7 Hard Problems

Work and Study, Week of January 13, 2019

Lots more to do on “Global vs. Local”. I had a couple of conversations over the weekend with an old friend who was in town for my birthday. He challenged some of my thinking about why globalization is unappealing to “people” whereas it’s pretty interesting for “corporations”. And in particular he wanted me to give a better account of global capitalist companies and what they mean for the future of the nation-state.

But I’m going to stick with moving on to the next vomitout, and catch up on these themes in the future.

The next antinomy is “Technology vs. People”, which is really three things for me:

  1. Techies vs. non-Techies. Not all non-techies are Luddites, but many of them are. What’s going on with the two different groups? This really begins with C.P. Snow’s idea from the 1950’s about “Two Cultures”, but there are a lot of threads to it.
  2. Intelligent Machines vs. Humans. Are we doomed? Are AI scenarios that have us being Terminated really possible? What kind of time frame?
  3. Future of Work in the age of intelligent machines. Are robots going to “replace” us? What does this mean? How might we manage this? What are the possible outcomes?

So I’ll be vomiting out on all these themes this week.

DIY, Lifehacking

Why Is Sharpening a Knife So Hard for Me?

I’m having a really hard time learning how to sharpen our kitchen knives.

As all the videos on YouTube will tell you, this is not rocket science. It’s a matter of patience and consistency and a few elements of attention.

But month after month passes, I keep trying, but I’m unable to get our knives sharp.

I went so far as to send them out once (by mail) to a professional knife sharpener. (I think I got the name from Lifehacker.) The knives came back very sharp.

So:

  1. It can be done
  2. It’s not my knives

Slowly, however, they became un-sharp, and, when they did, I was unable to get them sharp or keep them sharp myself.

I’m embarrassed to say how many different sets of gear I’ve bought to do this. Each of them has a video or two on YouTube showing how easy it is to use this system.

And I use the system, and I can’t get the knives sharp.

Latest iteration, I’m using a Norton Waterstone “Starter Kit” I got on Amazon. Not cheap. I’ve tried to get two knives — my favorite, and my wife’s favorite — sharp.

After two weeks, no luck yet.

I whale away at the coarse grit for a while on one side. No evidence of a burr. Then I whale away at the other side. Ditto. I do the same with the 1000 grit stone. Both sides. Then I try to cut a piece of paper with the knife. It looks like I sort of can. I declare victory. But it’s not really sharp.

I am training myself to see it through, to be more patient, to keep at it until it works. It’s uphill work.

Personal Information Management

Pimcraft: Whirlwind vs. WIG

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to “not be ashamed of what I like.”

For example, I kind of like country music, although my peeps are mostly alt-rock. I should let the country-music side of me unfold and stop just hoping a country tune will come on the radio. There is no radio anymore in any case…

But as I teed up this Pimcraft blog today I felt shame. Shame that I was such a deep-dish nerd that I care about the distinction between Whirlwind and WIG. Not only that, I even use those names for them.

I first read about Whirlwind and WIG in 4 Disciplines of Execution, by McChesney, Covey, and Huling.

(Ever notice how life uses the same “magic numbers” over and over? 3, 4, 7, 12)

The problem addressed by 4DX is this: even when you know the right thing to do, people have a hell of a time doing it.  The reason is they don’t pay attention to the 4 disciplines.

I’m not going to recap the whole book — it’s a good book, you might want to check it out — but discipline #1 has to do with distinguishing between “the Whirlwind”, which is the chaos of ordinary life in all its bewildering plethora of things to do, and the New Thing.

You have to respect the Whirlwind. After all, it pays your bills, educates your children, etc. etc. But unless you respect the New Thing as well, it’s never going to happen.

You do that by setting one special goal, a Wildly Important Goal or WIG. A WIG is a goal, but it’s also a formulation of the New Thing. Without the right WIG, the New Thing probably won’t happen either.

I decided that I wanted to put the distinction between Whirlwind and WIG right into the heart of my Weekly Review.

GTD-heads will know that this is like introducing a new section into the weekly church service. It doesn’t happen very often.

And what I did was split up the work into two days. I used to do everything for my Weekly Review on Saturday. Now I put the Whirlwind part — the “normal” analysis of the normal stuff for the week — on Saturday and then Sunday morning, after 24 hours living with the new weekly goals, I create a WIG for the week.

As I slog through the 7 Hard Problems draft my WIG has generally had something to do with the book. This current week the WIG is vomit out the chapter on “Local vs. Global”. And while I’m in the midst of the 7Hard push — the WIG for the year is essentially to finish draft 1 of the book — the weekly (and monthly) WIGs will probably devolve from that. But not necessarily.

In any case, the distinction is interesting. 4DX is a good read if you need more detail.

And let me know what you think.

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.

Cabinet of Curiosities, Cybersecurity

Cabinet of Curiosities: Ars Technica on the Russian Infowar Against the U.S. Elections

I really read every article I look at from Ars Technica.

If you don’t read them, you should.

That said, I don’t read them as much as I should. Compared to the daily drivel I sometimes take in — CNN’s daily blast, for goodness’ sake! TechCrunch! — Ars Technica is technically meaty and deep. It’s substantive.

So when Ars Technica published a long account of how the Russians hacked the American elections in 2016, I read it with interest.

You should, too.

My favorite bit was the patient way the GRU teams worked on spear-phishing attacks until they nailed Podesta’s account. They were then able to operate without interference behind the DNC’s various firewalls for some time, although the DNC’s IT staff — who had originally poo-pooed two-factor authentication (which could possibly have averted some of the phishing attacks) — eventually caught on to them and shut the compromised servers down.

In any case, not the proudest hour for our country.

7 Hard Problems

Themes for Work and Study, Week of December 30, 2018

OK, it was a nice holiday, and I had a great time writing some code (and solving some coding problems).

Time to get back in the saddle, back to work on 7 Hard Problems.

The basic idea for January is to vomitout the remaining “core” chapters of 7Hard. I’ll be kicking that off this week with “Pleasure vs. Duty”, which should be fun (no pun intended).

(With each of the chapters so far, doing the vomitout has raised a bunch of good points and questions and readings for further study. I’ve been complaining about the boatloads of new work churned up, but I’m basically pleased: the process is working basically the way I had hoped.)

“Pleasure vs. Duty” is a relatively new add-on to the list of seven problems, so I’m going to be scrambling for material, even core texts. Any suggestions are welcome.

So be it.

Developer stuff, Personal Information Management, Programming

Summing Up the Week’s Work

There was lots of family and friends this past week, and comparatively little Deep Work, but the few(er) hours paid off: I was able to solve the “depth of project/depth of task” design problem that had been vexing me, and the MLO parser now emits properly formatted (well, formatted with printf(); a few more details outstanding, but the gist is there :-)) project and task records.

Next week: Generating actual stuff that could be input into Todoist.

Benefit from my 35 years of tech industry experience