But even this stems from a deeper problem. We have somehow decided that “worth” is equal to “output”. The value in practice is not what you are creating, it's in what you are becoming. It's in how you are changing. If I am diligent in becoming a good photographer I will take a great many pictures, and the natural function of this is that I will, at some point, take some great pictures (and do all the other things that photographers do that I don't understand) that I can sell or put in a gallery or what have you. If I keep writing (#amwriting) then the natural outcome is that I will eventually write something good enough to get me some recognition. But it can't happen without consistent effort.

I write a story every week, because it's impossible for someone to write fifty-two bad stories in a row. -Ray Bradbury

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. While performing the first of these two duties I discovered a CD with a sticker on it that read “Cheaper than food”, and with my exceedingly generous employee discount it was much cheaper than my lunch that day. I bought it instantly. I don't know that I've ever listened to the whole thing, but that's beside the point.

The point is that for the past twenty years I've told this story from time to time with no way to prove that anyone would actually advertise that way. Today however, I actually found a picture.

You gotta love the internet and its complete lack of ability to forget.

So there you have it. Nordic Roots: the album that's cheaper than food.

#100DaysToOffload 9/100 #amwriting

Easy? Yes. Cheap? No, weirdly enough. All the decent Bluetooth enabled speakers I've been able to find are either

1. Expensive
2. Ugly
3. Ugly and Expensive

So I want to make something better. I want good but cheap speakers and a good but cheap Bluetooth adapter. Since I'm specifying cheap I'm obviously aiming for satisficing, not perfecting.

So here's what I came up with:

• Creative Pebble speakers. Roughly $20 if you find a good sale, $40 if you don't. I found a good sale.
• 1 Mii B06 Plus Bluetooth adapter. $30-ish. (I found it for $28, minus $10 using an eBay coupon.)

So my overall price was $38. The next cheapest set of Bluetooth speakers that looked reasonable was around $70, so I'm calling this a win.

Everything arrived and I plugged it all in. It works! But we see the problem with doing this as individual components instead of a pre-built system: wires everywhere.

Not a big deal. I'm putting this whole thing on a bookshelf, so let's use books to solve the ugliness problem:

I'm pleased with the result; the volume on the Pebble speakers is more than sufficient for the room I'm in and the B06 will connect to two devices at the same time, which means I can play music from my phone or computer without un-pairing and re-pairing.

And there you go! non-problem solved!

#100DaysToOffload 8/100 #amwriting

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. Sure, the Romans also wrote about love and science and engineering and politics, but these all seemed to end up back in the “ways to murder people” camp. (Cicero: genius orator. Brilliant politician. Changed the nature of political discussion for millennia. Cause of death: beheaded, had his hands and tongue nailed to a podium.)

So when we found the simple statement that to love a Roman you must also love that roman's dog, it was a whole different thing. There wasn't any death in there at all. Just a very human and very recognizable emotion. Dogs are good. Mostly. Sure they sometimes smell bad, and occasionally they do bad things in the house, or to the house, or on the house.

Since I've become an adult with my own house and my own dogs, I've come to realize how relatable this really is. Everyone loves their dog, and if you want to be friends with someone you make friends with their dog as well. so I know most of the dogs in my neighborhood by name. And what's even nicer is that my neighbors know my dogs as well.

It's a little thing, but it's a bond that keeps us all human.

#100DaysToOffload 7/100 #amwriting

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? Software development has been poisoned by school. In school you have a semester to complete a project, and you have to submit it once and that's all you get. You have to get it right the first time. (This is a wider problem; most of the western world has been ruined by that mindset from formalized education and we spend most of our adult lives either deprogramming ourselves from it, or being broken by it. Perfectionism is a cruel mistress.) Iterative development often falls prey to an expectation that each feature added to the system is perfect after a single sprint. It's insane.

Most of us who write code started by making weird little things on our own time. We made homepages on some free hosting site with obnoxious ads, or we modded our favorite game, or we wrote new games in ZZT. We weren't doing these things for money or for school credit, we were doing them out of the main stream of our “productive” lives. We were doing them for fun, on the side.

And now we get back to the title, clear up there at the top. Side Projects.

When you are working on a side project the key is to not make it feel like work at the outset. The key is to start, and to work on it a little every day, without getting too caught up in what it will eventually become or what it would look like if you were working on it forty hours a week for months. Side projects used to be called passion projects and that's a much better name for them. Let them be driven by your passion and your muse, and see where they lead you.

Write.as blogs make for great passion projects, by the way. The system is set up to make writing easy, but when you want to add sophistication to your workflow, like scheduling posts, or working on unpublished drafts, you can do that. When you want to play around with the style it's simple; you can make incremental changes when and as you feel like it. When you want to add some sophisticated interactions you can start writing JavaScript to make the blog do what you want it to do. It's actual iterative development, with no penalties for getting it “wrong” on your first tries. It's not wrong, it's just in development.

#100DaysToOffload 6/100 #amwriting

The thing is, my mind feels fine and active right now. I feel like I'm alert, aware, and fully on top of things, even though I'm clearly making more typos than usual, even for me.

And my perfectly active and functional brain knows that if I don't go to sleep I will be a mindless blob tomorrow, which is less than ideal when your entire job revolves around communicating clearly. So I can brightly and actively watch a bad day come at me, slowly, but with great weight, like a train car on a gentle slope, brakes off, engine off. The weight is passive but the impact is inevitable.

That probably isn't a great metaphor. I honestly can't tell right now.

Time to see if I can get some sleep.

#100DaysToOffload 5/100 #amwriting

The “help” I had been asked to give was vaguely defined, but I had to stand in for some work related ceremony, like a notary public. I had a specific role to play to make something a legitimate transaction. Part of it was to say this friend's name exactly. So she wrote her name down for me.

Hey have you ever tried reading a name in a dream? I've read somewhere that you can't read in dreams, because several parts of the reading mechanism in your brain are asleep when you're asleep, so reading doesn't work. It certainly doesn't work for me, so reading this person's eight-word name was impossible, especially when some of the words started to turn into things, like “impressively wrought copper snake wrapped around a hex bolt”. Not sure what syllables that was meant to represent.

Somehow I made it through the reading part and then got on to all the official words I was supposed to say. Only I realized halfway through that I was supposed to be recording all of this, and I wasn't. And I had said the wrong price for one of the items in the contract. And I had said someone's name wrong. Again. And this was all going to be a legal mess because of me...

And I woke up, stressed, breathing hard. My friend wasn't mad at me for ruining her business deal, she doesn't exist. Her family doesn't hate me, they aren't real. It was all just a dream, it was just a dream.

I'm still stressed.

#100DaysToOffload 4/100 #amwriting

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. But we've found ways to overdo dopamine. A lot of things that are “bad” for us, or just not productive, still stimulate dopamine production. So we get rewarded for doing nothing. Binge watching a show feels good, but doesn't actually accomplish anything.

Not that we need to be busily producing things all day every day. My point is that self restraint is the ability to choose things that create “slow” dopamine over things that create “fast” dopamine. Writing this post is not as fun as playing a game on my computer. But I believe that over time the rewards for creation are greater than the rewards for recreation.

So that's my goal: to pry myself away from things that are fun now and try to do things that will offer greater rewards later.

Sometimes I even succeed at following this advice!

#100DaysToOffload 3/100 #amwriting

So I can just write. I can just catch little things, regardless of state of finish or polish. The inner editor isn't allowed in my pocket notebooks.

#amwriting #notebooks #FieldNotes

Ten planned chapters, nine of them have had at least one draft pass.

Granted, I have seventeen chapters planned for Part Two, but hey, progress is progress. #PainlessGit #amWriting