Making and Breaking Resolutions

I have already broken my three New Year's resolutions.

1. Inbox Zero
2. NaBloPoMo
3. Decluttering

Inbox Zero advocates a philosophy towards email that seems antithetical to how many people treat their email. Using Gmail gets me part of the way there by archiving and keeping most every bit of mail I get. I only delete a few very specific items of mail, and part of my resolution this year means tweaking my filters to delete more unneeded mail. I have a much larger problem with actually answering/replying and acting on mail. I want to foster a better habit with email response.

NaBloPoMo riffs from NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. Sub "Blog Posting" for "Novel Writing" and it's the same schtick. I only wrote EIGHTEEN blog posts in 2009. This is not acceptable. I need to get back into the writing habit. I'm not hiding behind writer's block; I have plenty to say (as evidenced by the volume of words I output via Twitter), I just need to work on my long-form writing.

Decluttering remains on my mind. With an infant on the way, I anticipate that we'll acquire a mountain of stuff, stuff, stuff. I don't want to live a spartan life with no material anythings, but I do need to get rid of old things I don't need. I'm imposing another game buying moratorium and adopting a one-in-one-out rule.

How have I broken these resolutions already on the second day of the new year? One, I still have months-old mail I haven't replied to. Two, I didn't write a blog post yesterday. Three, Cat and I bopped into a thrift store and I bought two new games today.

How does this not bother me?

I'm making the effort with email. I might re-read Getting Things Done when I find it, but the first system in my head from an old boss is TRAF: Trash, Refer, Act, File. My good buddy Marc also left me a thought: "[With too much email,] that's archive 'em all and let god sort 'em out territory." I'm not there yet, but I have less than thirty pieces of mail in my inbox. Last month, it was probably closer to sixty. Facebook is part of this problem.

I'm writing a blog post today and not post-dating it. Good enough for me right now- the more I write, the more I have other ideas that I want to write. It's just a habit to foster, which makes it easier than other kinds of writing problems. (I still agree with the notion that Twitter makes you a better writer.)

I'm looking forward to trying the one-in-one-out rule to at least break even with material items- mass will never factor in to the decision (I buy a battery and sell the car), but I'm going to try to at least remain in the same class of item. Right now, I need to get rid of one book, two games, and a calendar. I don't know how long I'll give myself to meet each goal; maybe a week's worth of Craigslist before trashing or donating. I'm also happy with my current "play unplayed games" strategy, and my game-buying moratorium will merit at least a whole 'nother post. Or four. But seriously, I spontaneously bought two games new-in-shrink that I wanted to play for two bucks per. Does not count as a planned MSRP purchase and triggers the one-in-one-out.

Overall, I feel confident that I have achievable, positive resolutions that I actually want to follow. Hope you do, too.

Life's to short to give up chocolate.

Unplayed games

I have too many games.

More accurately, I have too many unplayed games. I know this thanks to either Ian or Dan back in Austin, who convinced me to start logging my game plays on September 20th, 2006. I had scoffed at this notion for a while, thinking it too crazy anal about gaming, or the first step in the long road to obsessive stat-keeping about wins and losses. I don't want to become overly competitive and I don't want to juggle statistics over actual play.

After more than three years of logging plays, I've since changed my mind. I simply play too many games to remember them all, and sometimes I simply blonde out and forget. Most of the statistics stuff I look at has been calculated by someone else, so I don't need to do any heavy lifting. The actual work I do to keep track of this is pretty low- I used to keep a 99-cent notebook in my pocket and jot down the date and game title for later logging on BGG. Now that I have a magic Google phone (Android G1, for the record), I use the BGG App to simply log the play then and there. The time investment is much smaller- a few taps and it's done. I can get back to actual play and not mess with the grisly details.

On the other hand, the simple fact that I'm logging plays at all means that the grisly details exist for when I want to look at them. The incomparable Chris "Friendless" Farrell maintains a site of BGG Extended Stats, where he does all of the statistical heavy lifting. Some of these stats break down when considering game expansions and game books. I'm not log to log a "play" of a book, and I generally don't log plays of expansions.

The one critical stat that I want appears to be broken within BGG's SQL query, unless I just don't know how to do it. They have a search function for played games, and you can specify the maximum and minimum number of plays- but it appears to store zero plays as null instead of zero, so the query doesn't return what I expect.

Easy enough: download my collection data as CSV, sort by number of plays, pop the title column into Google Docs, add a bit of whiz-bang-fu, and lo and behold I have a working poor man's database to help me find what I need to play. (I had to remove expansions and books and the like by hand, but it's not so bad.) I also added columns to track games that I know I've played before the two major events before my logging epoch: Katrina and moving home. I know there are games I've played in the ancient dim misty past (say, high school) just as I know I played games in Austin before I started logging plays in BGG.

When I first started this project at the end of the November (after BGG.Con, I know that my game-buying will be severely curtailed in the next year or so), my collection was almost 45% unplayed, very uncomfortably close to half. Over the last thirty days, I've given away a small handful of games and played a baker's dozen of new-to-me and previously unplayed games. This is awesome and gets me to about 40% unplayed.

I don't have a numerical goal in mind, but if I can get at least one unplayed game to the table, or sold, or traded, or given away every week, I'll be happy.


Also, this is my 700th post. Huzzah!

Communications convergence

Non-ironically, I want to opine about the various forms of communication I have at my fingertips, despite the fact that I've barely managed one blog post a week this month.

First, an examination of last month's NaBloPoMo experiment-slash-activity. Out of thirty days hath November, I wrote twenty-five posts. Not surprisingly, five of those days I went to BGG.Con and twittered my words. After con, I did up a Geeklist of the things I taught and played. I had thought that blogging once-a-day in November would have gotten me into the blogging habit; I think that BGG.Con and Twittering disrupted that nascent habit. Even though I cheated a little with some timestamps and missed a few days, I consider my November a blogging success.

Why the slowdown? Some of it is Twitter and my Google Phone. Right now, I get email, SMS messages, Google IM, Twitter, voice mail and phone calls on my telephone. I feel like I am communicating enough. Couple the tethering to my phone (sorry dear) with my sharing nifty RSS stuff, I know that I'm scratching my communications itch.

I still feel that blogging is/should be/is to me/feels like op-ed pieces; I want what I write to be interesting to everyone that I know reads it, plus the strangers who I don't know. Success is a variable here. Tweeting is the opposite of blogging.

Failing at NaBloPoMo; starting

I saw that Stephanie has started in on National Blog Posting Month. I'm already a day behind, but I'll keep on the effort. I'll even post a day behind in time to make up for it.

I knew about Nanowrimo, and I knew that between buying a house on Wednesday, fixing it up, trying to move in, going to BGG.Con 2008, running the Math Trade for this year, and attempting to perform some didj playing for the NOCCA faculty, I would never be able to make that fifty thousand word goal. And you know, I'm okay with that this year. Would I like to have a big complete project like that? Absolutely. But I've got too much on my plate that I can and will do this month.

November and writings

I did not write 50,000 words for NaNoWrimo. I wrote barely even a tenth.

I did not post thirty times this month for NaBloPoMo. I did about two-thirds.

But I did write. I hit my goal- not to write a novel or thirty blog posts this month, just to write enough to increase my volume. Now that I've got some of this under my belt, I've stirred up the writing bits of my brain and watched what floated to the top. I wanted creative Brownian motion and mental eddies, and I got what I wanted. Hooray for hacking the mind!

Webcomics I read

Here's a quick and dirty post that I've meant http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifto do for a while.

I read comics. I like 'em. Pre-K, the music jukebox had a program called dailystrips that screen-scraped web pages for comics images. (This is back in the dark days before RSS was as popular as it is now.)

Right now, here's what I've got in my RSS reader, to the best of my recollection. (Mom, some of these use naughty words. You might not want to click.) I need to add this to my sidebar.

• Ctrl-Alt-Del
• Diesel Sweeties
• For Better or For Worse
• Lucid TV
• Octopus Pie
• Order of the Stick
• Penny Arcade
• Perry Bible Fellowship
• Questionable Content
• Shortpacked
• Wondermark
• XKCD

Can anyone suggest some comics I should be reading?

Cheating at NaBloPoMo

This post was written on the second of November. I'm backdating it for cheastings. I won't cheat again.

I just found out about NaBloPoMo, basically NaNoWriMo for blogs. Post once a day for the month of November. If I'm already writing some 1600 words and change for NaNoWriMo, a few extra for the ol' blog shouldn't be to much more difficult.

Thanks to Steph for the initial reminder.

Shared and sharing, Web 2.0 style

Google, in their infinite wisdom, makes it easy to compile a list of "Hey, that's interesting" articles into a single page for public consumption. This kicks the pants out of me writing single posts that say "Heck, check this out- I think it's neat" and then a link to the whatever it is. I honestly don't think it's laziness, but rather a courtesy to my readers. I don't want to turn the Non-Waterlogged Blog into a rotating link du jour series of posts. I still have a lot to say, and this blog should remain my primary platform and soapbox to open my brain to the world.

Instead, I throw all this stuff into the sidebar. (Look on the right for a box called "What's on my RSS" and you can see what I'm reading these days.)

In the last few months, I discovered there's a super easy way to hoover all these shared links into a handy Javascript widget to slide into my Blogger template. Ah, Javascript, how I love thee. Once I took the five minutes to decide on a color scheme and set it up, now it takes a single click at the bottom of an article in Google Reader and posts automagically appear here on my blog.

Naturally, I'd rather that you come over to my blog and read stuff here- I'm trying to get my ad revenue above ten bucks this year. Everyone likes RSS, though, so feel free to check out the public page directly and RSS that.

A few thoughts on food, part 2: the Revenge

You've probably heard the old expression, "There's no such thing as bad publicity." Maybe it's true. When you say something a little foolish, it doesn't feel as though it's true.

I made an inflammatory statement over the weekend about the relative intelligence of vegetarians. Let's not mince words: I called vegetarians, carnivores, and vegans dumb — which I'll admit is a poor choice of expression. Corvus and Russ' comments on that entry made me strongly reconsider my words. I wrote without considering my words and my audience. Not smart on my part, period.

When I stopped to think about it, I let my mind wander over the people I know who eat different, and why, and I read my words as though I was in their shoes. I know a guy who's a vegetarian for religious reasons. I knew a guy back in high school who was politically vegan and needed to take vitamin supplements due to his chosen diet. My mom doesn't like to eat "anything with a face," which means that chickens and fish are fair game (pardon the pun) to her. I know a guy who lives on hamburgers and potatoes and hates green things. I know different meat-eaters who only eat their beef rare or well-done, both ends of the spectrum. I know people who won't eat certain kinds meat on certain days out of the year. I know a woman who cuts out sugar for health reasons, and I know a man who changed his diet after a gall bladder operation. I know someone who doesn't like bell pepper because "they don't like me!" Are they reading this, but keeping silent? I hope not.

When I saw the first comment, I admit that I had briefly considered the option of deleting my previous post or softening the tone of my remarks. This is teh internets, right? Any electronic information can be readily changed with ease, and it's not unheard of for bloggers or news agencies or corporations or popular websites to enact revisionist electronic history. Bah and humbug, say I! That's no way to run a community, even one so tiny as this. People don't always realize just how much an effect they have on others, and I'd like to not waste this mistake. Learn from your mistakes, lest you have to repeat them. Russ and Corvus don't know me very well, and they misread my intentions. What about the rest of the world, who know me even less well, or not at all? I'd rather this response speak to my character than sweeping it under the rug. Even so, I will update the previous post to point to this one.

Let me also explicitly say a few more things in direct response to Corvus and to Russ- I don't like to comment on my own blog and I'd now rather have this post above the fold. Firstly, I'm going to steal the phrase "meddlesome idiot," and make use of it the next opportunity I can- thanks for the addition to my lexicon! Secondly, yes, the food industry is totally out of whack given the number of people we have on the planet, who all must eat. I wish there was a more efficient way to distribute higher quality food to everyone who needs it. In my heart of hearts, I know that we need genetically modified higher-yield crops unencumbered by patent law or interspecies havoc, or space-age artificial foods like the fungus-based (and tasty) Quorn or textured soy protein or vat-grown animal protein, or gene therapy to eradicate lactose intolerance. Maybe I read too much science fiction, but I really think we-as-a-species need to start thinking more long-term. Thirdly, I haven't heard from any meat-eaters about being labeled "dumb," and I wonder why. Fourthly, I still believe that the human animal has adapted to eating meat and vegetables based on my incomplete understanding of our gut and our teeth- but we're more than just animals, hence the importance of our ability to (more-or-less) rationally choose what we eat. Biologically, meat is a pretty efficient source of protein. Logistically, and in this day and age and given population, too much meat's got issues. Lastly, I just got in an order of Vegemite. Anyone who doesn't like Vegemite is a meddling idiot! :) But seriously, I like eating the stuff. Go figure. I'm from New Orleans and I don't like seafood. Yes, that's a little weird in and of itself.

Thanks for reading, everyone. On a lighter note, I have some didj pictures and another video to post. Expect them up later this evening, unless my muse poops on my head and I'm inspired to write a roleplaying game.

Tags and labels

If you happen to see anything weird in your feed reader, please let me know. I'm working on updating the labels for my older posts.

I typically don't go back to old posts- I'm a blog-and-forget sort of guy. That said, I'm re-reading my words and remembering things I've forgotten.

And hey, if you want to click a tag and go exploring, that works for me.

Good-bye histamines

Hello, world.

Please accept my apologies for the recent interruption in my blogging. Between vists to the vet, the change in the weather, and high pollen/mold counts, my allergies have been in super high gear lately. I have gotten in a regular dose of gaming and geeking, but I just haven't really felt up to blogging about the experience. Suffice it to say that it's been bad enough that I actually made an appointment with an allergist.

Breathing is actually quite important, wouldn't you say?

Quick update

Feline antibiotics smell nasty.

Not as nasty as feline vomit, though.

The irregular updates shall return shortly.

Pardon our dust

I'm tweaking my Blogger layout after upgrading from the old non-shiny featurelacking Blogger. Feedback is welcome.

A brief video interlude

Meh. I'm sick and feverish. Watch these videos.

Here's an octopus escaping through a one-inch hole, courtesy Hilary.

More mollusk goodness: An octopus eating a shark.

A live-action stop-motion battle: Tony versus Paul.

My favorite, an Honda Accord commerical: Cog. (More at Wikipedia.)

If you've ever played a console "RPG," watch the forty-minute College Saga (parts 2 3 4), a Final Fantasy parody.

broadband

This marks the first time I'm on broadband since I left Austin for California. I'm in a coffeeshop in oldtown Salinas, drinking an average hot chai and killing the ton of spam I've managed to collect.

I could rant about airports and the loss of privacy in the wake of false security, but the bile isn't fresh.

I could take about the first day of actual sunshine we've had on our trip since New Orleans. Rain in Houston, rain while flying, rain while driving, fog while flying. We wound up circling San Jose for an hour and forty-five minutes waiting for the weather to clear. For a while, we didn't know if the pilot would land us in San Fran, San Jose (where Cat's parents waited to pick us up) or Oakland (of oak.oakland.edu fame).

I have a camera full of pictures, precious few of which are of Carl and Jackie's wedding- sadly, we left the camera in the car.

I would like to mention that I've played twenty-plus sessions of Wits and Wagers (BGG, BUY ME!) since Monday. Beyond passing the "Let's Play Again!" test, it has also passed the "Can we play without you?" and "Are we playing tonight?" tests. I'm a little floored- I suspected the mix of trivia and gambling would go over well, but How could I suspect I'd play so many games? I'm starting to need more question cards.

I have a new didgeridoo! A present to myself with courier servies courtesy of Cat's cousin, holidaying in Australia. Pix soon.

We will soon return to your irregularly scheduled game blogging, complete with a list of presents.

I've got some productivity and lifehackery things in store for the New Year, too.

I am not an Internet addict.

Pardon our dust

I'm on the new Blogger Beta, with bells and whistles and pizzazz. Right now, it looks like everything made it okay- I don't see any huge 402:Kidnapped By Elves errors, the posts are in place, the layout looks right, and the ads are working. I'll play with the features some time this weekend. Maybe even tag old articles for ease of reading.

Free press for the oppressed

Ellen "Queen of Sky" Simonetti, the flight attendant fired for blogging, is having a book signing event here in Austin.

When: 6-9PM December 6, 2006 (reading starts at 7)
Where: Mozart's (Google Map)
How much: $24 for the book, coffee unknown, wireless free

I'll be there to show the colors. Maybe I'll get an EFF membership while I'm at it.

Yet another bandwagon

Okay, okay. I joined LiveJournal so I could post a comment on a friend's LJ thing. Sadly, because I'm late to this party, my choice usernames have been claimed by impostors. I'm rossumcapek over there.

Never fear, loyal readers! The real action will continue to happen at this address.