I love airports. I’m flying today and I love flying into some random airport and listening to all the places planes are going. Sometimes I daydream about jumping on a different plane and just going somewhere. No plans, no reservations. Just go.
Yearly Archives: 2013
My Problem With Food
I have had a weird relationship with food all of my life. When I was young I was a fairly picky eater. I ate a limited variety of things and had a very simple pallet. I was resistant to trying new foods. As I got older and had to cook for myself, I found that I ate horribly because I had no clue how to cook and had no patience for doing so. I would be so pre-occupied with whatever I was doing (programming, schoolwork, etc) that I wouldn’t realize I was hungry until I was past hungry and then I’d eat whatever was handy. I’ve come to realize that “whatever food is handy” generally means garbage, because anything that can be made in a few minutes in a microwave is not particularly good for me.
None of this bothered me, though. I was naturally thin. When I graduated high school I was 6’1″ and weighed 155 pounds. Skinny was an understatement. I could eat anything and never gain a pound. I think that compounded my dietary problems as I never thought twice about what I was eating.
By the time I reached my late 20s/early 30s, though, all of that caught up with me. At one point I had ballooned to almost 220 pounds. Then I started to bike ride and go to the gym and have managed to stabilize my weight between 200 and 210. I’d like to be between 190 and 200.
My eating has improved over the years as I married, had kids, and started working harder to eat better balanced and less pre-made, microwavable meals. (My wife made this a lot easier as she does the evening cooking.) I don’t drink much alcohol or pop because I don’t want the calories.
I’m happy with my exercise output. Now I need to work more on my intake. I tend to snack, but only in the evenings when I watch a little tv before going to bed, which happens to also be the worst time to snack. I’ve started trying to control my intake not by limiting the amount of food but limiting the amount of non-fruits and vegetables during snack time.
Meals, too, are a problem for me. Because I never gained weight when I was younger I could always eat until I was full. Now, though, eating until I’m full is too much food. So that’s my next task: try to take smaller portions.
I know myself. If I try to go cold turkey on some of these things I’ll never succeed. But if I dial down the intake a little at a time, over time, I’ll be able to control my eating for the long term. In the meantime, though, I try to be patient with myself. I’ve always been really good at taking care of my brain. I can do a better job taking care of my body, too.
Cognitive Overhead, Or Why Your Product Isn’t As Simple As You Think
The pursuit of easy and simple, even in complex systems, is a never-ending battle. David Lieb discusses this not as a physical thing but as a mental thing, a cognitive overhead that we as software developers need to overcome.
What is cognitive overhead? A Chicago developer named David Demaree called it, “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”
As David says:
Minimizing cognitive overhead is imperative when designing for the mass market. Why? Because most people haven’t developed the pattern matching machinery in their brains to quickly convert what they see in your product (app design, messaging, what they heard from friends, etc.) into meaning and purpose. We, the product builders, take our ability to cut through cognitive overhead for granted; our mental circuits for our products’ patterns are well practiced.
But in reality most products are really difficult to use. Sometimes it is necessary. There is a learning curve for certain things. But the more we can eliminate those curves the more attractive our apps. In the article, David offers a number of ways to reduce cognitive overhead, and some examples of apps that both work and don’t work in this world.
Crazy
In high school I thought I was crazy busy. Then I went to college.
In college I thought I was crazy busy. Then I started a company.
I thought the company was crazy busy. Then I had kids.
Each year with children has been busier then the last.
I sure hope it doesn’t get too much crazier.
Thinking Only Of The Milestone Isn’t Enough
I saw two excellent movies this weekend. The first was Lincoln and the second was 42. Both dealt with racism. (I was thinking to round out the story I needed to watch Armistad 🙂
Lincoln was very good and Daniel Day-Lewis was excellent. The other actor I thought did an incredible job was Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Lewis, the ardent abolitionist and Congressman. In general I thought the movie was well done except the ending. The movie covered the period of Lincoln’s presidency dealing with the passage of the 13th amendment that abolishes slavery and the end of the Civil War. These issues were intertwined. Spielberg tacked on Lincoln’s death and a speech at the end, which I thought diminished the movie. It should have ended a scene or two before, with Lincoln walking down the steps at the White House.
42 was excellent. The acting was superb and the writers/director did an excellent job of summing up the story. 42 covers the period of time where Jackie Robinson is “drafted” by the Dodgers through his first full season in the Major Leagues. To start, I easily rate it one of the best baseball movies ever. 42, though, is more than just a baseball movie and Robinson was more than just a baseball player. Jackie Robinson, really, was the beginning of the end for Jim Crow and segregation.
What I couldn’t stop thinking about through both of these movies was something asked of one of the black housekeepers in Lincoln. To paraphrase, the question was, what happens once you have your freedom? And the reply was, we’ve thought so long about freedom we haven’t thought about what to do with it. It struck me that by the time Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, this was still not answered because of Jim Crow, almost 100 years later.
This led me to think about role models and how we each build ourselves, how we know where we come from and what we stand for. And I couldn’t help but wonder what is next, in our modern times, for our communities. The trials are clear: high unemployment, children born without two parents. How different would our world be today if those leaders could have thought about what to do with their freedom?
I don’t mean to only harp on societal issues, though. It also made me think about work. I think a lot of us in start-up land fall into this trap. It isn’t good enough to just think about release or funding or whatever that next big milestone is. It is critical to think about what we are going to do with it, how we are going to build the organization, and what qualities we want to instill in it.
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