Tips 4 Gettin Up @ The Buttcrack of Dawn
Those of us with variable sleep schedules may need some extra props and supports in order to get that damn werm. The following techniques have worked for me to greater and lesser degrees. (Of course we in no way guarantee the following to be fail-safe, and assert that you must indemnify and hold us harmless, implement at own risk, yada yada):
- Advanced Snooze Calculus: Set your clock's actual time forward some weird odd number (such as 17 or 23 minutes), and set your alarm for some non-complimentary weird odd number (i.e., 6:11), so that the mental perambulations and/or mathematics required to figure out whether or not you can hit the snooze button again are too difficult to perform in half-awake state.
- Snooze Button Inaccessibility: Under all circumstances, the snooze button MUST BE OUT OF IMMEDIATE REACH. And i don't mean just a foot or so out of reach. That shitz gotta be clear across the room.
- Alarm Annoyance Level: It almost goes without saying, but your alarm must be so offending (in volume and quality) as to wake the neighbors. The understated advantage of this is that people banging on your door and/or screaming 'get the fuck up' at your apartment window often operate as a secondary bonus alarm which i have found to be quite effective.
- Buddy System: I have found that sleepover visitors, especially if not warned about the alarm annoyance factors, to be of invaluable assistance. This will vary, however, with the level of alarm clock immunity said guests have themselves. You must make sure the snooze button is inaccessible to everyone in the bed.
Old School Linkloggin
*Sigh* For the first time in my experience, de.licio.us, the 'social bookmarks manager' is 'temporarily unavailable'. As a result, the links below will not be socially managed:
- Guardian UK: Marine life being suffocated (or 'dead zones the size of whales').
- BBC: People called Romanes, they go the house.
- NYTimes: Krugman, This Isn't America. Tangentially, I have decided that i would lick Richard Clarke's feet hez so frikkin great. Seriously. He can blow my whistle anytime.
- Wired: CA approves rice crops genetically modified to produce pharmaceuticals. Downside - Soon there will be only three or four food items you can safely eat. Upside - itz not soylent green yet.
- Wired: Drugs - the anti-drugs
- Y! News: Punctuation police are gonna get me.
- Special 2 da RRPF: ok, you got me freekin on the peeek awl thang tooo.
Reflections on "Final Report" Type Deliverables
- If the section is longer than 2 pages it is not an "Executive Summary" section
- By VERSION 13 (!!) i kinda expect more coherence and some polish.
- For instance, page numbers are important, as well as that little "confidential and proprietary" blurb i am so insistent upon.
- Styles are indispensible, but very dangerous unless you know what you're doing...
- In exemplum - if there are more than thirty different styles, and if "Normal" is no longer used in the document, well then, you're redlining it.
- Tables should be formatted consistently across the entire document. They should not look like they were harvested from the dead bodies of other documents.
- Hell, formatting in general should be consistent across the entire document.
- Please, understand and use Section Breaks. Especially if you switch from Portrait to Landscape no less than six times over the course of 76 pages.
- Rather than the body of the report, the Appendix is a GREAT place for raw data.
- I wanted all of this done by yesterday.
Whatz In A Name
NYC's MTA (Magical Transportation Authority)
It truly is the most magical transit system in the world, i believe. I have gathered evidence.
For instance, itz mind-blowing amazing to know that you CAN get from St. Marks (aka 8th street) and 1st avenue to 75th street and 1st inside of 20 minutes on the M15 Limited (i.e., express bus). I know because I have done it a few times. Dude - thatz a LOT of blocks.
Ah, but itz a fickle sort of magick that can go either way - witness today: the M15 Limited i boarded on 8th this morning, which mysteriously turned into a M15 Local somewhere around 23rd street without announcement nor apology. Turning a 20 min trip into a 40 minute trip.
Abrafrikkincadabra.
Hard of Hearing
So i guess i am lucky in that i can arrange my schedule and appointments to catch the Sept 11 Hearings in real time (u can cspan urself if youre not so lucky). And despite the sometimes satisfying elements (the calling out of prima dona condi rice, and the various lite skewerings of rumsfelds noxious ideological flippancy), i have to admit the whole thing is tending to towards anti-climactic for me.
*Sigh*, I don't know what I expected. I guess I've been watching too much of the UK House of Commons where they actually froth and spit, all the while couching cogent political slights in eloquent rhetoric.
Suffice it to say - no 'justice' is going to be coming out of this... even if the commission had such authority, itz certainly lacking the time, money and teeth.
And to think this will create any 'lessons learned' for the future is flat out idealistic. All I am learning is that the notion of administrative 'accountability' has irrevocably decayed in our government. It's little more than a shell game played out in sound bites and carefully obsfucated statements.
Annual List Of Things I Will Do Differently Next Tax Season
My receipts will be recorded fortnightly and filed in an orderly fashion, under the appropriate month in an accordian file. I formally admit that my current practice of carrying them around in my purse or knapsack for weeks, until they are nice compact wads of paper, and then stuffing them into that one drawer on the desk (or the giant vase by the door) is much more work in the long run.
Also, I WILL get a shredder, finally. I am so psycho about identity theft that i often store up snail spam for months at a time. Itz over my dead body that anything with my full name, addy and/or account numbers getz outa this casa intact. Sure, some snail spam is satisfying to tear up by hand with focused precision. But honestly, I just can't keep up with it, anymore. It seems the volume of snail spam has mysteriously spiked since I signed up with some political grass roots efforts.
Coincidence?!? You decide.
Sunday Skeet Fun
Get Your Vernal Equinox On
Ah, the season of fecundity and fertility is nearly upon us. Soon, even the trees will be having sex. In fact, by the state of my sinuses, i suspect that giant willow across the street is already starting to juice up.
But itz a beautiful semi-spring morning here in alphabet city. Time to open the windows a bit, and perform the annual top2bottom scrub and swab of the loft. I am going to start with Ajax (w/ bleach) on the housetrashing fairy infestation, although i understand that removal of housetrashing fairies can be a long and involved process. For every one you see, there are possibly 10z of 1000z more lurking where you can't see em.
I read that the best way to get rid of them is to remove from the domicile those elements that attract them. I hope, however, to find a way to lose them without cutting off the cable tv and wifi.
Recent Convo with my Mom
At least, I come by it honestly.
Pwylla: "I must have been an annoying child."
Momz: "What do you mean?"
Pwylla: "Well, you know... how, like, when i was nine. I was convinced the world was gonna end. I couldn't even sleep at night. I was always freaked out, going on about catastrophic earthquakes swallowing california, the oceans rising and drowning texas. And then the volcanoes. All exploding simultaneously (cuz, you know - once that caldera at Yellowstone goes, itz ON), then the impending ice age... "
Momz: "Well, all that still could happen."
Home, Dirty Cluttered Home
Well, I've tested the hypothesis, and can say that at least in my casa, housecleaning fairies don't seem to exist. In fact, i think this place is more messy than when i left it last week. For instance - there were several items of bedding on one of the futons that I am certain weren't there before. And a bag of chips that don't belong to me lay empty on the kitchen table.
So, i can't say for sure yet, but i think i may actually have a colony of houseTRASHING fairies. This would actually explain a lot.
Gonna have to set out some traps for those little suckers.
Adios, Tejas
Well, itz been a good trip. Particularly compared to the last two.
I have some issues descendent from a unnaturally close correlation between Time & Place, and my own Identity. I once excused it as my prerogative as a philosopher and/or poet, as philosophers and poets are notoriously affected by things like the Being, Context and the ineffable qualities of generally material elements... like the weather, and stuff.
However, since neither the philosophy nor the poetry thing ever took off for me (and therez no money in them anyway), lo, these last couple years I have been trying to find that excluded middle - some functional override where every single moment of life doesn't have to have a deep metaphysical semantic... or at least, a place where i don't have to pay attention to it so much.
I have been, for the most part, successful in crafting this veneer of metaphysical disinterest. Still, tho, i wouldn't be me w/o some sort of short ruminatory heat check:
- I am no longer scared of the future.
- I am, however, for the first time in my life i think, very wary of the past.
- I still love who i am in Austin.
- But she's not all i can be.
- My experience of Time, Place and Everything in between proves what I postulated long ago:
- My carefully chosen friends, family and lovers never try to hold me back.
- Nor I them. People gotta do what they gotta do.
- And itz just too frikkin cool how we all tend to meet up anyway.
Intimacy of Place
Sure, you've changed some. We both have. But I can still feel each of the old neighborhoods, and hear the echoes of my lives past. There's pain, bittersweet, to be sure - seeing a Starbucks where Riverwoods used to be. And they'll never know - those yuppiefied condominiums next door - such love and life as my friends and i have had in that same spot. At least they left that beautiful, old tree alone (the one that stood in the middle of the driveway down the hill)...
And it's true, too, that when i cruise by my old haunts in hyde park, they look weathered. More dingy - or maybe smaller - than memory serves. And therez the inevitable semantic dislocations - new words like "SoCo" stick in my throat, and itz always hard to see 6th street gussied up like a ho waiting for the yanqui SouthBySoWhat dolla.
None of that matters, though. Itz only the surface. Below that - you and i know - therez layers and layers of more. Alternately dug up from underneath, or dragged down by pressing weight, over fifteen years of myself, my friends, things we've done, people we've been and known - a multitude of constituent elements beyond casual apprehension.
"Home is not a place," she said that night at the kitchen table nearly nineteen years ago. "Home is people who love you - and home is the time when those people are around you."
And, Austin, in this way, you remain still my home, although I am head over heels for NYC. I find I am always still so proud to claim a history with you, and these amazing people i love.
Yes...
I am having too much fun to blog. Too much fun to catch up on work, as well. What?!? Vacations aren't for catching up on work?!? Silly me.
Regardless, it's actually probably a good thing i don't live in Austin anymore. Sooner or later, jail bail is involved.
Thesmophoria
Work papers, laptop and dirty clothes - packed. Car to airport - reserved. Docs to read and edit during plane flight: more MBs than battery life.
Am leaving the apt in the same sorry state it was in a couple weeks ago, when the work binge started. Will see if it exhibits any aspects of self-organization while I'm on the road.
Hey - c'mon, now, it could happen. After all - you really can't discount the possible existence of housecleaning fairies without at least testing the hypothesis once or twice. It's science, baby.
Sisyphus, Meet Rock
Conclusion: "Getting ahead" on three simultaneous multi-client projects actually means "just keeping up with" them. If that.
And, WTF!?! Was i high on crack when i told client #3 that they'd have the high level design sometime this week!?! Just when did i think i'd be doing that? During the four hours i slept last Sunday night? Damn the bravado of that 6 espresso shot latte.
Thank god client #1 is in love with me, and doesn't have time to review that mongo report this week anyway (altho, it truly is a beautiful thing).
As for client #2 (whose poor content kept me up all last night, and will do so again tonight) - itz unavoidable that we are going to deliver at least three days later than I scheduled. Oddly, they aren't freakt yet. We'll see.
Whatever - Atowne, i am SO ready for you, baby. Itz been a frikkin year, you kno! I just hope all those socali poseurs haven't turned you into a valet parkin hofest... But i'll rescue you, sweetie. I know you're missing my old school hometown WEIRD. And i got a huge dose of my special badassness all saved up for you.
Oh, yeah - i am also bringing all my dirty laundry as i don't have time to send it out between all day meeting tomorrow, errands, more work, yada, yada... but i kno you love me anyways :)
Getting My Werk Phunk On
The work marathon continues. As always during these grueling multi-day extertions, i find that i need various supports to keep my ass at this desk and on task. Today, to the rescue - Webjay: listener-created playlists of music on the web.
The playlists are web hosted, work with your standard media players, and therez a decent amount of variety and eclecticism up there already.
Currently facilitating my butt-groove: "a g00d p0und1ng" by jim
3X Grindstone
Finally i have a break, and a chance for a few hrs sleep. I haven't had a 36+ hr day in a while, but as per my last post, this one was unavoidable. And I expect there may be one or two more before my escape to the SW next week.
In this last, very long day, I have managed to:
- Make quite a bit of headway on some key phat deliverables due early next week
- Facilitate a heavy strategy session, and confirm bus dev opportunity
- Remember to pay AT&T (if only b/c they threaghtened to disc the cellie just an hour before a bi-coastal status call, but hey, point of need and all that)
- Bully an overdue document from a subject matter expert (ok, if you kno me, you kno i didn't bully... i cajoled, i noodged, i psychophanted, i pleaded, and then gently remarked that if we couldn't get it by this morning the development pipeline for that project and three unrelated ones would slip by about three days, requiring me to document and escalate* the issue to his superiors on the client side...)
And I have to send a shout-out to my pusher, the man who saved my ass at 9 am this morning:
Uber Cool Barista (UCB): What'll it be?Let me just say this about Higher Grounds - they are serious with the espresso - they create and roast their very own delicious blend. Chocolately, full-bodied, smooth and HIGH OCTANE. Plus, they always make those cute little leafy design things in the milk.
Pwylla: Well I've been up all night. And I need to be up all day.
UCB: Ahhh-ha!
Pwylla: What do you suggest?
UCB: Well, the "Redeye" is good because it has both coffee and a couple shots of espresso, so it's about 4 cups of coffee at once.
Pwylla: Yeah.. well... my tolerance is pretty high at this point, tho. I think i need something more.
UCB: Heh. ALLriiight! The 'large' latte has 5 shots espresso. Would you like to make it 6?
Pwylla: Now you're talking.
UCB: Tall or short cup?
Pwylla: Tall. I need to nurse this sucker over for the next few hours to make it through the afternoon.
And maybe a 6-espresso-shot latte can make anyone a little bit giddy, but this morning after that first sip, i just wanted to jump over the counter and hug the UCB...
Ok, to bed now.
*fyi: i have found the phrase 'document and escalate' to be quite effective at returning results in a variety of circumstances.
Late Nite Management Consulting Freak Out #167
Sudden realization that I have never had 3 hefty, concurrent projects before. One or two transitioning while one or two new ones start up, sure. But never 3 simultaneous full-swing team efforts with three different clients at one fell swoop. All coming at me with their various needs and nitty-gritty confusion.
Whoa. All I can say is - It's gnarly.
Especially as I hope to take a little time off soon and see my hometown fam and friends. Yeouch. Now I find myself planning my nominal week off around status conference calls, broadband access and sign-off dates.
This three project thing - itz a whole new competency i am just developing. And the fluctuating roles I play in each project - it's not just about keeping shit on track: itz soliciting and managing the client's expectations and strategizing next steps, all the while i am knee-deep in methodology and data, deliverables, deadlines and meetings.
Ok. More coffee. I can do this.
Fine Here Under My Rock
Whether it's due to my inherent entertainment malaise, or my impatience with lines and large crowds, I am woefully out of touch with the Academy. I have not yet seen the following films:
- LoTR, RoTK (altho i love the books)
- Pirates of the Caribbean (altho i love Depp)
- Monster (altho i did try to go to this one)
- Lost in Translation (altho i love bill murray, and embarassingly, not necessarily even in a wholesome way)
- House of Sand/Fog (altho i love Ben Kingsley - wholesomely, of course)
- Cold Mountain (ok, i really dont care too much about this one)