Patri's Peripatetic Peregrinations

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More TDK thoughts
With spoilers for TDK and Iron Man.

( Read more... )

I'm going to be the only person who didn't like this movie (no spoilers)
I'm a quality snob when it comes to movies, so it's almost unheard of for me to think a movie is really good but not like it. But The Dark Knight was such a movie.

In fact, I didn't like it exactly *because* it was so good! I found it so powerful and gripping that I was much more disturbed by the dark aspects than I normally would be. I don't like violence and murder and psychopathy, and this was just too engaging a depiction of them for my taste. Kudos to H.L., may he rest in peace, for such an incredible acting job. He deserves a posthumous Oscar for his nightmare-inducing performance. I just don't like nightmares, as it happens.

Seriously[1], I want to go cuddle with puppies now, to walk in green fields under the golden sun, to raise a glass in a bar filled with ordinary people whose main outlet for their violent tendencies is video games and enthusiastic support for their local sports teams. Anything to celebrate how bright and safe and not-evil our world is, the vast majority of the time, compared to that one.

Anyway, there were definitely some interesting philosophical aspects, which I will post about later...

[1] Deliberately inviting the obvious...

The Fannie Mae Gang
Part of the left-wing ethos is the idea that government power is needed to protect people from market failures and the power of large corporations. The libertarian viewpoint, on the other hand, is that government power tends to be co-opted by the selfish and corrupt and wielded to harm the general populace.

The anarchist viewpoint is even simpler: be suspicious of large concentrated power sources. The government is much larger and much more concentrated a power source than even the larger corporations, therefore we should be more worried about it. And we should expect these large power structures to cooperate to screw over the general populace.

This is a great example of the cooperation of government and the private sector to their benefit and everyone else's loss:

Trying to defend the mortgage giants, Paul Krugman of the New York Times recently wrote, "What you need to know here is that the right -- the WSJ editorial page, Heritage, etc. -- hates, hates, hates Fannie and Freddie. Why? Because they don't want quasi-public entities competing with Angelo Mozilo."

That's a howler even by Mr. Krugman's standards. Fannie Mae and Mr. Mozilo weren't competitors; they were partners. Fannie helped to make Countrywide as profitable as it once was by buying its mortgages in bulk. Mr. Raines -- following predecessor Jim Johnson -- and Mr. Mozilo made each other rich. Which explains why Mr. Johnson could feel so comfortable asking Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) to discuss a sweetheart mortgage with Mr. Mozilo, and also explains the Mozilo-Raines tag team in 2003.

I recount all this now because it illustrates the perverse nature of Fannie and Freddie that has made them such a relentless and untouchable political force. Their unique clout derives from a combination of liberal ideology and private profit. Fannie has been able to purchase political immunity for decades by disguising its vast profit-making machine in the cloak of "affordable housing." To be more precise, Fan and Fred have been protected by an alliance of Capitol Hill and Wall Street, of Barney Frank and Angelo Mozilo.

Yeah, it would be nice if groups of people organized democratically in large groups to do good. But that ain't what government is.

Pennsic next year?
I want to go to Pennsic next year.

Unless we have a new baby, which hopefully we will.

So I guess either 2009 or 2010, I'll say.

Haiku
(inspired by

xleste's post, and my tea discussion this afternoon)

Life has no marked paths
Only our footprints behind
the horizon ahead.

I think I'm getting the Dash Express GPS
It just seems so cool! Unlike other GPSs which use feeds of a few trouble spots to take traffic into account, the Dash Express uses other Dash devices as a swarm network to build historical records and get real-time data on local traffic. It then offers you multiple routing options, every single trip, with predicted times. You have to pay $10/month for the 2-way connectivity, but for that you also get constant free updates of maps, and the ability to send addresses to the GPS from your browser.

And they've released an app system which already has some awesome-sounding apps: warnings of speed traps and access to Gcal. Other cool features include searching for POIs along your route (ie "I want to stop at an ATM, I don't care where, but I want to minimally deviate from my trip"), prices for gas stations,

Apparently it is also bulky and a little buggy, but still sounds well worth it.

I sure wish I had those features in my crappy BMW in-dash GPS system, which cost way more.

Sleeping Around Craiglist
Great article:

We are both middle-aged women who have spent the past 11 months sleeping around Craigslist. At an age when most women were sending their firstborns off to college, we found ourselves -- through chance and circumstance -- single, tumescent and ripe for adventures. Those adventures have spanned 10 counties and four states and involved roughly 45,000 e-mailed words, 27 phone calls, 36 face-to-face initial dates and 13 actual lovers -- and re-aggravated our carpal tunnel syndrome from all the typing.

Years before embarking on Craigslist, both of us had experienced sexual abandonment. We were both hungry for intimacy and physical touch after years of wandering in the desert. Our lives were on similar trajectories.

squee! macbook air!
My new computer is here! It shipped so fast, and it came in an unmarked box, so it was very surprising and thus exciting to discover it tonight.

I've just barely met it, but it's so pretty and light and sleek and perfect and wonderful, I just know it is going to solve all my problems and organize my life and do my tasks for me. Together we're going to cure cancer, end aging, lose weight, win money, and land loads of hot babes. All the frustrations I've had with other computers will evaporate like the morning dew on a warm summer morning, and my life will be like the breeze that evaporates said dew on said summer morning.

I guess I have laptop NRE :).

(Thanks

insteadweslept!)

bleh
getting sick. sigh.

on the plus side, I can lie on the futon and watch TV on the PS3 now, which is nice (and about what I feel up for). Recent Simpsons seasons (16) do suck, just like

boffo says. I'm going to try the cash game episodes of Poker After Dark season 4, which

perspectivism recommended.

Current Music: Chiquita - ABBA

MITs
Wow, making key tasks for the day and doing them first (before email, before LJ, before anything) is damn effective!

My previous GTD system was failing, so I am reworking it. I got really stressed yesterday because I was in a bad transition where I had lots of things to do, didn't have a new system to track them, and didn't want to track them with the old system. It occurred to me that a busy and stressful period (like cleaning up all the loose ends to leave your job, while also running a nonprofit, selling a property, ...) is probably not the best time to change task systems :).

So I made a "crisis period" list of only the projects & items which have to get done over the next week and a half, reviewed my old system and unprocessed new system "stuff" to pick out only those items, and am working only with that set of things for now. It looks much less scary when it's all down in one place.

Lots more on my GTD rework in a week or two when I have time to finish it :).

Second draft email to Larry/Sergey
Incorporating your comments & feedback. This feels much stronger to me, although I'm sure there are some tweaks still to be made (like, I'm not happy with the flow of the first paragraph):

Subject: Farewell to Google, hello to seasteading

Hey Larry & Sergey,

I have a grand vision: to build new city-states in international waters so that people can experiment with a variety of political systems. I've been fortunate enough to get some funding from Peter Thiel to go work on this seasteading idea full-time.

While it is sad that I will be leaving Google for this endeavour, I see it as a "Googley" goal: a way to make government be less monopolistic and more of a competitive, long tail industry, with far more choice for citizens. More like the web, less like the OS industry.

I want to change the world, and would love any help or guidance you can provide. You can learn more at our website, www.seasteading.org, and I can be reached at patri@seasteading.org after I leave on July 29th.

Either way, thanks for creating a company which so deeply inspired me over the last 3.5 years!

oh strange new world
that has computers freaking everywhere.

I got some errors when I turned on my car, because a control system failed to boot. Or so I assume, since I power cyled it and everything then worked normally.

If I was Randall Monroe, this story would have been told with stick figures, and have been much funnier.

The state of the economy
The NYT (which I read every morning, BTW) has an excellent article on the current state of the economy, how bad things are, and how bad they are likely to get:

Uncomfortable Answers to Questions on the Economy

Most popular writing on economic topics is trash, whereas this article rattles off all the things that "those in the know" (at least, subjectively, by my judgement of who to read and believe) talk about: historical price:rent ratios, Case-Shiller index (rather than the less accurate OFHEO price index), the effect of Mortgage Equity Withdrawal, the overhang in home inventory, etc.

( Here are some key excerpts )

The graphic is also worth looking at

Things vs. OmniFocus
I think I'm going to switch OS X GTD apps soon, as well as revising my GTD process based on what has and hasn't been working for me. I've been using iGTD, and it's just too cluttered and powerful for me. I want less features and more ease of use. There are some great things about it - it's free, and the developer is very productive, so it has advanced rapidly. But it doesn't give me a "Mind Like Water"

I first checked to see if LifeBalance, my old favorite, had gotten a facelift or an iPhone version. I used it for years, and what I love about LB is that it actually prioritizes for you. Basically, at every level of the project hierarchy (from goals down to projects) you can set importance, and then LB sorts tasks based on those, and on what you've done lately, in order to try to keep your total accomplishments balanced by area. I love having it tell me what to do, and being able to yank up & down priorities on projects based on changing importance. I've never found this in another task manager, yet it's really simple & intuitive.

Anyway, LB improves very slowly, and still doesn't have an iphone version, so forget it.

The two apps that sounded really good from reviews are Things and OmniFocus. Both have available, robust iPhone versions. Any comments from those who have tried them?

Work productivity
I am fascinated by how productive I have been in my last days at Google. I get my stuff done quickly enough that much of the time, I'm waiting for other people. Yet I'm also spending way more time reading and sitting in the sun then usual. I take more frequent breaks, and have been spending less time in the office.

The key to the apparent paradox, as far as I can tell, is that I'm much more focused and wasting a lot less time. I have no need to appear or feel productive, so when I notice that I'm reading pointless work email, or news about Google, or any of the other things I do to look & feel like I'm doing Important Company Work...I stop. I either do actual work, or I go take a break (more often the latter). As a result, I have more energy, so when I am working, I can more easily force myself to work on what needs to be done, rather than what will be easy.

An interesting lesson. Reminds me of the Results-Only Work Environment, and Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time, and the 80-20 rule.

A brief guide to world domination
Or "How to live a remarkable life in a conventional world".

I just read this great PDF (google it, I'm posting on my phone). It really isn't about controlling the world, but about being a purpose-driven, unconventional, successful person. I liked it a lot. There's something really fun about reading stuff like this as I prepare to quit my job to do crazy things. Maybe it's a case of finding a source that will tell me what I want to hear, but there's a lot of "yay, I'm doing the right thing!"

Google has two Walkstations!
One is thanks to

zudini. Cool. Here's the product page. I had a sort of similar setup at home: a recumbent exercise bike w/ a special laptop stand, but didn't end up using it much. The stand wasn't great, and biking is somewhat distracting.

Somehow, while I am not a fan of long, repetitive cardio (like jogging), I am a fan of long, repetitive cardio (like walking while working, AKA "Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis"). Maybe there's some cognitive dissonance, or maybe they are really different. I don't feel like thinking about it :).

Draft email to Larry
I figure I'll send it Monday. Feedback welcome, particularly suggestions on trimming words, I think it's a little too long:

Subject: Leaving to work on grand visions of better government

Greetings. I'm leaving Google next week, and before I go I wanted to thank you for building such an incredible company. The amazing people, user focus, long-term vision, and "win-win" viewpoint have been truly inspiring.

I'm leaving because I've been given an opportunity to work on my own grand vision: building new city-states in international waters so that people can experiment with a variety of social, political, and legal systems. While it is a very different field, I see this as a "Googley" goal: I want to make government more of a competitive, long tail industry, with a variety of providers of different sizes serving different niches. More like the web, less like the OS industry.

If you're interested, I would love to talk about this idea with you, and perhaps get some feedback based on your experience in bringing visions of a better world to fruition. I'll be here until July 29th, and after that can be reached at patri@seasteading.org. For background, check out our Intro, FAQ, or press coverage by Wired, Ars Technica, and Gizmodo.

Either way, thanks for the inspiration, and for a great 3.5 years!

Reason interview w/ Peter Thiel
here