Small Thoughts for a Quiet World.
In the fall of 2000 I was working for a small local bookstore called Hawley Cooke in Louisville Kentucky. They had three stores, all owned by the Hawleys and the Cookes. What? It's no worse than “Barnes & Noble”
Anyway...
I managed the music department in my store, which was no great task. Basically I got to restock the CDs and answer music questions when my co-workers didn't want to.
So here's a non-problem I've had recently. I want to be able to listen to music, but without headphones. Headphones make it so I can't hear the rest of the house. I like to hear what's going on around me. Kinda. Sometimes. Look, let's not question the premise, okay?
Qui me amat amat et canem meam —Possibly the original Latin version of this phrase, except probably not.
I discovered this phrase when I was studying Latin in high school. It stuck in my mind because of how different it is from...well, pretty much everything else we had read from the ancient Romans. A few of my friends and I had devoted ourselves (briefly and humorously) to cataloging every verb in Latin that was a way to kill someone, until we realized that would be like cataloging every snowflake in a blizzard.
The best way to actually accomplish a side project is to not think about how big it will get. Start with the basic idea and let the complications and nuances come into play when they need to.
In writing there is the expectation that the first draft won't be the final draft. You expect to throw away a lot of work as you draft and re-draft a work.
In programming there is allegedly a standard model of “create then iterate.” But those of you who work in software development: how often do you actually get to say “this is just the first pass”? How often do you actually get to go back and iterate on a feature you wrote last year?
Kind of the opposite of yesterday's post. I haven't slept at all. I've laid in bed, tossed, turned, got up, read a book, tried to sleep on a couch... but my brain is convinced that now is the time to do neat stuff. But I can't just...not be a person tomorrow. That's not how life works.
My brain has a terrible feature: when it's decided I've slept long enough it starts poisoning my dreams. I generally can't sleep more than seven hours at a stretch because of this. Once I hit about 7.5 hours I start getting crazy stressful dreams until I wake up panting and go do something else.
Such power there is in clear-eyed self restraint. James Russell Lowell
Self restraint is difficult. We are curious creatures at heart, always looking to do and change things around us to better fit our needs. Curiosity and experimentation are traits that have helped us many times as a species and our brains reward us for doing things like that with dopamine.
Plexamp is rapidly becoming my favorite music player for a number of reasons. One of which is that it still has the small-development group feel of being a passion project, while also being very good at what it does. It is a commercial product that doesn't feel commercial.
Sure, I'll join in. I've seen a lot of “100 Days to Offload” posts lately, and I like the idea. I like it right now because I have felt entirely drained lately. For reasons that we all share. Here's why the 100 Days thing resonated with me today: Scrabble
Can someone tell me why music is so important?
(It's a rhetorical question; even though my posts get aggregated into the main “Read” feed I rarely check it to see if anyone has responded.)