Yay for random input!
Sometimes when you hang out on IRC channels and read prolifically, you get exposed to lots of random things you probably would not run into otherwise.
Archive for October, 2008
And now, good interruptions:
My cell phone goes off 3 times day at semi-random times to ask me what I’m doing. If I’m just being efficient, I need to immediately stop and do something else.
I should explain a bit. Because I hyperfocus, it’s easy for me to get locked into doing something completely useless with extraordinary efficiency. It takes a long time for me to realize I should be doing Something Else in order to be more effective – rather than efficient – where “effective” is defined as “moving me towards making the kind of impact on other people that I want to have.” Because really, if I’m efficient and I’m lonely, then I might as well just be a robot.
This isn’t as much of an interruption as it might sound. Since I keep my phone in my pocket on vibrate, all it does is buzz in my pocket, so if I’m in the middle of something I get that quick awareness check and just keep going without even pulling out my phone. (Plus benefit: people calling in the middle of a useful work sprint now actually serve to focus, rather than distract, me – I just check after I am done to see whether it was a reminder or an actual missed call.)
Am I doing something really really really well? Am I just sprinting aimlessly to fill in time by feeling busy? Or am I doing something that I really, really should be doing?
More powerful than caffeine
Andy P is far more powerful than caffeine when it comes to engrossing me to work on things way past my exhaustion point without realizing it. I think I have a similar effect on him; our conversation several nights ago progressed from standing to various states of leaning (later,collapsing) on/across furniture.
It ended with us lying on the carpet, heads propped up so we could still face each other with a minimum of muscular expenditure, still talking a mile a minute and intermittently cranking our eyelids open to feebly some to-do reminder on the whiteboard. When I started having trouble understanding Andy because I couldn’t read him when I closed my burning eyes, we realized that this was getting ridiculous and reluctantly proceeded to pass out.
i’ve learned that I can’t stop myself from running myself down – I can stop big burnouts, but not tiny ones, and I can clear the area of flammable materials and do reasonably controlled burns – ones allowed to “go wild” because they are contained in some way. It’s like setting off big firecrackers safely; there’s always the danger risk, but you can do it in a smart way that will be spectacular, have boundaries, and not hurt people.
The trick is keeping them contained. I’m learning that.
I need to go to sleep.
Healthy communities
While reading snips from an O’Reilly chapter on community-building, I was reminded strongly of some conversations I’ve had recently with current Olin students about Olin.Friday’s car-ride talk with Henry is also swimming in my brain; that was about the practice and process of delineating different groups of people, and what this harmed and helped in terms of how your resulting mental construct of the world could then be used. (In other words, Henry gently poked holes in some of my own mental constructs. There are so many different modes of thought that I don’t know – ohboyohboy, more stuff to learn!)
Anyway. Passages of relevance!
You’ll know you have a healthy community when users comment publicly that “this is the best site I’ve ever used,” “I came here because of the goal, but stay around because of the people I’ve met,” amd “No other place on the Internet is like this.” Happy users tend to talk in terms eminiscent of Manifest Destiny and settlers in a little-p paradise. It occurs in almost every healthy, somewhat-social community. Strongly-technical communities, like software development mailing lists, tend not to exhibit this behavior.
A healthy community also develops a sense of history and in-jokes. The phrases “Thanks, applied” and “Rule one” mean something very specific to Perl 5 porters. Everything 2 afficionados understand the intrinsic humor of “Soy.” Highly-ranked and respected Perl Monks regularly cite precedents when controversial topics reoccur.
Not making any particular point or asking any particular questions by posting this up – just curious to see what reactions, if any, it gets.