The Cat Piano

Nick Cave doing beat poetry with some well-drawn furry noir animation. What's not to love?

http://laughingsquid.com/the-cat-piano-narrated-by-nick-cave/

Nick Cave could make anything cool but this is pretty awesome. Hat tip to paradox_puree

Focus

Earlier today a friend made an LJ post about struggling with staying focused when working and this being a part of why they were working on the weekend today.

I confess that I have this problem too. Every day I go to work with the sincere intent to get a lot of stuff done, yet frequently I find myself daydreaming about other things I'd like to be doing. The real problem though is that I'm also a fairly honest person and I like the place where I work so instead of going "Woot! YouTube!", I feel rather rotten about my time-wasting and so I work extra hours and on weekends and stuff to catch up for all my slacking during work hours.

The real problem with this is it causes a feedback loop. I don't get as much time to work on my personal projects because I'm paying back the time I slacked at work and that makes me daydream more about my personal projects when I'm at work. It's a vicious cycle.

I've got a short list of stuff at my desk at work for things to help me stay focused and sometimes they work, but all of them are connected to being diligent in their use and they're pretty simple things.

• Break things into small manageable chunks and make a list of them so you can see you've got a lot to do and have a plan for doing them.
• Take regular breaks, take a short walk and actively daydream or do something else.
• Reward yourself for completed tasks
• If you find you're distracted, make note of what distracted you and how long it distracted you for. Keep a private list (a list of shame, effectively)
• If you have multiple tasks and you find you're distracted, switch tasks for a bit. Instead of coding, debug a module of what you just coded or write documentation or look at e-mail from within my group and see if anything needs my attention.

Stuff like that. They're all pretty basic means of staying focused, but like I said, they are not entirely effective. As it happened, I was working on work-related stuff (for the reasons above) and had let myself divert to read LJ. Said friend is a bit on the competitive side (and so am I, though I tend not to think of myself that way) and for whatever reason, an idea popped into my head.

I am most focused when I'm under pressure. Racing to meet a deadline or because I'm staying late at work and want desperately to go home and work on my personal projects. That ticking timer keeps me focused. Work hours in a way work exactly the opposite. There's X amount of time to fill and it's independent of what I'm working on. it's also a large block of time (8hrs) instead of an immediacy or a 'there's a meeting in 30 minutes and I need to give a status report) It's just too big a block to keep me focused.

So... I took the bit I was working on and estimated the time I need to complete that task, grabbed the egg timer, set it, and began a race against the clock.

My initial guess was off. I'd guessed 30 minutes. When the buzzer sounded, I was about 10 minutes from being done. Good game. I reset the buzzer for 15 minutes and beat the clock on the second pass.

I ran through a couple more short tasks that way and that timer counting down catching the corner of my eye REALLY seemed to do the trick. I think on the whole it let me cut about 3hrs of 'work' to about 1.5hrs of pure work and now I can move on to personal projects. I'm definitely going to continue this experiment and see if it continues to be effective.

Once I was done with work, I looked up a more portable solution for myself. I guessed there'd be at least one Dashboard Widget that fit the bill. I found three different ones and played with them. The one that best suited my use case is this one: http://www.baldgeeks.com/3-2-1.htm

Dunno if this will work for anyone else, but it seemed effective enough that I'd mention it.

Taking Woodstock

I kept Stacey up too late Friday night to get her out of bed in the morning to go oyster hunting Saturday morning. So instead, we went to see a matinee showing of Taking Woodstock It was playing in Palo Alto and we timed it such that after the show was over, it'd be just a short jaunt up to the woods to do the hiking we'd planned to do that morning.

The film has gotten mixed reviews, but most of the negative reviews have come from either A) People who were throwing a tantrum about the main character being gay or B) People who were throwing a fit because it was a movie about Woodstock that had none of the nostalgic music from Woodstock that they desired.

On the topic of the first part. DEAL WITH IT! Look. I know a bunch of our current right-whingers are people who like to blither on about how the Boomers were the GREATEST GENERATION EVAH and they want to take pride in an event that they were no part of and claim the awesomeness of it as their own as a way they can look down on the rest of us... But here's the thing... The movie was based on the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Elliot Tiber. He is gay. He wrote it himself. The guy that gave Woodstock a venue after right-whinge asshats ran them out of two other venues was a GAY JEW. Suck it up!

As for the music... I think I understand the artistic choice to use stuff that wasn't at Woodstock. The event was about the music, yeah, but it was about the music of the moment, not nostalgia. It was also about love and peace and all that, not about RIAA profit margins. We all know what Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and the Who sound like. Does everything need to be nostalgia and remix?

Besides, the movie was presented as being about the town and the kid who was managing the venue. He wasn't quite part of 'it' and the townspeople certainly weren't. Finally... How could a 2hr film possibly even hope to pay its due to three days of nonstop music? It's not feasible. You could never present the true sound of Woodstock in that amount of time.

Personally, I'm lucky enough to have a pile of reel-to-reel tapes my dad had and one of them happens to be a few hours of stuff that was recorded live at Woodstock (patched off the sound system, not open mic) and even the ~6hrs of sound I've got really doesn't even start to cover what things must have been like.

So... Now that I've addressed the critics, let me address the film: I really thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was really neat to see a film about Woodstock that wasn't focused on nostalgia and pop culture but instead was showing you the behind-the-scenes. All the people who worked to make it happen and the amount of effort and organization required to pull it off. The sheer scale of the thing is boggling. Burning Man caps at 50,000... That's about 1/10th the estimated 500,000 that were at Woodstock. It must have been totally overwhelming. The logistics of trying to pull off an event of that magnitude are staggering.

Speaking of Burning Man, I think that was part of what interested me most about Taking Woodstock. A lot of the people at Woodstock were proto-Burners. There was much commonality but there were also differences. It was really interesting to see what 40 years of event planning has done. Woodstock was not a Zero-Impact event. The people going to the thing made quite a mess by most counts and left the event sponsors doing a lot of the cleanup. Plus, it was different from Burn in that it was a show. At Burning Man, there are no spectators. You are part of it. I think this happened at Woodstock too, but not as consciously or intentionally as Burning Man. It's a subtle change in philosophy but it's important. Perhaps it was just my timing on seeing the film and my interests and some of my current project goals but I found the film really enjoyable and inspiring.

On only the thinnest tangent of connection, I started teaching myself to play the Beatles song "All you need is love" I'm learning the second-guitar chord parts first because chords are a lot more challenging for me than the first guitar melody. It's the first time I've tried playing guitar since I gashed my thumb with a meat cleaver a month ago and I played my acoustic guitar which as a wider neck than the electric. Happily, I was able to play for about half an hour before it started getting a little achey and I decided I'd best give it a rest. It's going to take a while before my thumb is really back up to full strength (I'm going to be taking it easy for the next two months just to be sure I don't re-injure it) but the outlook so far is promising.

Heh. Stacey isn't a big fan of the Beatles but likes a few of their songs. She skeptically asked if my book had "Paperback Writer" in it and was surprised that it did.... Actually, this book contains EVERY Beatles song (though some of them are in easier keys than they'd normally have been played) Somehow, this ended up in us looking the book up online and... Holy crap, I got a steal! I bought the book on our store credit at the used bookstore for what would have been $12 (but was effectively free due to trade-ins) The book is Beatles Complete Easy Guitar by Hal Leonard publishing. On Amazon stores, the book sells for between $65 and $210 O_O Wow. Glad I got it when I did. Needless to say, the book is out of print and is unlikely to ever be printed again. F***ing greedy music labels grubbing for every penny. *sigh* The current implementation of copyright law makes me so very sad. At the end of Taking Woodstock, Mike mentions that what happens next is probably that everyone sues everyone else as they chase the money. I don't know if this was an anachronism put in by Elliot or prophetic, but it is sad. Greed is so ruinous.