Skiing …

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I’ve been busy the past few weeks either by preparing, doing, or recovering from the ski trips I went on the past two weekends. The first one was to Wisp, down in Deep Creek Maryland. But why did I go down south to ski? Well, I got an offer last minute from a friend (Karen) … and who can turn down a ski trip? We lucked out and the conditions were great. About 6 inches of fresh snow on arrival, and it snowed the entire weekend. Karen and I actually managed to make it through the weekend without killing each other (but that all fell through a few days after the trip). The only problem with the Wisp trip was my total utter failure doing 360s (which I’ve just started to get the hang of this year). Oh boy those mishaps (aka complete crash landings) left a mark — but fortunately all bones still intact. And how can I not mention the hot tub snow angels? Good times.

I came back late Monday night (in fact catching the last red line T home) to try and rush together things for v-day. Fortunately, I had at least planned a bit ahead and gotten reservations the week prior, but there were plenty of other little things to get done (clean!). Reservations were at 9:00pm at Flora in Arlington but that’s the best I could scrape up — I didn’t know how crazy the city gets on Valentines, next time I’ll know that you have to plan that wayyy ahead of time. The dinner was a bit more elegant than I’m used to, but still good. Overall, I think it went well and I even got some homemade cookies. Thanks Cindy :)

This past weekend I was in Killington with the fam. Its funny to say that the conditions in Maryland were better than Vermont (I’ve yet to have good conditions skiing in NE). At least Killington has pretty good snow making so the mornings were ok, but in the afternoon the slopes were practically solid ice. It wasn’t horrible though, and we managed to still have a good time and do all the typical family bonding (aka ragging on each other constantly). I was a bit more reserved this trip, especially after I bruised my other hip falling off a box when boarding. I told myself that was all the extreme I needed for the trip… but I couldn’t prevent myself the next day on my ski boards. I managed to stay away from the rails and any special trips and stuck to seeing how far I could fly through the air. That one gigantic jump at the bottom of bear mountain was just too tempting :). I managed to get the courage to go off of it twice and I actually cleared the table top on the second try. I wish I could have gotten a picture of that, I must have been 10-15 feet in the air and cleared 15-20 feet on the ground. Now that’s a thrill.

So now I’m again recovering. Soccer was painful last week, but tonight… owch. I definitely was diving much less on my left side than I should have. And we ended with a tie… I so shouldn’t have let a couple of those goals in :(. Hopefully I won’t still have black and blue hips next week. So worth it though!

Update…

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Its been a while, so to the point

What’s new and good…

  • Getting back into soccer with a new indoor team
  • Plans to go on ski trips the next two weekends
  • Gaining more responsibility at work
  • Spending time with a nice girl ;)

What’s new and not so good…

  • Realizing those ski trips are planned right before and after Valentine’s Day
  • Doing the work of someone much more experienced and smarter than you
  • Not being able to help a friend in difficult times

What’s mostly indifferent but good to unnecessarily complain about…

  • Having six or more goals scored on you
  • Still forgetting to setup eye/dentist appointments
  • Being winter and not snowing so much
  • Paying town car tax

What’s good to take away from the complaining… (maybe)

  • Always room for improvement (or room to blame on others :) )
  • It’s good to be frugal (or… umm.. lazy?)
  • Not driving my car into a ditch this year
  • Being fortunate enough to not have to worry about money (spoiled?)

What’s the moral of the story?

  • Work is interesting and rewarding (and not going on as much past normal hours)
  • I’m getting to know more people and spending more time in the city
  • It’s difficult to find anything serious to complain about
  • … Life is good :)

Art.. and a bit of software

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Art is “the documentation of a thousand interesting decisions”.

Signs of Art from Rands in Repose… you’ll have to read this (at least the beginning) to get context of what I’m talking about… or you could miss these small letters and get confused… your choice


Now I don’t agree that this is the precise definition of art (fortunately I gave up thinking there was any such thing as a precise definition of anything a while back), but I do like its approach. And I think it brings up some notions of Art that don’t come with all those dusty textbook definitions from my Art theory class. I’ve certainly heard things about capturing/substance and difficulty/size/complexity but decisions — that is a new vantage point.

I like the notion of the decision making of/on/about Artwork because if you have ever been in the process of seriously trying to create — it seems like its all you are doing. Creating a mark of such shape, texture or bracketing your shot to attempt to get the exact exposure you want or decrescendoing till the note falls from your lips or designing your software abstraction in such an elegant and comprehensive fashion (well to start at least. we all know that abstractions are leaky and spherical).

The problem with decisions is that the term feels so rigid. Even the most non-organic of us still don’t think in black and white despite the fact our minds make us think that we do. You could never take a piece of Artwork and create a flow-chart from it. If you could, well… you are super-anal or its no where near a piece of art (moving to lowercase due to laziness). The decisions you make — while very intensive — are more often subtle (sometimes unknowingly subtle) or spontaneous and intuitive. Calculated decision making certainly takes place in artwork. “I like that wash, but I need to balance it.” … “How can I support the weight of that?” …”I need to use higher-speed film/this rated flash for this light.” … But, if you are you trying to create solely formulaicly* you will have a very difficult time (psst.. your subconscious is actually smarter than you think, let it have a bit more control every once and a while).

Does this mean that software is too black and white to be artistic? No way! I’ve already talked closely to this topic a bit before when I compared software to literature (word or sxw). In fact I think software is extremely artistic. Writing software is like having to elegantly dance a story around various constraints (hardware, language, requirements, OS, dependencies…). Sometimes you have to tip-toe, sometimes leap, but it all must be smoothly interconnected and yet still be recognized as part of a whole.

Where I disagree with Rand(s?) is his critical eye of modern art. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of it either (most of the time), but it does have its place in the art world. One part of art is the progression of itself. Post Moderns built off the Moderns built off the Abstractionists built off the Cubists built off the Impressionists built off the Romantics… I really am no art buff (believe me, I just looked at Wikipedia to make sure that what I just said isn’t too glaringly wrong), but I feel that part of the point of modern art is that it is so different that you have a difficult time placing it as art. Artists need to explore, need to push the boundaries, and also need to cross the line. If there wasn’t anyone saying something isn’t art, then how can it be art?

I help rationalize this because I do not think that there is anything that completely un-artful (yes double negatives can sometimes make more sense then their counterpart). So art to me is more of a spectrum to me than a classification. And more so, things can be more artistic to some than others. This has to be true since so much of the importance is the experience you have with the work. A piece can only be boring if everyone had the same response! Then all you would have to do is read a review to tell you what that response is.

Whew.. why don’t you go forth and break some new boundies then?

* probably not a word, but I like it nonetheless

The little things…

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I’ve come to realize that in user interfaces (whether digital or physical) its often the subtleties that make most of the difference. The best of these are details which you use without realizing or without prior knowledge. Simple examples are right clicking on an object to see what you can “do” with it or using page up/down in some application (like a photo app) without taking the time to think “I wonder if page up will move to the previous picture” — it’s when you try something and then realize (afterward) that you did it by native reflex, without thought at all.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with getting excited about stumbling on seamlessly intuitive UI features. You are prone to get frustrated when those things “that should just work” don’t work. :)

Today’s example of that is clicking a link while visiting a web page. Its not every time you click a link, but those times when you realize “oh crap, I didn’t want to click on that… now I have to rush really quickly to try and hit the stop button before the next page loads (and man is that stop button small)”. What I tried today is clicking on the link again after realizing I didn’t want to go to that page. I think my mind tried this since there are many hide/open ui patterns in many of the new AJAX websites. My mind must have jumped and tried out that same pattern in this (different) situation, but alas — it doesn’t work.

So this is where I say “Why not?”

And now this is the point where I realize my intention of just mentioning a tiny ui feature is blown out of proportion by me doing all of this extraneous explanation.

So yea, its a small thing but at least I think it would be useful.

So while I’m on this topic another small ui gesture I’d love to have is feed readers (news aggregators/whatever name is in vogue now) that display the length of a post alongside the title. Maybe it’s a number of paragraphs, maybe it’s a small icon to represent the long posts, maybe it’s some representative color gradient. All it has to do is give me some blurry impression whether the post is “more longish” or “more shortish”. That could makes broswing/flipping though feeds much, much easier. If its a feed that I’m only semi interested in then I can just skip over the long ones. (I guess I’m the kind of person that feels guilty stopping reading something halfway through). Ever since my feed reader has gone out of control (I spent much of today trying to work on this) I’ve had to start breezing though all the “possibly less interesting” entries instead of reading everything (in addition to dropping the blogs I just never got around to).

The reason I’m making such a deal about these simple touches is that I really do think they make quite a large difference when amortized over the long term. (oh yea, and also if enough people hear about it and become interested they might get the motivation to write feature requests for me) :)

Oh.. just one more thing. Will rememberthemilk please show the number of tasks along/inside each tab? Pretty please?

Honest and caring politician?

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This opinion editorial from the Miami Herald may be exaggerating a bit, but still if he (Robert Steinback) even only had a small chance of being right we should be worried. I’ll again say that I’m no longer proud to be an American (that reaction wasn’t caused by this article, I’ve held that opinion for some time).

Now I shouldn’t be too negative since America can and still does great things, but I think we could do so much more. Maybe it would be best for us to stop telling the world what they need and to start helping it genuinely (aka, honest care and support… even asking how to help). Is it too much to hope for a honest and caring politician?

Forwarded to me by Steve