Waffles

Waffles. 

So...  At some point in my life, I picked up the connotation that a waffle was a person who couldn't make a decision.  I have no idea where that came along.  I think I've also added a secondary meaning in that a waffle is a person who won't get to the point. 

Generally, I use it as a verb. 

Usage: Bob needs to quit waffling.

Urban dictionary agrees with me.  So I must have not been the only one who came to that conclusion.  Either that, or I picked it up somewhere. 

So I've been listening to a lot of Librivox as of late.  Librivox is a collection of copyright free books read by people.  Some are good readings, and some are terrible.  It's a crap shoot, really. 

I've been going through "The Book of the Damned" by Charles Fort.  Generally, I'm okay with listening to strange stuff.  But this guy just won't get to the point.  He basically goes on and on about nothing.  He waffles with the best of them.

I'm going to finish it.  But I'm going to do it at one chapter a day, but his "nothing is truth" spiel gets real old real quick.  On the plus side, the reader isn't a monotone. 

It's humorous, though.  People like him populate the work force and life.  The Internet is full of discussions like this.  Firefox pocket seems to be full of them.  Maybe their just the right level of click bait to get hits without ever purporting to solve the problem. 

I read one a few days ago about someone saying people should eat more meals earlier in the day.  And the end result was the suggestion that big government intervention was the solution.  "Solve poverty, and all these solutions solve themselves." 

No.

No they don't. 

Because poverty as currently defined is not "solvable". 

The current definition of poverty says the bottom X percent live in poverty.  So if you are in the bottom X percent, you will always be in poverty. 

You may have a million in the bank, and be eating high class meals every single day.  But because you are at the bottom in comparison to everyone else, you are in poverty.  No matter what you do, there will always be a bottom X percent. 

The answer "solve poverty, and you solve the other issues" is also in direct contradiction to the work done in Switch by Chip and Dan Heath.  They suggested that throwing money at the problem wasn't going to solve anything.  The best answers are small answers. 

The size of the solution doesn't have to match the size of the problem.  A good solution is almost always well smaller than the problem we perceive. 

Rearranging the diet of a bunch of Vietnamese solved their malnutrition issues without large amounts of government subsidies and financial spending.  There was no multi-million dollar solution with a super giant government study. 

Just a guy with a clip board and some questions, asking where things were succeeding.

That answer is too simple.

See... many solutions are like that. 

Me?  I'm opposed to a so called "living wage".  Not because I think people should be broke.  It's because the inbred fallacy that assumes if you start paying people more they will start making better decisions with their money.  A person broke at $8 a hour will be broke at $80 an hour.  The person didn't change.  Just some number that values their work.

The problem is not the amount.  It's the person. 

The wants of any individual are infinite.  The income of any individual is finite. 

All of your wants are not going to be met.

No matter how much you make.

Period.  End of story.

Even billionaires have limits to their wants.  They may be trying to solve bigger, more complex problems.  But their is a limit to what they are capable of solving.  It's simple math. 

Elon Musk is a billionaire.  Still can't do everything he wants. 

Maybe a lot of cool stuff.

But wants are always infinite.  And they always will be.

Hardgaining... or when eating has to become a hobby.

I'm decided to gain weight this year.  I'd like to hit about 160.  I haven't broken 140ish in 5 years.  So it's going to be interesting.

I started working on gaining weight today.  And I realize it's going to be a pain. 

See, that's after dinner.  And that's just to break even.  I've got probably 3 hours before bed before bed and I have to eat another 1500 calories just to break even.  Eating has to become a hobby at this point.  From what I've heard and read, the real answer is eat like a cow. 

In general, I'm following the ideas presented by Starting Strength.  Mark Rippetoe is the only person I've heard that has produced a decent reasoning behind what they were doing.  He's also got an article about the novice effect.  One of his suggestions was to drink a gallon of whole milk a day.  The reasoning makes sense.  You need to increase your caloric intake a lot.  You need to eat about 6,000 calories a day and lift heavy weights three times per week.

That sounds great...  but eating 6,000 calories is a lot.  It took a lot for me to get to 3,000 calories.  Making it to more than that is going to be interesting. 

But then I've always followed complex programs that promised maximum gains without fat.   But then came the answer from Mark Rippetoe.  Basic answer was you can't have it both ways.  If you want to get bigger and stronger, you've got to eat a lot and lift heavy weights.  Spend six months gaining weight and strength.  You can drop those extra few pounds later.  It's worth gaining the strength and muscle mass now. 

So it's now time to make eating a hobby.  Let's see if I can make it past 2 gallons a week this week. 

The inability to count

People I know...  I'm not naming names...

They don't seem to be able to count.  Simple math kind of count.  The electricity or water gets cut off every other month.  Some sort of crisis is always happening in that household.  And the funny thing... several years ago, I thought they were doing awesome. 

I know it's strange.  But 6 years ago, I knew several families like that.  All of them seemed to be going somewhere.  Everything was just awesome, and the world was rocking along great.  It was 2010, and the world was wonderful. 

Now, we're entering 2017 and I wonder what happened to those families.  I know what I did.  I started making a budget and following the thing.  It doesn't help if you make a budget and don't follow it.  I got my wife on board, and we look at the budget regularly.  We adjust as needed.  She tells me she needs things and I try to fit it into the budget.  We discuss everything.  The budget makes that possible. 

The other families?  They lurch from chaos to chaos, barely surviving what are normal and expected rocks of the ship.  See, emergencies happen.  So they aren't really emergencies.  Those "catastrophes" are normal occurrences.  You just have to plan for them.  And a stack of cash helps.  It's not a lot of cash.  Just $1000.  But that's a life changer.  It's just enough cushion to keep the big bad from beating down the from door.

But the people I know... they get payday loans. 

Six months ago, they said "payday loans are the devil". 

I guess that's the biggest trick of the devil.  He convinced the world he doesn't exist.

But then there is another side of the coin.  The part I don't understand.  I don't have to.  I just have to believe.  And I do.

See, I started going to church six years ago.  And it was a church that preached the new testament, and told me what the Bible said.  It wasn't about what someone thought.  You had to argue against the Bible.  Not against some random person.  Not against the thoughts of the world.  Against the word of God.  And there's a lot of parts in there that don't make a bit of sense to me.  But those parts are the ones that are the most important. 

As I heard someone say once... If you hear someone say "It doesn't make any sense" then that person has an invalid perspective of the world.  The world always makes sense.  It's not the world that doesn't make sense.  It's our view of the world. 

Now, the average person would tell me that the budget made all the difference.  But I know going to church and doing what the Bible said had an effect.  "Have faith and believe" it said.  I did.  That's all that was asked for. 

See, you really need to read the new testament.  It's a hard book to read.  Not for the words.  The words.  The words are easy.  They concepts are hard.  It's filled with a lot of differing and complicated stuff.  I don't pretend to be the greatest scholar of the Bible in the world.  What I do know is the main portion is so stupidly simple it's hard.  "Have faith in the living God and his son Jesus.".  That's the main thing.  

Because a lot of what people teach is flat out wrong.  Or at least contradicted by other parts of the new testament.  And if we're getting into a Paul vs Jesus interpretation, I'm taking Jesus any day of the week.  I think Paul is the problem with a lot of Christianity.  But that's an argument for another time.

I guess the biggest thing I want to leave with is this: Jesus is knowable.  I'm not saying you are going to understand it all.  But he is knowable.  And it's worth knowing him.

Learning the Right Lesson

I finally set a date to take the CCNA.  Actually, it's the part of the CCENT.  So I'm doing the two part CCNA thing.  Anyways, now that I have a date I have a limited time left to learn everything that I could possibly need to pass this thing.

And I'm doing everything different again.

See, success is a bad teacher.  I think I heard that from Bill Gates.

So far, I've had success.  But there were certain places that I had limitations.  Mental gaps in the knowledge.  I should be strong in all the information, not just sections.  But there are sections and specific information that I needed that just wasn't making it into my head in the correct manner.

It's funny.  At one point I was turning my CCENT notes into a book to sell.  That project was abandoned for various reasons.  But the main one being that what did good for the CCENT may not be good for the CCNA.  How can I know?

So I've been using Mnemosyne.  It's a flash card program that allows you to create your own flash cards.  So you end up getting a lot of flash cards that you study.  It seems I heard about flash cards for years, but always avoided them.

I didn't avoid them because they were complicated.

I avoided them because they were work.  I didn't need to work to learn everything.  Until I did.  And the methods I was doing weren't working.  And they didn't work for years.  YEARS.

So now, it's time to quit avoiding work.  Because that's what all this searching has been about.  Avoiding work.  And flash cards are work.

You are what you repeatedly do.

I think Aristotle said that.

Success is a bad teacher.

So if you want success, you must repeatedly do something.  And it's probably going to be work.  And it is going to suck.

And you can either do it now, or spend the rest of your life avoiding the work.

And you will keep ending up in the same scenario: wondering why you only get so far.

You are what you repeatedly do.  Excellence then, is not an act but a habit.
Success is a bad teacher.


Strangeness indeed.

redirection

I started listening to Scarcity again.  I've got it on audio book, so I can go back through the thing whenever I feel like it.

I think I'm beginning to understand something.  I was going to call this post the Kansas City shuffle, but I wasn't sure if that was correct.  So I decided to call it redirection.  I don't know if that makes it a lot different, but it seems more accurate.  Going back to to what I was actually going to talk about.

The thing I noticed was something Scarcity pointed out, but didn't provide an answer to.  It makes me realize how Alcoholics Anonymous works as well.  All major projects and adjustment schemes operate on the same principle.

Scarcity (the book) points out that being focused on something causes us to ignore other things.  The social and mental problems generally are caused by an incorrect focus.  So the answer to solve the scarcity problem is redirection.  And that's why everyone suggests exercise.

But I just made a jump there.  To get that jump, you have to go to a different book.  For that, it's over to Mastermind.   Mastermind points out that in order to think of something, you have to redirect your mind and let the unconscious processes work on the problem.

So, the answer to solving those stuck in a rut problems seems to be redirection by causing a mental separation.  The task needs to be sufficiently tedious to take the mental process away, or grind it down.  Exercise and manual labor seemed linked to the process.  Shoveling dirt for an hour or two or running both result in the brain not thinking about what it had been thinking.

So the answer to the rut problem seems to be exercise.  Or at least one answer to the problem.  I'm sure there are others.

Which makes me also wonder if the authors of scarcity ever went back to look at scarcity mindset on people who practice meditation or mindfulness exercises on a regular basis.  Meditation could easily cause that same mental separation seen by exercise and manual labor.

Though it makes me think that whatever the mental separation exercise is, it should be different than the day to day task.  A manual laborer couldn't use manual labor to create separation.  I say that, but I'm mostly guessing at this with no background in psychology.  I guess it's just what I've grown to understand.

Maybe I'm crazy.  But then again, exercise is considered a habit dominated by the rich over the poor.

things in control

Seems strange to me that people are obsessed with things completely out of their control.  I can understand a little worry when it comes to something in your teams control.  That's normal.  But completely out of your control and your realm of influence?   That's just humorous.

How can someone obsess over the treatment of another person while sitting on their couch, stuck to a phone?  What gives phone monkey the right to dictate anything?  The person that's not even capable of real action is completely obsessed with other peoples action.

My wife asked me about the weather.  She wanted to turn her phone off for the night, but there was a vague rambling of a storm.

I do not live in a ramshackle hut.  It has survived every thunderstorm thrown at it so far, with only the loss of a few shingles.

I told her to turn it off.

And what if the storm hits?

We have two tornado sirens in close range.  They test them on the last Friday of the month.

We have three kids.  All sleep with sound machines.  Which means as long as the power runs they will sleep through anything.  Should the power go out, they will go into full panic.

Our kids are also relatively afraid of thunder and lightning.  They often need comforting, or possibly  daddy shirt if the weather gets too bad.

I guess you could say I'm not terribly worried about the weather.  It's either going to rain or it isn't.  I'm not terribly worried about politics.

When you think about presidential politics, you have to think of it as a foot ball season.  No matter who you root for in the regular season, it always comes down to AFC versus NFC.  And other than a few pictures, there's not a lot of difference between the two.

There is no radically different candidate.  All those have been wiped out, and will always be wiped out prior to general election.

So what you get is a generic amalgamation that's pretty much what the last guy was.  George W Bush wasn't Satan, and neither was Barrack Obama.  Neither "destroyed the fabric of our nation" like they were declared to have done if they were elected in the first place.

The only things I worry about are the things I can control.  And I seek to understand so I can attempt to bring things that were previously out of control in to control.  Simple.

I was watching an interview with James Mattis.  He was asked if he still carried a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.  He answer that was true.  And his reason was thus...

There is nothing new under the sun.  Everything you are experiencing has been experienced before.  This situation is not unique.

I'm expounding on a short comment there, but the truth holds.  

Strange thoughts

It's interesting.

After being at work for 60 hours in one week it's hard not to work.  I've been on call this week.

And the chaos has finally subsided for a bit.  But now I can't seem to do anything that isn't work.  Sure, I've only got about 30 minutes to go.  But its my free time.  And I don't have anything that can't wait until after lunch.

I just can't seem to do anything that isn't work.

Weird, isn't it?

Or not really.

What you think about and what consumes you is what you do.

The more you do something, the more you think about doing.  Talking about doing something doesn't count.  That just counts towards talking.

Anyways... back to work.   Or lunch.  Whichever I end up doing.

walking in the rain

Saturday,  I took a walk and got caught in the rain.

It was an interesting experience.

Normally, people avoid walking through the rain.  The instant a down pour starts, people scatter.  We can't stand the thought of being drenched and out in the cold.

As the rain hit, I realized I would be just as long to turn around and head home the way I came.  The path behind was longer than the path before.  So I walked on.

Years ago, I used to read a comic called Hound's Home.  The author made a comic where a person is desperately running to get away from the rain.  Only to make it home and take a shower.  The contradiction has stuck with me for more than a decade.

So I decided I wasn't going to pick up and go at any faster pace than I had been.  The rain started lightly, and I kept walking.  And I realized: despite the seeming trouble that I happen to be in thirty minutes from now I will barely remember any of the experience.

And the rain got harder.  I could see the house as I turned the corner.  There was an urge to break into a run.  I didn't.  And that realization hit again:  ten minutes from now, I'll walk into my driveway and stare at the rain, protected and observing.  Twenty minutes from now, I'll be playing with my kinds.  And thirty minutes from now, I will have completely forgotten about the rain.

And I was right.

And it happened just as I thought it was going to.

It made me realize that some of the darkest times in my life have suddenly just disappeared.  And then it's back to a sense of normalcy.  A place where nothing seems to be complicated.

The problems of the moment are the problems of the moment.  Nothing more.

When the moment passes, the problems will be gone.  The moment might be twenty minutes.  It might be two days.  It might be three years.

But one day, after slugging through the rain, you will realize you have walked into your carport, and the misery is behind you.

Keep walking.

observations

My wife had wisdom teeth removed on Thursday. I took a couple of days off from work to watch the kids.  During this period, I think I've made some strange but interesting observations.

I will start with a story or two.

I had one of my wisdom teeth removed in 2005, right after getting back from Iraq for the 2nd time.  It was part of that post deployment list of things you want fixed before you go off active duty.  I'd put wisdom teeth down at the end of the 1st tour. I budged at the point, just wanting to go home.

At the end of my second tour, I wouldn't budge on the tooth.  I have all four wisdom teeth, but only one didn't grow in properly.  There was a gap in between the tooth and the final set of molars.  I would have been messy down the road.  And I wanted it out.

Finally, the military capitulated and sent me over to the base dentist at Camp Pendleton.  Not much later, I was short one wisdom tooth.  I don't remember the instructions they gave me.  I just remember a couple of prescriptions and off I went.

11 years later, it's 2016.  My wife wants her wisdom teeth out.  Twenty minutes to numb the mouth, and twenty minutes to remove the two teeth and we're done.  We got our instructions and the prescription and we were out the door less than an hour after our appointment time.

My wife's family considers themselves medical experts.  They know everything there is to know about every single affliction.  On any given day, they will diagnose you with afflictions you have never heard of.  None of them are doctors, or even trained beyond basic medical care.  But they are medical experts.

They were very concerned with dry socket.  I have no idea what dry socket is.  It can happen after you get a tooth removed, I'm guessing.

Now here's the observation.  The medical professional who removed my wife's teeth didn't mention dry socket.  He didn't mention any specific issue.  He gave some simple instructions and sent us on our way.

Now this is the guy who has to treat the effects of mismanagement of the healing process in the mouth.  Everything I've heard from "experts" were not mentioned by the practicing professional. So the guy with the most experience and professional knowledge with didn't think it was important enough to mention this issue.

Only the amateurs were concerned with all these medical maladies.  The dentist had a success mindset.

My wife's family has a failure mindset.

The failure mindset finds every possible reason something can't succeed.  It point to specifics and tells good stories as to why something will fail.

Let me reiterate: the medical professional didn't think it was important.
The medical professional went to school to become a dentist.  He passed dental school.  He has been a practicing dentist in a dental practice for years.  He was asked to consult with one of the other dentists on the diagnosis while we were waiting for my wife's mouth to numb.  So at the very least the other professional dentists in the practice believed he was competent.  He didn't mention anything about failure.

How is it that the amateurs are often aware of every possible method of failure, but the professionals don't even contemplate how something can fail?

It's pretty simple.  The professional is aware of failure.  But the professional is also better aware of the likelihood of failure.  And he didn't feel the likelihood of failure was high enough to even bother mentioning.

It leads me to this idea: when starting something new, gather information.  But only enough to get started.  Because the more information you gather, the stupider and less likely you are to actually perform.

passivity.

The more I read, the more I realize that there is a wide variation between knowledge and action.  Reading is a very passive action.  Despite the vast potential of knowledge, most of the knowledge is just a gathering.  The gathering system usually doesn't have an output.  And without the output, the knowledge becomes a cesspool.  It goes in and just festers.

But that's just what successful seem to disagree with.  The system of input only doesn't really work.  It's just like the system of consuming TV.  Just a content input with no output towards any greater good.  And that output is what improves society.

I guess that's why someone said the greatest pile of innovation is found in the graveyard.  Most innovation dies without creation.  What could possibly happen if everyone created?

Who knows.  Really, it's a large pipe dream.  Too many people content to live with what others will give them, as opposed to working on creating something different and unique.  They are far too content to accept handouts.

The mass producers will continue to produce.  The consumers will continue to consume.

Perhaps there a chance that all this will change.

But that's unlikely.  The stakeholders have no motivation to change the system and in order to make it work better.

The other question is simple: how do you get the average person out of the consumption mentality and in to a creation mentality?

How did we get here

I work for an established company.  The company has changed since I've been a part of the company.  Partly because I keep driving change.

Why in the world would I want to do that?

And that, is the essence of this tirade.

It's very easy to sit back and say you are an original thinker.  It's also very easy to sit back and criticize someone else's plan.

So I present the Dale Carnegie/man solution.  The next time you find something that doesn't make any sense at work, don't gripe.  Seriously.  Don't gripe.

Ask people why that policy is in place.  Ask questions about how the policy was put in place in the first place.

If the answer becomes "because that's the way we've always done it" then you are ripe for revision.

"I don't know" is also a good one to work on.

Whether you believe it or not, there are many policies and procedures that end up "because that's the way its always been done".  And there is a lot of "I don't know" in the procedure.

So... once you've find something like that, figure out whether you have the ability to change it.  If you are in IT, you aren't going to change marketing without some deep evidence.  You aren't going to change operations.

Initially, look to change your own department.  Because then you are dealing with people you know and policies you have internalized.

There are two ways to approach producing the change.  The first is to get permission.  The second is to implement and ask forgiveness.

I usually go with the second approach for two reasons.  1) No one understands the need to adjust the policy, and rocking the boat is probably not going to happen.  2) Your idea might sound great on paper, but suck in implementation.

So implement the easiest possible answer to the problem, and start using it.  You might come to the conclusion that your idea sucks.  Good.  Kill it then.  Go back to the drawing board and come up with a new solution to the problem.

If the idea is awesome, show other people.  Get them to start using your idea as opposed to the other policy.  See if people gravitate towards the new policy or the old.

I ended up implementing a Cacti server in this way.  I think it was a great idea, but no one uses it other than me.  So to me that's a partial success.

What I've been working on recently is a different way to document.  It's mostly a combination of PHP, Apache web pages, and a MySql database.  So far, the implementation doesn't work.  But the idea seems valid.  So I'll keep working on it until the idea is operational.  Documentation is always the hardest part of the IT world.  The second hardest part is designing a knowledge base that people are going to use.  You want a solution that is easy to implement and follow.  And a webpage seems to be a good idea.  But the non-technical parts of my team aren't going to run queries against a database.  That's beyond them.  So I have to provide a solution for them.  And that's what this approach is.

Try it.  You may find the cruddy company policies go away.

And you may find yourself with a load of new work.

Either is good.

Those who have seen war...

To those that have seen war know that the war never ends.

The location changes, the faces change.  The weapons change.  But the war starts and never ends.

I remember when the war started.  It was March 20, 2003.  Since then, it has never stopped.

The battlefield has changed.  I haven't been in Iraq since 2007.  No more sunsets in the desert sand storms blocking visibility.  The M4 has long since been returned to the armory, and I probably couldn't even set the headspace and timing on .50 cal any more. Those skills have atrophied with lack of use.

New skills have replaced the old skills  I use a keyboard and mouse now.  Electrical scissors and crimpers.  The speed at which I used to be able to disassemble and reassemble an M16 has been replaced with the speed of making Cat5 ends.  I fight with command lines and code.  Programming languages and interfaces.

The enemy hasn't really changed.  The enemy is still amorphous and dodgy, never wearing a uniform or showing his face.  Sometimes its Haji.  Sometimes its the apathetic indifference of your own coworkers.

The war is still here.  Fought in bursts of insanity and boredom.  Sheer terror and force of will.

It has never ended.  It just moved locations.

And it will never end.


And the rest will choose not to see it.  War exists all over the world.  Right now.  And nothing is changing about that.

It will never change.

Accomplishments

So, a few weeks ago I started reading my goals twice a day.   You can read about that here.  So I've been reading them.  And making some progress.  But not the progress I want.  See, reading is just a simple action.  It requires little effort.  You are effectively done reading your goals in a few minutes.   But reading goals and accomplishing goals are two different things.

So I've started to keep track of my goal accomplishment in a spread sheet.  I just started today.  I'm not sure how well this setup is going to work, so I may tweak it.  But at the moment its something.  The end result is to start accomplishing goals more.  To do the work to accomplish the goal.  Which is a lot harder than just writing the things down.

I have to admit.  Writing them down and reviewing them on a daily basis is causing me to  put some effort in.  Just not the effort level I want to put.  The hope is small accomplishments spread out over time resulting in a big goal being accomplished.  Not some giant, one time step to accomplish the thing.  There's no exoneration in this plan.    Just straight up dirty labor.  Never ending dirty labor.  But that's what gets things done.

Now, back to reading.  I've got 6 more pages on one goal today, and I want to get those knocked out.

Happiness is...

I've heard people discuss how a store experience can make a customer happy.

If you hear someone selling this, run the other way as fast as possible.  They are disconnected from reality and will not solve your problem.

First, happiness is a choice.  It has nothing to do with the circumstance.  It has nothing to do with what you have or don't have.  You choose to be happy.

If you are not choosing to be happy, you are probably basing your happiness on external factors.  As such, you are probably either affected by stuffitis or you have no direction in life.  You buy stuff to make you happy, and wonder why you aren't happy.  That person has confused happiness with temporary amusement.

Second, don't try to make your customer happy.  See point 1.  You are not a psychologist (unless that's your business. I'm assuming most of you aren't).  Try to engage and entertain your customers.  But don't try to make them happy.

Because you can't make them happy.

That bears repeating again.

You can not make your customers happy.

Engage your customers.  Entertain them.  Delight them.  But realize all of these are temporary, transitory emotions.  They fall suite to whim just like everything else.  But that just means you have to keep bringing your A game every time.  Because every single experience is a new opportunity to engage a customer.

Random Theories

Still reading the Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Several thoughts struck me as reading this.  I was particularly going through the chapter on the bell curve.  In this chapter, Taleb talks about network theory.  It says the more connected something is, the more stable it is to a point.  But there are certain nodes in that connection that can affect the entire ecosystem.  The edges of the system are incredibly stable, the center is highly affected by problems.

Which made me think of Apple.  Apple is a highly centralized company with a highly centralized development/distribution system.  Then compare their ecosystem to network theory.  With Apple, the central connector is Apple itself.  So the one thing that is most capable of being effected by a black swan is the center.  They have the possibility of other interconnections in their suppliers, but by and large those are mostly fungible.  Foxconn is probably their biggest non-direct control node.  Failures at Foxconn can temporarily bring the company to its knees.  Otherwise, they have deep control of their own black swans because they have deep control of their network nodes.  The biggest problem Apple faces is internal.  They are unlikely to be effected by large external variations.

Conversely, that also seems to mean that their explosive change and variation must also come from inside.  They can't have explosive growth in a non-center node that effects their entire system.  So Apple has direct control of their scale.

Google/Android operates under a different model.  They use the Microsoft model.  The Microsoft model uses a large, highly decentralized network to build resources.  Which creates two results.  1) They are highly affected by explosive growth in the wings of their network.  A side business that Google has no control of has the possibility to take complete market ownership.  2) They are capable of being negatively affected by wings of the network.  Depending on the strength of the network node, they could easily be taken down by a shift in an influential node.

Which shows the difference in two different development/business methods.  Neither is better or worse.  Just different.

I'm probably wrong.  Humans are notorious in being bad predictors.  I'm also very likely to have used affect/effect wrong in several places.

Anyways.

Finding Problems

Based on some ideas I heard on a podcast, I’ve started writing down things that annoy me.  I’ve got two plans on this.  One, I want to know whether I’m focusing on issues that are important or issues that are completely out of my control.  But second, and most important, was that it provides a list of potential opportunities that can be fixed.

So to do this, you simply need to write down three annoyances a day.  You do this every day for 30 days.  After those 30 days, then you have a list of problems that you have the potential to solve.  What I’ve found is that I’ve trained myself to not complain.  And I’ve been trying to start this project for several days. 

But I drive around, and I work, and I run into things that annoy me.  And they piss me off for about 3 seconds.  And then I’m off again, without any remembrance of what made me mad.  So I’ve had to take special effort to both remember what pissed me off.  And I also have to take special notice to write down those things that piss me off.

 

Funny thing is… once you’ve trained yourself to not be so critical of the world, it’s hard to go back to be critical.  But those observations are just what you need to find opportunity.

A New Beginning

It’s a new year and a new beginning.  What could I say about it? 

I’m not sure.  Because my current blogging status is based off whim, I really haven’t had anything to say.  Or at least I don’t think I have.  The problem with operating by whim is you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what you are going to say.  It’s time spent waiting for inspiration to show up.

Which is exactly opposite of what I normally teach. 

So maybe the answer is I should start talking about the complications and problems associated with trying to get something started.  But then, most of those are mental.  And the answer is “quit procrastinating” and do something.

It’s really that simple.

Whenever you get the idea, start then.  Don’t wait until the beginning of the week.  Start right then. 

Hopefully, you’ll get a small victory before the grind sets in and it becomes a lot like work. 

And if it doesn’t, happy grinding. 

Exoneration

Let's talk about exoneration for a minute.  Exoneration is the idea that I can do something for a period, and then quit doing it forever.  The concept is usually introduced when talking about money or fitness, but it's generally used all throughout life.

The mindset is generally this: if I can make it to X, then I won't have to do this sacrifice ever again.

The X factor is always different, based on the mental picture that has developed.  But it's all based on the concept of exoneration.  And the hard part is there is no point of exoneration.  Almost never.

Yet people reach endlessly for the exoneration point.  I'm not saying you shouldn't reach.  What I'm saying is you can't ever quit.  Because if you quit, you go back to being what you were before you started.  Dieting is generally a big exoneration subject.  The key to success with diet and exercise is a long term plan.

You are not going to fix whatever problem you have with your weight or health in three weeks.  It's just not going to happen.  You can take almost anyone and put them on an exercise plan for three weeks, and they'll lose weight.  Why?  Because they weren't putting in any effort before.  But long term, the weight loss will stop or slow down.  Then the person will quit, and regain everything they lost.

Several months later, the same person will find a new "quick fix" and proceed to quick fix and lose 20 pounds.  Then the new will wear off, and then 20 pounds will recover.  My wife found a book that was talking about clients losing over 100 pounds.  Except it was the same 20 pounds over and over again.

Most multilevel marketing plans are sold as exoneration plans.  I'm not saying they are not worth the income if you can get them to succeed.  But they are sold as quick fixes in a world that needs long term solutions.

Quit trying for exoneration.  It doesn't work.  There is never a point at which you get to quit doing what you've been doing.

Unless you don't like what you are doing.  You do like what you are doing, right?

Kitchen Table

It's formica, and it's my kitchen table.  At least it doesn't look like it came from 1999.  Maybe 1975.

Maybe I should spend more than 5 minutes on the background.

Or, I could go back to studying Scaling Networks.

Back to studying.

Circling the globe (the thoughts in my head)

I went on vacation this last week.  I didn’t spend any time working.  It was wonderful.  Now, it’s Saturday and I’m back to getting ready for work.  The mental processes are starting to grind away, and get back to what I was working on.  At the moment, I’m updating Visual Studio so I can work on the program I was writing in C#.  I know I’ve heard a lot of disparaging things about C#, but I’m not terribly concerned.  There are too many purists in the world. 

C# is a tool.  Nothing more.  If it’s not the tool you need for the job, then don’t use C#.  C++ is a tool.  Java is a tool.  Visual Basic is a tool.  They are all tools.  Nothing more, nothing less. 

Each tool out there has a specific use, and some tools are better for certain applications.  I can’t say C# is any better a tool than Java in this case, but it’s a tool I can manipulate easier.  I also spend a lot less time fighting the interface and more time working on what I’m interested in working on.  As such, the thing already reads XML files, runs threads, and generally works like I want it to.  It’s not complete by any means, but it’s on its way there. 

In the period since I started writing this (it’s been about a week) I read Seth Godin’s Small in the New Big.  It’s quite a remarkable book, and there’s a lot I’d like to say about it.  I’m really not sure what to say, though.  There truly has been a paradigm shift and in the world, and those trying to follow the old paradigm seem to be getting left behind.  It’s much easier to follow the new paradigm.

But what is the new paradigm?  I think the answer is release early, release often, and benchmark everything.  Quit trying to make something perfect, and make something you can release. 

So I think I’m going to go with that, and make something I can release.  I’ve already started working on it, but it’s neither groundbreaking nor amazing.  But it’s something. 

When you release often, you end up basically throwing a lot of stuff up, and hoping some of it sticks.  I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it does to me.  If I release something in the next month or so, then I’m doing better than I have in the last few years.  Too much thinking and trying to come up with the perfect idea.  Too little time releasing. 

I think I also realized the background for the past few months (maybe a year) has been chemistry related.  I like the picture, but this has nothing to do with chemistry.  I should probably change that.