Gifted Slacker

I’m taking a page from Marty McFly and calling my workload heavy.

I have 16 assignments for this term. Last term I had 7. How’s that for an escalation?

I have about 25,000 words due by the end May 23. 12,000 of which are group work. Include my dissertation (due August 31) and that number grows to about 37,000 words. If you figure that a page is about 350 words, then that’s about 105 pages.

Add in all of the reading, programming, and miscellaneous tasks on top of that and you get a number of man-hours that scares the crap out of me.

Here it comes: I’ve started writing a story. A short one.

The bad bit is that I keep trying to sleep, but as soon as my head hits the pillow another must-write-down idea pops into my head. This stupid brain-storm is keeping me awake.

I’ll post it if it turns out to be none too embarrassing. My self-imposed deadline is next Friday. If it’s decent, it gets posted. Otherwise, I’ll put up a note saying it sucked, was stillborn, or whatever and that I’m trying again.

I read this over at Reg’s blog:

Good God, some of the new young actors say they don’t know whether they wanted to be actors or not! I cannot understand this. To me, it is like saying you can’t make up your mind whether or not you love a certain woman. If you don’t then take a walk.

In acting, as in love, there is no place for indifference.

—Trevor Howard

Programming makes me sick.

When I sit down to program I lose everything that makes me human. All of my being becomes centered around the machine. When it’s time to quit for the day I have to pull myself away, and drag my inner self back to the surface for the next couple hours.

When I’m programming I don’t eat or sleep properly. I barely get enough exercise. I get sad and moody. It’s absolute hell.

Sure, I do get pleasure from programming–I’m good at it–but it doesn’t come close to outweighing the horrible things it does to me.

I need to must find something else to do with my life. Though I have no idea what.

Bryan Caplan says:

I’m so used to being completely against everything that any publicly visible group is for, I don’t even know how to respond. When a teen holding a Ron Paul sign walks past me on the street, what am I supposed to do? Give him a thumbs up? Cheer? Stop him and start arguing about immigration? When my flight attendant asks me what I want to drink, do I say “I sympathize with your button”?

Note: These contentless posts are starting to annoy me. In the future I’ll not be posting unless I actually have something to add to the conversation. If you want to see my links to such things look at my del.icio.us links and my shared items in Google Reader.

K.Thx.Bye.

I sometimes lose track of this sort of distinction:

Code is read much more than it is written. If people can’t read your story, they can’t improve it or fix it. Unreadable code has a real cost. This is the famous technical debt

Further:

Programming languages are for humans, not machines. If you have code that looks like it doesn’t do anything useful, is hard to read, or seems tedious, then introduce an abstraction that will let you remove it.

I guess Death does have more say than an ambulance:

Thanks Marc, that really disturbed and cracked me up all at the same time.

Obvious but worth repeating:

The Slackers back off because somewhere down the line, someone told them they were smart. They realized they could meet the basic requirements with a minimum of effort, and they didn’t really see any reward for exceeding that standard, so they got lazy and let the whole thing slide.

…

In the real game of life, results trump talent every time. The housewife who gets a B is still going to end up better than the slacker genius who blows off the assignment. And after 10 years of slacking off, the genius isn’t really a genius anymore. He’s been surpassed by ordinary people who did the work, paid their dues and turned their brains into something wonderful.

Bryan Caplan writes:

When women see how little housework men do, they interpret it as “shirking” - a willful violation of basic norms of decency. Men, in turn, feel unfairly maligned by the accusation (or, perhaps more often, by the stink eye).

Who is right? Let me just throw away any future career in couples counseling, and say: Usually, men.

The evidence: Look at the typical bachelor’s apartment. Even when a man pays the full cost of cleanliness and receives the full benefit, he doesn’t do much. Why not? Because the typical man doesn’t care very much about cleanliness. When the bachelor gets married, he almost certainly starts doing more housework than he did when he was single. How can you call that shirking?

This is the kind of thing that benefits humankind. Beware the power that economics can have on your daily life!

The UK government is hoping to start issuing a national id card by 2012. The Reg reports that two of the potential suppliers have pulled their bids for “commercial and political” reasons.

There is quite a lot of trepidation in the population about this card in light of the regular data loss by government agencies here. It’s kind of shocking that UK citizens are concerned with these privacy issues, but they welcome CCTV cameras.

The national id card program (or should I say “programme”?) has a lovely adoption strategy:

Documents leaked yesterday reveal the Home Office will target teenagers for early take-up of the cards. Anyone wanting to open a bank account, apply for student funding or buy alcohol or cigarettes will be forced to buy an ID card.

The reality is that privacy is increasingly a thing of the past. For better or worse, whether we want it to or not, it’s going to disappear for all intents and purposes. Fundamental cultural changes are inexorable like that.

Information wants to be free ,and technology is enabling it to be so. That’s a good thing. But it’s also what erodes privacy.