Programming sucks

Published December 20, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 20  ·  

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro,1 you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

System administration sucks too:

… And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

~ Peter Welch from, Programming Sucks

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hear! hear!

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The continuum of aggression

Published December 18, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 18

Men look at Elliot Rodger and say, “I would never do something like that.” Women look at his victims and say, “That could totally happen to me.”

~ Doug Muder from, #YesAllWomen and the Continuum of Aggression

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The realization that men and women fundamentally think about, and understand, aggression differently, is probably the single most “wait wat?” moment that I had in 2014.

Seriously.

My brain — and that of every guy I’ve asked — has different categories of violence; Murder is a “no way, no how, would I murder a woman” category. But every woman I’ve asked has “aggression” organized into one big continuum. Rhetorical: Does that strike you as a huge difference in the way men and women view the world? Does is perhaps suggest something about how the male half of the species treats the female half?

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Confirmation bias

Published December 17, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 17  ·  

If you are thinking about buying a new car, you suddenly see people driving them all over the roads. If you just ended a long-time relationship, every song you hear seems to be written about love. If you are having a baby, you start to see them everywhere.

Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively.

The examples above are a sort of passive version of the phenomenon. The real trouble begins when confirmation bias distorts your active pursuit of facts.

~ David McRaney from, Confirmation Bias

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Do you want to be someone or do something?

Published December 16, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 16

There comes a point in every man’s life where he must decide if he will strive to be somebody important, or if he will work to do something important. Sometimes these pursuits go hand-in-hand; often they do not.

Research has shown time and time again that kids of our modern age aspire for what’s perceived as a more glamorous life than one of service and lasting legacy. In fact, the top three career aspirations of today’s 5- to 11-year-olds are sports star, music star, and actor. Just 25 years ago, that same survey turned up teacher, doctor, and banker.

~ Brett McKay from, John Boyd’s Roll Call

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Preemptive: About the movie Tracers

Published December 14, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 14  ·  

Preemptive: To all my friends. Yes, I know about the movie “Tracers”. No, I have nothing nice to say about it. Imagine Hollywood used a generic formula to paste your favorite thing onto the big screen; Do you think you would enjoy it? Right. It pretty much highlights all the negative aspects of Parkour, and casts Parkour in a bad light. (That’s just my opinion of course.)

Selling Out

Published December 14, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 14  ·  

If you think you can buy your way to individuality, well, you are not so smart.

Since the 1940s, when capitalism and marketing married psychology and public relations, the market has been getting much better and more efficient at offering you something to purchase no matter your taste.

~ David McRaney from, Selling Out

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Care less

Published December 13, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 13  ·  

The less you care about what others think, the better your life will become.

~ unknown

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Infrastructure, suburbs, and the long descent to ferguson

Published December 12, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 12  ·  

The short version is that as the climate degrades and fossil fuels become simultaneously more expensive and less useable, each generation inherits from its more prosperous ancestors an infrastructure that it can’t afford to maintain. Society muddles through from year to year — sometimes even seeming to advance — until some part of that poorly maintained infrastructure snaps and causes major destruction. The destroyed area may get rebuilt, but not to its previous level. The resulting community has less infrastructure to maintain, but is also less prosperous, and so the cycle continues into the next generation.

~ Doug Muder from, Infrastructure, Suburbs, and the Long Descent to Ferguson

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He draws heavily from John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent.

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How To Live on 24 Hours a Day

Published December 11, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 11  ·  

This entry is part 9 of 72 in the series My Journey

As you look back on the year that has just past, do you feel as though you spent another 12 months merely existing instead of truly living? Do you often go to bed at night with an anxious, sinking feeling that you wasted away another precious day of your limited time here on earth? One of my all-time favorite old books addressed this very concern better than anything else I’ve ever read.

~ Brett McKay from, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day

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104 years old, still readable, and totally apropos of our lives today.

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DevOps

Published December 10, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 10

It’s been said by a number of smart people that DevOps is largely founded in an organization’s skillful collaboration and communication, and the culture that results. I agree with that idea, and I also think that it’s one of the reasons why the term DevOps is sometimes difficult to explain, because these are ‘soft’ skills we’re talking about. These aren’t things you can graph or alert on, they only manifest in the resulting product and environment.

~ John Allspaw from, DevOps

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Where transformation happens

Published December 7, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 7  ·  

It’s not about perfect. It’s about effort. And when you implement that into your life… every single day, that’s where transformation happens. That’s how change occurs. Keep Going. Remember why you started.

~ Jillian Michaels

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Love is all you need?

Published December 6, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 6

Nothing quite like the Grant Study has ever been attempted; as Vaillant puts it, this research represents “one of the first vantage points the world has ever had on which to stand and look prospectively at a man’s life from eighteen to ninety.” The mountains of data collected over more than seven decades has become a rich trove for examining what factors present in a man’s younger years best predict whether he will be successful and happy into old age. The study’s researchers have continually sifted through the results and reports in an attempt to ferret out these promising elements. As Vaillant details in The Triumphs of Experience, some of the researchers’ original hypotheses did not pan out, and the job of untangling issues of causation and correlation goes on. Yet several insights have emerged very strongly and prominently from the data, offering brightly marked guideposts to a life well lived.

~ Brett McKay from, Love Is All You Need

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If you start, go all the way

Published December 5, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 5  ·  

For some reason, we hold back – almost as if it’s preferred to actually going ALL IN on something. Why? Because if we’ve given our all, and we still fail…what is left? If we go all in and fail, we tell ourselves that we are failures. We aren’t good enough.

In reality, giving our all and then failing is one of the best things that could possibly happen to us. When we give max effort and we fail, we’re only setting ourselves to level up.

~ Steve Kamb from, If You Start, Go All The Way

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Bit of a backlog, sorry

Published December 4, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 4

Just in case anyone is actually consciously paying attention to what I post: I’ve a bit of a backlog of things to post, and I’m making an effort to catch up. So there’s going to be something like a post a day, for like, well, 150 days or so…

:^P

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History of Parkour

Published December 3, 2014  ·  All posts on Dec 3  ·  

Truth is, there is no consensus on this. And – which really hefts a giant spanner into the works – you can’t just go and ask the founding father because this great movement is pretty damn far from being a nuclear family, 2.4 kids and all the rest. No. This child has had a whole host of surrogate step-parents influencing its development down through the years, the centuries, indeed even through the millennia. It has drawn on many sources, supped on inspiration from all over, and drunk from a hundred different cups as it has evolved – and by no means is this process over.

~ From, History of ADD / Parkour / Freerunning

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I’ve heard a mind-boggling number or ridiculous things about Parkour. If you EVER have the opportunity to talk about Parkour, please go read this. If this doesn’t fit with your view of history… great! Now you know.

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