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It’s well established that my mind inhabits one of the most unreliable brains on the planet. That same brain doubles down on fallibility under the influence of narcotics. So, after my ACL surgery Thursday, (I know; I’m sick of hearing about it too!) I needed a way to remember to do some important things like taking medicine and keeping blood flowing to my calf and feet to guard against blood clots. Here’s what I ended up with

OmniFocus

For the pill reminders, I set up a project in OmniFocus. It has two actions—”Take ibuprofen” and “Take antibiotic”—that are “Due again” in 8 hours and 6 hours respectively. When the alert goes off that the task is due, I take the pill(s), slide the alert, check off the task(s), and totally ignore this until the next time it makes a sound. This way, I can focus on things like sleep and consuming narcotics.

Timer

Unfortunately, tasks in OmniFocus can only be rescheduled in some number of hours, so I needed another approach for remembering to flex my ankles. “20 reps every 20 minutes” is the rule. So, I set up a custom timer in Timer by my friends at App Cubby. I set this timer with a simple tap. When it goes off, I silence it, do 20 ankle pumps, and then tap it twice to start it again. (Yes, I know there are ways to do this in OmniFocus, but they had drawbacks for things like sleeping.)

This post is probably a lot of “Yah, duh” to many of my friends and the rest are likely wondering, “Is this all about being doped up on Vicodin?” The point is that, even though you’re probably not hopped up on goofballs most days, your brain still needs permission to not think about the things it knows you have to do at some point but not right now. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “I need to call my mom,” or “I’m out of coffee” and holding on to that thought like a mantra you can’t let yourself forget, you’re not doing yourself any favors. Even if you’re not high.

Three Saturdays ago, I tore my right ACL playing ultimate frisbee. The last week or so has been a combination of doctor visits, MRI, and physical therapy in preparation for surgery. But, I needed to figure out a way to get some work done in between rounds of physical therapy once I’m back among the ranks of the conscious. I have a beautiful retina MacBook Pro that I can use on my lap, but I can foresee that getting a bit tiring between heat on my lap and pressure on my leg. So, once I manage to hobble out to the couch, I’m going to be mirroring my MacBook Pro up to my Apple TV. (The display isn’t quite as nice as the retina, but it will suffice for a while.) Married to this I will be using my Bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad, pinned together with a Magic Wand, manufactured by the indomitable 12 South.

How do I know this will be a functional setup? Well, you just finished reading my trial run.

Here are two things anyone that knows me will corroborate. First, I’m a prick, self-centered nearly to the point of narcissism. I don’t care about your situation. Well, I do—I hope things are going well for you. That’s a handsome shirt—but I don’t care when I step into the voting booth. This is about me. Second, I don’t talk about politics.

So, let’s talk about the election.

2008 1

In 2008, I had a Good Job™ doing website development at a prominent retail company headquartered in Fort Worth. I was still in school, finishing up my Computer Information Technology degree at TCU, but had already parlayed my internship into a full-time position. Things were going pretty well. Within a couple years, I could probably have climbed up to some management position making three or four times the salary that anyone in my family has or will ever make and with pretty good benefits.

Then, I went to a conference for independent developers where I met a Russian guy from some company in Canada. He said they were looking to expand their team. It seemed like an opportunity, so I emailed him the next week to see if he was serious. (My current company’s stock had just dipped below $1 per share.) Just a few weeks before a presidential election and with the worst economic collapse of my lifetime beginning, I jumped ship from my first grown up job at a “real company” to do contract work with some company doing—what now? Something with Macs and iPhones? Where’s the office? What do you mean on the Internet? Most people I talked to seemed to think I had conjured the whole thing up in a fugue state that would make John Nash proud.

2012

It’s four years later, and I have been a silent basketcase about how this election would turn out. Romney’s promise to repeal Obamacare, his tax plan, and his stance on education finance would combine to mean that I would have to work harder to keep the status quo. It would mean that my kind and talented wife wouldn’t be able to pursue her dreams in the medical field, which would be a huge loss for the medical community and thousands of patients for whom she’ll provide excellent care. Romney is simply out of touch with people like me.2

Between the interest rate relief that was just renewed in July and will be back up for renewal before the next presidential election, costs of insuring our health, and provisions of the tax code such as mortgage interest deductions, our bottom line stood to take a monthly hit approaching $500. Maybe that’s what Mitt Romney drops on brie and wine at dinner, but for me and my family, it is significant. It’s the difference between renting a small apartment and owning our home. It’s the difference between our dog living and dying every month. For us, it’s the difference between forward and fucked.

The good news in all of this is that—even though I don’t care about your situation half as much as I care about my own—from what I can tell, this applies to a lot of people. If there’s 47% looking for a handout, and 1% trying hard to keep control of most of the wealth, that’s 52% of people in this country who are in my circumstances or similar, and what’s good for me turns out to also be good for them. And what’s good for us turns out to be good for everyone.3

So, I’m happy with the election results. If you’re not—if you think we’re going to be standing in bread lines and should all emigrate to Costa Rica before “they” take away our guns—that doesn’t mean I hate you. We’ll still be friends. Disagreements don’t drive me away from people so easily. For my part, I’m looking forward to four more years of progress for us all, no matter which way you voted.

  1. 2008 was the beginning of a really awful time for a lot of people in this country. I totally get that. It didn’t hit me personally, but who knows what would have happened had I stayed at that Good Job™? I made some really tough decisions at a time of great uncertainty both here and abroad, but I realize that a lot of people didn’t even get to make a choice. They were stuck. I get that, and I don’t want to minimize the tough time that a lot of folks had and are still having. I hope things get better for them. Truly. ↩
  2. If you can’t afford to go to college or start a business, borrow money from your parents. Really? What if your parents are poor—not broke because they overextended themselves buying houses and cars they couldn’t afford, but barely-getting-by-even-though-they-work-their-asses-off-at-two-or-more-jobs poor? Fuck you. ↩
  3. No one tell Paul Ryan, but Ayn Rand would concur. What’s truly best for the individual’s long-term self-interest is ultimately best for the self-interest of all. ↩

“That sucked,” I said to myself as I walked out of the auditorium. For the first time in over nine years, I played in a symphony band, and I haven’t played tuba seriously in almost thirteen years. And I’ve never played a CC tuba with five valves. All my previous experience is with BB♭ tubas with three or four valves. Rusty doesn’t quite cover it. I’m out of my element and in over my head.

A lot of the people in that group are way better than I am. I’m scared I won’t be good enough, that I won’t learn the music fast enough, or that my fingers won’t be dexterous enough to make some of the precise changes. But this is a more interesting fear than being afraid of trying in the first place. And it’s certainly more interesting than comfortably watching American Idol.

So, today, I practiced. I wrote fingerings in under the notes I couldn’t readily recognize. I marked where I’d breathe and the D♭s I kept missing. I played the opening eight bars of this damned Sousa march over and over. I counted out complicated rhythms while beating my hand against my leg to keep time.

I did all of this because it is something I can do today. And rehearsal is Monday whether I’m ready or not. And that’s terrifying.

Yesterday’s Back to Work covered obsessions, compulsions, and the accompanying anxiety of that feedback loop.

One of the best things I did recently was install this yellow ball in our garage. I was obsessive about and compulsively checked my parking after getting out of the car: did I clear the garage door; is there enough room on the passenger side; is it too close to the front of the garage or can I walk to the door?

Now, however, I pull into the garage and a little yellow ball drops from the ceiling. I drive forward (and slightly left) until the yellow ball touches the windshield right in front of my face. Then, I get out of the car and walk into my house. I literally never have to think about the position of the car relative to the rest of the garage ever again.

My wife expressed some doubts about whether it was needed or if I was installing it to subtly help her poor parking. No, this is about me and my own maladies of making sure I don’t dent the trunk lid or slice my leg open on the front license plate when I squeeze by or thwack the driver side in the process of taking a bicycle down off the wall or leave no room on the passenger side for my wife to get into the car without backing out of the garage first.

And my life is a mite saner thanks to that little foam ball.

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I’ve been participating in a Glassboard board about productivity where Eugene asked about keeping on top of calendar events. Here’s the lengthy answer Glassboard wouldn’t let me post:

This sounds like the same thing I have been through. Even though I use THE HELL out of my calendar, I get caught up in things I’m working on and then space out on the fact that I’m supposed to leave to do $THING. A good example of this is lunch time. My wife and I have lunch together most every day. But for the longest time, I would space out while working and forget to find a stopping place and leave on time. Then I would be frazzled when she reminded me over IM or SMS and I had to scramble to get there on time. This meant I was not in the best mental state when I got to lunch to fully enjoy her company. Terrible…

The first thing is to get really good at knowing how long things take. Now, I have two alarms for lunch. The first goes off 25 minutes before lunch time. When it does, I know I have 10 minutes to find a stopping place. The second one goes off 10 minutes later and that’s when I actually pack up my stuff and head to the car. This takes about 5 minutes and then it takes about 10 minutes for me to drive to lunch.

Why am I beating that scenario to death? Because it took me MONTHS to figure it out!! I’m a complete disaster. But the only way I got better at this was by paying attention and being more honest and less optimistic about how fast I can do something. “Hey, idiot, it takes you more than 10 minutes to get from sitting in a chair with your laptop open to lunch with your wife. Stop lying to yourself!” “You have never fixed any bug past a typo in less than 30 minutes!”

What does that mean to you? First, be honest with yourself about how much time you need to make those appointments happen in a sane way. Travel time between appointments. (Not just driving time. How long from sitting here to sitting there. Does it take you four minutes to get from your car to your cube? Longer? Budget the time in.) Time to gather your thoughts before and after appointments. By all means, don’t schedule meetings with no cushion between them, back-to-back phone calls, etc.

But don’t stop there. The other side of this coin is that you have to know and be honest about how long tasks take. If you finish something and look up at your clock, don’t think to yourself, “Oh, I have ten minutes. I can totally [fix that bug, reply to that email from my boss, return that phone call, google that question I had, whatever]!” Someone smart recently said that, really, assume anything you need to do will take an hour from first movement to completion. “That’s ridiculous! I’m just going to the grocery store real quick.” Oh yah? Time yourself and argue with the clock. If you find project work and client calls or ad hoc meetings are usurping your time, the time to recognize that is when someone says, “Hey, do you have a minute?” Or when the phone rings. If you answer the phone in a small interstitial chunk between appointments, don’t be surprised that you get wrapped up in that conversation and flaunt the tyranny of the calendar. Let it go to voicemail or tell the person to come back later or ask the question over email so you can give it quality time and consideration. And as I’ve heard Merlin say more than once: Not in a dick way. Let clients know that you can’t provide the highest service on an interrupt-driven basis. And be honest with yourself that you can’t do your best project work when your brain is somewhere worrying about what appointment you’re about to space and you can’t do any meaningful project work in between those calendar appointments. If you think half an hour you squeeze out between appointments to work on a project that’s ostensibly important to you is a good strategy, you’re totally fooling yourself.

If it sounds like I’m mad, it’s because I’m mad more at me than anything. I am a total dipshit about this kind of stuff. These are the lessons I have had to learn through much trial and error, so hopefully I can shed some light on things if you’re in a boat even remotely similar to mine, and it sounds to me like you are.

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A while ago, something I can’t pinpoint happened where I abruptly stopped using an RSS reader. I actually started going back to the sites manually throughout the day to see what was new. Mostly, I think this has to do with just not to launch yet another app.

Lately, though, I’ve found myself following feeds I like in a different but very useful way—via Twitter. I made a list and have added the feeds I follow there. The majority of the sites I used to have in my RSS reader have Twitter accounts as well, and since I use Twitter regularly (via the awesome Tweetbot), this fits into my workflow quite easily. This won’t work for everyone including those that read a very high volume of feeds and can’t afford to miss an article, but for me, it’s been an effective, guilt-free way to pop in, see what’s going on, and pop out all on my own terms.

This also has the bonus effect of being a up-to-date repository of feeds I read so that when people ask me about the sites I like, I can just point them to this link. It’s not exhaustive because unfortunately, not all the sites I like have dedicated Twitter accounts, but it’s a pretty good start and I know that if I check this list a couple times per day, I’m up to speed on things and can go about my day.

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When we moved to our new house, I needed to buy a new HD TV antenna. My previous approach wouldn’t work without drilling a new hole through the stone exterior of our new abode, so I began looking for an indoor option. Finally, I settled on the Leaf. There are two options: powered and basic. I purchased the powered version based on the combined reviews of both models.

The box arrived in our mailbox and seemed unimpressive. The box was ridiculously light and the body of the antenna is a thin, laminated sheet a touch larger than a standard 8 1/2” x 11” piece of paper. I began wondering what the return policy was. Undeterred, I screwed the Leaf coaxial cable into the TiVo and taped the unit to the wall. I scanned the airwaves for available channels and to my surprise, about thirty-seven were found.

Your mileage may vary. My setup consists of a Series 3 TiVo with a Western Digital 1TB DVR expander. According to antennaweb.org, our house in Benbrook is in a zone with all channels in blue zone or closer except for one.

I figured most of these would be unwatchable, but in my testing, I was able to view each channel clearly for several moments as I flipped. Most of these channels are things I don’t watch regularly such as hispanic and religious channels, but FOX, ABC, CBS, TXA-21, PBS, and CW, are all fully functional and so far reliable. NBC is flaky, but it was flaky with our previous antenna too. I will likely need to experiment with some alternate positioning.

Experiment with the wall positioning. Initially, I thought I’d put it as high on the wall as possible, but the sweet spot turned out to be about a third of the way from the top of the wall. You might want a helper to check the signal as you move the antenna around. Then, use something like these 3M command cable hooks to secure the cable. The cable needs to point straight down from the antenna body. The best I can ascertain is that the coaxial cable is actually a part of the antenna much like the iPhone 4 and 4S body serves as part of its antenna.

To my surprise, the Leaf from Mohu is a great HD antenna. It’s not as robust as the Terk we used previously, but it works great and prevented my having to drill a new hole in the exterior. The Leaf is a pleasantly surprising feat of engineering, and if you’re looking to cut the cord from cable or satellite, you should definitely give it a try.