April 8th, 2010
one thing that i’ve felt slipping away from me is my ability to write. it is literally as though i am forgetting words, and forgetting them in such a way that i know that i once knew certain words but can no longer remember them: typical ‘tip of my tongue’ syndrome. i blame it on my brain cells dying. well, that and the fact that life outside of college is really a life in which writing and writing well are entirely unnecessary.
blogging once filled the void, but let’s get serious here and call a spade a spade; blogging is hardly writing. (or rather, it is hardly necessarily writing, since there are tons of people who are rigorous and structured in their blogging, and yeah yeah, kudos to them)
anyways, in the interest of not forgetting the english language entirely, i am going to try in earnest to write more again. and hopefully write thoughtfully.
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April 8th, 2010
A friend was talking to me about the idea that all that is required to gain expertise in a particular subject is approximately 10,000 hours of requisite practice. The idea, whatever its actual merits are, has gotten stuck in my head.
I guess I’ve begun to wonder whether I’ve managed to gain expertise in anything. Day to day, i feel proficient at what I do, for sure. And yet I have difficulty shaking the feeling that expertise is constantly moving away from me, and that, day to day, I don’t allow myself to focus in on particular tasks in such a way that I am improving myself in any substantive or lasting way.
I’m reminded of the fact that they say you can’t forget how to ride a bike, and yet I have managed to do exactly that.
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February 4th, 2010
in a recent task at work, we were trying to decide upon a song to use in the company reel, and the result left me wondering if we had really built a consensus at all.
essentially, each person involved submitted a set of songs to the group and then each member of the group voted on their top picks. our first mistake was not specifying how many picks to choose and whether to indicate order of preference. What ended up happening was that some people submitted a top three, some a top six (as that was the number of people involved) and while some indicated the order of preference, some did not. the ultimate choice was based upon the song which received the most number 1 votes.
the issue i had with this result was that the song which received the most #1 votes did not appear at all on two voters lists. it left me wondering whether there would have been more overall satisfaction if a song had been given more weight for appearing on everyone’s lists, albeit in a lower position. i also wondered how the ability for people to apply a negative vote (ie. a vote for a song they absolutely did not want) would have affected the results.
what i’m thinking of is some kind of consensus building tool which is not so simplistic as a simple ‘vote for your favorite’, which i see as prone to create more polarized situations in which some people wind up extremely happy while others end up completely dissatisfied (see: our process of electing government officials). there’s surely got to be an easy to understand way to make the whole process more sophisticated.
Tags: smallthing02
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January 5th, 2010
i’ve been working at night from home lately and have decided that it just does not work. i end up going to bed around 3 with less accomplished than i could have cranked out in half the time from the office.
i’ve decided that this is in part due to the fact that as long as i stay in the office, the incentive to finish what i’m doing is that i get to go home. at home, there is no such incentive (aside from sleep, i suppose) and so the urgency to complete things just isn’t there.
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January 4th, 2010
I’ve been pondering to do lists lately, and one of the shortcomings i’ve experienced with to do lists is that, when working in teams, my to dos are sometimes partially or entirely contingent upon someone else in the team completing something on their to do list.
in the end, when someone at the beginning of the chain (myself included) falls behind on one of their to dos, it makes it appear on the surface as though people on the end of the chain went over their budgeted time, when in fact they may have actually completed their task faster than originally budgeted but finished later than planned because of the prior setbacks of others on the team.
i wonder if there is a more robust to do list tool than the ones i am using to link up lists in this way and to visualize the time spent more effectively.
Tags: smallthing01
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January 4th, 2010
A while back I had decided that it was daunting, stressful and depressing to try and complete large creative tasks in the face of work commitments, personal life and tivo addiction. As a result, I decided that smaller creative tasks for which I could allocate small chunks of time each day would be more reasonable and as a result more fulfilling. Perhaps through sheer laziness I didn’t stick to that plan very long.
This year I hope to stage a return to small things, in the hopes that they will become the building blocks to larger things down the line. Fingers crossed.
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October 17th, 2009
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October 16th, 2009
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October 15th, 2009
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October 14th, 2009
Into week two at the new job and I think things are going well. Some sketches I did made a good impression and I’m on to comping my first site in a while.
dvg baked a pie tonight and the apartment smells a little burnt at the moment. Also, I’m gassy. Wishing that it would decide whether it wants to go up or down instead of just sticking behind my waistband.
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