I read something else in The Brand You 50 that’s been bouncing around in my head a lot lately. I believe it was a quote from Tom Watson of IBM, who suggested:

Stop doing non-excellent stuff.

And it got me thinking. How much of my time is spent doing stuff that’s just uninteresting? Or that just doesn’t help anyone or anything?

(Note that you can have excellent relaxation. This is not about working more.)

It’s also made me think about scale. There’s “non-excellent stuff” in the larger sense, which is about rethinking all those projects we’re involved in and re-framing them in ways that can make them cool.

But there’s also the smaller scale. What am I doing right now? When I cook, what am I striving for? Palatbility? Or excellence?

(Note that reaching for excellence does not mean expecting it. I can fall short a hundred times; that’s not the point.)

In other words, what are my standards? For my work? For my writing? For my driving? (Oof.) For the books I read? For my conversations with other people? (Do I chat about the weather or do I try to go deeper, with the people I care deeply about?)

Thanks, Tom; I have a lot to think about. And a lot to do, which is even more important.

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I’ve been following this, and it’s inspired me to save a fair bit of money: The Million Dollar Savings Club.

One major feature, to me, is the steady buildup of three piles of physical cash. You actually see piles of cash sitting on your dresser, and that’s quite inspiring. I want them to grow, because I can see them. Much more inspiring than the drab financial game of making numbers add up in a checkbook, or watching numbers fluctuate on a website.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about automation lately.

First, I’ve been working a bit on this server, and I’ve noted how many things I’d like to be notified about. For example, I’d like to know when…

• …the server logs get really big and need to be trimmed
• …one of my webpages links to a webpage that’s now dead
• …the traffic to one of my sites increases significantly
• …some program on the server begins to eat up a large amount of processing time and/or memory

Thanks to Brennen, I have a little more automation running on this server. I’m now notified about most of the above things.

I’ve also been implementing some automation at work. I discovered that Microsoft Word will read a specially-formated XML document as a .doc file. This is a big deal for me, since it means I can write a script that will print out a .doc file. And that means that I can automatically generate a major report that we have to create every year or so.

One of my great automation inspirations is Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime, an SF novel involving people from multiple time periods. The really advanced humans have huge amounts of automation, both as robots and as computer programs that monitor and report all sorts of things. Everyone knows how to create these things.

That strikes me as a pretty neat future, one in which everyone can automate their lives. Seems to me that we don’t automate enough things. I have to tweak several files every time I upload a photo to my pictures; I would be so much more willing to upload photos if that were more automated.

What would you like to automate in your life?

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I’ve been re-reading Tom Peters’ The Brand You 50, a book I agree with more every time I read it. His basic premise is that 90% of white collar jobs will be annihilated or completely redefined in the next ten years. I’ve quoted that to a few people, and the reaction has always been the same: sage nods in agreement. But what are they actually doing about it? Nothing.

Peters aims to change that with Brand You 50, by laying out a lot of practical advice. His idea: See yourself as a one-person company who contracts out to other companies temporarily (where “temporarily” may be five years). And, more importantly, set yourself up like a one-person company. Are you advertising yourself? If you do a short paying job for a friend, can you print up an invoice that feels like it came from you?

I’ve been working on this, off-and-on, for a while. I spent today revamping my personal invoice template. I rewrote the main page of this site into a catalog of my various sites and subsites, and added a brief self-description. Because this is important. Because I may get my next job through this site.

If there was one thing you could do to make yourself more like a brand, what would it be?

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I’ve now watched my first Hong Kong John Woo movie, A Better Tomorrow. Overall, I’m impressed.

It’s about two mafia friends who get involved in a disastrous situation, after which one is crippled and the other serves three years in jail. The ex-con spends the rest of the movie trying to go legit, while the crippled guy wants revenge, and the ex-con‘s brother (who’s a cop) is hell-bent on re-convicting the ex-con. So it’s no comedy.

John Woo is famous for his slow-motion gunplay, and while that was certainly excellent, I was more struck at the clarity of his gunfights. It’s always clear who’s shooting at whom, who’s in danger, and who’s just run out of bullets. The editing never muddies the action. And he’s pretty realistic with ammo, too; handguns run out of bullets quickly.

I also appreciated the surprisingly tight plot. The plot wasn’t just an excuse to let guys shoot at each other; the movie has a lot to say about violence and the choices we make in our lives. Even the flashy slow-motion gunfights have nasty consequences.

The acting is generally good, and Chow Yun Fat deserves an Emmy. He plays the cool assassin who’s crippled partway in, and he plays a wide range of emotion with complete truth. He’s driven to rage and desperation by all that’s happened to him, which makes him a wonderfully interesting character because he’s not a bad guy. Heck, he’s one of the ”good guys,” until he’s consumed by his desire for revenge.

So, a good film, and definitely worth watching.

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© Aardman Entertainment

Creature Comforts is a series of shorts made by Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Grommit. It’s a claymation series in which interviews with average British folk are animated as though the interviewees are animals. It’s brilliantly funny, as droll explanations from hypochondriacs and circus performers seem much more real when coming from a dog or a duck. There’s probably something about the idea of the animals finally getting a say, too, that makes it work.

The really interesting thing about the series, to me, is that the animals don’t move. Well, their mouths move, and their heads, but they don’t walk around while being interviewed. So the animation is entirely focused on their heads, and occasional hand/paw/tail gestures.

This is in violation of a major rule of animation, which says that animation should involve as much movement as possible. Animation is a visual lie, so the theory goes, so you have to keep fooling the eye with lots of fluid motion to distract the human brain from the fact that it’s not seeing real faces.

I haven’t believed this “rule” for some time, as you can probably tell from my tone. And Creature Comforts shows why: Movement is kept to an absolute minimum, and yet the characters are fully realized, highly expressive, and extremely funny.

Abstraction can be just as effective as realism.

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I took off work yesterday, so I could partake of my yearly tradition: a trip to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to visit the museums. I’d already gone once before this year with Mandy, but decided I could use another refresher.

It was a cloudy day with a bit of occasional drizzle, but I never got wet; I was exploring the museums too often.

The Natural History Museum is first on my list every year. I always loved science as a kid, so this was my favorite museum (maybe next to Air & Space). There’s just so much to do and see, and they’ve kept it up so well over the years. I could walk by a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex every day and it would thrill me on the thousandth day.

The National Gallery of Art is also always on my list, simply because there’s so much amazing art on display. Paintings from grand masters. Not reproductions; the actual oil and canvas they touched. I also scored reproductions of four of my favorite paintings in that museum; Thomas Cole’s “Voyage” series.

The Air & Space Museum is not on my list every year, despite my love of space and science fiction. Why? Because the Air & Space Museum is a fantastic chronicle of air and space travel up until, oh, about 1978. There’s almost nothing recent in there; nothing about the Star Wars missile defense program, or the International Space Station, or practically anything else in the 80′s, 90′s, or 00′s.

I went this year anyway, partly because I hadn’t been in a while. All the old stuff was still there; the only new thing I saw was a set of flight simulators. :sigh: I did find a little book on the B1 bomber in the gift shop, so that’ll be fun to share at work.

After visiting Air & Space, I walked nearby to the National Museum of the American Indian. A little Cherokee blood flows in my veins, so this one is special. It’s a beuatiful museum, too; no straight lines anywhere. It’s all curves and flowing water and muted earth tones. Very good museum, though a bit difficult to navigate at times.

I also perused the National Archives for a little while. ‘Twas a momentous feeling to stare down at the original Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Also weird to see them faded almost beyond recognition. There’s probably a message in that.

I also took a bunch of photos.

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After my revelation last weekend, I’ve been consciously avoiding any internal arguments. I stop rehearsing conversations or imagining how I’d explain something to someone, as soon as I realize I’m doing it. I still do it a lot, but I’m doing it less than I was before.

The result? I focus on the task at hand much more often and much more deeply. I’m less distracted in general. I find I can focus myself more quickly, too.

And I seem to have a lot more time. Maybe I spent more time in internal dialogue than I realized.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that this has been highly beneficial. I don’t want to spend more of my life arguing, after all; I’d rather argue less. And even if I do come up with “the perfect come-back,” I can’t recall ever having an opportunity to use it; the conversation is never exactly as you imagine it will be.

And there’s always the question of whether finding “the perfect come-back” is a good or right goal. Usually, I want to find it so I can show the other person their error. But how often has anyone been argued out of their opinion because of a particular response? Do I really need to prove to people that they’re wrong? Even if I do, do I really need to rehearse doing so?

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I was in Target last week, perusing the new Halloween aisles, when I came across their Halloween DVD selection. It was mostly pretty thin; B-grade movies even by horror standards. They had a copy of Night of the Living Dead, “In spooky color.” They’d colorized it; I could hardly believe they thought this was a selling point. So I took down a copy and flipped it over, to read that the black-and-white version was included on the disk. My eyes wandered further down to read that there was an audio commentary track by Mike Nelson of MST3K, and with that, the DVD went into my basket.

And I watched it this week, with Mike’s commentary track on. Mike did a great job poking fun at the flick, and its use of (and invention of, in some cases) various horror cliches.

And the movie itself still holds up fairly well. It’s definitely a raw, low-budget movie; characters move around the room somewhat between cuts, and the special effects are sometimes crude. But it’s still a surprisingly effective “closed door” thriller, with a bunch of people locked into a small space with a common threat outside.

And, it’s clearly a low-budget film, so it’s easy to forgive the less-than-Oscar-worthy acting, and the simplicity of the sets. It’s about a disparate group of people holed up in an abandoned house, as hordes of the undead try to get in and eat their flesh. Certainly entertaining. I doubt I could make a better movie as my first film.

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When I was a kid, I had boundless creative juice. I could spend hours creating and fleshing out worlds.

That ability waned as I grew older. I’m still creative, but it doesn’t pour out nearly as much. I thought this was just part of growing up, until a few minutes ago, when I recognized a habit that I got in my teen years.

If someone frustrates me, I often argue with them inside my head. I’ll imagine conversations and how I could show them they’re wrong. I’ll spend a lot of time rehearsing different ways to respond to these people, even if any conflict I’ve had with them was long ago or minor.

I wonder if all this psychic energy spent on fantasy arguments hasn’t sapped my creative energy. If I stopped arguing with people in my head, wouldn’t that free up some energy that I could use creatively?

(Of course, actually doing this is tough.)

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