Category: Personal

A Traditional New Year’s Resolution

Resolved: try not to be a total dick to conservatives. It just strengthens their stereotypes, and while some of us liberals may, at least some of the time, deserve their jibes, it’s not fair to all the liberal folk who go out of the way to rise above it. (I’m thinking people like Larry Lessig, Dan Gillmor, John Perry Barlow, and others.) They get tarred with the same brush.

Really, if you play that “your side are bad people” game you have already lost. You can speak truth without invective. You can judge policies and actions and ideas without judging people.

The important thing is not so much getting the good people in power, as getting the people in power to do what is good, in any case.

New Year’s Resolutions

You can be invincible,
if you never go into a contest,
which is not in your power to win.

Look out lest seeing some more honored
or with great power or otherwise blessed with fame,
you are ever carried away by the impression.

For if the essence of the good is in your power,
neither envy nor jealousy have a place;
and you yourself will not wish to be a magistrate,
nor a president or consul, but free.

–Epictetus, here, (another translation here, thanks to MeFi.

Epictetus’ advice is interesting to understand in the context of New Year’s Resolutions, and also the book One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer. It is about taking small steps. It is about applying to one’s personal life the business philosophy called “Kaizen” in Japan, and based on the work of W. Edwards Deming, a brilliant management theorist whose ideas are constantly referred to but almost never actually put into practice in America.

Kaizen is about improving one’s business by small and unambiguously achieveable steps, rather than dramatic “innovations.” This is of course alien to American big business, because it’s the big changes which impress the stock market and inflate your stock options, even if they end up ruining the business.

Anyway, Maurer’s book suggests trying to improve one’s life by means of small, nonthreatening steps, which are insignificant one by one but which add up to change.

There are a lot of things about the book that make sense to me, but I haven’t actually done anything with Kaizen yet. My wife and I thought of Kaizenning ourselves towards exercise, but we chose a step that wasn’t small enough and ended up not doing it. (That’s the test of whether you’re doing it right: if the step is non-trivial enough that you fail to do it, it was too big a step.)

So I’m trying to think of areas where I’d like to improve my life, and completely trivial steps I can take to achieve them.

  • Draw more. I could resolve to cover one sheet of paper per day with markings of some sort.
  • Exercise more. TODO. Don’t know what I can use as a trivial step for this.
  • Keep the house clean. How about take one object which is lying out of place and put it in its place per day.
  • Create a job I really love. For this one I’m thinking maybe “take a minute every day to imagine what it might be like to have my ideal job.” Imagining things is a good first step for difficult and complex changes.
  • Escape my caffiene addiction. Not sure about this one. Have to think.

Those are a few to start with. Just thinking.

Blockin’ Out The Scenery, Breakin’ My Mind

Found out from Phil O at the party the other night that the Kava House on Kalamazoo south of 60th street has free wifi. This is really near my house, so I needed to check them out. A lot of my friends who live in Eastown love the Kava House in Eastown all to pieces.

My reactions are mixed. Two signs on the door seemed very unfriendly to me. “Restroom for customers only” and “Wireless for customers only (1 drink minimum)”.

This is a coffee house in a strip mall out in the pucks. Do they really have a problem with an excess of people walking by and trying to use their restroom? Has that really caused a problem in the past, such that they need to put it out there on a sign? Or are they just kind of jerks who resent the idea that they might possibly be duped into providing a service to the public without remuneration?

As for the “wireless for customers only (1 drink minimum)”, I can understand that they don’t want people plunking down and using their connection for hours on end without buying anything. I would never do that. But I’d like to imagine that they feel they could trust me to do that without the sign. (Also, isn’t the “1 drink minimum” redundant? How could you be a customer by buying less than 1 drink? Are they saying it wouldn’t count if I bought breath mints? Have they seriously encountered a problem with customers coming in and using their wireless but buying LESS than one drink?)

Oh, there’s also a handmade sign saying “Kava Cop says STOP: One Drink Minimum.” So not only can’t you use the wifi without a drink, you can’t even be there without a drink.

The signs out front give the impression that these people are obsessed by the fear that someone may get something from them for nothing — that their precious seating space and ambience and wifi may be abused by the unwashed, no-drink-buying masses. This comes across as massively hostile to me. I have not seen anything like it at any other wifi enabled coffee house in the area. It’s bizarre. I have a hard time believing, given the location, that it’s based on actual problems with deadbeats rather than just a general mean-spiritedness.

Apart from the signs it’s been good. Lots of available power-pluggage, pleasant atmosphere, reasonable connection, a guy who I assume was the manager was helpful, wanted to make sure I could find a plug, friendly staff. Everything’s good, but man, the signs really convey hostility to the public.

A copy of this review was posted at grwifi.net. If you’ve been there, drop in and post a comment yourself!

Egads, I’m Still on SITO.

Back in 1995 or 1996 or something, I joined an online art community called SITO. (Originally OTIS, but the Otis Art College sent them a nastygram and so they changed it.) I forgot about them for a very long time. A year or so I recovered my password. There was only one piece by me left there. There used to be a half dozen, made on a pirated copy of an ancient version of Fractal Design Painter on my 486. Maybe there was some kind of a purge. Anyway, I just posted another and might post more there. who knows.

Egads. The trippy flash gridcosm viewer, with over 2000 levels of art, in the making since 1997, is NOT to be missed.

Practical Applications of the Philosopher’s stone. For drunks.

Oh My God It Burns! » Practical Applications of the Philosopher’s stone. For drunks.

Tested this today. It works. Did a blind taste test for my wife. She happened to select the “before” vodka first. She made a horrible face. (She isn’t a giant fan of vodka to begin with…) I said, “You’re praying that’s the ‘before’ one, aren’t you?'” Then she tasted the “after” and agreed it was extremely, extremely smooth in comparison. (The “before” was Rikaloff vodka from Monumental Distilling Co. in Maryland, and seems likely to be comparable to the “Vladimir” used in the experiment. It was about the same price: under $12 for 1.75 liters; strong wood alcohol-like smell and a brutal aftertaste in the “before” state.)

I don’t have any Ketel One to do a taste test against, but the process does produce extremely smooth, potable vodka.

Now I’ve got her hooked on the idea of using the resultant smooth vodka to create tasty infusions, perhaps to give as presents to friends at the annual “friends of Rick from college” post-Christmas party.