With the new year comes new hope. While Dec 31st and January 1st are really no different, something changes in the mind… the past and the future, clearly delineated in a unique way.

I’ve struggled with what I can only call “burnout” for some time now. More simply put, its that unceasing need to “take a holiday”, but, even with some time off here and there the need is unceasing. Work, of any kind, whether completing a company project, personal open source project, or just taking out the trash, just seems burdensome. The time spent thinking about a task exceeds the time it would take to complete the task in exponential quantities.

This thinking is better clarified in conventional marketing acronym: FUD. FUD is used in non-obvious context such as “Thats FUD,” but the acronym in fact stands for those old standby emotions that destroy anything good and pure: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The fear that you’ll fail, the uncertainty on whether you can deliver, and the doubt that you have any real ability or usefulness at all, or that there is even any point. Christians would pinpoint these as the great weapons of Satan, whereas the secular would disregard it as simple depression.

FUD can result from both success and failure. You do something well and fear the inability to repeat the performance or you do something poorly and doubt your own ability. A quote that has always haunted me came from Henry Ford, a seemingly limitless fountain of wisdom, that goes like this: “You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.” With a great deal of shame I admit that the first time I heard this my internal voice admitted: “It’s worked pretty well for me.”

Proverbs 12:18 say “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” Churchill said, “To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.” It only takes a couple reckless words, commonly wrapped in meaningless disclaimers like “constructive criticism” or “just kidding” to open the flood gates of personal FUD.

All this really comes down to is a sense of ambiguity and confusion. What lies around the next corner? Where is all this leading? Will the result justify the effort? Will I ever get any better? A thousand questions with no foreseeable answer that conspire to keep you from even making the attempt.

The result is stress, your bodies reaction to imminent danger, real or imagined. More commonly in this day and age, the latter.

This truly is the information age. While I once looked at it as a catchy phrase for journalists, I sure many thought the same of the “industrial revolution”. The tipping point between a “phenomenon” and an “age” is mass acceptance by the culture with permanent integration. My favorite descriptive blurb is “when grandma does it.” While telecommunications have for decades carried our voices around the world, in this information age we now get all the information delivered, literally, to our pockets. And that reality is catching up to me.

This is not an uncommon thing really… while many of us have prided ourselves on brandishing gadgets like wireless PDA’s, iPhones, laptops, BlackBerry’s and all manner of cell phone, the strain is starting to wear thin. Being constantly connected and accessible was once of great novelty… now its a lurking menace.

In the last couple weeks several things have occurred to me that I find disturbing and I’ve tried to be honest to them. For instance, I’ve noticed that frequently my pulse is too high. Maybe thats part of getting older, an awareness of your own beating heart, but so be it. Over time I came to realize that there are several identifiable triggers that raise my heart rate, a symptom of acute stress:

• If my BlackBerry vibrates. I get 2 vibrations for a message, and I get 2 vibrations followed by a ring for a phone call. The first vibration spikes my heart rate commonly, and then again waiting for the ring which commonly, “thankfully” I think, doesn’t come.
• When I look at my Inbox. Mailing lists are a godsend and a satanic curse. Even the most restrained mailing lists consists of perhaps 5% material you care about, the rest gets quickly scanned and ignored. As a SA I get automated reports and monitoring alerts which make it all the worse. And, of course, there is both personal and business mail boxes.
• When instant messages come in for an unexpected source. What am I going to be asked to do? What didn’t I yet do? They probly aren’t just saying hello and IM’s take longer than phone conversations.
• …

All these stresses come from what some call “information overload”. Too many inputs from too many directions.

Information overload is helped along by the ease in which people can create and communicate in the information age. I once saw a great PBS documentary on the tools of writing, wherein someone noted that in centuries gone by writing with quill and ink was a slow and arduous task. Only a few works could be put to paper before the ink ran out and you had to stop, this added to the speed at which a quill scrapes over paper. The result, he argued, was a time when thoughts could be thought and re-thought, formed and re-formed, even during the writing process itself, leading to more thoughtful and concise writing that we’ve seen since the invention of the typewriter. I combine this with the ability to communicate in seconds via email or IM; not only can you input ideas quickly, perhaps more quickly than you can convince them, but you can direct them at others without a thought. The result is a maelstrom of requests and comments that are totally unnecessary given a little thought.

All this plays into a solution: GTD. David Allen’s Getting Things Done is a wonderful way of framing all this together into a system by which we can attack the underlying problems.

I realized, quite by chance, the other day that my elevated stress levels are symptoms of a total loss of “control”. What I’ve needed to do is execute the GTD work flow of Collect, Process, Organize, Review, and Do. There are a million little things, all around me, all the time, that need doing, and the noise in my head is so loud from all these personal reminders that I’ve just tuned them out completely and gone into panic mode.

I came to this conclusion indirectly trying to attack a small part of the problem actually. As part of my “information age” breakdown, I’ve suddenly become aware that I’ve transitioned from a person who’s created to little into a person who’s created too much. Code, scripts, notes, configs, scattered everywhere. I’ve transitioned from older more trustworthy SCM’s for management (Subversion) to newer more “hip” solutions (Mercurial) and paid the penalty, in particular because distributed SCM’s are lousy if you want to manage a golden archive of growing data in a (duh) centralized place.

Added to this is a realization of my own digital mismanagement. I’ve never in my life taken pictures with film, it has always been digital. My first Sony Mavica used floppy disks, a necessity at the time due to the absence of digital camera drivers for UNIX systems, with the added advantage of utilizing a cheap medium that could be archived (“tossed in a box”). But when I upgraded to a Canon PowerShot I suddenly had to download my pictures. The unique thing about pictures, for me, is that in the short term they seem insignificant… but months and years later they are invaluable. There are years of pictures that I’m simply uncertain of where they are, somewhere in a pile of hard drives, I hope.

And even my domains. I bought “clanrockwood.com” when Nova was born to provide updates to family without disturbing us during the first few months. I thought I’d continued to renew the domain, but a recent “What is going on with that domain anyway?” check made me realize that its been snatched away and I need to spend time auditing my records to see at what point I missed a renewal or allowed someone else to park it.

I’ve created a small empire of digital artifacts and, frankly, I don’t know where half of them are. A sad statement for a professional who views storage as his specialty. I only take comfort in statements such as “Who has the worst cars? Mechanics.” True or not, it dulls the pain a bit. Frankly, I need to take a week off work just to become a full time data archaeologist, seeking out and collecting all my scattered bits and calculating the damage.

—

While watching a presentation by Linus Torvalds at Google about ‘Git’, I noticed another Google Talk by David Allen on GTD. This served as a much needed wake up call: I’d fallen off the wagon. I was still using my planner, but I wasn’t “collecting” what I needed to do but rather recording what I’d done. Those millions of little items seemed too insignificant to collect and the few that I did put in my planner just got pushed from day to day.

I’m happy to say, however, that I’m turning it around! I added additional pages to my planner that very day and just started writing down everything, not matter how insignificant. “Pickup shoe in front yard”, “Clean trash out of truck”, nothing omited. Then I immediately took all those “single step” items and ran around the house in a blaze doing them. Anytime I saw something, anything, that “bugged” me or gave me the slightest hint of “needs doing” I immediately attended to it. In particular David says in the video (above) “Anything thats on your desk thats not equipment, reference, or decoration is something that needs doing.” That struck a cord. I cleaned off my desktop (physical and virtual) and removed anything that didn’t need to be there. And, by the end of the day, I felt significantly better. I was on the path to having control again.

I should also credit Sun Blogger David Pickens. In an attempt to troubleshoot the symptoms I began relying on an RSS reader to cut down on my excess information input, its less stressful to get it all delivered than to hop sites looking for it. Since I started actively reading the feeds I saw several GTD posts from David and those served as the nudges I needed to push me in the right direction, which finally converged when I watch David Allen’s Google talk.

So I’m on that path. I’m going to rely increasingly on RSS feeds, adopt “Inbox Zero” concepts with earnest, remove myself from any mailing list in which read less than 50% of by volume, and continually seek out new ways to acknowledge and handle “the little things” that add up. One simple change I’m making is changing the ring styles of my phones, using audible only tones that inform my brain before my hip. Vanity Vanity, all is Vanity, there is nothing new under the sun…. as always, the joy of rediscovering life’s little realities: ignore the insignificant and soon enough it won’t be.

Here are my take away bullet points that I’m going to try to incorporate more into my personal day-to-day operations:

• Consolidate information inputs as much as possible.
• Use applications with simplistic interfaces that limit the quantity of information present to you. This can be accomplished with folders or by view mail 10 at a time rather than a never-ending list.
• Switch ring tones from time-to-time to keep your mind from anticipating.
• Always collect items that require action beyond the thought or that aren’t handled on the spot.
• Don’t stop collection just because you hit the end of the page… insert another one and keep going.
• Don’t slip into collecting only work items.
• Don’t consider anything insignificant.
• If you feel any form of stress symptom, stop and analyze the situation to determine the trigger and record it then and there.
• Spent time doing “non-productive” tasks outside of the routine. Read a history book, philosophy, fiction… supply your brain with non-routine inputs.
• Play games more.
• Take commitments seriously… if there is doubt about the ability to deliver don’t commit, or at the least hedge the commitment “I’ll try, but don’t make me a blocker.”
• Compliment others, lift people up frequently, only criticize them when positive connentation is crystal clear.
• Let the “shoulda, coulda, woulda” crap go. ‘Do, or do not. There is no try.’

One final thought. What surprised me the most in this thought experiment was that its easy to mis-interpret stress. Commonly the desire for a vacation is to get away from work… but sometimes, in my case, work wasn’t expressly the problem, its was the way in which I was managing both my work and personal life. If I was to take a vacation the real purpose would have to be to switch focus to non-work tasks that need completion, taking a trip to Hawaii wouldn’t actually solve anything. Like David Allen says, just as in martial arts, its about clearing the area and returning to calm so you can be ready for the next input.

I was excited to hear that Warner Brothers is dropping support for HD-DVD. That seems like whats needed to break the stalemate between the BluRay/HD-DVD cold-war. To date I’ve not gotten involved, frankly. I watch High Def movies, but thanks to Comcast I can watch HD “OnDemand”.

Tim Bray was recently asking around about HD setups… I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on the matter in a general way because I have unique concerns.

I upgraded to HD last year. Truth be told, it was the first TV I’ve bought because everything prior was a hand me down tube that someone else was dumping. When I finally convinced Tamarah that it was time to upgrade I had some special concerns. First, it has to be cheap enough to buy cash, thus I set my budget at $2,000, no more. Secondly, HDMI is a pretty awesome inter-connect, so I wanted as many HDMI ports as possible. Thirdly, it needs to be an appropriate size for our living room configuration (which comes out to about 42″, anything larger is just silly for our living room). And finally, I need something really practical, and I love the idea of wall mounting, now or in the future.

Wall mount-ability was a big issue for me. If you think about it, the TV in most homes is like a shrine, everything is build around it. I like TV as much as the next guy and I enjoy films, but my TV is not the center of my life and neither should it be the center of my home. Wall mounting I think makes your TV a part of the room while not the center. I don’t currently wall mount, the room just isn’t in a good configuration for it, but I like the option to do so.

The big question becomes whether to go LCD or Plasma. I chose Plasma for the following reasons:

• Plasma’s are cheaper now. Bigger screen at lower cost.
• Plasma’s have _real_ blacks. My previous hand-me-down tubes had horrible color problems and when watching dark SciFi or old B/W pictures you just go nuts looking at dark green instead of black.
• Plasma’s are glass! Ya, thats right. LCD screens are not hard coated (not that I’ve seen) but rather soft. With young kids they are going to hit it, touch it, draw on it, throw things at it, etc. I have well behaved kids, but accidents happen. With an LCD they may damage the soft surface… with Plasma the glass is tougher and easier to clean.

The only downside to Plasma, besides being slightly heavier, is that they are really hot. I don’t think the kids could burn themselves, but I warn them all the same.

I will also note that Plasma can and do “burn”. We put “The Little Mermaid” on for Nova one day, and the screen was left on after the movie finished for a couple hours. The root menu has very contrasting colors and after I noticed and turned off the screen you could still see the imprint for several hours. Thankfully the anti-burn is pretty good and within a day it was good as new. If an image were left static for a day or longer, I’m not sure how permanent the effects could be, but this is only a potential concern if using the screen as a computer monitor… this alone may warrant computer users moving to LCD.

I personally chose to buy a Philips 42″ Plasma from Costco. I think I paid like $1299 or something for it, which was the best price around that I could find at the time. It has dual HDMI inputs and lots of features. While there are better screens around, the Sharp’s caught my eye, the cost savings was more appealing that a moderate improvement in picture quality.

Another reason for “cheaping out” was so that I could put the money instead into a Logitech Harmony Remote. I bought the 880 model and we love it! Normally I wouldn’t pay that much (around $300 I recall) for a remote, but having different remotes for TV, VCR, Cable Box/DVR, and DVD was driving Tamarah nuts, plus the Philips remotes are unbelievably awful. With about 15 minutes of programming we can no just press the “Watch TV” button and everything does what it should and reconfigs the remote appropriately. It was absolutely worth the money and more useful than slightly better image quality.

As for the DVD player, I bought a cheapo Philips DVD ($49) with HDMI output and 1080p upscale. The upscale doesn’t do jack, really, but sounds nice. The key factor here, again, is kids. If the kids destroy the DVD Player I’m not going to cry about it. Previously I had one of the first Sony all-in-one home theater systems (later to be dubbed “Dream Theater” or something), which was a great concept but I didn’t have anywhere to put the rear speakers, had piles of cables everywhere (not they are wireless thankfully) and it was pricy. Frankly, I’m not so much of an audiophile as to care much and frankly the majority of films we watch pre-date stereo.

One note I’ll throw in… if you pay more than $20 for an HDMI cables your getting screwed. I see cables at Best Buy for upwards of $50. I bought mine at my local computer supplier (Centeral Computer) for $10 and they are brilliant. I ultimately bought 2 HDMI cables and an HDMI-to-DVI cable… but I’ve never gotten my MacBook Pro’s screen resolution fine tuned to the screen so its just generally blurry… thats not the Plasma’s fault though but mine.

If you do get HD, I highly recommend the “Discovery HD” channels show “Sunrise Earth”. Brilliant show, featuring sunrise at some point on the globe without any time-laps. Total HD pr0n, but very relaxing and interesting to watch. I’ve got several on the DVR which I put on when Tamarah and I talk at night.

Whenever I do move to HD movies, I’ll probly opt for a PlayStation 3. Its not a great game platform (yet) but sure seems like a great BluRay player by all accounts.

The blogs getting a bit heavy… time to tone down a couple notches. Films are always a good topic…

Blade Runner is my all time favorite film. I first saw it when I was like 13 and doing a baby sitting job. (Yes, I did a lot of baby sitting as a kid, I earned enough one summer to pay for SCUBA lessons, gear, the works… sucked living in a family of non-divers, but was fun to get it.) I put the kid down to sleep and had like 2-3 hours to kill, so I rummaged around in a box of VHS tapes and there was one with just a bad label, written in a sharpy “Blade Runner”. The title alone was stimulating, had to be good! I imagined some dragon fantasy or something, but was blow away by what I found. It was a bad taping off HBO or something, the full US theatrical release with that horrible narration and all. Everything about the film blew me away and I was most excited by the hour afterwards that I sat on the couch in the dark just unraveling the story and philosophy buried within it, heavy stuff for a 14 year old kid.

While its an amazing film there are tons of little quirks in it. Painstaking effort went into the visual effects, but there are several “WTF?” blunders in there, such as Pris not looking exactly like Pris in the Deckard fight at the end, or the dove flying into the blue sky, and what exactly was that unicorn clip all about? Like many fans of the film these things don’t turn you off but rather engage your curiosity.

In the 4 disk Collectors Edition released in December we finally got all the answers. On Disk 2 is a painstakingly long 3+ hour documentary on the making of the film. I have never seen a documentary so candid and blunt in all my life. One of the producers wanted more sex, the visual effects department used the Millennium Falcon as one of the buildings in the city flyovers (I didn’t even notice that one before), and that “missing replicant” that was omited from the Bryant briefing was not actually Deckard but rather a character that they chopped from the film due to length and cost. As long as it was, it was worth every minute of it and paid for the disks in and of itself.

If your a serious fan you’ve probly already bought it. If your a fan of the film but haven’t, do yourself a favor and buy it! Don’t bother with the 2 Disk version, go for the 4 Disk which includes several variations of the film. If you are seriously die hard, buy the 5 disk ‘Brief Case”, which contains the oh so sought after “Work Print” version of the film.

If your film collection is kinda shabby, I recommend putting Blade Runner together with the recently re-released Patton:

Patton is one of the greatest films ever made. If you’ve never seen it in its full glory you must have a run at it, the various lines and music in it are strung throughout our culture in ways that your probly not even aware. Its full glory is only matched by films such as The Right Stuff and Citizen Kane. (If you are snickering at Citizen Kane your a moron who needs to go watch the damn thing… Wells is amazing.)

Thanks to my favorite channel, TCM, I’ve gotten to better know James Cagney as of late. I watched all that I could and put the rest on the DVR. James Cagney is known far and wide as the father of all on-screen gangsters… but he’s so much more than that. There is a brilliance in Cagney that can’t be described. My favorite of his films were ones in which he plays the tough guy with a heart of gold. I think that element, more than any other, was the setup for the most beloved mob stories… sure he’s a tough guy that takes no lip and shots anyone that gets in his way, but he’s doing it because he loves his brother or his girl or whatever. There is always a sense, not matter how despicable his character, that he’s just doing the best he can to get through life.

One of the films I watch tonight was City for Conquest in which he plays a reluctant New York boxer. Its the kind of film that leaves a mark… you leave wanting to be just like Jimmy. He’s down to earth, so unlike Cary Grant or Jimmy Steward or Clark Gable you don’t feel like you have to move up the social ladder or be more suave or something, you just have to put your heart in the right place and roll with the punches life brings.

Now, that said, White Heat is close but far more gritty than any other pictures he’s done. The infamous line “TOP OF THE WORLD MA’!!!” comes from that film, and he’s utterly ruthless. If your into that HBO crap like “The Soprano’s” go and have a look at Cagney in that film. Holy crap man…. very little redeeming quality in that character, but damn he’s still got his reasons.

Of course, if you only see one Cagney film, let it be Angels with Dirty Faces, perhaps the most commonly known. I’ve seen that one several times over the years and I always love it. Its probly Cagney at his best.

Now… truth be told, my favorite “sit down and just be happy for 2 hours” genre is romantic comedies. Tamarah and I have watched When Harry Met Sally about 5,000 times… but the romantic comedies of the last 30 years have been lacking, at best. For real whit slinging you’ve got to go back to the 30′s and 40′s. The Thin Man, My Man Godfrey, and my favorite Love Crazy are some of the best comedies ever made, featuring William Powell and (excepting My Man Godfrey) Myrna Loy. These two probly describe Tamarah and I better than any other couple on screen, we aspire and revel in their chemistry. Behold!

Someone actually put Love Crazy up on YouTube in 11 parts… see if you like it, here’s the first part:

Just classic. If your tired of the horrible crap thats pouring into theaters, getting worse every year, don’t give up on film, just start digging into the past. The old the better. Chaplin, Cagney, Gable, Astaire, Crosby, Stewart, Grant…. there are hundreds of amazing films that you’ll love, you just don’t know it yet. TCM is always a good place to start. The rules are simple… black and white is better and never assume. The rewards are easy.. women (not teenage girls) of beauty and wit and charm, men of integrity, character and strength. If it helps, start with a Hitchcock film like Notorious (did you know that MI:2 was an adaptation of Notorious?) and work out from there.