Before:
After:
The blank wall is a bit stark, so I’ll probably put something up to replace the boards. The trick will be to find something that’s not distracting. Perhaps Monet’s Water Lilies, or an Ansel Adams print. I’m open to suggestions.
Archive for November, 2006
Distraction Removal
Monday, November 27th, 2006Planning vs. Working
Sunday, November 26th, 2006“Going Meta” is one of my favorite coping strategies when there’s some piece of boring work in front of me that I’d rather avoid. When you aren’t working the work, kick the abstraction level up a notch and work on working on the work. A great way to fool yourself into thinking that you’re being productive. Works almost every time.
So there I was, sitting at my desk, actively avoiding some particularly boring paperwork task, when I started pondering the problem of having the problem of being stuck on the task. Usually, this goes nowhere, but tonight I think it paid off.
The “duh” answer to my stuckness is that I was letting myself get distracted too easily. The slightly deeper, but still pretty shallow answer was there there where too many distractions within my range of vision. As I sat there, looking at what was in sight, I realized that much of what was directly visible in my work area was planning artifacts. On the wall behind my desk are two magnetic boards that are covered with index cards. Most of the cards are about various projects and other stuff that needs to get done. When my eyes wander off of the screen, they invariably land on some reminder of something else that’s not done (or not even started), and my attention gets drawn into planning, and away from whatever concrete task I was intending to make progress on. I’ll eventually snap out of the planning trance and get back to work, but the next time my eyes drift, off I go into the planning again.
Tomorrow, the magnetic boards get moved to a different wall. I still need them for planning, but they have no business interfering when I’m work mode.
An unexpected “generation gap” moment
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006I was standing around in a hardware lab yesterday with the two twenty-something guys from hardware ops who’d just helped us move a bunch of computers out of my team’s area and into a safer space where cables won’t get kicked accidentally.
We were waiting for DNS updates to propogate so I could verify the health of the stuff we had running on the boxes. The two ops guys were talking T.V. and got on to “Heroes”, which I haven’t seen, but had just read a bit of news on*.
“I hear they got George Takei to play Hiro’s father,” I added in.
Blank looks.
“Uh, Ensign Sulu?”
Blank looks.
Uh oh.
It is so easy to forget that the cultural stuff we grew up swimming in is just a layer of sediment to people who grew up later. Or sediment under sediment in this case.
*Via Bill Humphries.
What the Radiologist found
Friday, November 3rd, 2006“Hello, Mr. Smith? This is Dr. ______. The Radiologist took a look at your chest X-Ray, and found…”
“Uh oh,” a part of the brain says. “Oh crap,” says another part.
The backstory is that I’ve had a strong, persistent cough since recovering from a head cold ten days ago. The cough comes and goes, but often comes at 2 AM, waking everyone up. The usual signs that Something Is Wrong were absent (no weakness, shortness of breath, or bubbling sounds when I breath). But to be prudent, and because I’m hopping on a plane in the morning to head to the AYE Conference where I’m presenting a few sessions, and it’s no fun for the participants when a presenter collapses mid-session, I got myself off to the clinic. They took a chest X-Ray.
“Lungs are clear,” the doc said after looking at the film. “Probably viral Bronchitus. No sign of a secondary infection. The cough should go away in a week or two. Sometimes these things hold on for a while. Drink plenty of fluids. Let us know if it gets worse. I’ll have the Radiologist take a look at the X-Ray, just be sure.”
That was yesterday. This afternoon I got a call. The Radiologist saw a spot in the film, and couldn’t rule out a small case of pneumonia (which is what I’d kind of expected in the first place.) A few hours later I had a 5 day course of antibiotics. Now I feel a lot better about getting on the plane.
Still, in the brief moment before the doctor finished the sentence, my imagination did a few backflips.
JUROR SUMMONS
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006Tag, I’m it.
The last time I was called up for Jury Duty was for the week between Christmas and New Years two years ago. That’s probably the one week out of fifty-two that has the lowest likelihood of a Court starting a case. This time I’m on-call in early December.
The jury selection process, at least in Santa Clara County, California, is monumentally boring unless you’ve brought a good book. You sit in a holding room for some number of hours until your block gets called in to court, where you sit for another hour while smaller groups of people get interviewed to screen out relatives of the judge, the defendant, spouses of police officers, hardship cases, anyone carrying a “Jury Nullication” book, etc. The prosecution and defence lawyers then have a set number of “peremtory challenges“, which let them excuse a prospective juror without having to give a reason. (In Santa Clara County, the joke is that they’ll reject anyone who thinks for a living.) Eventually, both sides run out of challenges, and the first Jury’s worth of people left, plus two for alternates, are it.
Having to hang around the court for a day does have some unexpected benefits. If you hit the right day, one of the Bail Bond companies, being demographically astute advertisers, might be giving out free t-shirts. I missed my chance at one a few years back, and hey, Christmas is coming up.