First Lines of Reamde

"People who had job titles and business cards could say easily where they worked and what they did for a living, but those who worked for themselves, doing things of a complicated nature, learned over time that it was not worth the trouble of supplying an explanation if its only purpose was to make small talk. Better to just go directly to airline travel."
- Neil Stephenson, Reamde, p. 14

So not the first lines, but a good quote nontheless. I had forgotten what an entertaining writer Stephenson is, even when he's not distilling a complicated technology or arguement down to its essence. I was scared after abandoning Anathem - a book I found to be needlessly obscure - that Stephenson had lost his technically savvy voice that I came to love in Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. Based on the first 70 pages (of a 900+ page novel!), my fears were misguided, for I'm already hooked and can't wait for nighttime to come so I can dive back into this world again.

The MP3 in Vinyl

Check out this awesome video that uses vinyl records to simulate the building of the visuals of an MP3 track. It's mesmerizing.

The Voyage of Discovery

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes."

–Marcel Proust

Worlds Greatest Mycologist

My father-in-law is quoted extensively in this article about Microcheck, the biology company he owns with my mother. The company is being profiled in "The World’s Greatest!..." TV show sometime in June, and i'm looking forward to watching it!

How to Listen to Music, and One Reason Why

Don't stop the beats! Why? Well, listening to music can boost your running performance by 15%. That's pretty significant, and part of the reason why I feel that i'll have to listen to at least some tunes when I run the Burlington Marathon later this month, despite their strong discouragement.

No word on if this will help you achieve this 15% productivity gain, but Elliott Schwartz presented seven essential skills for listening to music in his book Music: Ways of Listening, originally published in 1982. In it, he says that our ears have been “dulled by our built-in twentieth-century habit of tuning out” and thus need to be actively developed. It sounds a bit pretentious, but Brain Pickings gives us a quick synopsis that's worth a read. Essentially, the skills are:

1. Develop your sensitivity to music. 
2. Develop a sense of time as it passes
3. Develop a musical memory. 
4. Acquire a working musical vocabulary. 
5. Develop musical concentration (especially when listening to lengthy pieces)
6. Concentrate upon ‘what’s there,’ and not what you hope or wish would be there. 
7. Bring experience and knowledge to the listening situation (e.g., info about its composer, history and social context)

Stephen King Speaks

Two interesting Stephen King articles for you. One: an amusingly angry rant called "Tax Me for F@%&’s Sake!", and two: a Neil Gaiman profile that includes this great story:

"I never thought of myself as a horror writer. That’s what other people think. And I never said jack shit about it. Tabby came from nothing, I came from nothing, we were terrified that they would take this thing away from us. So if the people wanted to say “You're this”, as long as the books sold, that was fine. I thought, I am going to zip my lip and write what I wanted to write. The first time that anything like what you’re talking about happened, I did this book Different Seasons, they were stories that I had written like I write all of them, I get this idea, and I want to write this there was prison story, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, and one based on my childhood called “The Body,” and there is a story of this kid who finds a Nazi, “Apt Pupil”. I sent them to Viking, who was my published my editor was John Williams – dead many long years - terrific editor – he always took the work dead level. He never wanted to pump it. I sent them Different Seasons ... And that was the first time that people thought, woah, this isn’t really a horror thing.
I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner this old woman – obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, 'I know who you are, you are the horror writer. I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.'
“And I said, 'I wrote that'. And she said, 'No you didn’t'. And she walked off and went on her way."

Saying No

"People think focus means saying 'yes' to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying 'no' to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things we have done." -  Steve Jobs

As a new father for the third time, I'm struggling with this concept all over again. As always, there's thousands of things that I'd like to do, but only limited time in which to do them. This means that I have to be ever more strict about the things that I do allow to take up my attention. Gone are the times when I allowed myself to absently draw or paint. No longer are the lazy afternoons on the sofa where I leaf through the newspaper and/or magazines. This doesn't mean that I'm going to cut out all creative playtime - open time you give to yourself to pursue your interests (Julia Cameron calls this time "filling the well") - but it does mean I'm trying to be more vigilant about how I spend my time. I'm trying to notice when i'm absent-mindedly browsing the internet or reading news I don't really care about. Rather, i'm trying to focus my free time on one or two things that I want to do well. At the moment, that's running (specifically, training for the Burlington Marathon), taking care of my kids, and finishing up a lot of the outstanding home improvement projects I have on my "honey do" list. When the marathon is run and the major projects are completed, i'm going to move on to other goals, but never more than two or three at a time so that those activities benefited from a sharp focus rather than a dilettante-like grazing interest.

What do you think? Anything in particular you're focusing on right now?