http://www.43folders.com/2010/04/27/impro-talk

Five Patterns

Identify Leaks:
* What is sucking time and attention on a regular basis?
* Who’s stealing your time?
* Repeat meetings
* Poorly run meetings, respect people with agendas.
* What are you repeatly doing over and over again?
* Batch requests to people for meetings (hey, don’t bug Joe with lots of little things)
* "is this still a good time for you to talk" (I respect your time and I expect you to pay attention)
* Program rescuetime – track all apps/docs to see where time goes.
Govern Access:
Minimize notifications
* Don’t let pings come in all the time
* Get off of unnecessary email lists
Work in dashes
* If it’s important, firewall off time to do it.
* Know when you are done with an activity. Don’t let it leak on forever.
Renegotiate

To be a good knowledge worker
* Can you be tolerent of ambguitiy and go make things.
* Information, sure you need _enough_ information. Do you know when you’ve got enough
* Have the courage to take the information to go make something with what you’ve got

From a TED talk:

External rewards narrow focus, which is bad for rudimentary cognative skills for "creativity". The Candle problem versus the candle problem for dummies.
Automony, mastery, and purpose are creativity motivators.
Rewarding results only in the work environment may help as people can choose their path.
Does Lean standardization go counter to engaging people?

Too many choices results in 2 primary problems:
1. Paralisis in choice – too many choices makes it difficult/impossible to choose
2. Less satsified in the choices is that is’t too easy to imagine all the alternatives (opportunity costs) that could have potentially be better.

Why choice makes people miserable:
1. Regret and anticipated regret
2. Opportunity costs
3. Escalation of expectations
4. Self blame – leads to depression

Seems like this is that similar to wealth, some choice is good at improving happiness and welfare. But too much choice doesn’t increase happiness at all, and actually decreases.

Thus, the conclusion is that wealth redistribution would actually be helpful for both the top and bottom classes. See the 50s where we did have a larger middle class – did we have something going there?

Interesting quote that I found on one of the GTD blogs (http://www.davidco.com/blogs/kelly/)

"""A foolproof way to create resistance to stretching into new and wonderful places for you is to maintain a sense of over commitment. And one of the surest ways to allow that feeling is to lose track of what your commitments are. The Weekly Review — done regularly over time — awakens your self-regulating mechanism. Knowing how overcommitted you are — really — is very different than being afraid of how overcommitted you are! -David Allen """

I’m definately feeling this right now. I don’t feel like I can stretch out and try new things because I’m too behind on execution of things that need to "get done". And having a todo list with 60+ items just in the "Work" category contributes to a sense of being so far behind that I’m not even sure how far behind I really am.

Seems like I need to do some clearing of the brush and cut away a bunch of stuff either by carving out execution time or decommiting from tasks to get some space clear. This is also true because I’m having trouble getting focused and started executing on "big scary tasks" that need to get done.

All these things seem like they are adding resistance to doing things to becoming exceptional and taking my professional and personal life to that next level.

Papa’s pumpkin patch on Scholls-Sherwood west of Roy Rodgers road about 1-2 miles. Nice clean, cheep pumpkins and they have cooking-specific pumpkins and small hay bales. Much cheeper than other places nearby.

Also has authentic cow smell :-)

Got midpssh (http://www.xk72.com/midpssh/index.php) running on my blackberry, but it required setting some magical settings to get it cleared for full internet access. Fortunately, documentation is good and pointed me here: http://www.blackberryforums.com/blackberry-network/2185-blackberry-internet-msn-chat-web-telnet-tcpip-no-bes.html

I’ve got it working to dreamhost.com, but not to the iMac at home. That is probably a problem with port forwarding more than a problem on the blackberry.

Flow for moving pictures from Gallery2 to a flash picture frame. It relies on:
* Cart and zipcart modules in Gallery 2 being installed (http://gallery.menalto.com/) – I’ve installed this on http://3cats.us/gallery
* The MS resize images powertool being installed (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx)

Steps:
# Add albums to cart
# "checkout" the cart as a zip file (slow action for me)
# Unzip to new directory
# Rotate all photos clockwise (ctrl-a, right-click, rotate clockwise)
# Rotate all photos counterclockwise (ctrl-a, right-click, rotate counterclockwise)
# Resize images to 1024×768 – use advanced to not make copies (ctrl-a, right click, resize pictures)
# Copy to flash drive (ctrl-a, ctrl-c, move to flash drive, ctrl-v)

Questions:
Why rotate all photos twice? Because Gallery sends images taken in portrait images as portrait, but apparently leaves the "this image is a portrait image" tag/setting/whatever that I assume is in the EXIF data set. So the digital photo frame rotates the image again and that doesn’t work out so good. Rotating the images appears to clear this setting.

Why the size larger than the frame? Because the powertool leaves images that don’t match the perscribed aspect ratio larger than we would like. For example if you tell it to do a 3×2 ratio image to a 800×480, it gives you a 800×547, which the frame still has to resize. I like giving the frame a little more to work with, and 1024×768 makes for a small image with a little extra goodies for the frame to display it nicely.

Blueberries. A wonderful little berry – durable enough for easy handling, full of antioxidents and other tasty goodness. Also easy to grow in the Pacific Northwest and one of Sophia’s current favorite foods.

While we have 2 blueberry bushes, they aren’t very old yet, so they only produced a pint or two of berries this year. Fortunately, Laurie’s parents have 4, 14 year old bushes that produce a lot of berries. Fortunately for us, they are happy to share the berries with us. We freeze them and use them through the year. Of course, as our friend Alten Brown points out, the sharp ice crystals created in the normal freezing process rips up cell membranes and leave the fruit "juiced" when defrosted. So he recommends freezing them using dry ice to greatly accelerate the freezing process and thereby reducing the size (and dangerousness) of the crystals.

So, we tried it. After picking and washing about 10 pounds of berries we got just under 10 pounds of dry ice from the Wilsonville Thriftway. Using a small-medium cooler, we crushed the dry ice and mixed it with the majority of the blueberries, filling the cooler completely. It did freeze the blueberries, but there are a few lessons to be learned from the experience to make it go a little better.

# Use a slightly higher ratio of dry ice to blueberries.
# Use a larger cooler to facilitate stirring. In our situation, we needed to better distribute the dry ice to get all the berries equally frozen. Stirring was difficult in the small cooler as the berries quickly got very deep, so we did not stir very much or very deeply.
# Break up the dry ice a little more. After 2 hours there were still some chunks that hadn’t sublimated, and that made bagging a little tricky.
# Make sure to get the dry ice into the corners of the cooler. That was where the majority of the unfrozen berries were.
For results, the berries seem to take less damage by being frozen in this manner. They also seem less likely to be stuck to each other in clumps, and without going through a significant drying process, which can be a little time consuming. Finally, we got to play with dry ice, which is fun anyway.

TED conference presentations – Seth Godin (2003)

Interesting presentation on our current 1st world environment where we so many options and very little time relative to those options. In terms of advertising, the majority of people are tuning out the majority of the advertisements. Which in a world where what he calls "idea diffusion" is key to success (and I think he argues is the metric of success in general) getting people to pay attention is the hardest part. He claims that you need "remarkable" products and advertising – not necessairly the best.
* Remarkable – worth making comment on
* Basically the idea business needs to learn to position and act like the fashion industry does
* Market to those who care about your product (the okatu, or fanatics) and not the the masses – the masses will ignore you. Get the fanatics and they will trickle into the masses. I think we call this the "halo effect" as well.
* Don’t be safe. Being safe will kill your business because people won’t care about your product. Without an emotional connection to your product or company you’ve only got price to compete on.
* He uses the example of a purple cow – nobody over the age of 6 points out a cow by the side of the road, but everyone will point out a purple cow.
I’m not sure that simply being remarkable in the "look at me, I’m different" is sufficient to business success, but in terms advertising and marketing, he’s got a point. I’ve tuned out all advertising for large categories of products: cars, beer, pain releivers, etc. Every time I see one of those, that’s money poorly spent by that company because I’m not really reachable, regardless of how cool, clever, interesting their advertisement is. I’ve chosen to elminate those choice spaces in my life to protect my time as Godin claims that we all are doing because we have so many choices and so little time.

If I do get into product definition, I’ll be sure to check out some of his books as it seems like he’s onto some good ideas.

Laurie, Sophia and I were out on a walk the other day and while waiting for a stoplight, I noticed a chunk of tree sitting on the sidewalk, about a foot and a half in diameter and about as tall. I pointed out this somewhat unusual item to Laurie as a "stump". She referred to it as a "log". Unusually I didn’t take the bait to sing the most wonderful "Log Song" but after a little prompting I sung what little of it I could remember. Fortunately for us, The internet has provided me with what my limited memory could not: the entire Log Song from Ren and Stimpy:
<<<
What rolls down stairs alone or in pairs
Rolls over your neighbor’s dog?
What’s great for a snack and fits on your back?
It’s Log, Log, Log!

It’s Log, Log, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood.
It’s Log, Log, it’s better than bad, it’s good!
Everyone wants a log! You’re gonna love it, Log!
Come on and get your log! Everyone needs a Log!
<<<
Thanks to: http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~fatwa/ren/songs.html (via google of course)