Musings

I think the reason why I can't keep this going steadily is that I take it too seriously. Instead of just posting any old thing up here and letting the words flow for the day, I end up drafting and editing the post.

I realize that's silly. This is a journal, and since I'm treating it like Julia Cameron-style Daily Pages, I should just let loose. No one reads this stuff anyway, and if anyone did so what? It's just stream of thought musings and I wouldn't mind showing anyone the notebooks that I filled up longhand in the exercise.

So, the battle cry from now on is "be like Neil" and don't overthink it.

Who Owns Language?

This post on Miss Snark's weblog points to an interesting discussion on who gets to decide how we all write English.

I fall on the side whose argument for leaving well enough alone stems from etymology. If the English language started spelling "plateau" as platoo, or "pizza" as peetsa then how would we know that the words were stolen from other languages?

That argument aside, it would be a nightmare to retrain everyone. It would be like learning to read a whole new language that you already know. Kids who would be taught in the "new" phonetic (fonetik?) composition would be unable to read much of the English body of work.

I won't call the whole thing stupid, but there's too much of a switching cost to even consider it.

Back and Not Alone

Billy Mernit not only worships Jess, he proposes that she be The Candidate.

Google Spreadsheets

For a person in my line of work, the spreadsheet is a fact of everyday life. Lotus 1-2-3 was my best friend until Excel usurped that position.

Now, we have Google Spreadsheets.

It's currently a very bare-bones app, with limited formatting options and a clunky formula interface, but it's a good first step. If Google continues down this path with full-featured web-based competitors for Word, Powerpoint, Project and Visio, there will soon be little need for MS Office on a workstation.

Wasn't this what they were calling the "network computer" a few years ago?

Misdirected Idealism, Misguided Light

So I've got a front-row seat for a corporate function. We've got five supposedly-distinguished guests on tap to talk about (surprise, surprise) leadership. One's a marketing exec, one's a basketball coach, one's an NGO exec, and the last one is an exec who just spearheaded an org-rendering cultural shift. Of those four, one spoke with passion, and another spoke with intellect and vision. Two out of four, not bad. The fifth speaker, I didn't know what to make of.

It's a guy who quit his day job to write a book (more of a booklet) on things a person can do to supposedly help this country. He's now speaking where he can to talk about this epiphany of his.

Yep, I don't get it. His heart may be in the right place (I have no idea if he's got delusiuons of grandeur - I don't think so) but he, to my mind, is going about this in an extremely ineffective way. What bothered me even more is that he's clearly an intelligent man, perhaps lacking a bit in the public speaking skill department. What he's become is a quote-spewing machine. Quotes from all sorts of historical figures and management gurus.

That's simply brain power going to waste.

I guess we all tilt at our own windmills, and follow our own yellow brick roads.

Wild Horses

When the Suns lost Raja Bell after that calf injury (he may have been on the court the last two games, but that wasn't really him), it was all over. The Phoenix Suns are a tough team (no matter what the game they play looks like) with huge hearts, but there is simply no way that a six-man rotation has enough to stay with the Dallas Mavericks. Without Bell, the Suns wouldn't have made it past the LA teams.

So, my 4-2 prediction of the Heat dumping the Pistons comes to pass, and my prediction of a 4-2 Dallas win (after Bell went down - my initial prediction was Suns 4-3) also comes to pass. Great batting average so far.

Now, we have The Dirk and Josh Howard vs. The Big Smooth and Dwayne Wade. More compelling is that Miami and Dallas have never played for the O'Brien Trophy before, much less taken home a championship. Also, the methodical, defense-oriented teams that have dominated the NBA Finals for so long (Pistons, Spurs and yes, Jordan's Bulls) are now gone. Miami and Dallas are balanced teams that can score as well as defend. Each has at least a pair of players that can dump 20 on you any time, with supporting casts that feature at least a couple of players each that can also dump 20 on you on a good day (Terry, Harris, Stackhouse, Walker and White Chocolate).

I also love the coaching matchup. Grizzled all-world, all-time great Pat "Armani" Riley, vs the rookie Coach of the Year Avery Johnson. In a league where coaches can easily be overshadowed by their star players, these two guys have full no-nonsense control of their teams. I love that. Flip Saunders had the Pistons unravel under him. Mike Brown is already in a Kobe situation with Bron-bron. Not these guys.

So. Matchup time.

C - Shaq and Zo vs 3D (Diop, Dampier and the suspended DJ Mbenga). Are you kidding me? Advantage: Heat, and they had better take advantage of it whenever they can. Shaq has to stay out of foul trouble. If he can avoid the offensive fouls, he could average 30 on the 18 Dallas Fouls.

F - Haslem and Posey vs Howard and The Dirk. Are you kidding me? Advantage: Mavs. Just as no one can stop Shaq, no one can stop Dirk. Bowen tried and failed. Marion tried and failed. James Posey isn't going to make a dent. Miami's problem is that these two guys are very erratic shotmakers, which will free Howard to wreak havoc on defense (especially if he covers Wade). If Riles is forced to play Walker for long stretches, Dirk may well average 40, or Howard 30. Riles has his work cut out for him here.

G - Jason and Dwayne vs Jason and I'm guessing Adrian Griffin. Harris will come off the bench, because there's no way he or Terry can guard Wade. If AJ uses Hoard on Wade, that leaves a mismatch with Posey who they don't want to get untracked. So I'm guessing Griffin will start on Wade. Terry is no slouch though, and Wade will have to take him since J-Will is a sieve and Payton is too slow now. If Terry can get untracked, it will cause all sorts of problems. Advantage: Even.

Bench - I think this is where the Mavs will clean house. Miami's bench is weak beyond Mourning, who will only be useful if the Mavs play Detroit-speed slowball (I'm betting they don't). Walker and Payton are defensive liabilities. So are Stackhouse and Harris, sure, but they make up for it by being good meshes with the Dallas scheme. When Walker is on the floor Miami becomes a train wreck. Advantage: Mavs.

Coach - Even.

X-Factor: Can you say hack-a-Shaq? I thought so. The Diesel's free throw liability is a problem as always. Wade is also ill at the moment. He needs to be 100% if Miami is going to have a chance to beat Dallas.

Prediction: Dallas wins 4-2.

Absolute Sandman

I guess the (unintentional) wait was a blessing in disguise.

Absolute Sandman is a "fix" for the original Sandman's art, taking the whole thing digital and restoring the artist's vision. (Link to Neil Gaiman's journal.)

Look at the comparison on Neil's page. It's stunning. The colors are vibrant, and it's amazing how you never notice the washed-out, dull inks back when reading the originals. The stories were that engrossing!

Mark me down for all four volumes, hopefully with the case that Neil talks about.

Writer Beware's Top 20 Worst Literary Agents, featuring Barbara Bauer

As a sometime writer I consider myself a silent fringe member of the "struggling unpublished writer" community at large. In that capacity I sometimes lurk on web resources for writers. One of them is the weblog of a mysterious New York-based literary agent codenamed Miss Snark.

Now, this lady lives up to her nom de guerre, answering writers' questions from the hip. The stupider the question, the more snarkastic the answer.

Another key resource on the web is Writer Beware, a section of the Science Fiction Writers of America website dedicated to rooting out literary agents who scam writers.

Writer Beware recently published its list of the Top 20 Worst Literary Agents. You can imagine the reaction of anyone whose name appears on that dishonor roll. One of them is agent Barbara Bauer, who went on a campaign against Writer Beware and allied sites, including Miss Snark's.

Not a good idea. Miss Snark and her legions of Snarklings are hitting back as only web-savvy writers can, employing Googlebombs and Technorati tags like this: BarbaraBauer. Check out Miss Snark's left hook and right straight. She skipped the jabs, and now I guess we're waiting for the big uppercut.

Hey, Barbara Bauer? I think you're in trouble.

Receipts

Thise little slips of scrap paper are truly annoying. You have to collect them, sort them, keep them somewhere safe, and then summarize them so they can turn back into money you spent. It doesn't help that some of them are printed on thermal paper and the text fades after a couple of days.

I'll be so glad when we get to the stage where all your spending can be tracked on a card or chip and wed can dispense with the little slips of annoying paper.

Juanes: Mi Sangre (3.5/4 stars)

I haven't run into such a fun album in quite a while. My Spanish comprehension isn't much more than 50%, but what I could understand of the lyrics, the ringing strings and the sweet Latin rhythms make Mi Sangre (My Blood) a real pleasure to listen to.

My favorite cuts are the infectious Amame (Love Me), a rocking obsessive love pean, the slower burn but still kinetic love song Nada Valgo Sin Tu Amor (I Am Nothing Without Your Love) and the unusual breakup song La Camisa Negra (The Black Shirt).

I don't have very many complete albums on my poor little 4GB apple green iPod mini. Mi Sangre is one of them, and I don't think I'll be deleting a single track for quite a while.

A Life i(Pod)mproved

I'm late to the iPod revolution. I got my lovely wife an (appropriately) apple green iPod mini for Christmas 2004. She had is for over a year until the iPod nano appeared. I got her one of those, and the mini was handed down to me.

Previous to that I had discovered podcasts. The only way for me to listen during my long commute was to burn the mp3s into a CD, which I would then play on my fortunately mp3-capable car stereos. This was pretty cumbersome, but I kept with it just because the podcast voices were like friends chatting you up on the way home after a long day of hard work.

Anyway, the CD player on my current car stopped reading mp3 CDs a couple of weeks before the mini became mine. I got myself an iTrip (my wife got a RoadTrip) and now I no longer have to burn CDs. I also no longer have to continuously shuffle my CD collection in my car, five discs at a time. The 4GB of my little green friend can only hold a fraction of my music collection (the classical stuff has to be ripped whole CDs at a time, and I can't bring myself to listen to anything below 192kbps...) along with a few podcasts, but now I understand why people take the iPod wherever they go.

Fall Off Horse, Get Back On Horse

It's funny what invisible lines can do to you.

My writing momentum was deep-sixed by that trip to the other side of the world, as I expected it to be. When I got back I was so disoriented that reestablishing routine was a struggle. Being an inveterate creature of habit, that meant I needed to go back to the start and rebuild my routine. It was no mean feat, since the back-to-back weeks away meant that Important Stuff, i.e. work and home, needed a lot of tending to before trifles like weblogs could be addressed.

Add in another week off of work to spend some quality time in the sun (and rain) and the onset of Busy Busy Busy here in the office and, well, I have a lot of excuses to make to myself over the silence.

So, I'm back. One can always rely on Major Events like two purportedly-blockbuster films to bring me back online to add my two cents to the world's currency regarding the Current Controversial Movie. Yes, my obligatory lines on the Ron Howard celluloid treatment of Mr. Daniel Brown's moneymaking tome will be on The Silver Screener shortly.

The other weblog will have the long-delayed retelling of the Jersey Game Session up soon. My fickle sometime-writer, ever-a-gamer alter ego decided that it didn't like the fragments of a session report I had previously saved on Blogger and deleted the mess. So I will do a rewrite based on badly-faded ten-week-old memories. Well, it won't be the first time.

It feels good to have the virtual pen back in hand.

Heading Home

I'm sitting on flight NW71 headed for Nagoya, Japan then on home to Manila. It's going to be about 16 hours on the plane, plus a couple more layover in Japan. I'm just glad to be headed home. Overall, y trip was ok work was good, meet and greet was good, got to spend some (ok, more than I planned) cash on things you can't get at home, and I got to meet a couple of BGG people as has been my custom ever since I started travelling again

Still, I'm glad to be going home. I miss Chris something fierce, and I'm sick of the scourge of jet lag. My world needs to return to normalcy, and my work is in shambles right now.

Amazingly, I'm off to Tagaytay on work for 2.5 days on Thursday, and then I'm off to Hong Kong for the MF1 training program on Sunday.

After all these crazy travel days, I'm really going to have to make it up to Chris. And to myself. Burnout's gonna be just around the corner if I don't apply the brakes really soon.

Lindbergh Terminal Councourse C

I'm sitting here and having coffee. I never really got to see MSP last time. NWA's northern hub is huge - it took me a good 15 to 20 minutes to walk to gate C15 from the G gates where we landed.

Homeland Security isn't as bad as the news makes it out to be, but it could be that things are now relaxed as 9/11 gets farther in the rearview mirror.

It's clearly cold out there, around 10 to 15 degrees, but I think I'll survive in a sweater.

Walking by the first bookshop I passed, I spotted a new Lencioni. Turf wars. Joy! Right on time. Bought it ($25) of course.

The flight itself wasn't too bad. Still uncomfortable, but business class makes a huge difference. The seat actually stretches all the way out, albeit at an angle. Still didn't get any real sleep, and my system is telling me to fuck off because it's 1 am. Fighting back with lots of coffee. Will try to crash the system around 6pm in the hopes of being able to get up early "tomorrow". Whoever created time zones - I hate you at the moment.

Biting off too much?

Dude.

I'm no HR guy and here I am planning to lead the team into an organizational planning meeting. Two days. Sure, I've done it as a member of a team, but I don't have the formal training and I don't have any experience leading the process.

Will I be able to pull it off with theory from all the books I've ever read, and those two times I participated in the process?

I'd better or there's gonna be a whole lot of egg on my face.

The good thing is that there's over two weeks to prepare. Of course one of those weeks is gonna be in Jersey where I'm likely to freeze to death. But that's still preparation time. God knows what I'm gonna do while I'm stuck on a plane for 20+ hours anyway. Thank goodness for business class.

When it Rains it Pours - And I've Got the Umbrella

Just went thorough one of my most hectic work weeks in recent memory. Three different guests from overseas, one BPO implementation series of meetings, strategic planning proformas up to 2013, leading the first mangement team meeting in almost a year, sales cutoff week for February, scads of financial templates, foreign travel arrangements to be made for two trips out in March, two months of expense reports, 12 backlogged training modules, three cross-sector coordination meetings (1 HR, 1 Finance and 1 Non-Stock) and five performance reviews.

Add in the political stupidity in Thursday and Friday and it was one hell of a last five days.

But you know what? For someone who's just survived an 80-hour workweek, I feel great. I didn't have as much trouble as I thought I'd have getting up in the mornings during the week. I was actually looking forward to getting in and polishing off work.

I love the feeling of knowing that most other people would get killed with that kind of workweek. And not only did I survive it, I got everything done. It wasn't all pretty and perfect, but everything was done effectively and on time.

Add in the great performance review from The Boss, and it was pretty damned fine for 80 hours of work.

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this job, and am starting to enjoy it.

Seasons Change

We just took the Christmas tree down. I think this is the latest that the tree has stayed up, just because everyone here at home's been too busy to just do it. Took under an hour to take it down and put it away. See ya next year, tree.

A Crush of Media and Interests

It's been over a month since my last post (on this increasingly-misnamed weblog anyway) and I'm still struggling to absorb all the information from available media sources, plus maintain two interests (film+a bit of small screen series, and boardgaming). It doesn't help that not only has work been going through one of those stretches where everything needs to be done in the same timeframe, plus the three trips abroad which only serves to short circuit any attempt I make to establish a rhythm to deal with the work. Sigh.

Books are dead. I haven't read a single page since polishing off the disappointing A Feast for Crows. I'm still stuck halfway through Guns, Germs and Steel, and have built up a reading stack that's going to take me until 2008 to get through at this rate.

I'm currently tearing through film in an attempt to catch up with all the major Academy Award-nominated films. It's a decent crop this year, and I've seen all five of the Best Picture nominees and written up four as of this writing. On the downside, I've accumulated even more DVDs that I am simply not going to get to finish off anytime soon, plus the first 1.5 seasons of Battlestar Galactica (criminal, I know), the only season of Firefly, and I've-lost-count-of-how-many seasons of C.S.I. and 24.

Forget about working on my novel AND my screenplays.

Here's hoping that work slows down as I expect it to in April, so I can take some time off, take a trip with Chris and maybe catch up on some media.

Man, I'm glad I've completely given up on videogaming. I don't think a stack of unplayed or unfinished games similar to what I built up for the PS1 and PS2 would be a good use of cash.

More power to the Net

Now I'm even more convinced that internet check-in + no check-in baggage is
the way to go.

Flights for the Bumbling Bee

The check in line is still really long, so I can rant a bit on this wonderful country of mine being a truky crummy place to fly out of.

When I was working in Jakarta, I had to fly SQ through Singapore to get the Jakarta from Manila and vice versa. No direct flights. I flew to Kuala Lumpur in 05 and had to do the same thing, take a connecting through Sing. This adds and extra couple of hours to the trip.

Even when the airlines fly direct, the flight selection is abysmal. To get to Bkk, I'm taking a 1420 flight. I hate flying in the afternoons. Always too many people, and you arrive late afternoon to early evening. Too late to do much. Too dark to see much. There are no other flights. Sigh.

What the heck's in Bangkok?

I'm standing in line to check into flight TG621 bound for Bangkok. This is the longest line I've ever stood in, despite arriving 150 minutes before departure. And I thought that line for the Narita flight was long. Yeesh. This is guaranteed to be a full flight. I hope the travel agent got me my usual aisle seat.

This makes me appreciate SQ all the more, and I haven't gotten on the damned plane yet.

That. Sucked.

Your first pass on the second play of the game goes for a 66 yard gain. Then you're taken down at the knee by someone twice your weight after you let the ball go. Torn ACL. Instantly, your team reverts to being The Bungles with blown coverage, shanked punt and fumble. So long Cinderella season.

More like a Feast OF Crow. Who likes the taste of Crow?

We waited five years for this?

Fine, George makes all sorts of apologies and excuses for the lateness of the book. He might have just said that he was afflicted with Jordanitis - a condition affecting writers where they have no idea of how to get to where they want to go (assuming they do know where they want to go) and where they get caught up in enjoying the "sound" of their own "voice" to the detriment of their readers (and their story).

First, go listen to this episode of Michael & Evo's Cover to Cover where you can get the whole story from the horse's (George's) mouth.

On with my take on A Feast for Crows.

Half of this volume, which is Volume 4 Part I (the second half, supposedly titled "A Dance with Dragons" if you listened to the above podcast, is due this year) is wholly unnecessary. There is a huge amount of exposition and backstory and description on secondary, far less interesting characters. Brienne of Tarth getting about a fifth of the book? You have to be kidding me. I skipped most of her chapters because ther were putting me to sleep and NOTHING WAS HAPPENING. Samwell Tarly on a boat? WHO CARES? You could have lopped out everything until he got to Braavos, and even those segments could have been edited down. The deal with the squids could have been abbreviated. Breinne of Tarth? What the HELL! She got more ink than the remaining Starks combined! WHY? Only the Jaime and Cersei parts were tight and paced decently, and formed the only part of A Feast for Crows worth a reader's time.

George, George, George. Why did you foist this glorified doorstop on us? You left two of the most important characters out - Tyrion and Dany. A third, Jon Snow, gets almost no coverage. Everyone in this book is left TALKING about Tyrion, and there's no hide nor hair of him. Dany is the driver of the whole arc, the timepiece if you will. She's nowhere to be seen. Snow is the Lord Commander, fine. So what?

Nothing. Happens.

Sorry George. You almost lost me here. A Dance with Dragons had better pick up the pace and move the story arc along at a decent clip, or I'm going to start calling you Robert Jordan II and this series as A Wheel of Ice, Fire and Time. This was about the spot in WoT (after The Dragon Reborn, which was the high point of WoT - everything after that went sharply downhill) that Jordan took leave of his senses and put the whole story on hold while his characters talked and travelled and preened. Don't make the same mistake.

Borrow this book, read the Cersei, Jaime and Arya chapters, then return it. Nothing else in A Feast for Crows matters.

Resolutions

I find the way people keep time... amusing. We like chronological landmarks. The first of the year. The end of the year. The first of the month. The first day of spring. Midnight.

How about now?

Yes, "now."

Saying "this will be done beginning _____" when you can do it now is just an excuse to procrastinate. If you fail at something, there is no need to wait until the next chronological marker to begin again. Get back on the horse after falling off. Don't wait until the horse is dead or irrelevant.

Happy new year. May your life's work be more fruitful from this day forward, or from any day that you need for something to begin anew.