Slight modification to the 30/30 work cycle
I was just reading about the 30/30 work cycle, in short work 30 minutes then relax 30 minutes. This sounds ideal, but I think a better idea is to never focus on a problem more than 30 minutes. If you go 30 minutes without a break through, you need to stop thinking about it and relax.
Removing your focus every 30 minutes when you are being productive sounds like a terrible idea. If you are in the zone, stay there.
(Source: Lifehacker)
iTV Prediction
I’m writing this as a prediction to the post-iTV announcement reactions. Pundits will claim it’ll flop, no-one will buy it. It’ll be declared an inevitable flop.
In the following months, it’ll prove to be hugely successful and all other electronic manufacturers will try to play catch-up. Each, in turn, producing an Apple iTV-killer, and each failing.
Expect me to point to this post sometime after that, unless I’m wrong then you can expect me never to speak of it again.
"The device manufacturers aren’t very good at software, yet they keep writing their own. The OS has no consistent hardware platform to target. The manufacturers produce devices with inconsistent build quality."
"Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short"
— Steve Jobs
Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen is Good
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen was one of the books suggested to read in my Senior High School English class, unfortunately it wasn’t until now that I picked it up. It’s definitely a bit racy, but in an intriguing and interesting way. I’m not much for a synopsis, so I’ll just paste in what Amazon says. The book will definitely take hold of you, as it did me (I couldn’t put it down in the 2 days it took me to finish it), and at only 6 bucks for the Kindle it’s a great buy.
One interesting plot of the story that I thought Gruen truly captured was how living in a nursing home and growing old affects the main character. She makes the point that the protagonist, an elderly widowed man, feels “no longer really a part of [his children’s] lives” and that visiting him has become “more like a duty” to them (Gruen). Throughout the book he fights with his desire to be independent and realization that he needs help sometimes. It is through his dreams and memories of the time he spent in the circus along with the help of a kindly nurse that he is able to find a balance.
Synopsis from Amazon:
Jacob Jankowski says: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn’t always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn’t write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.
Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob’s life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the “menagerie” and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and… he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August’s wife. Not his best idea.
The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there’s trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the “revenooers” or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena’s and Rosie’s pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it—and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. —Valerie Ryan
