneliness.

Had I been the one who leapt and were Spalding still as he was before his breakdown, he would be incorporating my disappearance into a monologue at this very moment.

But death has become wild and obscene in this country. Its power threatens our national religion of control. To die in America is to fail. It is an act of weakness. The dead could have beaten it had they been tough enough. And suicide, of course, is even worse, whatever the unendurable torments or neurological malfunctions that might drive one to it. Believe me, he tried some truly medieval procedures to penetrate his horror. [Read More]

Happy New Year

My first moment of consciousness today, huddled in bed after late-night movie watching: a distant plane roar announced the beginning of the Rose Parade. "oh, the planes," I said, and then rolled over and went back to sleep. Which, if you're recovering from respiratory crud, is the way to observe the local hometown parade. On TV. Later. (Channel 5 repeats damn near all day.) Some of the floats were nice enough that I'm bummed I couldn't go to the Fiesta Floats judging spree yesterday morning. Never gone to view the floats afterwards, despite living in the area a coupla decades. Always a time for firsts, though.

Speaking of firsts, I knocked one item off my oh-so-unserious Resolutions for 2004 list: I clarified butter. (Got Julia Child's The Way to Cook for Christmas) Like many just-done-for-the-first-time-things, naaaaah, it wasn't that hard. And the crepes were good, too!