Author: Reality Laughs

It’s early—before dawn. My mind has been working for a while, even before wakening. Dreams of work. Those dreams of logic and process that don’t quite make sense but almost make sense so I obsessively return to the start and replay the sequence to make it work better and it doesn’t so I return to the start . . . .

All while telling myself, in dream state, that I will remember this when I wake up and it’s all extremely valuable. Which of course it’s not. It’s just a fever dream without the fever.

I get these dreams when I have work pressure. This one is about a current project.

So my mind is cranking and I awaken and there is no going back to sleep.

A bite to eat, early. Let it settle for a couple of hours, then run.

See how the rest of the day turns out. I have Plans.

I am quietly streaming Scriabin’s complete piano sonatas while I’m working on my laptop. Me and PDFs and Keynote and Word and my head full of decades of technical stuff. And Scriabin.

From nowhere a passage muscled itself from background to fully occupying my consciousness. Stopped me dead cold. I could do nothing but listen. It brought to mind Evie’s funeral, and Hal’s anguish. And then, the music released its grip and allowed me to return to work.

Music can make me weep. Misere does it. So does Ebben? Ne andrò lontana.

And that ancient opera recording (1910s? 1920s?) that I have sought for decades now. Heard in the car, on KUSC and played by Jim Svejda I would guess. A Sunday night. I remember that. A soprano, an old, tinny, scratchy recording, all of the musicians long dead of course. I often wonder who or what I heard that night.

But a few minutes of piano that can command front and center of my consciousness at its will? That’s a first.

Find a purpose outside yourself.

You, alone and tumbling through empty space and darkness, are not enough.

Scale. Understand scale. Understand who you are. What everything else is.

Now find something bigger than yourself. And go.

This is from an important (to me) blog post. It introduces a useful way of thinking about my activities and approach to life, work, and everything.

How can we call a function that doesn’t exist? Well, it’s an exercise in imagination. As we’re writing main, we can ask ourselves “What kind of function would we like to call here?” What name would make sense for it? Would it need to take any arguments? If so, what? Would it return any results? How many? What type? And so on.

In fact, this is a good way to design such a function—and, by extension, the whole public API of our package: by using it.

There’s a Zen saying that applies here:

If you want to climb a mountain, begin at the top.

In other words, if we want to design a package, we should begin by pretending it already exists, and writing as code that uses it to solve our problem. When this code looks clear, simple, and readable, we probably have a nice design. The hard part is over: all we need to do now is actually implement that design.

Write packages, not programs

Apply this to today’s planned activities, and what do you get? The development of three universal introductory modules that will work until the underlying premises on which these ideas are built are altered. (I am constantly watching to see what Darth Vader does).

Packages vs programs. The illustration that crystallizes the idea is:

The biggest shift in our thinking, then, is from solving our very specific and parochial problem, to solving a general class of problems that includes ours. For example, instead of writing code to calculate the square root of 2, we write a package that calculates any square root, and then we apply it to the number 2.

Write packages, not programs

Slept. That is good. Now the standard morning routine, this time punctuated with a couple of extra bananas.

Today. Let us build the secret business.

And the visible one? You haven’t put the time block into the calendar and respected it. That’s one reason it is stagnant.

Yes. So today is a focus day. The product. The “thinking about your thinking” applied to the secret and the visible businesses.

Funny. Focus time. I keep blowing that aside. Back to the beginning it is. A familiar cycle: productive actions, mentalities fall by the wayside and . . . why have things gone to shit?

Today I learned a new word and gained a new perspective on How Things Really Work.

The only way forward is to stop singing threnodies for a vanished political order, and start thinking strategically about how to survive in the one that replaced it.

https://unherd.com/2023/03/what-posie-parker-learnt-from-brexit/

Threnody:

A threnody is a wailing ode, song, hymn or poem of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person.

The author’s insights into How Things Work are new to me. They make a sense of chaos that I observe. (I am sure there are other ways of making sense of chaos).

Every politician needs brownshirts, but at a plausibly deniable distance.

Up early after going to bed late. Went to bed late because too much caffeine too late in the day. Memo to self: no need to replicate that experiment.

Long day today. Zooms bracket the workday, then go run.

And so it goes.

What do I want? Not what I have. The fuckity-fuck problem exists and I’m pissed off still. Convo next week is required.

The plan is:

1. Access to software gained.
2. Items printed.
3. System, using paper, assembled.
4. System, using paper, demonstrated to self by self and documented.
5. Consider how to supplement the system for later-acquired documents.
6. System, using virtual paper, demonstrated and documented.
7. Meeting. System presented. Nonnegotiable conditions.
8. Follow-up for development.
9. Follow-up for performance.

Consider joint venturing with someone. John or Dan. or brainstorming with them. Ask David if this is too hard core.

Do I have my eye off the ball?

No forward action apparently.

The inertia is staggeringly hard to overcome. It’s impossible for people to see why their efforts are even bad.

How to think. How to define. How to commit. These are hard skills to acquire and wield.

Start somewhere. Do one thing. Do it well. Repeat.

Define crisp. Model it. I have a vision that is clearly different, but I don’t articulate it well. I will have to talk to David about this. “What would you do if you wanted to be utterly thorough?”

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

And again I wake up and write.

I have a draft of what I want to publish on Friday. The draft is a mess. How do I get from mess to done? See, these little daily exercises build momentum but I need effortless production.

What to do?

• One or two points to make. What are they? What do I want my reader to know how to do?
• Bullet point outline. H1 and H2.
• Fat outline. Simple statement under each heading.
• Move existing text.
• Polish the prose.

I’m inspired by the guy who I’m listening to on the podcast who said now he can blow out his videos in one take, whereas when he started it took 4 hours.

It’s been surprisingly hard to find competent email newsletter software. Mailchimp is shit to use for writing and formatting, but the alternatives have their own problems.

Well the day started with the “Welcome to Hollywood” refrain in my head. There is a song from the 1970s with that title and the lyrics tell the same story of Hollywood then that is Hollywood today. Yet the hopeful keep coming.

I only mention that because the mind throws up random memories and that was one of them.

Today let’s do what needs to be done. It’s another recovery day so take it easy on the exercise front.

For work, let’s see. Things are moving. (1) Sublease: the wheels are in motion. (2) The Big Decision? I don’t know still. I know what I want to do but I don’t have a Plan B for what would happen next.

I think getting more insistent on checklists. The trouble ticket analogy is the way to think about it. I’m going to try those systems.