husband

No jury would convict.

Yeah, I dunno, man, I am deep in yak-shaving mode at the moment. When I descend from the Tibetan plateau with my freshly-shorn yak I will have a nice little assemblage of javascript micro-frameworks, some written by me some not, to use to build the client-side app of my dreams. I could explain, but there is no point. The upshot is that I have written no new features this week and knocked no items off my alpha to-do list because, well, I could have but it would have been investing more time in going down the wrong path. I wasted time using stuff written by other people that didn't quite do what I needed.

The upside, I guess, is that my github account is filling up with interesting little packages that might be useful on a resume some day. But I do worry about my case of NIH. Mind you, Mr P's case of Not Invented Here is epic compared to mine. His reaction to my report of how I spent my week was, "At last you're seeing sense." A typical conversation might go like this:

"Why do you use all these packages? Write it yourself instead!" he says.

"I'm not going to write a web server myself for this project."

"Why not?"

"I want to ship in a couple of months, not a couple of years."

"Loser."

"Nor am I going to write the language I'm writing it in."

"Los-- okay, languages are hard. You should just use Lua."

"I am going to murder you."

DISRUPT ALL THE THINGS indeed: Kickstarter's two million-dollar projects and the day in which they both happened. That Hollywood disruption is going to happen soon.

Text formats: If you like Markdown (and why wouldn't you?) you might also like Fountain, a Markdown-inspired format for screenwriting.

Lolitics: Man, the Republican nomination scrum has been fun to watch! Matt Taibbi goes into why in Rolling Stone. A teaser:
If Romney is a scripted automaton who could make it through a year's worth of marital coitus without one spontaneous utterance, Gingrich is his exact opposite – taken prisoner in war, Newt would be blabbing state secrets without torture within minutes, and minutes after that would be calling his guards idiots who lack his nuanced grasp of European history, and minutes after that would be lying to two of his captors about an affair he had with the third.
Don't feed the evil: I"m at a month of using DuckDuckGo for all my searching and I'm not looking back. It's nice to get a page of search results back and not some bloated Yahoo-style portal page to services I don't give a damn about.
  • Current Location: project, politics, random
  • Current Music: Rafting Starlit Everglades : Baths : Cerulean (Bonus Track Version)
Tags:
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    daiseechain
    Thank you, thank you, thank you for the DuckDuckGo link! So tired of Google and even Startpage filtering the results for me.

    Disrupt all the things? Think I missed something important there...
    antennapedia
    "Disrupt all the things" is a quote from a tweet mentioned in that Kickstarter link. One of the projects that hit the million-dollar funding mark was a game development project. Funding through Kickstarter completely bypasses the game development industry, giving gamers something they want from a beloved designer who couldn't get support from that established industry. This, if it happens again, disrupts game development.

    Silicon Valley wants to do this to Hollywood next. Well, I say "Silicon Valley" but it's more complicated than that. Some venture capitalists think that Hollywood is ripe for disruption because their current business model relies on litigation and strip-mining existing content rather than creating new things. The next generation will not be entertaining itself at the movies, they project.

    Google jumped the shark with G+. I maintain they jumped it with Android, to be honest. Both products are warping the company out of recognition.
    seldomifever
    The only part of this post I understood was the DuckDuckGo bit. I am enjoying it as well (when I remember to use it).
    antennapedia
    I just replaced my default search engine with it. Easy with Chrome (lol). If you're using Safari, install Glims and use that to add new search engines.
    snickfic
    I've been using DuckDuckGo, too, since you linked to it. I like it, too - easy and minimalist, and I like the possible alternative search box at the top.
    antennapedia
    Yeah, they make it easy to fall back to other search services if their results aren't finding it. The other thing I like: no personal filters/results skewing.
    beatrice_otter
    Hee! I'd never heard of Yak shaving. I was more familiar with my favorite author Lois McMaster Bujold's similar phrase: "cat-vacuuming." As in, you know that phase where there's something you want to do, but don't want to, so you're coming up with other things you could do instead? Well, once the garden is weeded and the kitchen and bathrooms cleaned and the laundry done and the garage organized, you can always try to vacuum the cat ...

    And I must say the "Distrupt all the things" is heartening.
    antennapedia
    Yak shaving can be pointless procrastination, but more often it's not. You start out working toward something you genuinely want, but end up working on a sequence of blocking tasks further and further removed from that initial goal. It can be hard to see in advance that this is what you're doing, and hard to know if it'll be ultimately worth the digressions.

    Here's a classic yak shaving scenario.
    thea_bromine
    I know your internal politics are...well, in the UK we have problems enough of our own, we can manage without worrying about yours too, but last week I did hear a suggestion that we might take more interest if we didn't find the names so unfamiliar, and that to a British ear, Mitt, Barack and Newt are not so much Important People, more IKEA bookcase styles.

    I offer you this for what it's worth, which isn't much.
    antennapedia
    Current UK politics make for horrifying reading for me over here across the pond and the continent.

    All three names are a bit odd even for Americans, by the way. "Barack" is not derived from any of the usual European language suspects, nor from any of the Asian language sources that are familiar to anybody over here on the west coast. "Newt" is a slightly silly nickname sort of name. It rings either prep school (loads of money) or vaguely Southern US to my ear.

    "Mitt" is ... hell if I know. A guy named after baseball equipment?
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