escape to insanity

I was going through an e-mail address of mine that’s been lying abandoned for a while, just out of curiosity to see what’s accumulated since I abandoned it — there are inevitably people who didn’t update their address books.

I found this little chain-mail gem, offering some tips on filling up on gas, and then some uber-useful tips on how to help reduce the high cost per barrel that our wallets are all painfully aware of:

WHERE TO BUY USA GAS, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO KNOW. READ ON.

Gas rationing in the 80’s worked even though we grumbled about it. It might even be good for us! The Saudis are boycotting American goods. We should return the favor.

An interesting thought is to boycott their GAS.

Every time you fill up the car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia. Just buy from gas companies that don’t import their oil from the Saudis.

Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends.

But wait. If we only buy gas from companies that don’t import, eventually… they’ll run out. And guess who they’ll have to buy from?

Conundrum.

Oh, yes, and the Saudis who are pumping oil are the ones who are trying to kill us. Yep. Those oil drillers and the company execs go American-hunting on their days off. They strap on an AK-47 and head off on the nearest Boeing 747 (which they all no doubt own personally — we Americans buy Corollas, those dirty Ay-rabs buy airliners, right?) like we go deer huntin’.

This how-to-boycott-gas thing has been making the rounds for years, and no one has figured out that these stupid schemes don’t work. People are too apathetic (and too busy) to bother with hunting down these mythical gas stations that apparently don’t deal with “those Arabs.”

Grr. I’m just fed up with the excuses used to justify this blatant racism.

Okay, rant over. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

A while ago, I announced my intentions to declutter my life following something resembling the “rules” of the 100 Things Challenge. I haven’t mentioned it since, but I am in fact making progress.

While I’m still not sure if I’ll actually hit the 100-things mark, I’m definitely getting closer. Foregoing the tedious task of first making a list of everything I own (which even I wouldn’t want to see or read), I decided to attack the job by first just going through my apartment as systematically as my apparent OCD will allow, and throwing out anything I know I don’t use. The tough part of that is getting around the “well I might need that at some point.”

A little tip if you’re going to do any decluttering yourself: if you can’t remember the last time you thought to yourself, “gee, I really wish I had that [insert ridiculous object here] right now,” then you don’t need it now. Packrat-ism isn’t healthy.

So while I haven’t made any official lists, there is a sort of list in progress. (Though, it’s stored entirely in my head, which arguably isn’t the greatest storage medium. It’s like trying to store your finest wine in a sieve.) It’s more of a list of stuff I know I need to keep. And no, I’m not posting it here. There’s just no need.

In the meantime, my apartment is starting to look a bit sparse. I’ve never really been much of an interior decorator. I moved my DVD collection from the nice media rack I’d bought last year onto some shelves in a little cubby on the outskirts of my living room, which freed up a giant chunk of empty space on the wall. I have absolutely no idea how to fill that giant hole in so my apartment doesn’t look like a jail cell.

Any creative ideas on apartment decorating? Obviously being a renter keeps me from doing any significant structural modifications — hell, I was taking a risk just painting the place a few months ago (it used to be an awful yellowish color, now it’s more off-white), so knocking holes in the wall is probably out. Help me out here, people.

Last night I went down to Summerfest, perhaps known best for being the world’s largest collection of fat ugly drunk people. Of course, the promoters call it “The World’s Largest Music Festival” but clearly that’s just marketing jive talk to hide the truth. I generally try to avoid Summerfest to the best of my ability, but last night there was an event so monumentally awesome that I was practically compelled to go.

I’m talking of course about The Crystal Method.

These guys are, without a doubt, hands down (as opposed to hands up) my absolute favorite musical group of all time. If you haven’t heard of them, first crawl out from under your rock and then go look them up. They make sweet sweet music. I suppose most people call it “techno” or “electronica” — I call it heaven. This was my first time seeing them, and let me say… it was like a two-hour orgasm for the ears. I’ve heard people talk about being able to “feel” or “see” music, but I’d never actually experienced that until last night.

I actually had the opportunity to see them from the covered “VIP” deck, but the stage acoustics were not meant for that area. They’re meant for the benches in front. So that’s where I was. Standing up on the bleachers, from just about 9:45 to 11:45 when the Summerfest organizers literally shut off the lights and speakers to enforce their curfew. I also discovered that it’s actually quite liberating to not be around anyone you know; I was supposed to meet up with some friends for the show, but they either bailed or we were split up. It’s okay, because it let me focus entirely on the show. …and the two girls making out in the row ahead of me (despite the best efforts of some guy to get them to include him, which they were having none of).

Holy awesome, Batman. On an awesomeness scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most awesome thing you can think of, this show ranked somewhere around, oh, I don’t know, a billion. It’s quite possible that last night was the single greatest night of my entire life. Most of the two-hour set was new stuff as far as I could tell. They did include a few samples of their released stuff — off the top of my head I remember hearing “Busy Child,” “Born Too Slow,” “Trip Like I Do,” “You Know It’s Hard,” “Renegades of Funk” (their remix of the original Rage song); there were also some unexpected samples of songs I hadn’t heard them deal with before — a great mix of “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, and a crazy take on “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees (made even more popular by the great John Travolta).

My ears are still ringing, actually. At 5:30pm the next day. That’s probably not good, but it was TOTALLY worth it. Too bad they’re not coming back anywhere nearby for the foreseeable future, according to their tour schedule.

I was getting hit pretty hard by spam comments for a while (thanks to the excellent Akismet Wordpress plugin, none of it actually made its way past the filters), so I ended up banning the IP address responsible for 99% of it.

Life was good.

And now they’re back. Different IP, but same base range. So, that entire range is now banned from this site. Don’t worry - most people won’t be affected (and by most people I mean the two dozen people that ever read this site). The IP in question is a fairly well known, fairly prolific spam center.

So goodbye, 85.255.117.* — you won’t be missed.

The company I work for is currently undergoing the difficult process of layoffs. Because of the downswing in the economy, and the nature of our primary product, it’s been rough times financially and the decision was made to cut back on the number of employees across the organization. As a result, the last two months have been some sort of surreal adaptation of Office Space in the real world.

The whole process has been a mess. They announced several months ago that they’d be laying off a few hundred people, but then proceeded to do almost nothing for weeks. Any communications were along the lines of “you’re probably pretty safe, but you may not want to decorate your cube much more than it already is.” A little over a week ago, a company-wide e-mail went out, stating that while they don’t have any updates, they’ll tell us more later. Thanks. That’s helpful. Should I dust off my resumé?

What I find most amusing about the whole thing is the ridiculous amount of corporate-speak that gets bandied about. It’s amazing to me just how bizarre some of these people make themselves sound when they come up with these terms and use them, as though no simpler and more straightforward alternatives were available.

This isn’t a period of layoffs, it’s a “workforce reduction program.” We’re reducing the workforce, see? By laying people off. Apparently the word “layoff” must scare people, but “workforce reduction” is perfectly safe. You’re not being laid off, you’re just being reduced – wait, isn’t that worse?

Fortunately, my team isn’t affected by the layoffs, but we may still have to work with those who are “impacted.” You’re not being dropped like a bad habit, you’re just impacted. Cheer up!

My favorite: “rightsizing.” So we’re apparently wrong-sized to begin with? What if we get rid of too many people? Then we’ll be wrong-sized again? Will we have to rightsize again at that point to undo the previous right-sizing, which turned out to be wrong-sizing anyway? I think it would be better if they’d just say it like they mean it: they’re trimming off the dead weight. Sorry, you perform no useful functions for us. Here’s your box, start packing your desk. Maybe you shouldn’t have brought in that extra little bauble to set on your shelf. Only one box for you.

Meh. I’m not even “impacted” by all this, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s just ridiculous to me how badly corporations tend to handle things like layoffs. When your CEO reports several million dollars in income, but then announces that the company is losing money and a few hundred people need to go, that’s not a great way to boost morale.

Knock knock!

Who’s there?

Not you anymore.

Being part of a corporate environment, you quickly find out just how easy it is to get inundated by e-mail. Especially when you work in a role directly involved with your company's website. Those sort of people are the ones more likely to use e-mail as their primary form of communication. At least that's the case on my team.

Some of the people in my department (and in all likelihood elsewhere in the organization as well) are so overwhelmed by the quantity of e-mail they receive on any given day that they're literally days behind on reading their e-mail. (so much for Inbox Zero.) These are the people who you begin to assume will never read your e-mail, or will read it well after it's lost any sort of relevance.

My former boss (who recently resigned to spend more time with her family, and whom we wish well) was one of those people. If you sent her an e-mail and walked down the hall to chat with her about it, it was likely already pushed down past the bottom of her screen by the deluge of other messages she'd received in that 15-second timeframe. She was that busy that any message to her had to be as absolutely concise and short as possible - anything over a sentence or two would never be read in its entirety. She simply didn't have the time for it.

To that end, I've worked from day one on crafting my e-mails (regardless of recipient) under the premise that she would have to read it. I'll type up a message as fully as I think it needs to be, containing all the relevant detail. Then I'll cut it to half its length. That's right, half, if humanly possible. If it still looks like she wouldn't read it, it gets cut in half again. I'll try to stick to five sentences or less if I can.

I've also recently started prefacing my subject lines with shorthand designations. (Sidenote about subjects - for the love of all that is holy, please, make sure that your subject lines are descriptive. You have no idea how many e-mails I get every day that have been forwarded for weeks, where the discussion has changed course three dozen times but the subject line hasn't once changed.)
If I'm asking a question where I specifically need an answer, I'll generally preface the subject line with [ ? ]. If I'm sending something I consider particularly urgent, in addition to marking it “important” within Outlook, I'll preface the subject with [ ! ] (yes, I realize this is redundant, but this gets used more when I have to send a message from our web-based content software, which only allows a subject and a message field.)

Then of course there are the more standard methods like using EOM, and the suggestion of using NRN for “No Response Needed.” The catch is that your recipients need to understand at a glance what these acronyms mean — otherwise they're completely invalidated — but once you get past the learning curve it may be worth it. My question is, are there any other useful e-mail tricks you use or have heard of to make communicating more efficient?

I'm genuinely curious what others are using or have found useful.

I’ve tweaked the code to my del.icio.us bookmarklet a bit, and thought it may be worth sharing if anyone else is interested.

The default bookmarklet is just fine as is, but many of the times I’ve saved a link, I wanted a way to auto-populate the notes field with some text from the source page, and the only way to do that was to copy and paste into the new window. This tweak lets you highlight some text on the page, and once you click the “post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet, that text will be automatically inserted in the “notes” field for del.icio.us.

It’s a very simple tweak, and I know I’m just lazy for needing or wanting it, but hey. Lifehacks are about coming up with solutions to eliminate or automate a task you do repeatedly, and this does that.

Drag this link to your bookmarks folder or toolbar: post to del.icio.us

I just made one of the geekiest purchases of my life. And given the fact that I currently own a shirt that says “geek” on it (and nothing else - just that word), that’s a pretty telling statement.

Anyone that knows me in person, or knows enough about me online to have a pretty good guess at my general interests, knows that I’m a big fan of Battlestar Galactica. I’ve been watching it since the original mini-series event, and been hooked just as long. It’s an amazing show. If you haven’t seen it, DO IT. There’s only four seasons (we’re in the middle of the fourth and final season right now) so you can easily catch up, unlike shows like “Friends” which ran for something like 73 and a half seasons. Or “ER” which is apparently still running, despite no one giving a damn about it.

Anyway… yeah. I was browsing through ThinkGeek and found one of the coolest poster sets ever.

Battlestar Galactica Propaganda Posters:

A rolled set of 5 posters, 22″ by 17″ printed on heavy 100 pound satin-finish paper, each depicting a motivational phrase and inspirational graphic designed specifically to keep humans alive, wipe out toasters, and keeping our Vipers aloft.

Hells yeah.

In the style of WWII-era propaganda photos, and with the clipped octagonal shapes to boot. I can guarantee these posters will be proudly hanging in my apartment for all to see. I am not ashamed of my geekiness.

So say we all.

(Photos will come as soon as I get the posters delivered and hung.)

Update (6/8/2008): the posters arrived in the mail yesterday! They’re currently laying unfurled on my kitchen table, flattened and anchored by a handful of books. Once they flatten out, I’ll start mounting them for display.

Update (6/9/2008): they’re pretty well flattened now. I’ve got some preliminary photos on Flickr:

For some reason or another, my big thing right now is GTD and efficiency/productivity. While I haven't actually read the flagship book yet, it's definitely on my list (there are a few other books in line ahead of that one). In lieu of a physical book, I've busied myself with reading up on all the latest and greatest the vast world wide web has to offer on the subject.

One of the related-slash-included topics I've been following like mad is something called lifehacks - the idea of finding clever and innovative ways to simplify your life. If there were a single guiding principle behind lifehacks, it would be this:

Work smarter, not harder.

(There are some really great resources out there if you're interested in lifehacks - most notably Lifehacker.com, 43 Folders, and Stepcase Lifehack.)

Along the way, I came across something called The 100 Things Challenge. Here's the gist of it, from the source:

I'm going to only keep 100 things. All the rest gets purged. Sold. Given away. Traded ;-) Some how, all the other things will no longer remain in my possession.

Yep. The goal was to streamline his personal possessions to no more than 100 items in order to reduce the amount of clutter and required cleaning. The beauty of this challenge is that there are no rules - you tailor the challenge according to your own need. For instance, basic necessities aren’t included in the purge - the loaf of bread and jug of milk in the fridge don’t need to be thrown out to spare your favorite stuffed animals. For couples, shared items aren't cut, so don’t give away your family car. You don't necessarily even have to make it 100 things. It can just as easily be 500 things, or 38 things. Whatever.

So I’m going to give it a try. I'm going to keep it as simple as possible, and as flexible as possible. I'm going to, over the course of the next two to three months, systematically go through everything I own and decide whether it's worth keeping or should be tossed/recycled/donated. It shouldn’t be that hard - in the course of moving several times over the last several years, I've already streamlined most of it. Excluded from my purge:

• Consumables like food, juice, etc. I'll be cutting back on soda, but that’s not really part of the challenge.
• Basic necessities - cleaning supplies like handsoap, paper towels, toilet paper, etc.
• My computer and its immediate peripherals, power cords, and the like.
• My car. I may want to drive it off a cliff right now, but that's not really going to happen. It stays.
• Existing collections. That means my DVD collection stays intact, as does my CD collection, and the vast amount of LEGO pieces I've managed to accumulate since my childhood.
• Furniture. I don't have much to begin with, so what I have needs to stay.

Pretty much everything else is fair game. One of the other (fairly obvious) rules I'm going to go by is that separate things that act as one will be counted as one - like the DVD player with its power cord and A/V cables; the player isn't much good without the cables, and vice versa.

While I’m going to aim for the 100-thing mark, there’s no guarantee I'm going to hit that, and that’s okay. I haven't even started yet, so I'm not even sure yet how much I own to begin with. I'm going to try to post my progress as I go.

If you're looking to streamline your life and reduce your clutter, you may want to give it a whirl. I'm certainly interested to see how it'll turn out.

I’ve been getting really into del.icio.us lately. If you haven’t heard of del.icio.us, well then… after you’ve extracted yourself from underneath that rock, click that link. Immediately.

The basic premise of del.icio.us is to allow you to save your bookmarks from anywhere in the world. (Well, anywhere with an internet connection. It might be a little on the difficult side to use del.icio.us from the middle of the Gobe or in an Amish village.) But that’s not the end of it - it’s a social community in a way, because you can browse other people’s bookmarks and see what other people are saving.

I recently liberated all my bookmarks from the confines of my Firefox installation using an excellent extension called, cleverly enough, “Delicious Bookmarks.” It let me export all my bookmarks from one to the other and even auto-tag them according to what other people have used.

It’s really quite amazing sometimes what you can find when you connect to other people’s interests. I’ve discovered some great links - anything and everything from recipes to try, to DIY solutions to organization, to various memes, to… whatever. As time goes on, I’d like to get more active on here again, and I think del.icio.us will be providing the fodder for most of my entries.

That is, if anyone’s still reading this.

If you’re already on del.icio.us, please feel free to join my network. If you come across a link you think I’d find interesting, by all means share it. You can suggest links for me by simply tagging them with for:tigerblade and they’ll show up on my feed.

Happy bookmarking!