I tend to collect a variety of interesting links throughout the week, at least to me. I always think that I’ll post them and write a little about them but in truth, I don’t have that much time and would rather write about things that are more important to me. So I’m going to just start posting 5 or 6 occasionally just to have them out there.
1. The Coming Hyper Inflation. We’re printing money faster than the ink dries. If you think the Fed can handle toning it down when the chain starts to catch on the cog, you’re more optimistic than I am.
2. Why The Left Derided The Tea Parties. It’s on Reason so you have to wade through some of the hyperbole but it has a core of truth that is worth considering.
3. Writing Software is like. . .Writing I have a lot of thoughts on this topic but they haven’t really congealed into any recognizable mass yet. Suffice it to say, the more I think about writing software, the more I think it’s much closer to art than science.
5. An Introduction To Mindfulness Meditation This is the best intro on the web I’ve seen and the link to A Guided Meditation is a fantastic description of how to begin and end a meditation.
6. Taming Perfectionism I struggle with this a lot, specifically as it concerns writing and developing pet projects at home. Nothing is ever quite good enough. In one of my garden project books, the author was describing how to build an arbor and said “Remember, if you screw up the measurements a little, it’s just a garden project.” I may start applying that to ALL projects.
May 1, 2009 at 7:59 am
I think coding can be art or science. The best coders are artists at what they do.. where the weaker ones are scientists. I actually think my writing style is a lot like my coding style which may not be for the best.
May 1, 2009 at 8:10 am
That’s the direction I’m drifting towards as well. I had a thought the other day that Test Driven Development is a scientific way to make average developers (like me!) into good developers. But TDD will never make you into an artist and the very best developers I’ve known probably couldn’t function using TDD.
May 1, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Most of us lefties, and alot of independents as well, thought the tax revolts were rather pitifully late. Where were they during the Bush Administration when he was running up the tab? Our two parties mostly spend similarly, but Ike was the last GOP President to be willing to pay the nation’s credit card; that, of course, is why we like taxes to be slightly higher.
Speaking of battling with perfection, I worked for a few months for a company that’s lasted over ten years and gone through VC $millions without actually ever quite releasing a product. I guess they keep getting money because by now it’s gotten to be the most awesome demo you’ve ever seen, but they have $0 in sales in that over a decade.
There’s a good essay on the MIT VS NJ schools of design, which is about perfectionism, and helped me get a good handle on this early.
May 1, 2009 at 3:09 pm
That’s a fair point, Jon but I don’t think the tea parties were entirely about spending. A great deal of anger dealt with bailing out firms that were supposedly too big to fail. Plus, I think we’re talking about an order of magnitude difference in debt at this point. I’m probably being naive but I feel like the tea parties were at least partially non-partisan. Only time will tell if they amount to anything though.
Vaporware, it’s what’s for dinner. I worked on a project all last year that still hasn’t seen the light of day. Whether it ever will is or not is debatable.
May 2, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Of course, you guys have a real point to your protest. But, shouldn’t it have started six or seven years earlier? I’ve seen alot of cranky pro-tea-party blogposts and comments (not yours, mind you), enough to make me wonder if many tea partiers aren’t a little annoyed at themselves for not having done exactly that.
Thanks for the pimp-my-swine-flu-mask link!