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random observations about my life

Pets are social critters (duh).  I have both an office and a living room at my flat.  I spend more time in my office.  When one of the cats' perches was in the living room, they never used it.  I've moved it into the office, and now Hawkeye has made it his perch.

I get more done when I feel secure.  When my health, finances, eating and recreation habits are well cared for, I feel more secure than when they are neglected.  The more secure I feel, the more productive I am.  That said, I still need to finish my taxes. :/

Helping people enables me to feel good about myself.  However, I fear that is just a manifestation of my desire to please people – to obtain external acceptance.  Somehow, this seems related to my second point.

People are either born curious or they are not. I enjoy being around curious types, which is why I continue to gravitate toward academic types or geeks.  This is mentally stimulating, and that gives me endorphin happiness.

I like filing bug reports with imperative statements rather than facts about the bug.  For example, rather than say, "foobar is down," I now write, "bring foobar up."  Somehow, this feels more satisfying than saying something is broken, because it implies a direction to move in to make it better.

One has to be cautious about how to define the state one wants something in.  I probably only suggest what I know as a solution.  If my goal is A, but I suggest doing x to reach A, and x is sillier than y, which I know nothing of, I limit myself.  So, I want to know the problem, understand the goal, and then ask for possible solutions.

Earth Hour 2010


Earth hour 2010 by CW Ye

I've decided to go out to photograph the Golden Gate Bridge tonight for Earth Hour 2010.  Let's see if I learned anything at the workshop last weekend (f19, Cris, f19!).

My Saturday: clean house, finish uploading last weekend's photos from the workshop to Flickr, catch more March Madness, pick up dog and cat food, shoot bridge, and also keep an eye on the site to ensure that nothing blows up.

Oh, and maybe follow through with my latest idea for this blog, which is to 'interview' the people I know to learn how they came to do the jobs they do in life. I originally wanted to focus on all the developers I know to learn what key points in their lives led them to engineering (and to learn if there are any common threads there, a sort of a "what makes a developer tick?" thing), but then I realized that I know so many people who do interesting things that I just want to learn how they got where they are in life.  Not that I have an readership here, but it's more of a personal curiosity and a way to focus my thoughts here (purpose, Cris, purpose!)

Exercising what’s left of my brain

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about ethics, which ought to be more of a pervasive concept than it is. We seem to have left ethics at the curbside somehow.

I do not mean that some dogmatic morality should inform policy. Ethics, put succinctly, should inform policy how to not screw things over so badly that some group is marginalized to gain profit for another group.

Which is not to say that policy ought to please everyone, just that it fairly consider many disparate interests and not be driven to privilege some at the expense of others solely for any financial profit which may line the pockets of some while downgrading the overall quality of life for many.

So, I’m going to be asking, “Who profits?” a lot more lately as a mental exercise to see what role, if any, ethics still plays in life.

Sent from my iPhone

a question or two about March Madness

Last week, I greatly enjoyed filling out a bracket for March Madness, the NCAA Basketball playoffs that take up a few weeks in March, and following the games on both CBS Sports and CBS itself on TV.  Kudos to CBS for running all live videos of the men’s tourney online (quite a difference from NBC’s pathetic online video for the Olympics).  This year’s tournament has been stellar, with a few upsets, the Kansas one the most notable.  It did put a dent in my brackets, but then, it was also a very amazing game to watch, highly enjoyable.

 

But today it just dawned on me that there was also Women’s NCAA Basketball March Madness happening… but where are the televised women’s games?  Where are the online videos of the women’s games?  Where are all of the online Brackets games you can fill out for the women’s games?  Where is it even in the sports headlines of major news services?  It was in going over to Northern Iowa’s website to learn about their sports program that I have seen any information on women’s basketball.

 

Just seems a little weird that this isn’t as loudly surfaced as the men’s games.

Been 5 years, and still I find….

Pam & Jeanne’s Headstone, by me

 

This morning, a good friend sent me a text message about life and love and keeping on.  It’s the 5th anniversary (is that a good term for it?) of our friends’ deaths in a firey car accident on Interstate 80 in the middle of Nebraska.  The photos I have of them are on a disc somewhere, so what I have today for my blog is their headstone, which is over a 1000 miles from me at the moment.

 

I’m glad my friend could be as grateful for the day as she sounded (it was a very positive text, acknowledging the loss and the fact that we’re still here to keep on keeping on).  I still think back to the night I learned of this tragedy and how devastating the loss felt.  Feels.  I dunno, I’m so removed from feelings lately that I’m a bit removed emotionally… although I can sense it in all the tentative ways that I don’t let people in much anymore.

 

That said, I have let people in, and it is all of those living people that I’m thinking about right now, wishing we were all just a little more in touch but knowing it’s the endless struggle to do so.

 

So, anyway, back to Pam & Jeanne.  They sure were good role models for me.  They really approached the world in a non-nonsense and kind way.  They gave a lot; an awful lot.  They were gifted, and warm, and kind, and helped build an incredible community of people.  The last time I saw them, we were all at a peace rally together, and they were both wearing all white, it seemed.  Maybe they both just had white t-shirts on.  And I keep thinking of the song, Little Wings, which I had etched onto the back of my iPod.

 

 

Now I don’t want to be a jet airliner, I just want to be a little bird
I don’t want to rip the skies wide open, I just want my song to be heard
And I don’t want to be state of the art, I don’t want to get there overnight
I just want to be part of all this beauty, want to be part of all this flight on little wings
- Kris Delmhorst