I’m still trying to find the right way to say it - My trouble with school boils down to the fact that all too often they rely on me to have some advanced knowledge that they refuse to teach. I’m well aware from getting hit over the head enough times that I learn a different way. Maybe it’s reasonable to expect most people can make up a business plan out of their imagination. It doesn’t seem like my group can. To me it’s no wonder. I’d much rather take this time and effort and apply it to a real situation in my life. Do the hard stuff with an idea I already understand. I finally respect the artifice of it - the proper form of documents for each person you need to impress - but by the time I figure out what’s needed, there’s hardly any time left to do it. The trial by fire stuff is great for weeding people out, but whenever I tried to suggest that I would be the one getting weeded out, everybody thought it was nonsense - that I was being defeatist. There are times to make rational calculations about future outcomes, you know.
I was reading Language Log just now, and thinking about a few of the articles when it struck me that in a text like this law, all the sentences are finely crafted to play a specific role. They’re - dare I say it - almost subversive. You can read those sentences, and know the surface meaning instantly. But look closer, and you see how they might snag you. Traps not so hidden. What’s more, the effect is partly due to the fact that with laws, as wordy as they get, the economy of words is still brutal. Imagine how long it could be if they decided to spell it all out. Of course they don’t want people to be able to read it. It’s code, not communication.
Just wondering aloud: In the absence of an effective method, should I refrain from action?
Posted in school, infogami-blog, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 28 May 2006 19:11:00 GMT
I noticed that with work and school weeks, the daily sleep cycle, and larger intervals like monthly payments or school semesters, I have to take an obsessive interest in time. Any sort of deadline sticks pins into the flow of time and obstructs it. Nothing so strange there, but I can’t seem to meet those requirements casually. I seem to need to obsess over when things need to happen, and this creates a high level of anxiety. On the one hand, during a typical work day, I’m hunting for little scraps of time to work on tasks that would take hours of clear-headed focus. When I actually get to go home and have about four hours to myself, I don’t experience time as the gift it should be. When I get a day off, I see only hour after hour of wasteland. I wonder if I’m not at the point of no return: The only way to relieve the anxiety is to turn my back on everything. I’m afraid I might have wandered off to take a walk too many times when I had serious work to do.
It fascinates me that business management would come up with the task. It works great when you already know what needs to be done. You can’t do it all yourself, because it has to be completed quickly, and a lot of different parts need to be done in parallel. So, it is easy to see that some things are knowable but not doable by one person. In truth, nothing is really knowable. Some things are just more routine than others. Some of the oldest, most reliable procedures still get messed up sometimes, but when you move into the unknown, you’re really asking for trouble. I thought I might learn something about breaking apart the things I need to do. At work I’ve developed a kind of system: lists of reminders. But they’re still not really tasks. Every item on the list is shorthand. Some items are simple units that can be completed, but other items are about ongoing processes.
Posted in school, infogami-blog, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 28 May 2006 14:40:00 GMT
There is not much of a guiding idea to my group project. We don’t know what we’re doing. And really, why would we? I got the impression that some of the other groups were really getting along and coming up with good ideas. Not us. I suck as the leader, but I still doubt anybody else would have done better. There are just so many new concepts. Just because I know how to use some Microsoft Office programs, doesn’t mean I’m suddenly also going to know what makes sense as a task on a Gantt Chart. I have to have a really intimate idea of what is supposed to happen before I can start to explain it to people. The closest I’ve come to leading the group is asking “Does anybody know what we’re doing?”
I have endless difficulties with the frame of reference. I never know if we are discussing a real-world analogy, an assignment for the group to hand in, or a suggestion for how our group should be working. More than once I found out later that I was too hasty with a categorization. I find the teacher much too vague for the onslaught of information. This is the sort of material I would slow down and mark out. Once again, we would benfit from a kind of workshop. We could take actual concrete examples and examine what was actually done.
Do you think I’m going to start making Gantt charts for the things I do? Some of it is really complicated. I can map out a trip to the Laundry down to the minute, and program in slack time and milestones. Of course, it would take me longer than returning with a load of laundry, but it would be good practice.
Posted in school, infogami-blog | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 28 May 2006 04:32:00 GMT
I don’t understand what I’m doing anymore. Why am I attempting this complicated odyssey when I don’t have the basics under control?
All or nothing is NOT my style. I do a lot better with a gradual process. I’m sick of not being able to do things my way; of feeling tremendous weight on my shoulders when I’m trying to break out. Why am I always finding out too late that I’ve signed up for a brutal commitment?
In other news, I don’t think Christina is talking to me anymore. I didn’t expect this to happen. She obviously thinks I abandoned her Sunday. It makes me really angry that she thinks that when I was waiting for her a few blocks away. It’s nice to have a girlfriend sometimes, but the last thing I need is somebody to make more trouble for me when I’m already living on the edge.
Posted in infogami-blog, relationship-angst, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 27 May 2006 17:49:00 GMT
Everything simple. On my terms. On my schedule. No friction between thinking and doing. Charm and Grace. No pushing myself. Achievements without anxiety. I think I know what is important, but it requires a serious commitment, and it could be a serious disaster if I’m wrong. I can’t be afraid to buck the trend - to blaze my own path - but that would mean embracing disaster. The stakes are higher. But I’m not sure if that is true: This slow tailspin I’m in now may just as well be worse.
So what do I do? No, think about the question. What is it that I do? Not: What should I do.
I played hookie from the group meeting. Somehow we need documentation by Saturday night, and a slideshow Tuesday. I think maybe I have to let go. But I predict that letting go will mean doing nothing. Won’t I fall down?
Posted in school, infogami-blog | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 26 May 2006 01:39:00 GMT
Reviewing a long post from April, this passage struck me. The painters were there seven weeks ago, and I’m still in the early phases of cleaning up after them. This bit takes on new life now that I’ve been banging my head on Project Management for a while…
Look at how it is in my life: Exceptional efforts don’t get me anywhere. I would burn out well before anyone would appreciate what I’ve done. So, I realized that the steady climb is worth more. But my mind crackles with energy until I pass out – so two problems: I can’t always meet low expectations, and when mediocre work is expected, I’m writing symphonies. I don’t want to lose that ability, but on the other hand, I have to be able to stick to something long enough to finish. There’s the rub.
Posted in infogami-blog, school, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 25 May 2006 22:07:00 GMT
We just had a big party in the office for two coworkers who are leaving. So it’s not a normal day at work today. I got throught the work I had to do for the email newsletter, and sent some book orders, and then I was hoping to sneak in a little school work. After this, I have to go to a group meeting for Project Management. Sometimes I’m so useless after a day at work.
Sam, one of the driving forces behind the party, remarked this morning that I should have invited Christina. Funny, that. I was going to invite her Sunday, but as far as I can tell, she’s not talking to me right now. Maybe it’s just selfish of me, but I didn’t really want her to come to the party. She is bitter about some of the managers, and she left the company because she felt shafted. She would have had to get all the way over here from Vienna. And, most importantly, I can’t spend any time with her - I’ve got to go to the group meeting. I don’t doubt that she would have pouted about me running off to school. It’s all academic now. She has free time right now, and I don’t.
I don’t like the chilling effect of hard work. It threatens to invade all aspects of my life and shut everything else down. I don’t mind hard work that I understand, but whenever I take it up a notch to hard work that I don’t understand, there is always some kind of disaster. This is a concept nobody else in my life seems to get. Hard work that I don’t understand is a time sink. My entire life could get sucked down that drain. I don’t have enough time in my busy schedule to put things aside as needed. There is no real break for me - everything I put off is still waiting for me later, in bigger, badder piles. I want to be able to throttle back as appropriate when the stress gets too intense. There have been plenty of other times when I could have handled twice the workload I was given. It just left me soft and unprepared.
I’ve been waiting patiently for a chance to spend time with my girlfriend, and it can’t just be when she’s ready. I have to be ready for it too. She broods about things for a long time, then suddenly when she’s happy, she expects me to drop everything and come out to play. Doesn’t she realize that?
Posted in relationship-angst, infogami-blog, school, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 25 May 2006 21:44:00 GMT
Which you might call: The Problem With Ideas Part II
Here’s a live example of me having an idea. And watch for why I think ideas take over…
Stop. Rewind. Imagine I’m back in Project Management class on the first night. But this time I’ve seen TV advertising’s DVR challenge at News.com.
Because I’m dirt poor, I haven’t been able to indulge in gadgets. I haven’t sampled the many cable and satellite television options. Why would I want to watch more TV, anyway? It’s hard to have a conversation with people sometimes, because I can’t figure out what shows they’re talking about. But what a tremendous waste of my time it would be to remain knowledgeable. Are there scholarly journals I could read to keep abreast? (Yeah - If you consider Entertainment Weekly) It’s bad enough I have to watch Simpsons Reruns.
I have been paying a little attention to the commercials on broadcast TV. For many years, I’ve been fascinated by the more artistic examples. Most of the clever ideas get on my nerves because of frequency. I’m really annoyed by one commercial split into two parts and run separated by another commercial. Half of the commercials seem to be about cars. Which I find weird, since I think of cars as a necessary evil - something for special occasions. I don’t have one, I don’t want one, but I will probably have to get one. And the next one I get is going to have to be cheap.
So, another thing I don’t have is a DVR. I have taped the occasional show. Alias and Firefly were on nights with frequent distractions, like late night bookstore inventory shifts. I got in the habit of taping every episode so I could watch them in sequence, and not be left with copies of only the episodes I missed. From the patterns of my computer usage, I already know that I prefer to have whole collections of related material to analyze/enjoy. It’s funny to look back five years at the commercials that were on when I couldn’t be at home. My instinct has always been to skip the commercials and that’s a big pain in playback. But I realized that I don’t hate commercials per se, I just don’t like the interruption.
Maybe cable could have metered channels. Think about it. You pay while you watch shows, and the system pays you back when you watch ads. That way, you could choose the balance. It would even be possible to make money by dedicating a lot of time to watching only ads. Sounds a bit like selling electricity back to the power company by installing solar panels. This aspect just occurred to me while I was thinking about being able to watch the commercials if you wanted to. Some of them are interesting, and worth seeing once, or even more times when they’re really good. And, you can already see that a lot of people wouldn’t mind sending tracking data back through the system. Heck, that news.com article talks about having fun with a kind of scavenger hunt.
Is this a useful idea? Was there an idea here at all? Can someone explaint to me what it was? Would it have worked in the context of something called “Information Technology Project Management”? Have I just been rambling through a web of ideas? Fragile as in the web a spider weaves?
Maybe there are several ideas that I’m mashing together. Is that such a bad thing?
The question becomes: I imagine a cable or satellite TV system with metered viewing. The high-tech viewer tracking problem is largely tackled by your Nielsons, or at least a lot of energy is going into it. The viewers don’t just keep a journal anymore. You probably need TVs with motion detectors and IR sensors to register warm bodies. Maybe viewers have to ‘click in’ to keep the segments loading. That would get truly annoying with a long program, but with shorts or ad viewing it would make perfect sense. There is an ancillary way in which the program distribution also carries tracking data, or becomes a conduit for better targeted marketing. Surely, a lot of people are engaged in designing this type of system right now at Microsoft or wherever. Otherwise, why all the Media Center PCs? And floods of strange advertising patents? I think for some of these reasons there are some real barriers to entry.
What I’m learning about myself is that - at least in this realm - I am painfully literal. Daydreams of this variety are fun, but anything I can’t accomplish myself seems like a lost cause. My world is clamped down right now. I still find it amusingly creepy to see people with cellphone headsets, little music players, and other strap-on gadgetry I can’t identify. I clamp down on my ideas for a good reason. I’ll never prove anything to anybody with pipe dreams about rolling out web applications to a school system (Really - that’s the project my group is working on). I can’t seem to wrap my mind around a fabulously large project, even if we are just making up the details. It would seem a whole lot more useful to concentrate on things I could actually do. That making up the details part takes it too far from reality, in my view, to do any good.
Posted in infogami-blog, school, film-and-TV, computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 24 May 2006 20:10:00 GMT
What does knowledge consist of? If knowledge is supposed to have some utility, than most of what I know is useless in my current situation. What is the point of anything? I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, so I can’t know what I’m supposed to be learning. I already know so much… I expect I can just start working, and it won’t be any different than anybody else.
Look at what I just wrote in BIS325:
Effective navigation is essential in a quality web site. Identify effective navigation techniques and post links to examples on the web.
Pike Place Fish Market
This might have something to do with my own peculiar strengths and weaknesses, but I think good navigation should be very easy. It is a trivial task, once you know what exactly it is that you offer. The fish market sells fish, so does the web site also sell fish?
Two kinds of people arrive at a web site in my estimation: The first kind know your business already, and are expecting to see something in particular. So their thought process is “Where’s the fish?” Sometimes those people know the name, and sometimes they arrive from a search engine. The second kind are exploring, don’t know what they are looking for, and see what is available.
Every design has to consider both types of user. The designer might make a conscious decision to snub the explorers, but a portion of those users wind up as customers, so there is still some value to each of those visits.
Which brings us to the navigation: Good navigation accommodates both types of users. The categories have to be worded just so. Users miss what they are looking for because the right link suggests something that they aren’t looking for. It is a process of elimination. Users are not necessarily in a hurry, but something about the computer makes everybody impatient.
Posted in infogami-blog, school, web-craft, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 23 May 2006 22:44:00 GMT
I’m hoping it does me some good to constantly complain. The particular hope is that I am forced to think about all sides of an issue. Although, I imagine it might cause the reverse; cause me to channel my thoughts on well-worn pathways.
It is with this idea in mind that I bring up some thoughts about Business Management in General, and this Project Management class I’m in, but most specifically… the Group Project. I promise not to merely complain! I have in mind a way to use my complaints as a rubric to apply to other problems:
When we sat down in our groups that first night of class, we were lacking some of the puzzle pieces. If I hear the phrase “That’s the way it is in Real Life” one more time, I’m going to scream. Here are a few ways in which that is correct, but I’ve added some rebuttals:
- You’re not going to know the people in your team. Not true all the time. You probably have some working knowledge of the people in your team. It may not be necessary, but that kind of familiarity is going to go a long way towards bridging other gaps.
- You’re not going to get to choose the project. Who says? And anyway, sometimes having a project imposed on you is pleasant. I see myself as a problem-solver. I like a challange. We wound up having a brainstorming session where we had difficulty communicating ideas with each other because, once again, we lack a shared background, and more than that, we’re not part of an organization engaged in business. A bunch of students are in the business of studying. A bunch of employees have already been engaged in that business activity. Add a few new hires to the mix, and it’s only different by degrees. BTW, do people really sit around in groups coming up with ideas for projects? Because, I think ideas come from immediate needs. In the Real World, I have to imagine that a superior either has an idea to peddle, or a widely acknowledged problem exists, and it’s just sitting out there like a target for the next clever person who cares enough to try / thinks they can get the glory. Yet another way that the people who will constitute your real group have a shared context.
- People have different strengths and weeknesses. Granted. You’re not going to know up front who is best suited for which tasks. But now I’m seeing a problem with group work altogether. I was looking at it like a sports team, and don’t I plenty of sports analogies in business school? But there are more customer-supplier relationships than anything else, aren’t there? We as a culture seem to love these scenarios where two groups of five guys battle it out on a basketball court, and it looks like they are “teams”. It’s not really about those guys - they’re only the visible part of the organization, so everybody tends to focus on them. Some of them are just there in case another guy gets tired, or injured.
- My list is falling apart. That’s a good enough reason to stop. Looking back, I haven’t changed my mind. No one Real World factor ruins it. It’s about how the deck has to be stacked for the sake of a class. If real world aspects are to be mastered, maybe this isn’t the forum for doing it.
In addition to all this, something I consider my own peculiar problem: Artificial situations bug me. Artificial situations do not fall on a spectrum from Abstract to Concrete, or from General to Particular. Artificial situations pretend to be more concrete or particular than they really are. You lose the power of being abstract or general without really gaining much. I think the class I’m in sends the wrong message: Through this process of making things up, you will prepare yourself. But you’re skipping the power tools of generality, and you’re not getting any real experiences that allow you to build up the tools from the particulars. The worst part of it is, those tools are laying out for the taking. Other people have developed the healthy attitude “Don’t waste your time with things that aren’t on the test.” And I’m under too much stress to really try out the tools in the short run.
Why would you want to be specific with false detail? Now I realize that I’ve suddenly tarred all fiction writing. But think again: Not all fiction is needlessly artificial. Good fiction is true in the details, even if that particular story never happened. The artifice in fiction is surely the source of endless debate. I don’t even care for narrative all that much. Give me an idea-space to explore any day. I’ve heard a lot of the arguments, so you can probably save it: I think I know what good fiction consists of, and I think there are a lot of crappy writers out there, in addition to the good writers who make good novels out of ideas I don’t care about. There is a lot of crappy non-fiction too. I like a good novel, when I can find one, I prefer good nonfiction that isn’t so worried about telling a story, but best of all is a textbook. That’s right, I said textbook. I guess deep down I’m a scientist.
Posted in infogami-blog, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 21 May 2006 17:10:00 GMT
