It starts with corndogs. Yes, I still eat corndogs. And I like them!
Ahem, it starts with corndogs. There are two ways to prepare them. One is to put them in the microwave, zap for 45 seconds, roll them to their other side, and zap for another 45 seconds. The other is to preheat your oven to 350 degrees and then let them sit in there for 18 minutes.
I always microwave them, because by the time I’m hungry f0r a corndog, I sure don’t want to wait 20 minutes!
But a few weeks ago I did. It was largely an experiment to see if they tasted any better cooked in the oven vs. the microwave (they didn’t, but I swear that instant oatmeal mixed with water that’s been boiled is better than oatmeal mixed with cold water and zapped in the microwave), but in so doing I noticed something. 20 minutes is a solid block of time to accomplish something. So I took care of the laundry. I spent about as much time placing the corndogs in the oven as I would the microwave, but I didn’t wait idly by the microwave for a solid two minutes accomplishing nothing. I could have done the laundry after lunch, but in all it would have taken two minutes longer than necessary.
When is instant gratification really instant? High speed internet still requires time for a given page to load. Every time you do a google search, as fast as the search engine may be, you still click on the page and wait for it to load. How much time do you spend in a given day waiting idly for pages to load into your browser?
In the 90’s no one enjoyed television commercials, but we sat through them because the commercial breaks were short, and it was easier to wait idly and endure them because the time slot was too small to get anything productive done.
By slicing our time into finer and finer segments we stop paying attention. This is similar to micropayments for downloaded content in videogames. What’s $.99 for a cool feature that will make the game I paid $49.99 a little more enjoyable? But, just like the micropayments, that time is still being spent somehow. Imagine if you could take all of those little moments spent waiting over the course of a day and add them all together? How much time would that give you? 10 minutes? An hour? 3 hours? What could you do with that time if you had it all mushed together instead of sliced into a thousand page loads and seconds spent standing next to the microwave?
Instant gratification is never really instant. And without meaning to, we pay for a perceived convenience in lost productivity. How many days of your life have to spent staring at the spinning wheel on a youtube video as it loads the buffer before starting to play?
This is not to say that high speed internet is the enemy. Fast access to a swath of knowledge has the potential to make us more efficient. I’m mostly just trying to become more aware of what leeches away my free time without my knowing it. 10 minutes. That’s probably the minimum time block I need to get a small but productive project done. I think I can free up at least that from my current time wasters. The fastest solution may not be the best, if it results in a less productive use of your own time.
And now I’m hungry for corndogs again. Nuts.
As part of cleaning up I stumbled across this draft that I apparently never published back in 2007. I'm a little more database savvy now, but I think the crux of the article still holds. Reprinted in it's entire, incomplete state due to my laziness to properly edit.
Database interfaces continue to prove an enigma to me. I’ve tried to work with Access, MySql, along with a couple others whose names I don’t remember or have since blocked out of my mind. They’re wretched to setup, harder still to change, and seem to specialize in one of two categories:
Those that are easy to put information in.
Those that are easy to get information out.
Wikipedia is a great example of a database that’s easy to get information in. Bugzilla is another one. People who need to get information into a system love these types of systems. You freehand in information and do not require any particular type of structure. They’re very approachable, and great when you wish to amass information from a variety of sources very quickly.
But have you ever tried to compare two articles?
Let’s say you want to know the name of Franklin D Roosevelt’s dog. In wikipedia, you can probably find such a thing, but you can’t search for it directly. You have to search for
But what if you wanted to compare articles referencing
Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, more business oriented databases like Access exist. My former employer used Access to keep track of clients, inventory, and various product models, as well as employee records. These systems require a lot of forethought. One must first consider Exactly what types of information you’re going to need to enter. For a product that you sell, you could include information like:
But, if a year into the business you decide it’s time to start considering multiple vendors for a particular good you need, something you hadn’t thought of originally, your database needs a reworking to support all that. Cells have to be added, new information has to be entered. New queries have to be created, and some old ones have to be changed as they may not work anymore.
Progress is never as swift as one may like, but progress is still progress. Our reclining chair is now gone, and just in the nick of time, as it gave us a place to setup our Christmas tree. That act alone was enough to galvanize me back into attacking the stacks of paper that had begun to gather dust next to my desk.
Manuals continue to fall prey to the recycle bin as I find their digital counterparts online. I’ve also become more lax about what I’m willing to throw out, and have to laugh at myself for holding on to some things so fervently before. Why do I need assembly instructions for the entertainment center? I’m not going to put it together again.
Going paperless has also had a positive impact on the amount of mail we receive. It’s mostly junk now, and I’ve not figured out how to make Chase Bank stop sending me credit card offers, but the sheer mass of paper flowing into the house has decreased dramatically.
One odd note. It turns out that when you call the yellow pages distributor to opt out of receiving future copies, the try to sell you books. They also ask for your email address to verify that you wish to continue to opt out in the future. Sketchy?
The thing about storytellers is, the telling’s the thing.
Everyone loves a different part of a story. For some people, it is the narrative structure, tracing the arc of presentation to building tension to climax to denoument. For some people, it is the people, their characterizations and mannerisms. For some people, it is the scenery and the setting that makes the story compelling. And apparently, for a lot of people, it’s about sex. I can only guess that’s why most of the free contemporary ebooks on amazon are stories I’ll never read to my son.
But for storytellers. It is the act of telling the story that they find enjoyable. A storyteller can tell the same story to the same person 5 times in a row and enjoy it every single time, unlike the person listening to the story for the 5th time in a row. I think it is important for both parties to realize this.
The telling’s the thing. For the storyteller, it’s more about how the story is told than the story itself. While the listener may hear the exact same story told 5 times in a row, the storyteller is actually tweaking the story each and every time it is told. A little more dramatic cadence for these sentences. Take out the ‘and then’ for that part, it’s extraneous. Pause for half a second longer at this point. They are artists for which the story is a canvas whose paint never dries, forever allowing itself to stretch, squeeze, and twist into new variations. The stories evolve over time. Sometimes the canvas tears, the endings change. It’s not about consistency. It’s not about accuracy, it’s about the telling of the story. The telling’s the thing.
