Gems from John

We need torte reform: less cherries; more chocolate.

Pesto: the bacon of the veggie world.

Me (having just eaten a Cinnabon): Ugh, sugar coma.
John: Is that a cinnacoma? Or a comabon?

A Disturbing Realization About Politics

Okay, like that narrows the range of things one could realize about politics....

Like so many, I'd found it troubling how much of political advertising is focused on bashing one's opponent. Then it occurred to me: everybody's been saying for a while that it's all about turnout, which seems only natural since only half of people turn out to vote even on a good (i.e., presidential election) year. The point of a lot of political campaigning or advertising isn't to convince a voter of your own value, but to convince them that it's not worth getting off their couch for your opponent.

In this case, I think McCain did a lot of the work to convince his people he wasn't worth getting off the couch for.

Reflections on a Quarter Century

I'd clearly been meaning to write this post for a while, since it's nigh on 2 years now since I've stopped being 25 - and that is part of what reminded me; my birthday is coming up soon. Thus, late being often better than never, I still wanted to record what I still remember wanting to say about the remarkable amount of life change I had at the quarter-century mark:

• Graduated from college (grad school, to be precise)
• Visited a bunch of family I either hadn't seen for a long time, or, in a couple of cases, never met before
• Moved to a new state (not that I hadn't moved to very different states a few times in the past)
• Got a real job at a large, fast-moving company, having never done anything besides tutor/TA and sometimes help my dad work on houses - huge contrast to any previous experiences (only similar thing previously was my Google internship)
• Bought a real car (not that I didn't love my Mazda in its own way)
• Bought a townhouse - boy, was that a big one
• Corollary: first time being a real landlord (and not just the tenant who happened to remain longer)
• Got my first grownup boyfriend (anybody want to comment that as soon as I got out of school and had a range of ages to choose from, I started dating much older guys? I think that was just luck, really, though, and certainly shouldn't reflect badly on anyone before that...)

It's not like there weren't plenty of substantial things before that (24: First real-job-type internship (Google), first time to Burning Man; numerous moves between states and even countries in the 5 years before that) or after (26: First involvement in a legal action - I tried to take a guy to small claims for not paying rent - wound up not being able to serve him because I couldn't find any valid contact for him; first promotion at my real job), but... the sheer number of things that happened while 25 is rather striking. Maybe that's why car insurance changes at 25 - does this statistically work out to be a turning point age for a lot of people? Are there so many people who aren't out of school until 25? It was, in many ways, really entering the real world - growing up, even - to the extent I think that's a good thing ;-)

A Response To Piaw

My long-time political rant buddy (and bike buddy) Piaw wrote an excellent article on why universal health care makes sense not just from a warm-fuzzy-take-care-of-everybody perspective, but also makes good sound economic sense and will make the whole health care system more effective and efficient. But there was one part I wanted to respond to in more than just a comment:

No mandate. Now this is a problem. It creates a moral hazard, in that if you're healthy, you have no incentive to join the insurance pool and help subsidize all the unhealthy people like me. This is even more true if (as anticipated) you can sign up for health insurance after you got hit by a bus or some other health catastrophe, and still get the same cheap coverage that you could have gotten if you signed up while healthy.

Now, yes, this is a problem - why would you ever buy insurance (unless you were planning to have non-emergency procedures done or needed ongoing care or medication) if you could do it after something bad happened?

So, if you assume no mandate, there are two obvious choices: allow retroactive signup, or don't. The former, and you get people not paying in, and then sometimes suddenly sucking up bunches of taxpayer money. The latter, and you get people declaring bankruptcy, sucking up a bunch of health care provider money, since they're probably only going to get paid a few thousand (average American has almost no savings) before the poor soul gives up and stops trying to pay any of it.

Neither of these sounds very good. Either way, you get losses to the group as a whole, and you're choosing between not incenting healthy people to opt in and driving people into the ground. So, what other option do you have? Well, what if you said that you can retroactively sign up - after you've been hit by a bus or found out you have cancer or whatever - but you still have to pay a large sum. The question then becomes, how much? It needs to be more than the insurance would have been; otherwise, you're still not providing an incentive to opt-in. It also needs to be a low enough amount not to drive somebody into bankrupcy - ideally, you want to make the person pay as much as possible of their medical bills without destroying their life. Make it easy to get a loan to cover such expenses, too, even with features like income-sensitive repayment, so that the person does pay it off over time, rather than trying to get out of it. That way, you get the best of both worlds: incent people to pay while they're healthy, get the maximum repayment possible if they don't, and avoid driving people into bankruptcy.

Why am I defending the no-mandate portion of the plan? Well, for one, I think it'll be far easier to sell to Americans if they can opt out - if it doesn't have that valve, it sounds a lot like the "European socialism" that many Americans have vague, high-unemployment ideas about and are afraid, or at least suspicious, of. For another, I believe both in letting stupid people shoot themselves in the foot (so long as they don't substantially take others down with them), and in letting people who think they can beat the odds give it a try. Heck, if it were up to me, I'd make it possible to opt out of Social Security, at least the retirement part of it - but then, I'm the generation that isn't expecting to get any money out of it.

Not Quite Freakonomics

Man, I feel like such a geek for putting this on my blog. This isn't even like writing a post about javascript, which I might have some business doing. But hey, it's what I think about, and maybe somebody will pick up the ideas and use them (well, most the second idea... I don't know if the first idea has any practical application, except maybe to dentists to motivate their patients to take care of their teeth).

The Economics of Flossing

I have two baby teeth. Although they're not in bad condition, there's no question they're going to come out sooner or later. I was at the dentist a couple of weeks ago, and we briefly discussed options for replacing them. I'm not planning on doing it until they actually cause problems, but I did ask how much it would be. For an implant, about $5k. Now, insurance will cover some of that, but I don't know how much. For the sake of current argument, let's just pretend I'll have to cover all of it.

Now, let's also assume that each day I floss pushes back by one day when I'll need to get the implant. This is also a bad assumption. As I said, at some point, those teeth will come out, no matter how well I take care of them. It's also likely, I believe, that not flossing at all will cause the replacement to occur in less than half the time of flossing every day. Of course this also depends on a lot of other factors, like how often I brunch, whether I use fluoride mouthwash, how much sugar I eat, etc. Missing one day of flossing probably causes less harm than missing multiple consecutive days. Nevertheless, this assumption probably isn't that far from the truth.

But, using both these crude approximations, let's do a back of the envelope calculation. If I take that $5k and invest it at 5%, that's $250/year, or a bit under $1/day. If flossing takes 2 minutes, that's about $30/hr to floss. Now, that's just for one tooth. I have at least two that are likely to need replacement, so that doubles the value. For the other teeth, who knows - they probably won't fall out as long as I keep up a fairly minimal care routine, but they benefit from that 2 minutes as well. They probably won't need as many fillings over the year, and I've needed a couple of fillings already and had copay for them. All in all, flossing appears to make excellent economic sense, as long as having your teeth is worth the potential cost to fix them.

Creative Financing

I've become a rabid follower of financial news. And I'm well aware that a big chunk of the problems going on now are because too many people were provided with loans there was a good chance they wouldn't be able to afford before long, either due to their own circumstances or because of changes in the loan terms. Anything called "creative financing" probably sounds crazy risky right now. But, bear with me... this is the opposite of the problematic things.

What if we reversed one of the primary the problems with these loans, namely, that the payments went up at some potentially inconvenient point? Take a standard 30 year mortgage. About 16.7% of your initial payment goes to principle, and the rest to interest. The common thing these days is to do interest only for some period, usually 3-10 years, after which you have to start paying off the whole balance on a shorter time scale, and possibly at a higher rate. Sure, your pay might be higher, and there's inflation, but it's still a bit of a risky proposition, and often a prompt to refinance (getting the brokers and originators more fees, of course).

But, you could reverse this: say, for the first 5 years, you pay an additional amount that goes directly to principle, after which, you have a lower balance and your payments go down to amortize over the remaining 25 years. Better (maybe, depending on your perspective), you could make it completely fluid: any extra payment you made went toward principle, and every month, the minimum payment was calculated to amortize the remaining balance over the remaining payment time. That way, you could pay down the balance not just to shorten the life of the loan, but to lower your payments later. The current mortgage system gives people very little incentive to pay off their loans: you only get to deduct the interest, not the principle, so the more paid off you are, the less of a deduction you get. Once you've paid that money in, you can't get it out without originating an equity loan or line of credit, and if the housing market goes down, you may not be able to get anything out at all. Canadian homeowners apparently have over 75% equity in their homes, whereas in the US the figure is below 50% (2nd hand statistic).

Why have I never heard of any programs like this? Did they used to have them, but not now, like assumable mortgages? I doubt it. More, I suspect it's a combination of a few things. First, for a good while until just the past couple months, people spent as much as they could possibly afford on housing, figuring their pay would go up, as would the value of the property, so they didn't want higher payments to start out with. Second, banks and mortgage brokers would rather have people refi to lower their payments so they can get more fees, and tell people they can always pay extra principle if they choose to (which almost nobody does). Greedy buggers.

Greedy, greedy buggers, all of us, me included.

Blog Topics, Part II

My, I do seem to be doing the multi-part thing lately.

Okay, actually it's because I couldn't think of anything better to call this, because it's sort of about writer's block, to the extent that it's about anything at all.

I've had a lot of ideas for bloggable things lately. If I had a dictating device with me all the time, I'd probably have put up half a dozen posts since the last. Problem is, by the time I sit down at a keyboard, I've either forgotten a substantial amount of what I wanted to say, or just plain don't feel like writing. Rather a shame, since much like working out, I almost always feel better when I do. I used to write in a journal regularly for something like therapeutic value; now I think I fulfill that outlet by a combination of talking with John and IMing with Shauna. The desultory wander of an IM conversation may give me my fix of philosophizing and just being goofy, but it doesn't do much to hone one's ability to write organized extended things. I guess I still write ranty emails to some of my relatives, and they're trying to make a point and even maybe somewhat organized about it, like why I'm happy to swap a 99 BMW for a 92 Civic, or what I think of all those greedy banks and politicians.

So, now, do I actually have anything to say? Well, I've got some snippets of things I noticed before, and thought of writing about. Maybe not all I had originally, but something.

John is doing The Master Cleanse, aka The Lemonade Diet. Right now he's on Day 2. For those unfamiliar, this entails 10+ days of eating no food and only drinking a lemonade drink made from lemon juice, grade B maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. I think I'm more bothered watching him do it and thinking about him do it than he is actually doing it. He's not really bothered by not eating. I nearly panic at the thought of restricting what I eat, let alone eating no solid food for nigh on two weeks. It's been bad enough going off sugar again, but heck, that's better than being bone tired all the time... and I've lost 6 lbs in the past couple weeks, despite getting almost no exercise.

Speaking of food, a couple of weeks ago, while cooking dinner, John noted that there was not a single thing we were having that he would have been eating before we met. Some were just brands he wouldn't otherwise have had (Trader Joe's parmesan cheese instead of some other store's), and some were things he didn't previously like at all (squash - but he likes sunburst squash cut into slices and fried with parmesan cheese on top). I wish I rememebered everything that we had - there was also Bariani Olive Oil, and some kind of fish.

Well, that was sort of about something, even if I didn't remember half the topics I wanted to write about, nor half the details about the ones I did. But, now it's late, and time to head off to bed...

Blog Topics

Connie made the observation that Nik and I often write about not just what we're doing but what we're thinking. Actually, in my own estimation, I write almost exclusively about what I'm thinking and rarely about what I'm doing (and even then usually in the context of something it made me think of).

This was a while ago I thought of this, shortly after reading her post, or maybe even while reading it. As an experiment, I decided to try writing about more things I do, and I figured that last trip was a good occasion.

So, I wrote 4 longish posts about my trip, and... it was work. It was a chore. It was like having to finish an essay for school. Man, I don't like writing about stuff I do. How do you guys keep it up? Especially making it so lively and fun? I'm sure to some extent I just find it that way because I, like, care what you guys are doing, but I'm surprised Nik doesn't have a regular readership from a bunch of people she doesn't know.

So, yeah, here's the summary of rest of my East Coast trip: we went to New York MOMA and saw some creepy Dali videos, went up the Empire State Building, saw Spamalot on Broadway, and went tubing on the Delaware River (I licked Pennsylvania!).

Was there more detail worth recording? Probably, but I find it far more interesting to write about thoughts I had then and now because of it. For instance, confirmation of how much I hate cities. Man, it was really crowded. I was near panic several times because of it. MOMA was really cool, but by the end I was just like getmeoutofheregetmeoutofheregetmeoutofheregetmeoutofhereseriouslygetmethefuckoutofhererightnow.

Then, there's the problem with public blogs: anybody might read them. Maybe I should just make it private, but there's a large-ish set of people I sort of know that I don't mind reading my blog, should they find it entertaining or informative to do so. But, there's also another large-ish set of people who make me have to consider what I post in public, like future employers. It makes me watch what I say about criticisms, things I do, profanity... not that I'm left with nothing to write about, but it's certainly not my journal.

Times Not To Complain

Which big, loud, multi-DJ, themed, random-circus-type-entertainment party shall I go to?

Master Kundalini yoga class or show at Triple Door by an electric-Euro-rock band?

My hands are dry because I've spent so much time playing with the silly putty my manager gave out last week.

How shall I get to work, beautiful road bike ride in the golden Northwestern sunlight, or drive the BMW?

My bread goes bad quickly because it's fresh artesian local bread (or home made).

Listen to trance and play with Greasemonkey, or just go home and sleep?

Realization About City Planning

Imagine a really bad piece of code. Not just little stupid things (like 'if (x == true) return true; else return false;'), but big design problems that prevent it from being changed to work in the ways that you need it to work now, that has a tangled web of dependencies and versioning and redundancy problems, and that is arcane and fragile and different parts are built on totally different infrastructures. Thin facades protect you, but you know that underneath be dragons.

Now, picture that... in concrete.

Ouch. Now I feel sorry for city planners. My discovery of how much work it is when the program managers want all my components to work differently must be nothing compared to, say, realizing your city needs to support mass transit.

The Problem With Options

You'd think giving people a choice would be a good thing. If you have complete freedom of choices, you should be able to get exactly what you want, right? Somehow, this never works out, and I've been thinking lately about why.

I've seen a lot of this problem lately. First, I discovered it with scheduling (parties or anything else involving a bunch of people): never ask people when they want to meet. If you do, you will wind up with complete chaos, and people still won't be happy with any choice that comes out of it. Propose a time, and if too many people really can't make it, then propose an alternative.

Then, there's design. Like, for websites. If you tell people they can choose one of A, B, or C, and one of 1, 2, or 3, they'll tell you they want some of A with a few aspects of C, plus 2 with the colors from 1. Show a committee every button you could add, and they'll try to add all of them, and wind up in a catfight over it. It just doesn't work.

This comes up in all kinds of products. Let people customize every parameter of their bike, and they'll be left with this permanent lingering feeling that it doesn't quite fit right. Have a shoe custom made for your foot with your own colors and materials, and you'll always think it looks and feels just a little bit off.

Yes, I'm overgeneralizing and making these cases out badly, but bear with me. You know you've seen examples of this. But, do you notice a pattern? Why are people unhappy after they are offered choices? For one, since you had a choice, you feel like you should have gotten just what you wanted - and not only that, if it doesn't seem right after you've chosen, you feel like maybe you should go back and choose something different. Beyond that, though, I think there's a bigger problem: people don't know what they want. This is a far more insidious problem than you might at first think. This is why usability is so hard. It's so easy to see when a program "just does the right thing", but it's amazingly hard to know before you see that right thing. It's why ergonomic design is so hard - why is it only in the past couple of decades we figured out that having lumbar support is comfortable? If you don't know what you want - what will look good, what will be comfortable after you've been sitting on it for a few hours - you don't have much hope of making a good choice for yourself.

If you want a much better and longer piece on how hard it is to evaluate things and people (with lots of good research to back it up), read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell - fascinating book, quickly becoming one of my most highly recommended (right behind Hackers and Painters and Freakonomics).

Random Thoughts

I spend time wondering about things I know I shouldn't wonder about. Like, if you blow your nose on a piece of toilet paper, is it more ecologically friendly to throw it in the trash or flush it? I decided it's probably the former (maybe just because I've been around a lot of old fragile plumbing), but it probably doesn't make much difference.

Or, if I bike to work, I have to wash an extra set of clothing vs driving. Hmm, let's see: electricity, water, and soap to do a fraction of a load of laundry, or gasoline to pull two tons of metal for 9 miles? I think we have a winner there.

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The modern world has all sorts of problems we never anticipated. Our cell phones, for example, are pretty close to a Star Trek communicator, but you never saw Kirk going "Um, Spock, could you buzz my communicator? I don't know where I put it."

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Parking around my buildings has been a problem for a while, as it has been around most of the main campus. Either the parking garages are only a couple levels deep and there aren't enough spaces, or they are deep enough... and there's a Balrog on the bottom level.

That being said, we do actually have plenty of parking now. The building next to us, which is under construction, isn't finished - but its parking garage is, and while it's a little farther than our own garage, it beats the valet (sometimes blocked in, have to get your key back from security if you're there late) or the old Eddie Bauer lot (almost half a mile away). 'Tis a most beautiful sight to the Seattle-ite: a broad open expanse of empty parking spaces.

Boat Festival

I've gone from saying "so people don't think I'm insane" to "so fewer people notice I'm insane."

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Written Wednesday:

Last night I was at Jazz Alley (great venue, BTW), and I couldn't help but notice the loops on the ceiling fans looked just like handles. We were sitting on these perch seats right below the ceiling, so we were actually looking down at the fans. I kept thinking how fun it would be to leap off the balcony and catch the fan handles and swing around. Yeah... mind of a five year old hiding in the body of a twenty six year old.

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Sometimes I get sick of being a weirdo. I'm contrary enough that I often try to go against whatever people say usually is the case, but sometimes I get really tired of being the exception to everything. Especially things like, "this usually works well for people." I really wish it did.

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Latest source of amusement: making events up, and then attributing other things to them. For instance, toward the end of this week, Shauna and I were driving into Seattle through this awful traffic, and noticed many, many boats out - lines of them out into Lake Washington near Montlake, Portage Bay packed to the gills. In speculating what this was, I said, "maybe there's a Seattle Boat Festival," which sounds reasonable, since hey, if any city is going to have a boat festival, it would be Seattle, right? So we had a good laugh. Further on, Shauna made some further comment wondering about the cause of the awful traffic, and I said, "Mmm, must be the Boat Festival."

So, turns out it's just opening day of boating season. That's almost a Boat Festival.

Random Thoughts

My machine at work is named Haste (in keeping with my Berkeley Street Names Theme). That means that while I'm waiting for a webpage to load from my machine, the status bar says "Waiting for haste...". That could be an observation about life, and the futility and counterproductivity of hurrying. But mostly it's a neat coincidence.

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Webolution: However tempting it might be, with the Web 2.0 doing much what the initial Dot Com Boom hoped for, let's not bring back this word. It reeks of the Dot Com Bust. It's the kind of word that screams, We're going to get overenthused about something and fail spectacularly, trying to force technologies and services on people who don't want them, don't trust you, and don't understand, and piss away many billions of dollars in the process.

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Sometimes, it doesn't take much to make you feel clever. Today I realized I could eat carrots in my office.

Okay, maybe that doesn't sound like much, but consider the problem: I try to set everything up so that I can focus on work with as little maintenance as possible. For this purpose, I'm kind of high-maintenance, in the sense that I need to eat frequently, and I strongly prefer real food (where real implies the largest reasonably attainable subset of {local, organic, unprocessed, nutritious}). I also get distracted by things like people walking in the hall outside my office. For the former, I got a mini fridge, and I need foods that I don't have to think much or do much to eat. Carrots? Perfect! No cooking, no portion commitment, no extra container or utensil. Just type and munch. For the latter problem... I spend a fair amount of time seeking out good background music, which is mostly techno/trance plus a little choir music. Something I don't need to pay attention to; it just has to be pleasant and keep me from needing to be aware of anything besides my screens. My precious, precious screens.

Does It Come In A Jar?

I parsed this as, "A Child's Mind: On Sale Now for $5.00":

Why I'm Not In Marketing, Part III

ASP: Don't worry, it doesn't byte.

Greyhound: Now with 50% more mildew on the sign!
(I'd really like to find a picture of the Seattle Greyhound station to put with this one)

The Letter H: Because there's a big difference between "airless" and "hairless."

You didn't think letters needed advertising, did you?

Engage Duffel

Funny what things do and don't change when you get more money. Dumpster diving, for instance. You'd think I make enough that I wouldn't be interested in this, but hey, it's still free stuff that just needs a little washing. Yesterday afternoon I took the trash out, and I saw an Army duffel bag full of clothes sitting in the dumpster. Of course, I couldn't resist the urge to climb up and try to pull it out - and I found out that those scenes with Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse engaging Duffel were no exaggeration: this thing probably weighed 80 lbs. So, I pulled most of the clothes out first, then pulled maybe the last third with the bag. Also found a couple of sheets (black beech sateen, I think - score!). Kind of sad - you can pretty much guess what happened: guy gets back from the military and gets dumped, and his girlfriend throws his stuff away. Well, more for me, and it's in the washing machine right now... with bleach.

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Have you ever spent all day deciding what to do, not done anything, and realized that you could have done most of the stuff you were considering if you'd just picked something and gotten moving?

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Right next door to my house (I can see it out the living room windows) is a big church parking lot which is usually empty (except, as you might expect, Sunday mornings). Last night, I suddenly saw it differently: no longer just a place where the faithful leave their vehicles, but a giant rollerblading rink. Only took me four months living here to think of that. But they were four dark rainy gray months that didn't really lend themselves to thinking of outdoor activities that work better on dry ground.

Thoughts for Pi Day

Happy Pi Day! I missed 1:59, both of them. Oh well. I missed 12:34:56 7/8/90 too. I don't think it made any difference. I had a good day today anyway :-)

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There is no good amount of email, i.e., nothing between "Nobody loves me!" and "Ack, leave me alone, people!"

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Plants in Hawaii go about life differently from plants on the mainland. Here, they grow a little, think about it, then maybe grow a little more. In Hawaii, it's more like, "GROW GROW GROW GROW COMEONHURRYUP! GROW GROW GROW GROW GROW...." til they're nothing but leggy green monsters.

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Oh, yeah, and it looks like this post actually missed Pi Day by 9 minutes. It's still Pi Day in 4 timezones west of here (did I count right?).

Daylight Savings

Are my savings of daylight FDIC insured? Can I collect interest on them? Is there a daylight 401(k)? Or maybe 401(d)? Do I have to pay luminosity gains tax? Can I spend any of the savings in December, when I really need them? Or do I just get more light after I retire? Is that what the light at the end of the tunnel is, all that daylight you saved throughout your life?

Density of Meaning in Code

If you're in the tech field, chances are you've heard the statistic that industry programmers average 3 lines of code per day. If you're in school, you don't believe it. But, let me tell you, in school, I had no trouble cracking out a thousand lines of code in one day, like many CS students. Now, I work at Microsoft, and yeah, I probably average 3 lines of code per day. I got to thinking about this a couple of weeks ago, when I spent more than half a day tracking down a bug that I fixed by moving one line of code down 100 lines, into another function. Not only did this work, it was probably the best way to fix the problem (that feature has since been tested and found to have no bugs). I mentioned this to one of my coworkers (who's a great coder), and he said we should be doing more of that kind of fixes, because it usually means you've understood the real problem, rather than just trying stuff until the issue magically goes away, and never knowing why.

This seems to be a property of large systems: the bigger the code base, the more effect you can have with a given number of lines of code. In fact, I'd argue that this is part of the nature of coding: the first time you need to create something (a window, say), you have to create the entire thing (lay out the window, add all the styles, etc). The second time on, you can just make another one of what you already have (you can make arbitrarily many windows with just a for-loop calling the constructor). It's a property of electronic things that once they exist, they're easy to copy. This manifests in code as being able to do more and more, the more code you have. Each line can do more, and thus means more, in the sense of having more semantic/visual/effectuality significance. The density of meaning increases as you have more code.

Actually Doing Stuff, Part 2

I don't think people ever do things they really don't like, at least not for more than short periods of time. But, you say, I do it all the time! Work, maybe, or school. But you must like something about it, at least the results, enough to keep you going. Or maybe you, unlike me, have that mystical thing called "willpower." Although I think Scott Adams was right in saying that people don't really have willpower; it's that people need a certain base level of happiness, up to which they'll work very hard to get, but after which they don't care much. So, that actualized starlet may really have a much easier time than you turning down the ice cream; for her, it's extra, but for you, may be the only good thing in your day. (I'll find the link to that post soon....)

I think I may be particularly bad, though, at making myself do things I don't like. Maybe this is due to some combination of liking most things I've tried for most of my life, and not having anybody around telling me that I should do things I don't like. I'm tempted to call it a moral failing and berate myself mercilessly for it, but that has a bad way of making me dangerously miserable, so I've decided not to try that approach anymore. It seems far more productive (not to mention safer) to just get to like more things. Sure, some things are harder to like than others, but once you get into liking something, it's much easier to get into a positive feedback cycle of doing something more, getting better at it, and liking it more. So that seems like pretty good motivation for attempting to get things done this way.

I try to do this with exercise, for instance. It is deliberate that I'm not biking to work right now: I wouldn't enjoy it, and it's extremely important to me to preserve my love of biking. If I still love it, it's easy enough to pick up riding to work again when the weather gets better, and I still go on rides for fun on sunny weekends (like this past one), which is at least some exercise. It's the same reason I'm not super hardcore about hills: don't like them; don't want to build up unpleasant associations. I find I take on more hills as I get more into it anyway, and then I don't mind, so I'm not very motivated to force myself into it when I don't feel like it; I'll get further faster if I just focus on enjoying it and doing it the way I enjoy it.

Hobbies and exercise seem to be the best examples of this, or at least the most obvious (I could list many more specifics - dance, massage, photography), but I think it applies just as much and probably more at work. I like my job, and I don't think I'd be very good at if I didn't. If I'm feeling unfocused, I can usually get myself back on track by going back to the root of why I like programming: it's all puzzle-solving. Even stupid annoying bugs are just another set of clues to unravel, the process of which can be fun, even if the end result seems kind of pointless.

Wow, blogging before I go to work... I am getting up earlier. It did only take me about 20 minutes to write this, though....

Now, off to solve puzzles.