Bobby Henderson's blog

Indianapolis

Tomorrow.

great idea lost forever

I hate it when I find notes that don’t make any sense. It sucks because I wouldn’t have written it down unless it was important, but because I didn’t explain it clearly enough and I have a crappy memory, it’s lost forever.

I just found this one:

I have written “nature is a dick”, with a drawing of a hybrid lightning-bolt/penis.

Clearly this was a genius idea, but I don’t remember what I was thinking.

:|

art

I am pretty sure I know how fine art photography works.

The original:

Here I’ve darkened the edges and blurred everything not in the very center of the frame to imitate a cheap/old lens. I’ve also screwed with contrast and saturation to imitate cross-processing (where they’d develop film of one type in chemicals meant for another type). Accurate colors are not art.

Last, I converted to black and white. And now, barely identifiable and blurry, it is art.

Another one:

Cactus:

Old-timey Cactus:

One more:

Wizard of Powells

This guy was sitting next to me in Powells Bookstore. He left, and now I am filled with questions without answers:

Why the wizard hat?

Why the wilderness survival books? — “How to Stay Alive in the Woods”

And why do you need survival skills, wizard? I think you are a fake.

Please email if you read this, wizard.

school was a waste of time

Does anyone else think school was a waste of time - academically, I mean?

Being exposed to new things is good. The social part is important. 

But the whole philosophy of academic learning seems backwards and useless: sit there and be fed information; memorize a bunch of things that could be looked up in 10 seconds; learn how to do things that others have done. 

Are any of those things still useful today?  Is it just that I haven’t had a “real” job in so long?  I don’t get it.

Learned knowledge is useless.  What is the point when you can look it up when you need it? 

In my experience, the only thing that matters is being able to figure things out when you need to.  Resourcefullness and ingenuity - the things that school beats out of you.  No using notes or computers or collaboration on the tests .. why? Because those things aren’t available in the real world?  Those resources are exactly the things that DO matter. 

Anything that’s been done before that has the slightest chance of being needed can be looked up - the internet knows everything. 

For anything new, learned knowledge is useless. 

Experience matters; doing things matters - but school doesn’t work like this.

I remember in physics having to do fourier transforms by hand. Something that takes hours and teaches nothing.  This was preparing, I guess, for the chance of all computers being destroyed. What a waste of time. That’s the day I stopped caring. 

And you know that it is all just formalism.  Things are the way they are because that’s the way they have been, with zero thought towards how the world is different today.

I get annoyed every time I make a student loan payment. 

Disneyland

I hate everything about it.

stocks

I think I should make a hedge fund with only volatile stocks - because I can pick them. I have owned 4 stocks in the last three months. Two are way down, two are way up. It’s not easy to find a stock that can drop 70% in a couple months, but I did it. It was a penny-stock. The one that dropped almost 60% was not.

The two winners wiped out the losses from the losers. I’m up, overall. I should sell the losers, but I hold them for spite, reminding me not to gamble with stocks. Sort of works.

The FSM Pirate Ship fund $$ is safe, in another account.

permission

Back in college, I wanted to study for a year in New Zealand. There was no established study-abroad program for the school I had chosen. I asked my advisors if it could be arranged so my credits transferred back home. I was told no, repeatedly, for months. It was a battle.

The next year I went to New Zealand. When I came back, all of my credits transferred.

I learned more from the experience of making it all work than anything I learned in my degree. But I didn’t realize what had happened until later. I’m going to analyze it and pull out some important points.

I should have talked to decision makers first. Advisors can help if they want to, but they have no reason to need to help. These guys told me no for months. Then I talked to the dean of my school. He said it sounded like a fun experience.

My problem early on was asking for permission. There’s no need. You can do whatever you want. No one really cares what you do unless it affects them. Once I had vague approval by the dean, the context of conversations with advisors changed from “Can I go? And will things transfer?” to “I just came from the dean’s office; I’m going to New Zealand next year, what steps need to be taken to ensure all my credits will transfer”. Context is everything.

Once I had the outlook that I was going, things fell into place. I went. I came back. Credits transferred smoothly enough, with a few exceptions. If I was doing it again, I would get more in writing.

Conclusions:

1) Start at the top, the decision-makers. Don’t ask outright.  Talk of plans, what you’d like to do. Keep going until you hear what you want to hear. Everything is open to interpretation.

2) Take the attitude that whatever you want is going to happen, and now you’re just dealing with the logistics. It is no longer “I would like”, it is “this is what is going to happen, what needs to be done to make things run smoothly”.

3) Document it, with the burden of revision on the person you will be depending on later. E.g. “This is my understanding. I am doing this. Let me know if that’s not ok.” Very easy for them to ignore the message, which can later be taken as approval, if the need arises.

xmas lights circa 2004

I found these pictures from years ago. We used to put up a lot of xmas lights: 

In the daylight: