I was reading an interview with the comedian Demitri Martin, and it turns out he’s a deep thinker–
At some point I created a point system, like breaking my life down into categories, and then in each category trying to achieve certain things in a week’s time. Every Sunday night I would tally up what I had achieved, for a total possible of 35 points. It was mind, body, career, personal management/relationship contribution. It was pretty funny. It was really ambitious in retrospect. The stuff I set out to do each week was pretty much impossible. I kept track of it for 27 weeks. I had a binder in which I actually was consistent for half a year. Every week I’d carry it around with me. I never got 35 points. I never even got close. Years later I found it, and I was like, “Oh my god, this is crazy.” 4 points was my lowest week, and I think 24 was my highest. When I made the system I figured I’d be topping out in the 30s, and once I’m close to my maximum, I’ll just bump up each category, I’ll just make the goals a little harder. And then that way I can develop a balanced set with the different things that I’m trying to learn how to do. I averaged 11 points out of my own system. So I failed kind of miserably. But the cool thing is that ever since then I haven’t really ever been bored. I haven’t watched TV since then, and I just never really feel like there isn’t something to do. That changed my perspective. So it’s like, draw a picture if you’re sitting somewhere, or write something down, or write a palindrome. It’s just about all the different opportunities in one moment. It changed my perspective on time and creating things.
This made me laugh because it’s exactly the kind of system I imagine building. Turns out someone else has built it - it’s called joesgoals. JoesGoals sports a stunningly intuitive and friendly user interface, which you can play with on the site:
This is friendly data collection — like a CRF in a clinical trial. What can you do with the data? Determine cause and effect (causal analysis)? One person found a correlation between cycling and migraine relief:
Bradley has been using Joe’s Goals to track his migraine attacks (-1 point), the times he has to take medication (-1 point), his cycling activity (+1 point), and when he wakes up in the morning (+1 point). Printing out the 30 day report he took it too his neurologist and the results surprised both of them. After reviewing the results the neurologist looked up and said “Why would you ever stop cycling?”
Like most geeks, I have an interest in self-experimentation, but not the discipline to gather data reliably. Seth Roberts discovered the Shangri La diet via self-experimentation. The spirit of curiosity and observation persists in his readers - see this post on the effects of DHA omega-3 oil. His seminal paper Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas describes his 12 years of self-experimentation as a basis for idea generation. It’s basically R&D, finding unexpected correlations.
JoesGoals is myware and a way of turning mundane tasks into a game. The simple data model is blessing and curse. It lacks numeric variables. This means you can’t record interesting variables such as weight, mood or sleep. Hopefully it’ll move in that direction in the future. The creator has a real knack for good UI. With a simple CSV download and good analysis software, users might discover other unexpected and helpful correlations.
If you’re a Spinal Tap fan like me, these are gold. Ricky Gervais is a huge Spinal Tap geek. He and Guest talk about the history and style of Guest’s improvisational movies. The Office uses this style. Parts II, III, IV, V are on YouTube.
Guest is plugging For Your Consideration.. which we watched tonight and pretty much sucked. Far too broad and sloppy. Oh well.
So the Wii supports Flash in the Opera browser, and it’s not half bad. This also opens the door to Flash games, see WiiCade.
We had 8 people over last night who hadn’t seen Dick in a Box. I hooked the laptop up to the receiver but didn’t have an SVideo cable for video out. The Wii seems perfect for social viewing of vids– especially since Opera does pan and zoom.
I love the idea of sharing vids with a large group without having to wrangle A/V equipment. XBMC is great, but the Wii is a Trojan Horse with a lot of future possibilities.
Edit: SofaTube gives the Fisher Price UI needed for video selection. I’m so getting a Wii as soon as I can pay retail..
I had Firefox open on my laptop and clicked on a video file to download it. Firefox hung.. couldn’t get to Tools/Downloads. But it wasn’t take much CPU.
After 10 minutes, I had an idea.. was there a modal window up? Clicked into Firefox, and its titlebar was the lighter blue color of a behind window. I typed Alt-Space, M for Move, then Right Arrow for 10 seconds. Sure enough, a modal came inching onto the screen where I’d been hooked up to an external 24″ monitor.
This photo is a 90000*40000 image of Downtown Boston. The image consists of 612 separate images taken from the Back Bay’s Prudential Tower Skywalk using a digital SLR with a 300mm lens.
We did the 8 hour drive to Virginia from Boston over Thanksgiving. I did most of the driving, and Elana most of the navigating. As always, we used MapPoint 2004 with a RoyalTek Saphire USB GPS velcro’d to the dash.
Occasionally I did some navigating, and that’s when I realized how different our styles are. Elana views the screen the whole time and is good about announcing upcoming turns. I, alternately, leverage the EVDO connection to surf away. This leaves me behind the curve of upcoming turns.
To relax and surf, I need alerting of upcoming turns via visuals/voice synthesis. The Add-On Advanced GPS looks good for this, and it’s a good deal at only $10. The new (to me) MapPoint 2006 also has the navigation features built in:
New Advanced GPS Features - The new GPS task pane takes information about your current location as determined from your connected, compatible GPS device and displays your current location and the speed at which you are traveling.
Voice and Text Directions for Windows XP Users - New Driving Guidance takes your location from a connected GPS device and combines it with a route you have created to give you voice-prompted driving directions.
The day after Thanksgiving we went geocaching with E’s geo-virgin cousins. Geocaching approaches satire with the arm-busting Z60M.
We went to James Bond movie the other night. It was packed and people actually cheered for the trailers. When Sly Stallone showed up in Rocky 6, up to his old Philly tricks, it was met with disbelief, derision and nostalgia. From behind us I heard:
“Rocky was my parents first date — that was 30 years ago!”
