But stressed out and worried we are not. And if we’re feeling frenzied for any reason, we delay the release until we’ve calmed down.
[It’s really the last part that sets this apart. Having a culture of trust that the stress is not normal and worth listening to and acting upon.]
I have long envied people who stick to their morning rituals. Or maybe they rely on them. I find the world highly ephemeral. I try not to rely on anything I don’t feel compelled to rely upon.
So I’ve watched over the years, now that people share, in the Instagram perfection of it all, their rituals, if not daily, then at least over time what appears to be a daily thing.
The first action of the day might be making coffee. They grind, froth, stir, and ease into their day. Some get kitted up and cycle to their favorite spot where they meet others of similar ilk and collectively drink and eat a bite of something before whisking off on their daily ride.
Lots of folks I know head quietly to their workshop of choice. Wood, pottery, metal–it matters not. They spend some time making things that they or others may cherish for years to come, a tribute before heading off to work. Sometimes it’s a wish, a hope, or prayer that they can spend more time doing the creative activity they love.
My mornings have been defined by external factors for a long time. Garbage and recycling 3 times a week. Getting DaKid™ on the school bus. Sometimes commuting. But not much in the way of taking a few moments to greet the day.
I have a pile of gifts that I’ve been making in my little wood shop for a while. Some of the folks have been waiting years for their gifts to be completed. Sad. So terribly sad. Last year and now this year have been banner years for completing projects. Bookcases, a dining room table, and now the gifts are all being finished. And while it’s a tiny fraction of what it used to be, I’m even working on some new music.
I find new rituals establishing themselves. After taking care of the other stuff (garbage, School bus, etc.) I make my way to the shop and spend a few minutes adding another coat of shellac to a board. Or some other not very risky task. Risk takes time. I need to be able to back away, think, come at it again. There’s little time for that in my morning.
Shellac is a beautiful finish. A bit high maintenance for some, but beautiful. I use very thin coats and many of them. Each day another thin layer is applied. It’s probably dry in ten of fifteen minutes, but work beckons, and so I don’t make it back there until the end of the day. It is ritualistic. I go down there, flick on the lights, put one glove on like a drunken surgeon, uncap the canning jars, one with shellac, one with the cloth pad. A few swipes later, and I’m done for now. The jars are lidded, and the glove, turned inside out as I remove it, goes in the trash.
More recently, as I began composing some new music, I started practicing again. I sit down, grab an instrument, turn on the metronome and lose myself in exercises for 15 or 20 minutes. Amazingly peaceful for me. A touchstone from an older aspect of my life and a meditation. And probably something I should every day for the rest of my life. It’s not “playing” or “performing”. It’s a simple discipline where I work toward increasing facility. Playing things that are hard for me now until they become smooth and easy. A new picking technique. A hard to play phrase. A difficult intervalic leap. A few concentrated minutes that stops time outside of my focus before the day is in full swing. A morning ritual.
The Universe’s Most Enigmatic Frame Builder | Bicycling:
BS: As far as I’ve been able to tell, the rider is not going to experience the imperfection—everyone I’ve talked to who rides your bikes says they’re exquisite. And the imperfections are not even something other highly skilled builders notice easily or at all. There’s no practical reason to try to exceed that.
RS: Yeah, the thing about it is… it doesn’t matter at all.
BS: Right—and you also cannot succeed at what you’re trying to do. You go into it knowing you’re going to fail, so—
RS: Well, when you start, every time you start, you have a chance. You also know you won’t do it. Both things exist for you at that moment. And for some time as the heat and the metal and the human element interface, both possibilities stay alive, and that is… Look, ultimately, yes, you get to some point where you concede, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t… you know… you…
[and then]
BS: So the point isn’t to make a perfect bike but to be a human and to make a perfect bike? Or is the inevitable imperfection itself the perfect part, because it represents that struggle, the human part?
RS: This is the point where we are beyond reason. And probably beyond answers.
BS: Why should a buyer care about your struggle? Why not just go out and buy the perfect bike?
RS: I can only make one file cut and once that cut is made, I can’t put the material back. That’s what people are paying for. I think that makes a bicycle more beautiful.
[This conversation so nails how I feel but fail to express about everything I’ve ever worked on, built, made, and achieved. Richard Sachs pushes everyone who makes anything forward, and while some have their shortsighted view of his stance and explanation, I see the way forward.
While I’m certain, having seen his bikes first hand, that owning one would be a joy, and riding one regularly a double joy, I don’t need to. That is, that the process toward mastery doesn’t require ownership by me. That he continues to chase mastery and perfection is what I need, although I admit, it’s not as visceral.]
Congratulations! You’ve Been Fired – The New York Times:
Treating workers as if they are widgets to be used up and discarded is a central part of the revised relationship between employers and employees that techies proclaim is an innovation as important as chips and software. The model originated in Silicon Valley, but it’s spreading. Old-guard companies are hiring “growth hackers” and building “incubators,” too. They see Silicon Valley as a model of enlightenment and forward thinking, even though this “new” way of working is actually the oldest game in the world: the exploitation of labor by capital.
HubSpot was founded in 2006 in Cambridge, Mass., and went public in 2014. It’s one of those slick, fast-growing start-ups that are so much in the news these days, with the beanbag chairs and unlimited vacation — a corporate utopia where there is no need for work-life balance because work is life and life is work. Imagine a frat house mixed with a kindergarten mixed with Scientology, and you have an idea of what it’s like.
[One of the differences between sports and almost any other job, is that while you can try and reduce people to numbers, it’s often horribly shaded by the perception of others. I’ve often said that sports that requires “judges” is not a sport. It’s performed by athletes, but a sport can be measured. You hit the ball fairly or not. You ran faster than the next gal or not. And because of that ability to measure, you can apply other arithmetic solutions to the problem of “value”. That simplicity of goal and skill is why sports is so much fun for all of this. Instead of myriad shades of gray and decisions you have the clarity of simple goals and yes or no. Applying that thinking to most workplace jobs simply reduces people to… well read the article. I know folks are replaceable at a skills level, but you’re failing if you miss the human behind those skills and bringing out the best in them.
Here’s my prescription since I’ve been from one end of the US hiring economy and back.
Since so many young people start off with lots of debt relative their income, I say this to the parents now (it applies to them to, but some bandwagons are hard to abandon) don’t saddle your kids with debt by allowing them to run up huge debt to start out. (and try and teach them that it’s not the Way.) Consider eliminating your own. (cars, house, business loans, venture capital, etc. the stuff that really ties you down.)]
Some comments on The Anarchist’s Design Book:
Which brings me to my final point. Schwarz has been one of my favorite go-to writers for matters of technique for well over a decade. With this book, (and to be honest, this really snuck up on me) he’s also suddenly sitting as one of my favorite designers. These pieces are all based in historical research, and standing on the shoulders of centuries of other makers – but the results are, to my eye, most definitely his. I’ve been looking at iterations of the desk and chair above, both in photos and in person, for months now, and I think they’re some of my favorite designs of recent memory. And they’ve only gotten more appealing to me over time – which, to me, is the key hallmark of really good design.
[If you the read the piece I wrote on ratios it would be very easy to know all my interests intersect. Music, cooking, coding, baking, woodworking, photography, and others have a thread woven through them for me which I endeavor to exploit. The technical similarity makes for a warm welcome. And while ratios bring some rigor to the process, in the end they inform the process of design and composition and can be extracted from designs as well. A tool on the road to making a point that comes and goes like a barn swallow. The Anarchist’s Design Book. That’s aesthetic anarchy. Not the stuff that passes for anarchy in the news these days. You don’t have to build furniture or work with wood to be impacted by Schwarz’s books. It’s as much about eliminating consumerism, stewardship, and the cost of things. The tool chest in the first book in this series was a metaphor as much as a reality.
And if you love beautiful design rendered as tools, go convince Raney to sell you something. You won’t regret it.]
Bear with me, this will take a bit of doing…
The size of an interval between two notes may be measured by the ratio of their frequencies. When a musical instrument is tuned using a just intonation tuning system, the size of the main intervals can be expressed by small-integer ratios, such as 1:1 (unison), 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (perfect fifth), 4:3 (perfect fourth), 5:4 (major third), 6:5 (minor third). Intervals with small-integer ratios are often called just intervals, or pure intervals.
Most commonly, however, musical instruments are nowadays tuned using a different tuning system, called 12-tone equal temperament, in which the main intervals are typically perceived as consonant, but none is justly tuned and as consonant as a just interval, except for the unison (1:1) and octave (2:1). As a consequence, the size of most equal-tempered intervals cannot be expressed by small-integer ratios, although it is very close to the size of the corresponding just intervals. For instance, an equal-tempered fifth has a frequency ratio of 27/12:1, approximately equal to 1.498:1, or 2.997:2 (very close to 3:2).
There are some instruments that can be played in a just intonated fashion (voice, violin) and many that cannot easily do so (piano, guitar.) The tradeoff in using an equal temperament system is that you can easily change keys which enabled all sorts of wondrous music. However the intervals aren’t pure, and before you dismiss the value of that… part of the excitement and wonder of a choir, string quartet, etc. is that they can change keys and yet sing pure intervals (or not) as they wish. Remarkable flexibility.
The wonderful little volume “Ratio” by Michael Ruhlman displays the ratios behind cooking. In the book one can learn that pasta dough is 3:2 ratio of flour and eggs. No wonder we all love pasta—it’s a perfect fifth of a food! Cookies are 3:2:1 (flour, fat, sugar). There’s little surprise that ratios are there to be found once you start digging into ratios and they’re place in the cosmos. And more importantly, they’re far more useful.
If you have grandma’s pasta recipe (I looked up one by Mario Batalli) you get something like this: 3 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, 4 extra-large eggs Now we can argue our way through whether this is represented by the ratio above, and how much it deviates, but my point here is if you memorize the ingredients and all the “use half the flour unless it’s not dough or too sticky stuff” you still will only be able to make that one recipe. But if you understand that the ratio of 3:2 makes a pasta dough then you have different starting point. You have *information* that you can use to create other variations… or explore the boundary between pasta and cookies etc. Same is true of music.
If you know how to hack your way through a song on a guitar and sing along that’s cool. But if you understand the intervals, the chord progressions and the meter, you have the tools that will allow you play 1000s of songs or make up your own.
One more example before I’m done torturing all this to a fare the well.
The lovely volume “By Hand & Eye” discusses ratio, although in this instance as it applies to furniture and proportion. As it says on the site…
…George R. Walker and Jim Tolpin show how much of the world is governed by simple proportions, noting how ratios such as 1:2; 3:5 and 4:5 were ubiquitous in the designs of pre-industrial artisans. And the tool that helps us explore this world, then as now, are dividers.
Something like a step stool is one handspan high by two handspans wide… or the same ratio as an octave, which at this point should be no surprise. And when you begin to pin the ratios together you can find them in the subdivisions of our hands and bodies, in the spiral of a nautilus shell, and in the fractal nature of so many things, where the thing up close repeats the pattern of something of greater distance.
And all of this leads us to the Fibonacci series, which is building block that we seek at eh foundation of so many ratio related conversations (which at least for me is a good enough source from which to crib.)
A piano keyboard makes this somewhat clear…
…scale of C to C above of 13 keys has 8 white keys and 5 black keys, split into groups of 3 and 2. While some might “note” that there are only 12 “notes” in the scale, if you don’t have a root and octave, a start and an end, you have no means of calculating the gradations in between, so this 13th note as the octave is essential to computing the frequencies of the other notes. The word “octave” comes from the Latin word for 8, referring to the eight tones of the complete musical scale, which in the key of C are C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C.
So look… I’m not telling you that your whole life should be constructed around Fibonacci, The Golden Ratio, etc. (although many things already are…). Or that the art of music, cooking, design, and creating in general might be in how and when you break or bend that cosmic sense of proportion. But it might well be the case.
The real point of all this is that recipes are for students. They are a constraint that you can embrace in order to begin producing results. Follow these drawings and you’ll create a reasonable staircase. This plan and you’ll produce reasonable tasting food. That sheet of music and maybe something Bach like will be heard, or maybe some ‘Stones or Coltrane.
But if you embrace the knowledge behind how how the universe orders itself engrained in all we use to create, you need only apply is a little bit of inspiration about where to bend the lines.
Whether it’s music or software or chopsticks or whatever… I think the faces of the people in this video says it all. There is a deep connection between creation and human beings. Even when we don’t practice making things for years and years it is never lost. It’s as much a part of who we are as humans as anything I’ve ever come across.
I find it impossible not to enjoy this. I hope you see what I see when you watch it.
And if you care to, read about John Economaki’s experience.
Open source license usage on GitHub.com:
Open source simply isn’t open source without a proper license. Unless you’ve explicitly told others that they can modify and reuse your work, you’ve only showed others your code; you haven’t shared it. Here at GitHub, we’re big fans of open source, so we set out to better understand how our users approached licensing their code by looking at license usage across public, non-forked repositories, in hopes of encouraging more users to share their work with others.
[snip -ed]
Share your code
If you haven’t already, we encourage you to add a
LICENSEfile to your project. To make things a bit easier, if you begin to create a file namedLICENSEvia the web interface, we’ll even provide you with a list of common license templates to choose from.This is just the start. Look forward to a more in depth analysis over the coming weeks as to how license usage affects project success, as we delve deeper into the numbers. Of course, in the mean time, we encourage you to explore license usage on GitHub using the Licenses API.
Happy open source licensing!
[One of the many parts of software development that I truly enjoy is making easy things easier. It’s not hard to include a license in a project, but time is always at a premium and discipline is as well. When something requires even a little bit of both the chances that a large community will consistently perform those actions diminishes. Of course, even better, is when someone does it for you. Sadly, the vast majority of the code I’ve written will never see the light of day. But that’s the way it goes. We (at work) open source what we can, when we can.]
GOTY 2013: Badass Girls Need Not Apply:
I have gone to buy a computer, and had the salesperson speak to my husband and not to me, even though I am a professional game developer and my husband has trouble using a printer. I have had men in my department throw a Halo launch party and not invite me, assuming that as a woman I have no interest in games. I have had my professional opinion on server purchases overruled by men that were talking over me in meetings, and then watched those men be fired when the systems they purchased didn’t work.
Those life events inform my experiences and opinion. And, they inform my perspective on 2013 Tomb Raider. And, with respect, if you only have people voting on game of the year from a very singular opinion — generally white, straight and male — it’s missing so much information that it loses its validity.
This doesn’t mean guys can’t have awareness of issues affecting women. And it doesn’t mean women have a singular, monolithic opinion on games or even sexism. Even among my female friends, we have vastly differing opinions about 2013 Tomb Raider. Some of us love Bioshock Infinite; some of us hate it. But more viewpoints need to be represented in discussing games. We need more female games journalists who have a more central part of the dialog.
Sometimes, though, you run into a guy with empathy, who takes multiple points of view into account, not just his own. He might not even think of himself as a feminist. When 2011’s Vanquish came out, former IGN editor Ryan Clements was extremely enthusiastic. Then, in the middle of glowing praise of “watching an enemy explode into a cacophony of pieces” and “feeling entire highways crumble away under your feet,” Clements makes the following offhand remark in his video review.
“I say this game needed more badass girls, but that’s just me.”
[I agree. the world needs better representation for girls/women/ other folks etc. Expand the point of view of your company, team, whatever as widely as you can. It raises everyone’s level. We also need more folks who are badass at whatever they do and whatever field they do it regardless of gender or other ways people falsely divide themselves. ]
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule:
When you’re operating on the manager’s schedule you can do something you’d never want to do on the maker’s: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.
Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They’re effectively free if you’re on the manager’s schedule. They’re so common that there’s distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to “grab coffee,” for example.
Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you’re on the maker’s schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager’s schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day’s work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.
Till recently we weren’t clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I’ve realized what’s going on, perhaps there’s a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem.
Those of us on the maker’s schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager’s schedule is that they understand the cost.
[Well explained. I try and line up meetings in a given day. When they can’t be aligned that way I use the middle of the day, reserving the morning and end of the day for “maker” time. Allez! ]
turnings :: daniel berlinger 