November 2006 Archives

Just a test of the category.

This comic illustrates my idea of practice very well.

Don't worry about all the things you can't control. Peel the potatoes.

I ran into a little bit of a problem profiling a XSL transformation in oXygen today. Any errors at all in the transformation will cause the profiling to return no value. So, just as a note, make sure your transform doesn't return any errors, not even errors related to being unable to open files using the document function.

Its been a strange week. I've written very little, and I blame it on the audio book I'm listening to. I can't write while listening to a gripping book, it takes the same part of my brain.

No exercising at all this week either.

At the same time, I've worked very hard yet feel I haven't accomplished much.

You've probably had weeks just like this, where at one point you lift your head and say, "where'd the time go? I wanted to do 'this' and 'that' but I didn't get anything done."

It really is amazing how easy it is to let our intentions slip away, to fall back into "just getting by" or "I don't have time for that".

There's a great book called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (GTD). It's a guide to getting your life organized. One of the most powerful ideas in it can be paraphrased like this - when something comes into your mind that you want to do, if you can do it now, do it, otherwise put in on your list, get it out of your mind, and finish what you are doing.

The problem with implementing that is two-fold: managing the list and letting the thought go.

I'll leave managing the list for another discussion, but I want to write about letting the thought go.

We have become a nation of multi-taskers. Drinking coffee while listening to the radio while driving our cars is the norm. We're afraid to miss anything or to waste time. We've trained ourselves to do several things at once. So, naturally, when we are doing just one thing, we get bored. That's when we get into trouble. Our brains, when they are bored, start roaming through the detritus of thoughts and memories in our heads. We find something, and we grab on to it. This can be a really good thing. Our unconscious mind often comes up with things that our conscious mind doesn't. It only becomes a problem when we grab onto something. We begin to worry at it, living in our mind rather than the moment. GTD depends on you letting the thought go and helps you do that by telling you to get it out of your head and on to you list. Zen's a little different. It tells you to just let it go.

It's interesting how the two are connected. They both have a goal of getting you to focus on the moment, but with very different ends in mind.

In the article Republican Committee Agrees To Stop Some Campaign Calls, a New Hampshire TV station details how the Republican national committee is being a nuscience by using automated calling to people on the "Do Not Call List". The people of New Hampshire think it's illegal, but the RCC said, "It's a complicated legal question that's not going to get adjudicated this weekend". In other words, "We don't care if it's legal because we can get away with it this weekend, which is all that matters".

This shouldn't be surprising, it's the same thing that Karl Rove has been doing for years.

One of the things I'm finally learning is to laugh at myself, and I'm doing it in an odd way - I'm laughing at the memories of myself first.

We all have memories that are painful to us - the time you embarrassed yourself in front of friends, the time you were made fun of by a group of strangers, the time you did something stupid with a (potential) girlfriend. Throughout my life I've treated those like a sore tooth, occasional touching on them and feeling pain. Now, though I still dredge these thoughts up (today's was how I acted like I thought a cool person acted the first time I smoked pot), I laugh at them rather than making myself feel miserable.

Its a powerful change for me.

Berkeley, in the fall, is really a lovely place. Today was the first rainy day of our long wet season. Days like today, though, are enjoyable. The rain, while steady, is never really hard, and it is quite warm.

Some of the trees have golden leaves, some green, and a few bare of any leaves at all. The lawn is the darkest green it has been all year, but it probably won't need to be mowed again until next spring.

I do miss the flowers, and the sun, but the smell of the rain and the sound it makes on my roof, as I listen to it late at night from my warm bed, are adequate trade offs.

When I think about where I am and where I come from I have to admit I'm an American success story. But I'm here to tell you, it doesn't feel that way. I don't mean to say I'm not successful, I am; I mean I don't feel like there's an interesting story to my life.

My father worked in the mines. Dramatic, isn't it? But he didn't dig up coal or do anything that required him to be out in the pit - he fixed electric motors. Everything from huge pumps that kept the water out of the pit to the tiniest motor on an engineer's electronic eraser. He always wanted more for himself, though, and he was determined hid kids would have more.

My brother and I grew up knowing that our parents made sacrifices for us. They moved away from my father's family in Illinois because they didn't want us growing up there. We knew that. Ma stayed at home, rather than working, as she had before we we're born, because they believed we needed her. We knew that. Our Dad would trade shifts and work crazy hours to see a a 10 year old play in a basketball game or swim a few laps in a pool. We didn't know how hard these sacrifices were for our parents, but we knew they made them.

And so it seemed, and seems, normal to me, and I believe my brother as well, normal, not expected, but normal, to be successful.

People, including my boss, talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. My parents aren't giants, but without them I could never have been as happy or as successful. I don't stand on their shoulders, but I got to where I am because they held me up, because they showed me how to focus on what is important and accept the consequences of doing the right thing.

Twenty-five years ago my father was on strike and we were living off food stamps, the fish we caught, and the vegetables from our garden. Now I live in a half-million dollar home in Berkeley. A lot of it was luck, but my parents taught me how to work hard and take advantage of that luck.

And that's why it doesn't seem interesting to me. I didn't do anything special except work hard and do the best I could with what life gave me. If a few things were different, I might still be washing dishes or waiting tables, I might even be living on the street. If a few things went a different way, I might be a CEO of some multi-billion dollar dot com.

What does seem special is that I am happy. I'm not happy because I have a beautiful house and a great job, I'm happy because I accept what I have, both the good and the bad. That's what makes me a success story. I've learned how to be happy.

Goals are a funny thing. We often make goals, like New Year's resolutions, in an attempt to change something in our lives, something we perceive as wrong about us. Then, we use the results of the actions we take to accomplish the goal as a prop up our ego ("I lost 10 pounds! Aren't I great?") Or a cudgel for our insecurities ("I only lost 10 pounds! What's wrong with me?"). Both cause suffering, to yourself or to others.

It's not just the results, either. We often take every step of the whole process and turn it into a mechanism to cause suffering.

• I've never had to lose 10 pounds before, why am I so fat now?
• I feel great! Why doesn't everyone try to lose weight?
• I've only lost 3 pounds so far!
• I've already lost three pounds.
• I don't want to talk about my diet.
• Let me tell you about my diet.
• etc.

I'm not trying to say setting goals is a bad thing. This missive is a result of one of my goals. What I'm trying to say is get your ego out of your goals. Plan them and execute on them. Assume you are going to accomplish them, but don't judge yourself, positively or negatively, based on your actions related to the goal.

Goals can always be positive, if we can keep our ego out of them.