s3e21: That Is Interesting, Isn’t It?
by danhon
0.0 Station Ident
But now I have succeeded – ha – to the extent that my work is self-directed and people ask me to do things and we haven’t necessarily negotiated hard deadlines other than “it would be great if you did this” and I’m not surrounded by a visible web of social obligations. So, there’s two things I’m trying with the to-do lists this time.
1) I can’t put everything in one to-do list. This is because I can sit here and think of everything that is to be done and I get that there are only so many configurations of baryonic matter in this universe but it sure *feels* like my to-do list could at least conceptually be infinite so it’s really hard to see getting *a thing done* as progress against the inevitable heat death of the universe.
2) I fall into the trap of being biased toward Unimportant Urgent Things (hey, what’s happening *right now* on Twitter and how can I be funny about it) and Unimportant Non-Urgent Things (an idea for a tumblr that I have that I haven’t done anything about). When things come to a head I am confronted with the Important Urgent Things (and have learned how to use the Urgent pressure productively, but now appear to be asymptotically approaching some sort of Maximum Urgency Maximum Anxiety mode which, let’s agree for the sake of argument, is probably not conducive to my long-term health), and *even worse* I find the Important Non-Urgent Things (like, say, getting life insurance – which, finally, I have done! – or things like Eating Healthily and Exercising for Future Dan) *really* hard to do. So, I’m trying to organize the things I do across the four axes shown in the Procrastinator’s Matrix[0].
3) I also have three new lists! “This Month” which is essentially all the shit that needs to get this month, or even after that because really who can think more than a week in advance, “This Week” which is a slightly shorter list of stuff that I’m mildly anxious about, and “Today” which is a holy-shit-I’d-better-get-this-done-today list.
0.1 Station Ident, Redux
1.0 Customer Support, How May I Help You?
Which made me realise: there’s that bit in The Martian (sorry, spoilers) where Watney happens upon a piece of old hardware on Mars and, of course, there’s an exact duplicate of that old hardware at the Jet Propulsion Lab and the team uses it to figure out how to talk to Watney. One day, I hope “hexadecimals!” will become this generation’s “A unix system!”
Anyway: I’m now at the point where I’m seriously considering having an exact copy of familial computing environments just so that I can adequately perform troubleshooting when required. It’s almost like (well, it *is* like) a sort of forensic archaeology where you can’t have access to the original environment so you set up a duplicate and try to recreate everything that’s being done remotely on your own system. So: next time I’m at the parents, I’m severely tempted to at the very least dump a virtual image of the Windows laptop so I have a parental-computing-unit-in-a-box.
2.0 Things That Are Infrastructure Now
The answer, of course, is no, they are not boring. But there was an argument made (and I desperately wish I could remember who had pointed this out, but it’s super hard to cite at 30,000 feet and I realise this is totally a first-world problem where you’d love to cite someone but you’re impatient because the SKY WIRELESS INTERNET is too slow) that landing rockets is infrastructure now. To which I responded that I’d love to see a page on wikipedia entitled List Of Things That Are Infrastructure Now. Here’s some of my nominations:
* landing rockets
* landing rockets on drone ships
* looking for planets (more on this below)
and I bet you lot can think of a lot more.
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Anyway. Hello. How are you? I’m just going to send this episode that’s been stuck in my drafts folder and unblock. I have a bunch of super interesting stuff to talk about next episode. Have a good weekend!
Best,
Dan