Category: Blather

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Blather Software and Programming

Remarc about Marc

I found a page with photos taken at the August Linux event, and while looking for pics of hot Linux chix I found that my old gaming aquaintance, Marc Volovic, played some role in a previous event of this sort. Apparently, he opened this earlier event with a greeting in Anglo-Saxon, which suits his MO.

Intrigued, I googled him up and found his big contribution to Levantine civilization compiled into the "Marc A. Volovic complete flame fortune file collection" (also available with a web-friendly face on an Iranian chap’s web-site). Also, it looks like he’s been working lately at a small consulting start-up called Ximpo, together with a guy I used to work with (well, in the same company as) called Dotan Shavit.

Categories
Blather

Advanced Procrastination Techniques

Ijon’s post on how bursts of creative enthusiasm come up to distract him from the task at hand tied in with amazing synchronicity to this item that turned up in my feed reader, about the technique of Structured Procrastination. That article actually outlines a cunning strategy where, by cleverly structuring your task list, you can actually benefit from the natural tendency to avoid doing the urgent, important task by doing something (allegedly) less important. Oddly enough, I’ve actually done things like that, even at work. However, the synchronicity doesn’t stop here, because here’s a link describing the important idea of Yak Shaving, which is much more typical of how I actually go about my work:

You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.

Categories
Blather Oddities

Derek and Clive are still alive

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, AKA Derek and Clive:

‘Are you going to go out laughing?’ asks Dudley Moore during the sessions for Derek & Clive Come Again. ‘No,’ replies Peter Cook. ‘I’m going to go out shitting myself with fear and fucking cancer that God so kindly provided. Without that, we wouldn’t have a way to die would we? Fucking good of him not to torment us with being eternally young and being able to fuck everyone – no, he gave us this great gift of fucking cancer. I wouldn’t have thought of that if I’d been creating a universe, would you? Bung in cancer? No, I’d have left that out.’

Eighteen years later, Peter Cook did go out shitting himself with fear. According to an apocryphal event in Harry Thompson’s 1997 biography, Cook’s friend Rainbow George looked into the comic genius’ eyes and told him, as his system haemorrhaged beyond recognition, that he was going to be OK and make a full recovery. Cook paused for one beat, and simply said ‘Fuck’.

(via DPH.)

Categories
Blather

how to be creative

Gapingvoid: how to be creative (link via Warren Ellis’ link log or something). Bah. Note point 3, Put the hours in — as opposed to reading crap on the web and posting it to your blog…

Categories
Blather

Alan Moore and fucking Tarzan

Warren Ellis riffing on RFIDs, mobile phones and a singularity:

The Near Field Communication system that’ll allow you to get this stuff out of RFID tags is near-term, like within the next eight years. By 2012, in other words. We’re talking about the construction of the noosphere and literal, technological psychometry available to anyone with what will be a basic-level mobile phone. And by then, the only people without a basic mobile phone will be Alan Moore and fucking Tarzan.

What about… ?