Celebrating Reading

I stumbled upon This Site while looking for a text-to-speech program. It is not about text to speech, but rather about all facets of reading.

Naked Science

Here is a place where you can download MP3s of the Naked Science show.

Today, instead of playing WoW...

What am I doing to fill my time now that I am no longer playing World of Warcraft? Well, so far I am setting a pretty good precedent:
I have written a story, learned double-entry book-keeping (which sounds like it should be illegal, but isn't), rebuilt a toy car for my kids, saw the movie "Cars", took my kids to the local ice cream parlour, and replaced my laptop keyboard.

As one of my co-workers said to me a couple of months ago, "Playing WoW did not improve any part of my life."

KnitDesigner

My wife and I are working on a program to allow knitters to create patterns by selecting stitches on a palette and then clicking on a chart. The program can then write out the knitting instructions in words as well as print the chart according to a number of popular conventions (Barbara Walker is the default).


Is there any interest in making that program available here?

Flash Science Fiction

Limit of Expansion is one of my entries into the WBA Flash Science Fiction Carnival. I will try to get a few more up before the deadline on June 30.

It was inspired by current thinking on the Big Bang at WikiPedia, and by one of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke short stories, The Nine Billion Names of God.

Limit of Expansion

The researcher waited expectantly, but not impatiently, for the timing signals from its colleagues in distant galaxies. Impatience was a crutch for those races that still had physical forms, not for those who were lattices of quantum probability. Yet for all their advancement, there was still the question: what would the ultimate fate of the universe be? Was the mass of the Universe sufficient to halt its own expansion? If not, the universe would continue to expand until everything was so far away from everything else that no interaction was possible and heat death would occur. Was there enough mass to reverse the expansion, ending in the collision of all matter? Or did the Universe rest on the knife’s edge of probability, where there was just enough matter to hold the whole thing together, expansion slowed to the point of imperceptibility but did not reverse? Then the universe would continue indefinitely, allowing the matter it contained to find its own fate.

Countless civilizations had spent thirty billion years experimenting, measuring, and speculating. Until now it was too close to call. The researcher considered it a point of academic curiosity only; all of the three possibilities still left fifty billion more years: enough time for life to be completely eradicated and to rise from nothing to its pinnacle thousands of times more. But finally the time had come to know. In the next few moments, the quantum communications tracking the distance between far-flung galaxies would verify whether the expansion had continued, halted, or reversed…

Having been filled to its utmost with Divine breath, the bubble burst, leaving a sticky, pink film on the face of an oblivious, child-God. She giggled, peeled the mess off of Her face, poked it back into her mouth, and resumed chewing.

Why Leadership is a commodity

One of the themes that emerges when one reads "how to make a million dollars" material is that 1) You need to start your own business and 2) Most people are afraid to start their own business.

This transcends simple risk aversion. When I was playin WoW, I noticed that most people were very reluctant to lead even a 5-person group in adventures. Why is that? What was the "risk" ? These people were very eager to play in the 5-person group, they just didn't want to "lead."

This same phenomenon shows up at work. Being the team lead on a project doesn't require any more technical expertise than being a "rank and file" worker on the project. It just requires the ability to stand up and take charge. So why are managers paid so much more than engineers? I think that the answer is "supply and demand." As rare as good engineers are, they are not as rare as people who are willing to take charge.

I think that a good consulting company could be formed just on the basis of coming into a situation and taking charge just long enough to find somebody who is already there who should be put in charge. I might just try that. Again, I'll let you know if I become a millionaire.

One Week without WoW

One difference between quitting WoW and quitting smoking is that I didn't have any actual withdrawal symptoms. I just stopped playing. I have not been tempted to log in. I don't have dreams about playing. My blood doesn't beg for me to get a fix. This was WAY easier for me.

So, during the first week without WoW, what has changed? Well, I haven't had a miraculous recovery of excellence at work. On the other hand, I did have time to do some "dad" things. I found a Power Wheels Suzuki Sport next to a dumpster and brought it home about six months ago. There it sat while I was playing WoW. Two days after I stopped WoW, I got out the tools and repaired it. It took me about an hour to go from a piece of junk to a toy that my two youngest kids were riding exultantly around the yard. And yes, I removed the dangerous parts that were the cause of the recall and replaced them with automotive-grade electrical components.

What else? Oh yeah, I started looking into how to improve my financial position. I went to Marshall Brain's site and read about how to make a million dollars. I highly recommend it. This turned me on to a few books that I have since purchased as MP3's, and I listen to them on my commute. It also re-engergized my will to spend a little time writing this blog. I will let you know if I become a millionaire.

My wife has noticed that I am "more energetic." That's not a bedroom reference. It means that I am not sitting at my desk like a sack of potatoes.

How World of Warcraft Changed My Life

Addiction is a heavily used word. Being a linguistic conservative, I usually like to go by the dictionary definition. What I was taught in school many years ago is that addiction necessarily implies physical withdrawl, and any similar effect was "psychological dependence." Well, as I often note, the English language is evolving (i.e. disolving), so I will take the popular definition of addiction, which is "persistent compulsive use".

And what does this have to do with World of Warcraft? More than I thought, it turns out. I have been playing WoW for about a year and a half. I played it a lot, but that that is relative. For example, this article has plenty of annectdotes about people who played more than me. And although I may not have played baseball with my son as much as he may have liked, nothing like this ever happened.

For me, "a lot" meant spending almost all of my free time playing. Sure, if I am completely honest with myself, WoW also occasionally cut into non-free time; from time to time I would go to work a little late, or go to bed a little late, or put off the yard work for an extra hour or two. But the point of today's rant is to examine what happened when my "free" time was spent doing the same thing.

I don't watch television. This is another form of addiction that I have been fortunate enough to avoid. That simple fact means that I have about 12 hours a week more free time than most people. What I did with that free time before WoW was: read books, play with my kids, write computer programs, do work that I hadn't finished during the week, and play paper-and-pencil role-playing games with my friends. After I started playing WoW, I cut out reading, programming, and extra work. My RPG time was limited enough that it didn't interfere with WoW, so it didn't really suffer.

And what was the effect of that? Duh. I started fallin behind in my understanding of current affairs. I stopped excelling at work. I got rusty at computer programming. I stopped most of my positive interaction with my kids (they still got yelled at for making too much noise and distracting me from my WoW group responsibilities). Here's one pretty bad thing: I didn't notice any of these things, at least not for a long time. I am not alone in this phenomenon. This cry for help is an example, but even more interesting is the large number of responses at the bottom of that page.

Normally, my family would let me know if I was doing something bad that affected them. For example, the wife and kids ganged up on me to get me to stop smoking. But when it came to WoW, my wife said "you're not missing work, and you need your recreation." But finally, something inside me snapped. I woke up one morning and said "I am going to do an experiment and stop playing WoW for a few weeks and see what happens."

Over the next several posts, I will share my experiences and reflections.

Government of the people?

We in the United States have government OF the people. And people constantly complain about how bad the government is. There seems to be a disconnect here.

My personal experience as a military contractor has taught me that elections are vaguely consensus, largely influenced by advertising dollars, but the actual government is done by special interest economics with personal representatives in Washington who pay personal visits to congressmen and their aides.