Late last year, the New York Times published an excellent article, Navigating Love and Autism, which I highly recommend reading in full. It then published an incredible correction:
[The article] misidentified the character from the animated children’s TV show “My Little Pony” that Ms. Lindsmith said she visualized to cheer herself up. It is Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.
This is old news. But today I came across this sentence in a blog post explaining how the error was introduced:
She was listening to music on her iPod known to Pony fans as “dubtrot”—a take-off on “dubstep”, get it?—in which fans remix songs and dialogue from the show with electronic dance music.
I recently took a six-week sabbatical. I had a similar approach:
I made nearly no plans for my new free time. … I had the vague idea to relax, work on projects, and catch up on video games. (I went cold turkey on games early on in college in an attempt to focus; in retrospect, putting Linux on my primary computer to help enforce that was likely a valuable career decision.)
For me, the vague idea was to:
- relax;
- see neglected friends;
- record some songs;
- write an IOU-tracking webapp;
- finish working my way through iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide.
In retrospect, these ideas are too numerous, and possibly too vague. This shouldn’t be news to anyone, but trying to do too much—and hence not completing any one thing—is far less satisfying than focusing on one goal and achieving it. So, I didn’t see as many people as I intended to; I didn’t finish recording any of the songs I started on; and I didn’t get anywhere near the end of iOS Programming. I did get a very rough first cut of the IOU-tracker working, which I am using on and off, and ended up making some (extremely minor) contributions to Yesod in the process, so that’s okay. But being wound up about not ticking all these boxes (and more) did not exactly help me relax.
The lessons here, for me, are: focus; commit myself to achievable, incremental and worthwhile goals; and lower my expectations of myself. It’s okay to spend an evening achieving nothing more than two episodes of The Wire; equally, there’s very little satisfaction in completing four chapters of a programming textbook if I’m not applying that knowledge to a real project.
When I was planning my leave I had wild dreams about getting fit or learning Arabic or whatever. Once I no longer had my job to blame for it I was confronted by what I already subconsciously knew: my own motivation is at fault. I was using “no free time” as an excuse.
“Should I take a sabbatical too? Will it give me a chance to finally do all those things I’ve wanted to?” My response was, “No, if you really wanted to do those things you would’ve found time for them already.”
I*de”ate (?), v. t.
To form in idea; to fancy. [R.]
The ideated man … as he stood in the intellect of God.
— Sir T. Browne.
- To apprehend in thought so as to fix and hold in the mind; to memorize. [R.]
(Source: machaut.uchicago.edu)
Obviously you have all already seen this, but…
Let’s talk about … JavaScript!
failbowl:~(master!?) $ jsc
> Array(16)
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Via Edward, in turn via Andy Wingo. Marco remarked:
I have no words to describe js. is js really our glorious future after C?
People defending the good bits of JavaScript always bring to my mind this toot by Bryan Cantrill:
I am reminded that “we only use a strict subset of C++” is like saying “I only smoke meth socially”
This seems to be the year of hilarious write-ups of CES by jaded and cynical journos. Obviously you’ve read this already because you read Boing Boing as much as I do; but these two paragraphs jumped out at me:
Lenovo is making a TV with Android built in. It’s not built on Google TV, though, which is Google’s interface for TVs? This is a clusterfuck. For Lenovo and for Google. Focus!
Also, too many people are making waterproof computers and tablets. Stop it.
Is it any wonder people are afraid of technology?
At one point during the 40-minute address, Obama wondered aloud if anyone could blame him for wanting to avoid another four years of idiotic questions about his birth certificate, racist immigration laws, Eric Cantor, citizens who know in their hearts the country must switch to renewable energy but simply refuse to do so, the South, antigay bigotry, and “just all of it, really.”
Via aquarion.
Just one of a whole bunch of fascinating articles in Evan Martin’s Chromium Notes series I ended up reading after looking into Glick as a possible remedy for the long, slow process of trying to publish a binary tarball of Bustle which works on more than one Linux distribution. As a fan of messing with people’s software by embedding RTL markers and the like, I particularly enjoyed the footnote:
In this image, I constructed a page with a specially-crafted title, which Chrome naively formats as “$PAGE_TITLE - Google Chrome” and then hands it on to the OS. The image shows what happens when I alt-tab.
