Monthly Archives: January 2019

7 Hard Problems, Deep Work

Work and Study, Week of Jan. 6, 2019

Happy New Year!

Resuming work this week on 7 Hard Problems. I’m continuing with the partial vomitouts. Maybe even call them “extended outlines”. The point is to get some words on the page, maybe even words that could be used in the final of the chapter. With liberal partial credit.

This week the antinomy is “Local vs. Global”. The Master Anecdote for this chapter is a straightforward one: climate change. And digging into it will get us started with most of the issues of concern for “local vs. global”, including a trend I call “Global Balkanization” which is a reaction to globalization — hardly an unmixed blessing for ordinary people — taking the form of “Balkanization” everywhere. My tribe. My ethnicity. Me.

(I identified this trend maybe 5 years ago, and obviously, sadly, it’s playing out in Trump, in Brexit, in Brazil, in China. I wish it weren’t so.)

Developer stuff, Lifehacking

Hack of the Week: Rebooting Your Router, 3 Ways

An article this week in How To Geek on “10 Annoying Problems You Can Solve with Smarthome Devices” has this to say about resetting your router:


You can spend a lot of time troubleshooting a router. But you probably should just reboot the thing. This is, amazingly to this day, still a valid solution that is most likely going to solve the problem.

They go on to suggest two ways to do so: the eas(ier) way and the hard(er) way:

https://www.howtogeek.com/367785/use-a-smart-plug-to-power-cycle-your-router-without-getting-off-the-couch/

https://www.howtogeek.com/206620/how-to-automatically-reboot-your-router-the-geeky-way/

And for the ultimate in geekery, you can build your own router-resetting circuit from Hackaday.

Happy hacking!

7 Hard Problems

Summary of The Work this Week

The novelty of this week’s vomitout brought some challenges with it.

“Pleasure vs. Duty” is a relatively new addition to the 7 problems (replacing an earlier Problem that was too closely related to existing ones). Because it was new, my ideas about how to pursue it were even more sketchy than in previous vomitouts.

I had some vivid personal entanglements (I guess you would call them) with Pleasure vs. Duty.

For example, I still rehash the part of the Disney movie of Pinocchio where Pinocchio, along with some real boys, turns into a donkey. (It’s a consequence of not applying himself to his studies, which, of course, turns a boy into “nothing but” a little donkey.)

And other fairy tales: the Ant and the Grasshopper. The Ice Queen, perhaps.

And these fairy tales, as I worked on the draft, suggested other “re-casts” of the antinomy: Freud’s “Pleasure Principle” vs. “Reality Principle”. “Passion vs. Necessity”. “Self vs. Other.” “Work-Life Balance”. All of them cousins of “Pleasure vs. Duty.”

I went with the flow of these various cuts at “Pleasure vs. Duty”, teasing out various nuances in each one.

Finally, at the end of the Deep Work “week” (yesterday) I realized that Aristotle (and Kant and Hume, among others) had had a lot to say about Pleasure and Duty and the Good Life. I resolved to dig into these sources some.

So:

  1. There’s a deep agenda for this section
  2. Lot of work still to do

As I’ve done with previous sections, I’m batching the work into projects to do downstream, and I’ll be proceeding with the vomitout — “Local vs. Global” next — this coming week.

Welcome your comments, as always.

Personal Information Management

Pimcraft: New Year’s Resolutions

First off, let me say that I’ve taken New Year’s resolutions seriously for as long as I’ve taken Personal Information Management seriously, which is getting on forty years.

People have two peculiar reasons for dissing New Years’ resolutions:

  1. They’re “arbitrary” (meaning, I guess, that New Year’s Day is an arbitrary time to make a resolution, or perhaps that the annual cycle is an arbitrary time scale for goal-setting). Well, I agree that they’re arbitrary, but so what? If you tell me you want to make resolutions on the Summer Solstice, or on the closing day of every calendar quarter, I’m not going to tell you that you must do them on New Year’s day.  That said, there is an argument for doing them at a relative down time (New Year’s Day is a holiday without an event, if, like me, you don’t watch Bowl games).  Said down time closely follows a time of great excess (Thanksgiving through Xmas).  So maybe it’s a good time to reflect in tranquility and set aspirations.
  2. People break them, so they’re useless. Well, Eisenhower said that “plans are useless, planning is priceless”.  I think the thought applies here.

So, OK, let’s stipulate that we want to make New Year’s resolutions. How many? What kind?

I’ve gone from “Make a small number and be sincere about them” to the other extreme: “Make a few for each major life area” (like Health, Work, Fun, Love). I’ve found that I didn’t gain very much by keeping the number small (in particular, it didn’t make them any more likely to succeed :-)) and that I gained a lot by being comprehensive, by having a goal for most of the important things I want to do during the year. 7 Hard Problems book? Goal 1: finish a draft. Goal 2: build up the core of a community. Body? Goal 1: Hit 185 pounds. Goal 2: Hit 15% body fat. Goal 3: try a team sport or group fitness class.

I don’t generally share my goals much. I’m a little ashamed of how much they matter to me, and I basically want to keep them private. Baring the details of my work on 7 Hard Problems is about as much transparency as I can manage. I have zero desire to discuss my goals on family or feelings or fun.