Bobby Henderson's blog

Indianapolis

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 03:11:00 -0700

Tomorrow.

great idea lost forever

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:11:00 -0700

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.

portland from the tram

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:49:36 -0700

portland from the tram

art

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:29:00 -0700

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

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 16:39:00 -0700

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

Sun, 25 May 2008 17:23:54 -0700

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

Wed, 21 May 2008 23:33:28 -0700

I hate everything about it.

stocks

Wed, 07 May 2008 16:12:00 -0700

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

Wed, 07 May 2008 01:28:00 -0700

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

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:49:18 -0700

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

In the daylight:

stress and apathy and sleep

Mon, 05 May 2008 14:35:00 -0700

I think this is how it works. Let me explain my graph.

I wake up behind, with a pile of things that need to be done, and an email box full of new things to be added to the list. Not just work-defined tasks, but everything. Everything that needs to be done.

My stress level starts high and generally goes down as I get things done. It’s probably flatter than I’ve drawn it. It may even be a positive slope. This is the red line.

The blue line is apathy. Apathy is burn-out and tiredness and my brain getting worn-out. It’s the feeling that whatever I’m doing is not worth it. It’s anger at working insatead of living. It is just not caring anymore. It increases through the day. In the morning apathy is low, by midnight, it’s high. Sleep resets the apathy meter.

Eventually Apathy is a greater influence than the stress of needing to get things done, and only then can I fall asleep.

I strongly believe this is true, because I have many, many nights where I stay up late not making any real progress for hours, but unable to sleep. But then something happens, around 2 or 3 or 4am, and I’m able to sleep. It’s not sleepyness. It just all the sudden feels ok to sleep. I believe it is when the exhaustion and not-caring is a greature pyschological influence than the need to get more things done.

It is stupid, really, because after midnight I don’t get anything done. It would make a lot more sense to just go to sleep so I had a greater chance of getting things done the next day. But I don’t, I can’t. I stay up “working” but not accomplishing anything.

If my graph is true, then I see two solutions to my sleep problems. Either have less stress or more apathy. I need the apathy level to cross the stress level at about 10pm.

I have believed for a long time that apathy leads to productivity, and maybe its mechanism is that greater apathy allows more sleep.

I don’t know.

[I wrote this a long time ago and forgot about it. I still sort of agree with it. It sounds bitter, but I’m not bitter. I just want more time to get things done.]

Burning Bridges

Mon, 05 May 2008 03:26:35 -0700

After college I moved to Las Vegas. I had a physics degree, I knew the tech industry was exploding out there, I wanted to explore, so I just went.

I got a job as a Test Engineer for a company that certifies slot machines. You check that the machine is fair and random and meets a checklist of arbitrary guidelines. It paid well. I was happy to have found the job.

I had a slot machine in my cubicle. I spent all day flipping switches and looking at source code. It got old after a week. In a month I couldn’t stand going into work.

I hated the job, the boredom, the industry - the casino industry is so sleazy - and I hated the company I worked for. It was a racket. If you build a slot machine, you need to have it certified before it can be sold. There’s one certification company - and they can, and do, charge whatever they want for their services.

There was a gas station/mini-mart next door. You’d walk in and there were these people slumped over slot machines, just sitting there, zombies, feeding dollars into the machines. This is in Las Vegas - minutes from the strip where you could play the same machines in a beautiful casino, drinking free drinks. You know these people didn’t come to gamble; they came to buy something, saw a slot machine and sat down for a minute, and an hour later they’ve spent their paycheck at this shitty gas station, on these shitty slot machines. The same slot machines I worked on.

The guy who worked in the cube next to me wanted to leave Vegas desperately. He was miserable. He was married and had a kid, and the casino industry pays well. 5 years into it, you have a hard time starting over in a new industry for half the pay - hard to justify that with a wife and a kid, I’m sure.

I lasted six months. One day I couldn’t do it anymore. I made it halfway to work, turned around and started packing. I left everything that wouldn’t fit in my car and took off.

Here’s what I remember about that time:

I remember worrying about money. I had maybe $2k in the bank and I still owed over $30k in student loans. I knew I’d have to pay a penalty for breaking my apartment lease.

I knew people wouldn’t understand. I thought everyone would see me as a failure for quitting, for throwing away a career.

I had no idea what I was going to do. I knew I was going to Oregon, but no idea what I’d do when I got there.

I never told the company I was quitting. I just stopped coming to work. When they called me, I didn’t answer. I didn’t pick up my last paycheck. It was only when I was in Oregon that I told them I had no intentions of ever coming back.

I have some thoughts about the way I quit, but I don’t know if they’re true memories, or rationalizations after the fact. I will explain it as I remember it, with the disclaimer that it may be wrong.

The casino industry is sleazy and depressing. I had nightmares of getting stuck there. People don’t choose careers, they fall into them, and rarely change tracks entirely. You want to make sure you don’t end up in a field? You burn bridges. That’s what I did. I left in a way that I’d never get a good reference. I made it so that I had to start over.

So here is what I’ve been thinking: We do things, and then later we rationalize our actions, after the fact. E.g., you cheat on your wife. Your subconscious says, “well, it was because she was distant and cruel. She had it coming.” You’re a nice guy so it can’t be that you’re at fault. Your subconscious won’t allow you to be at fault and still see yourself as a nice guy, so instead it produces the rationalizations of “she was distant” and “she had it coming” in order to resolve the dissonance. The principle is known as Cognative Dissonance and it’s powerful and real.

What I’m getting at is, maybe I just hated my job and quit. Maybe I was just horribly irresponsible and didn’t have the courtesy of giving notice to my employer.

I think it’s entirely possible that my feelings towards the casino industry are a result of actions I took, rather than the reasons for those actions.

I know what I feel now, but cognative dissonance is stronger than memory. So, who knows. Either way, I don’t have any regrets.

But no one regrets anything.

procrastination and productivity and internal conflicts and apathy

Sat, 03 May 2008 01:12:07 -0700

Back when I worked for myself, the number one problem was procrastination. Or, lack of efficiency. I had all the time in the world, but it was tough to get things done. Or, more accurately, to get things done to the point where I’d let go of them.

Working for someone else, the criteria of “done enough to show the world” is external, so it’s not an issue. You do the work, and someone else takes it away when they feel it’s ready (always before you’re ready). Probably lower quality overall but more is produced because it’s actually released. Artists sit on their work forever and never release a thing. That’s the way the world works, and it’s fine.

I haven’t had any time to work on any of my own stupid projects in the last month, or sleep, really, and I’m getting burnt out.

For the few hours I get to work on random stuff now, it’s more important to be productive. Before, I could waste all day wandering around town, working when I felt like it, and it was fine. Now, these chunks of free time are chosen by external factors - something falls through and all the sudden I’m free for a few hours and I can work on my own stuff. But I don’t. There’s a lot of pressure to get things done quickly, but that doesn’t seem to help.

I think the problem is not any sort of lack of inspiration. I think it is unresolved internal conflicts. Maybe I don’t want to offend someone, maybe I don’t want the attention something will bring, maybe I’m unsure about what direction I want to take.

I’ve been sitting on a project that will piss a lot of people off. It’s not about religion. I don’t want to deal with the attention that it’ll bring. I already get death threats and hatemail. I already have more requests and emails and things than I can handle. I don’t need more piled on right now. I don’t have the time to do it right. And I don’t know where I want the project to go. So it sits.

Other projects are more simple. E.g., blog post about something I know will offend someone that I know will read it. That’ll stop me from writing it half the time. Or worse, it’ll make me soften the edges. That’s worse than not writing it.

It doesn’t take much to derail a project in the early stages. The thought of someone’s reaction can do it. Or you start something, put something out there, talk about it, whatever, and you hear some feedback. Not negative, but maybe just some vague feedback. That can easily stop a project. Most projects die before they’re out of the womb.

The ideal solution would be to not tell anyone what you’re working on, and then release it. But the problem is projects don’t blow up out of nowhere. Takes a long time for projects to gain momentum, and before they do, they are likely to be killed.

I see two solutions to resolving internal conflicts, and dealing with external reactions - really two sides of the same coin - for the sake of productivity.

One is apathy. You don’t give a shit what anyone thinks, and you say/do whatever you want, and the world can go F themselves if they don’t like it. This works, and anything I’ve said that is offensive probably had some apathy behind it. The advantage to this sort of strategy is that because of cognative dissonance, after you say/do something questionable, you’ll find a million reasons to justify/rationize it, after the fact. There’s a lot to be said for apathy. Misanthropy, even. Misanthropes are ridiculously productive.

Second solution I’ve been thinking about is alter egos. Writing under a pen name, something like that. Even making an argument from an external point of view, not attributing it to yourself. I think it’s a little bit of a cop out, but I’m sure it would work.

There are probably other solutions. Email me if you have a good one.

Spite and motivation

Fri, 02 May 2008 01:00:00 -0700

“Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge is a pleasure.” — Tacitus, A.D. 55-200.

I strongly believe that spite is the only effective motivator.

If this is a general Truth - and I believe it is - then to really support a friend’s efforts, you’d first make them hate you, and then then tell them they will fail. Then they’d be in a greater position to succeed.

If I were trying to accomplish some lofty goal, I wouldn’t surround myself with people who supported my efforts. I’d make enemies who opposed them, and I’d succeed by spiting them.

To that end, I’m looking for enemies to criticize these goals:

* Have a million dollars in the bank by the time I’m 30.

* Get a pirate ship (greater than 100 feet in length ) for the Church of the FSM, by 2010.

- Update 5/3/08 -

Please don’t send me a fake hate-mail just to “help” me. I was looking for real criticisms by real would-be enemies.

I respect everything about lawn chairs.

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:43:00 -0700

The weather is starting to be nice in portland. Today I bought a crappy lawn chair and built a table out of boxes. I’m out on the patio with my junk laptop. I won’t lie, it is pretty awesome. When I am forced to be at home, working, I full intend to be out here. I’m ready for summer.

conservation through abundance

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:14:00 -0700

Something I hear often is that the rich become rich because they’re good at saving money. I am going to make the argument that they are good at saving money because they’re rich.

Certainly there are counterexamples to both sides - poor people who are good at saving money, and rich who blow money. Disregard these people for the moment.

I would argue that the key part of saving money is the learned skill of self control: being able to choose not to spend when it would be easy to do so. I believe that having a small amount of money does not cultivate this skill at all.

When you are cash-poor, your spending is determined by external factors. For instance, if you make $3k/month, you have $2k/month of expenses, you’re free to spend the rest. Your spending money is determined in large proportion by factors outside your scope of control.

If you have $30 in your wallet, you are able to buy anything under this amount. You’re likely to have a lot of “could I buy this” type thoughts.

The limits on what you can spend are determined mostly by external constraints. This does nothing to cultivate self control.

Now suppose the situation changes and you’re making $25k/month. You have $2k/month of expenses. You have a surplus of $23k. I doubt very much that you spend it. There’s a decent chance you’d spend less than in the earlier situation. I’ll come back to this.

Suppose you’ve got $1000 in your wallet. You see a $30 item. There is no longer an external constraint on *if* you can buy this item. It is now fully in the *should* you buy it frame of mind.

The rich spend more time in “should I” thinking than “can I” thinking. The poor spend more time in “can I”, and less in the “should I”. Most people spend what they make. They spend what they can.

To cultivate the skill of self control, I’d want a situation in which there are no external constraints to decide for me what I should do. I think $30k in the checking account and $400 in cash would do it. Now, I *could* buy anything, at any time, but instead I’m forced to consider whether I *should*. The more I think whether I *should* spend, the less I spend. It just works that way.

Related thoughts

Again there are going to be counterexamples, but ignore them for the moment.

Fat people in many cases, I would argue, have lost their skill of self control as it relates to food, for whatever reason. And really, most everyone has given up this control to external forces. We go to a restaurant and portions are chosen for us; we eat what we’re given. There’s no decision to be made of how much to eat.

Someone who overeats, who wanted to cultivate the skill of self control, shouldn’t limit portions or buy small plates or shop for small amounts of food at a time - as not to eat everything in the house. They should go the opposite direction. They should lay out a huge trough of food and have giant bowl plates, and fill their house with food. The food supply should be virtually unlimited and all external constraints on how much to eat removed. And only then could self control be addressed.

I can imagine a situation where someone might want a piece of cake, and a trainer would allow them a small piece. And it would be the complete wrong thing to do. To address the issue of self control - the only issue that matters, unless you planned on babysitting the client forever - you’d want to give them not a small portioned piece, but an entire cake, as large as possible, and they would have to decide how much is appropriate.

That’s what I think. I could be wrong. I’m interested in feedback.

I could be a bum

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:01:00 -0700

I think I’d be successful at being homeless. I think about it all the time. Whenever I see bums I think about what I would do differently. I think about it so much, so often, that I’m worried I’m subconsciously stearing myself in that direction. Because, you end up where you see yourself - I believe that without doubt.

It’s not that I see myself as homeless, exactly. It’s more like it would be a good test of resourcefullness. Where to sleep, how to make money for food, dealing with other bums, etc.

One definition of success would be to get out of that situation, get a job, and live a normal life. That’s not what I’m talking about.

When I use the term “successful bum”, I mean living a comofortable lifestyle, just not having a home.

I think if you can be identified as a bum, you’ve failed. No one wants a smelly bum in their coffee shop. Cleanliness would be priority number one. I bet there are public showers somewhere in portland. Or showers that could be found cheap. A gym would be an option.

Second priority would be to find an income. I think I have too much pride to panhandle. I don’t know what I’d do. If I had to, I’d get a real job. Grunt work, whatever I could find.

Sleeping on a park bench would get old. I don’t know how shelters work, but I’d check those out.

I’d want to find storage. I don’t own much but I’d at the very least have a laptop, and I wouldn’t want to keep that on me when I was sleeping. Pushing around a shopping cart would cut down on mobility - though I did see a bum manage to get his bum-cart onto a streetcar the other day.

So those are the big four priorities that I can think of:
1) shower facility
2) income
3) place to sleep
4) storage

Once those are taken care of, the day is free to be spent at coffee shops or exploring town or anything you felt like.

I bet there is an informal bum information network. Where’s the best free food, where can odd jobs be found, where to sleep. It would be important to tap into this resource. I’d bribe my way in with aluminum cans.

There also may be some sort of bum hierarchy. You’d have to find out who is the King bum, and get on his good side. I’d give him whiskey or a new shopping cart. Or in the case of a Queen bum, a stray cat.

Some day I will do it.

I’m also interested in gypsies.

I like cheap junk

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:53:00 -0700

All of the best things I’ve owned were junk.

I just bought a laptop for $180. It’s old and slow and very used, but it will work fine for anything I’d ever want to do on it. Internet, e-mail, typing.

I’m going to treat this computer like garbage until it breaks or until I wear it out. Then I’ll sell it for whatever I can get for it and buy another one exactly like it.

I don’t have to worry about breaking it. I can throw it in my bag without a case.

I don’t have to worry about it being stolen. I can leave it sitting on the table wherever I’m working. I can leave it sitting in my car.

It’s slow enough that it can’t run 10 applications at once. This is a plus. I run one application, and I have a chance at finishing something. Multitasking is not productive.

This laptop doesn’t have built-in wifi. It has a wifi card in the pcmcia slot. If I really want to be productive, I’ll pull out the card, and bring the computer somewhere. Without internet, I get a lot done.

This Cheap Is Better philosophy applies to other things.

My car is 15 years old and has 140k miles and is probably worth under $3k. But it’s paid for and I don’t have to worry about keeping it nice. I treat it like garbage, and when it dies, I’ll buy something just as cheap and be just as happy with it.

I once had a $2500 camera. I never brought it anywhere because I was worried about damaging it. I had a padded case for the lens, and a UV filter permanently attached so that it - not the lens itself - would get scratched. The only pictures I took with that camera were when I went out specifically to take pictures.

The camera and lenses were stolen out of my apaprtment a month after I purchased them.

I replaced the camera with the $500 several-steps-down model. Still expensive, but nothing compared to the first one I had. I use this camera all the time. I carry it around and don’t worry about it being broken. The lens threads grind every time I adjust the zoom, and I don’t keep a lens cap on it anymore. I just use it. It’s a $100 lens and if it breaks I’ll buy another one.

It is very liberating to not care about things, and just use them instead.

I don’t think it has anything to do with buying “cheap” things. I think it is all about using, instead of protecting, the things that you buy. You have to mentally devalue something that you just paid for. It’s hard to do that except when you buy something very inexpensive.

I would like to get to the point where I can buy something and immediately treat it like garbage.

Portland

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:34:00 -0700

The importance of framing

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:08:00 -0700

A nicely framed photo of some earthy guy playing a guitar across the river from downtown Portland:

Same photo, with different framing. Can you spot the difference? (Hint: shirtless and mullet’ed).