YouTube linkery aplenty.
Here's an RV-classed house that's smaller than our current living space. It's 325 square feet.
(Direct video link)
Linked from that, a more movable house that folds up for easy transport.
(Direct video link)
I find it interesting that both appear to be of Canadian manufacture.
We're a long way from living in an ultimate engineered house, but I like the spartan/utilitarian approach to these designs.
I just unsubscribed from Lifehacker- that's some 300+ unread posts I don't have to think I need to read to stay informed.
In a few weeks, I'll reexamine and see if I miss it.
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!
I recently found a little lifehacky site to offload birthday reminders. I want to avoid forgetting things, so feel free to enter your birthday (year optional, if you're shy) and have a machine kick me annually so I won't forget. Yes, I'm sure some of you would like a machine to kick me at some regular interval. [EDIT: link fixed]
You may have heard of a game variously called Werewolf or Mafia (BGG, WP). It's a social game, with one side trying to win over the other. Evidently, middle schoolers in New England can't handle the truth. Heaven forbid that children are exposed to anything potentially disturbing! [EDIT: link fixed also]
The Picayune has a nicely uplifting Post-K tale (alternate link) about a couple who opened a restaurant I want to explore, Cafe Arabesque.
It's a hack that works. I woke up this morning with a rant, ready to blog.
Let's say you work as a professional typist. I don't mean in the 1950s-secretary sense of the word, but I mean a person who types for a living. One who types hundreds of words per minute, knows dozens of layout programs, eats word processor manuals for lunch, and can hand-tune the margins on a vintage IBM Selectric... not just someone who knows the difference between a hyphen, an emdash and an endash.
Now let's say that you, the professional typist, get a call from someone who wants to pay you to type up a research paper as per your regular freelance rates. This person is your client, or possibly just a customer.
Now let's say that you, the professional typist, work for a large organization that pays you for your capacity to type things. One of your coworkers in a different department sends a project your way- let's say the transcription of a presentation given at a conference. Unless money changes place, this person is not your customer, not your client. Yall are just coworkers.
Sometime in the eighties, corporate flacks, inundated with anti-drug messages, decided that they didn't like the connotation of "user" when applied to their employees, and started the disturbing trend of referring to "customers" rather than "users."
I can appreciate wanting IT monkeys to provide better customer service to users, but that does not make customers out of your users! There's a whole different relationship implied between a customer and a provider that is wholly inappropriate for the workplace.
The customer is always right, but the user doesn't know what they need. I don't mean that people need up-selling, but that quite literally a user doesn't — and shouldn't — know what they need to use their computers and systems. It's not their role and not their job to know that the one server connects to the other server via this-and-such encryption protocol because it's regulated by the Fed's TLA branch. They simply need to use their tools they need to do their job.
It's just plain wrong. It's the wrong word. Drives me crazy. Whenever I hear someone in a Corporate IT position say, "customer," I have to ask, "Do you mean the end-user?" Some IT positions are customer-facing, and some aren't. The person one supports is not unnecessarily one's customer.
Most importantly, I dreamt this rant- so the blog-a-day-slash-NaNoWriMo hack is working.
One neat thing about the human brain is the sort of crazy random nonlinear tasks it's good at doing.
Some people brainstorm, just letting the floodgates open and allowing the mind to wander. Like improv, this is more of a skill than most people realize.
I have a widget that acts as a deck of cards from the Oblique Strategies, a set of cards with nonspecific phrases and questions.
Here's three from the stack:
Yikes, I almost missed my daily post.
I don't like to drive, and my mind tends to wander quite a bit. I tend to view almost all travel as a waste of mental effort- where the hell are my flying cars? I've got better things to do.
Yesterday, I wanted to remind myself to do something, and I didn't want to dig out my cheapie 99-cent pocket notebook out while driving and try to write. I thought about leaving myself a message and tried to find the voice memo feature buried somewhere in my phone.
Lifehacker mentioned a service called Jott, one of these hip new not-perfectly-named Web 2.0 kinds of beta services. The practical upshot is that you call the 800 number, talk, and both human and automatic transcription turns your message into an email or a text message. I found out that you also get the source audio, too.
Seems like there's some nifty potentials here: talk a text message to a group of contacts seems very handy these days, as well as possibly just voicing a blog post: Call Jott, Jott transcribes and sends to Blogger, Blogger autoposts. I'll give that a try soon, I think.
In other news, I obtained a copy of Leopard (gotta back up!) and had buffalo steak and garlic potatoes for dinner. Yummo!
I'm an hour late from starting- 50,000 words in thirty days? It's nuts. I've not participated in the National Novel Writing Month project before. I don't know what to expect.
I don't feel like your archetypical starry-eyed hopeful novelist.
I'm just going to write a novel as a hack.
Wish me luck.
First, I assume that you can read English. Secondly, I assume that you know how to swear in at least one language, regardless of your cursing habits. Thirdly, I think you should read Steven Pinker's article subtitled "Why We Curse." Astonishingly, the title has a number of asterisks, but the editors did not censor any word in the article itself.
I've had a huge problem with Yak-Shaving these days. I want to go to the bank before it closes, but first I want to write this article, and to do that I need to research and re-read the articles I want to link to, and I need to find which tab I've saved those links, which reminds me that I forgot to read my webcomics for today, and one includes a link to a book I want to check out, which reminds me that I need to go to the bank so I can get money if I want to buy a book. For example.
I've got a 504 area code again for free, plus all kinds of lickable 2.0 phone handling features. Feel free to test one of 'em out- GrandCentral will call you, then call me. Handy if you don't have my number or want to save on long distance calls, or if I finally get off my tail and sell some stuff on eBay/Craigslist.
I wonder if there's Asterisk under the hood here?
Following on the heels of the popular and possibly successful Inbox Zero from 43 Folders, someone has come up with Buddy List Zero. As of press time, the site is a little content-light, which seems oddly apropos.
In a nutshell, the basic idea revolves around culling down incoming distractions by getting rid of IM-associated clutter. I particularly like the notion of removing buddies you haven't chatted with after a month.
I'm going a little more extreme, and basically turning off Adium, my handy Mac cross-platform chat client. I still have Gtalk active, so if you need to IM me, there's your venue. If you only contacted me via AIM/ICQ/MSN/YIM for chatski excitement, be advised that I won't constantly be online and available for the near future. Most of you should have my email address or my cell if you need me.
Let's see how this works, shall we? Maybe I'll get some work done.
Applied topology is cool.
I found this link on Lifehacker, a Aussie fellow who focuses on efficiency and knot-typing as a side interest. I'm trying out tying my shoes a little differently.
Soon, I leave to work. Gotta run some errands first, and after three months full of free time, I really don't like having to adjust my schedule based on external factors. Times like this make we wonder how everyone else takes care of errands outside of nine to five, and why more "normal" service providers don't have later hours. Imagine a mechanic that stayed open until midnight!
Yes, you read that right. I have too many board games (approx 345 as of this writing).
More accurately, I have too many games that I haven't played, or too many mediocre games that I snagged at thrift stores or in trades or simply purchased impulsively. Right now, I'm sorting them into a few different categories:
Here's a twofer quickie.
I posted the latest improv game design experiment over on the Flywheel. I know that it doesn't get updated super frequently, so here's your excuse to go check it out for some freshness.
I came across this list of procrastination hacks by some fellow who posted the list as a means to hack procrastination. Since I'm about to have my machine off for a few hours while I calibrate my battery, I'm going to hit #8, #12, and at least #3 on a few things I want to do.
Yesterday, I relinquished more than half of the mass of my keychain to my former job. No, I didn't weigh it. Yes, I wanted to.
I no longer have a key to the Xilinx Austin office, their server room, or the admin's lockbox; I also don't have a nifty VPN token (handy for random numbers if you forget your dice), either. Now I only have house, car, mailbox, and the ring itself. This is all metaphor that I don't have to strain or stretch to make it fit. I've shed responsibility, burdens, and restraints- the world is my oyster and I can do anything.
What's on your keyring? What do you need? What can you get rid of?
If you had three months with no vocational obligations, would you take the opportunity to pursue your dreams? How would you change your life if you find yourself no longer tied to your job?
My man Tom back home had some data problems, both at work and at home, to the tune of a 2.5 terabyte (Mega, then Giga, then Tera- imagine about a quarter of the Library of Congress) disk failure and a flaky home system.
I'm doing my backups right now. I use a handy program called Synk to do the dirty work onto a 300GB external drive. I also set up a monthly reminder for myself to run backups. What is it about April that makes me think about backing up?
I don't do it frequently enough, and I know better. You can get a blank DVD for about a buck, so compare spending less than a crappy meal and one evening's time versus days and weeks and months if you need to recreate everything on your machine. Just imagine that for a second, that you have to retype every document, rediscover all your contacts, remember all your emails, take brand new photographs, redo your taxes, find new porn, rip your music, etc etc etc.
When was the last time you backed up your stuff?
The absolute worst time to update your resume is when you need to; you really should look at it every three months, at least to make sure your contact info is right. You never know when a better opportunity will come along, or if you'll find yourself in a position of need.
When did you last update yours? Don't put it off any longer.
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.
Support the Non-Waterlogged Blog. Buy stuff from Amazon.
Are you still using Microsoft's Internet Explorer? Why, for all that's good in the world, why? Get with the program and get Firefox.
DriveSavers have saved my bacon (and data) at least twice. If you need data recovery, I highly recommend them.
You can always buy me stuff from my ThinkGeek wishlist or my Funagain wishlist.
Like games? Shop at Funagain. I get a kickback in store credit, you get a deal.
