On this day

September 2nd

Growth versus competition

September 2, 2022

With every government initiative in education there are unforeseen consequences. The current drive to build character through sport (and other activities) is having, in my opinion, an unforeseen negative impact on curriculum PE. Staffing, finances, facilities and time are being redistributed from PE provision to school sport provision. Now this might not necessarily be a bad thing, but it has to be provision beyond the current narrowness of school sport which tends to be traditional team games focused on winning competitions for the purpose of bringing prestige to the school. This reduction in PE which focuses on movement for all in favour of school sport which focuses on competition for some worries me.

~ “Sporticus” from, The physically educated person – drowningintheshallow

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It’s always nice to see someone else talking about sport as a subset of movement. “PE” is so entrenched as a thing; does anyone still wonder what should physical education even be? Apparently, fortunately, the answer is “yes.”

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Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend

September 2, 2021

To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown—the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: Any explanation is better than none […] the cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear.

~ Friederich Nietzsche

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On becoming somebody

September 2, 2021

No sign of any good habit, no attention or regard to yourselves. You do not watch yourself closely and ask, “How do I deal with the impressions that befall me? In accordance with nature or contrary to nature? As I ought, or as I ought not to? Do I say to the things that lie outside the sphere of choice that they are nothing to me?” If you are not yet in this state, fly from your former habits, fly from all laymen, if you ever want to make a start on becoming somebody.

~ Epictetus

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Getting control of mornings

September 2, 2021

Staring this month, I’m making another large change to how I’m structuring my mornings. For as long as I can remember I’ve woken up about 5:30. There’s variability, but it’s a rare morning if I’m not actually awake, vertical and puttering towards my desk by 6:00. Unfortunately, for what might be two years now, what I’ve been doing upon reaching my desk has been an every-morning battle between my intention, and what I had actually set myself up for.

My intention was: Do self-focusing, restorative things. Meditate, some movement [yoga, mobility, etc.], maybe a quiet podcast, then do my reflection reading, and write in my journal. Then “surface, ” which means waking up a computer and checking in on a variety of places—multiple email programs, web sites, etc., to get a pulse for what today looks like. Checking the calendar to verify appointments, calls, etc.. And then, at 6:30 exactly, Tracy and I would have a quick morning meeting to compare our days. We’d discuss the day’s activities, meals, chores, our respective meetings, etc.. Each morning I make up a very crude, quick listing of things for the day, in a very small notebook that I carry around. But what actually happened was that, because I use a program to track everything, and I need to look some stuff up to fill out my little notebook to start my day, I’d end up starting by just peeking into one or two things… and bam! It’s 6:30 meeting time. Dammit.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I must begin the morning without any devices. (Pretty sure that’s safe to do without checking with my doctor, since it was fine for the first 25 years of my life, right?)

Have our evening meeting, figure out the basic layout of tomorrow, and jot my notes in my little notebook. In the morning, get up, gather my coffee, and start my day with the little notebook. No phone for podcasts, nor music… just me and my notebook. We shall see.

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Start where you are

September 2, 2020

If you’re trying to get to the beautiful lake or beach and you’re caught in the weeds, ignoring the weeds and their constraints will produce nothing but desperation and angst. You first need to know what weeds you’re in, and how to get unhooked from them.

~ David Allen from, Starting with where you are, not where you should be – Getting Things Done®

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Of course this insight is blindingly obvious once you see it.

…and I distinctly remember what it was like when I hadn’t yet seen it. I can’t quite put my finger on an exact year, but I remember a feeling—or rather a few feelings and things which kept happening to me:

I was often late.
I was often tired.
I was often bored
…and then suddenly realized I’d forgotten to do something that I had felt was important.
Chaos.
Disorder.

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Reading is a superpower

September 2, 2019

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. Cultivate that desire by reading what you want, not what you’re “supposed to.”

~ Naval Ravikant

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Podcast Backstory

September 2, 2017

Why doesn’t someone…

Hopefully, you’ve discovered the the podcast project. (Originally it was called “Parkour, They Said”.) The original project was entirely based on the written word and was inspired — ironically — by podcasts in general.

In late 2015, I was lying on the floor slow-roasting myself before the wood stove. I had stumbled onto a new-to-me podcast — yes I remember which one, no I’m not telling — and I was starting from their first episode. The episodes were horrible, but I knew they would get better, since a recent episode is what had drawn me in.

But listening to those early episodes left me with a litany of ideas:

I can’t even understand them with this crappy audio. Why aren’t all podcast episodes fully transcribed and available?

But honestly, no one would read the entire, long transcript of this horrible ramble-session. Why not break that large interview apart into its basic themes? Then people can read the entire interview, or just a part.

Why not have a standardized set of themes on the site? Then the “chunks” of the interview can be organized under those themes, and people can read just the material on a particular theme.

Why not add translation functionality? That’s way better than a podcast because people can read the interviews in many languages.

So wait, why bother with podcasts at all?

Why not just open it up with a form where anyone can write anything? Then people can contribute their writing in any source language, and the site then facilitates communication by translating everything to/from every language.

…and why not make it a generic project, conveying whatever everyone contributes? Well, what would we call that? It’s just a collection of whatever it is that people have to say…

“They Said”.

…and why not make several sites, each on a particular topic. How do we name and label each site?

“Parkour, They Said.”

(Bully on you for reading this far! You now know that the “Try Parkour they said, It’ll be fun they said,” meme is not in any way related to “Parkour, They Said”. :)

What could possibly go wrong?

I know, right… that whole project above is a TERRIBLE idea. (I’m not being sarcastic.) There are at least two, major problems:

  1. Writing is hard. People don’t like to write. Actually, it turns out that writing well is also very much harder. It’s as if one could make an entire living if one could write well. :P So this project’s success depends on… Oh, that’s a problem.
  2. The way the project works, and its purpose, are not the least bit obvious, and the name is downright obtuse. Worse, the name uses a wonky grammatical construct, (“topic, more information”) which is uncommon generally, and a straight-up Unicorn in spoken language. And the meme does not help. So, go ahead, say, “Parkour, They Said” out loud. Did you manage to convey everything about the project? Oh, that’s a problem.

But, whenever I spent 10 minutes blabbing about the project, people seemed to think it was a good idea. (This was probably the conversational equivalent of Beer Goggles on my part.) So, after many months of talking about it, we built it anyway.

“You should write something for Parkour, They Said!”

“Huh? What?”

I spent more than a year, randomly in my spare time, talking about the project and trying as politely as possible to repeatedly nag a few hundred people into writing. I learned at least two things:

  1. Writing is in fact really hard, and people already know this.
  2. “Parkour, They Said” is a strikingly unhelpful name for an already non-obvious project. If the project had been called Snorklewacker, (yes, yes it is, yes I did,) it wouldn’t have been any harder for me to explain, or any harder for everyone to remember. And just for the triple-bonus, start in the hole, difficulty score, we put it on a “.world” domain.

Surprisingly, a number of people actually managed to write some really interesting things. This made me very happy.

“Craig, why don’t you just make a podcast?”

I really like talking. (Everyone who knows me just laughed and thought, “collossal understatement there Craig.”)

Via a perfect storm of things not worth the deep dive, I wind up in a ton of fun, wide-ranging, interesting, and educating conversations. That’s not just me being hyperbolic; I regularly find people glommed onto my conversations. (I literally have a new friend who — their words — “was just eavesdropping the shit out of that conversation”, and we started talking when my original conversation partner moved on.)

People — often the people who were eavesdropping my conversations — started saying “that conversation should have been a podcast episode.” So the idea of making a podcast was gaining some footing in my head space.

But, I have a problem. It’s called shiny thing syndrome, or ADHD, or whatever. (“Get off my lawn! We didn’t have all these fancy acronyms back in my day.”) So I was really, REALLY, determined to not add “podcast” to my list of things to do. I already had this crazy “Parkour, They Said” web site sucking up time.

In one last-ditch, Herculean effort to avoid the inevitable, I started offering to help people write by recording Skype calls and passing them the transcripts. I think I did three recorded calls before I had convinced myself that-

oh! SHINY!

“Hello, I’m Craig Constantine…”

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The Edge of Time (Tue 26th)

September 2, 2014

In Jurassic Park there’s a route called The Edge of Time (5.9R ***) which is on the cover of the guide book.

Simply an unbelievable piece of rock carved into a literal prow.

My attmept was sketchy. I spent a while projecting the 5.9 crux (which is way above my climbing grade.) Eventually, I punted and move left to East of Eden (5.9 *) and worked my way up, and then back over to finish the arete. (Sadly, no photos of me un the upper part of the Edge.)

Mike’s run up was a straight shot as he put up the top rope for the rest of us.

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