Apologies in advance for the multiple threads this site has recently developed - there are 2 active topics which I consider to be “ongoing” right now - productivity and finance, and I’m brewing up more tasty mind-beverages on those topics even as I type this.

Veering onto another topic entirely, though, today’s major preoccupation is international in nature. Right now I’m working n a talk I’ll be giving soon to a bunch of Korean developers in Seoul, regarding Flickr’s API. What’s interesting about this is the peculiar challenges it raises.

Firstly, I’m not 100% confident that my inevitably-slightly-manic English presentation will be all that understandable to a diverse group of Korean speakers. I’ve brewed up something of a defense against this - designing slides for the presentation which contain both an English component (so that the presentation matches the talk, and I know what’s going on, more-or-less), and a Korean translation. Hence the hurry to get the slides done - so that a Korean co-worker can translate! Nevertheless, it means that every design has to be somewhat “symmetrical”; and that there’s half the usual space per slide for any given concept.

But the really weird thing is how much uncertainty a foreign culture injects into the process of building entertaining presentations. In the circles I move in (amongst my fellow Flickr-ites, for example, and other talented presenters such as the lovely Mr Coates), the Done Thing these days is to illustrate one’s slides with somewhat-relevant photographs, usually as a background to the slide.

The approach makes a lot of sense for the Flickr team (we are, after all, in the business of hosting awesome photos), and has taken off in general due to the ease with which anyone can find good creative-commons licensed imagery through Flickr.

Using photography in this way also has the advantage of making the presentation immediately more visually appealing, and allows for a host of sly (or not so sly) jokes in the form of tangentially-related imagery, or flat-out visual punnery.

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I’m still trying to work out if the first comment on my post about finance a few days back was a helpful hint, or spam. I let it through because it seemed pretty genuine, although it raises quite a few doubts in my mind. I’ll repeat the main point here so you don’t have to bounce around the site.

If you are starting out investing in stocks and shares, you might want to use a share tipping service. They point you in the right direction, and then it is down to you to decide if you want to invest in what they suggest or not. You might decide not to invest in everything, but it tends to broaden your horizon and show you companies you would never have looked at before. If it is good, it will also keep you up to date with what the stock market is doing.

The site link which followed is useless to me, being a UK share tipping site (I live in California, for anyone late to the game). And even so, there are a couple more reasons why it doesn’t help much.

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I promised a post on productivity when I resumed writing last month, but as I’ve been gathering notes and writing drafts I’ve realised that it’s a really huge topic, and probably better treated in chunks. I’m starting here because procrastination is one of the most serious common roadblocks to productivity - no matter how robust your task-tracking methods or efficient your “inboxes”, if you regularly balk at certain tasks then progress is impossible.

So what are we up against?

Procrastination has one major root cause - fear. There are many sources of fear; some (fear of death, fear of pain) are hard-wired into all of us; others (fear of embarassment, fear of inconvenience, fear of failure) are learned responses to past conditions. All fears originate in the subconscious, and herein lies the problem.

Our subconscious has a highly vivid imagination - it’s always looking out for the wildest, worst scenario that could befall us, and steering us clear. Sometimes that’s good - it’s what stops us accepting rides home with drunks and playing with matches. Other times, it’s disastrous, holding us back from speaking in public, paying a bill or asking that cute stranger if they fancy a coffee. Our subconscious, designed to keep us safe from harm, has a hard time differentiating between Real Harm (certain death) and Not Actually Harm (”sorry, I’m dating someone”).

The very thing which makes us human - the ability to spot patterns, imagine scenarios and weigh up alternatives - can be a crippling burden if left in the control of the subconscious. Luckily, all those things also combine to afford us a defence against ourselves - rationality.

Fighting fear with rationality takes some practice, but it’s a useful skill to have. Training yourself to fight your subconscious knee-jerk reaction against getting something done provides you with a better chance of fighting stronger, more primally-driven fears (fear of flying, or spiders, or clowns).

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Total, utter bewilderment. You find some sources, start reading, and tinkering and experimenting, and some of the bewilderment seems to lift, only to come back in spades when you run up against a scenario you didn’t anticipate, or a major technicality which you’d overlooked. It can be frustrating; it can become a huge time-sink. I absolutely love it.

I’m talking about jumping feet-first into a new area of knowledge or expertise, and trying to “climb your way up” through torrents of information, advice and opinion so that you build your own “world view” of the domain in question and possibly, if you invest the right time in the right places, become an expert (or at least a competent amateur) in the field in question.

I think most people have done it at least once in their lives - if only when studying at university or learning a trade. I can immediately think of 3 times that I’ve done it - getting used to the realm of literary criticism at UCL, first learning my way around the internet, perl and linux around 1998, and properly acquainting myself with the rich and impossibly complicated world of independent music, starting last year.

The reason I’m writing about this feeling now is that I’ve just embarked on a new “problem domain” - money.

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Okay, so that title’s a little cruel and, yes, this is mainly filler to cover up the fact that I haven’t finished any of the pieces I mentioned previously. Soon, I promise… (again)

But anyhoo…

For quite a while, I was a big fan of Mark Morford’s SF Chronicle column. The writing was alternately breezy and frenetic, and each piece generally contained a kernel of truth or outrage which was… resonant.

Over the past year or so, though, the quality dropped. His politically-leaning pieces became directionless rants, and more and more columns were taken up with meandering rambles about consumer technology or science news.

At points, the only fun left was to play “spot the ‘Bush-ravaged’”, scanning each column to see how he’d managed to work that horribly over-used phrase of his into a subject completely divorced from Republican politics.

Today’s piece, however, is something of a return to Morford of old. It’s a little bit honest, a little bit brutal and a little bit sweet. It also contains the killer line

…whose biological clock is ticking like Dick Cheney’s pacemaker in a gay fetish dungeon…

…which made me accidentally snort tea this morning.

Since the column in question was apparently prompted by his newly single status, the headline here speaks for itself.

I posted this first on flickr, but it’s been far far too long so I thought I’d reproduce it here. There are a few other things I have half-formed posts on. Maybe this week. Maybe…

My earliest memories of America look like this. I must have been 4, and it would be another year before I’d actually visit the US on a holiday in Florida, but I had an overwhelmingly strong image of America that I’d picked up from the television.

Even though it was deeply American to its core, we got a lot of repeated 70’s episodes of Sesame Street on TV in the UK, and one of the features I remember most clearly were the filmed segments about aspects of the “real world” beyond a neighbourhood where the most esteemed resident was a freakishly gigantic talking canary.

I imagine that most of these segments must have been filmed in LA. The difference of it all from the semi-rural English “housing experiment” I grew up in was startling. I dreamed of big, chunky vans and beige garages. And the light (the thing that really made today a “Sesame Street day) - it was startlingly clear, almost painful, but somehow optimistic and beautiful.

My dad was always a big fan of America and all things American, and I think that some of his enthusiasm rubbed off on me. I never imagined though, right up until the moment the offer was presented, that I’d end up living here.

Like any society which is attempting to balance the prejudices, fears, hopes and dreams of millions of people, the US is far from perfect. Too much of the “culture” is based on conspicuous consumption (although the UK suffers from that malaise too); too many people talk of “making their peace with God” whilst failing to make their peace with themselves.

But somehow there’s space here. Space to be what you want to be; just a little more space than I ever found in London. It’s those “Sesame Street” days which really bring that home to me and marry my childhood dreams with my life as it is now. And they make me glad, at least for the time being, to call America (and San Francisco in particular) “home”.

Late, disconnected, reawoken, a little confused.

But here’s something that’s been rattling around my head for a while, and it needs to get out.

Contemporary songs which capture the essence of a particular city. I have a burning need to compile lists of such things.

So let’s start with the easy ones… (more…)

So I hit a bit of a slump over the past month or so. It was partly due to a slow transition of my duties at work, partly due to tiredness, and partly due to the fact that I’m basically a lazy slob.

I always feel terrible where I hit a point where I can’t seem to get things done, although a host of evidence indicates that I’m not alone in this, from sites like lifehacker and diyplanner to the instant cult status of the “Getting Things Done” method.

I think a whole book on getting your act together is a little much - the key for me at least is simplicity in a method. And I’ve finally started to work myself out of the unproductivity hole with a very simple method indeed, so I thought I’d share it. (more…)

I wrote this a while ago, and then forgot to post it. Although I’ve since switched to commuting by train, I do occasionally carpool when I have errands I need to run. And meanwhile, the situation on the Bay’s busiest freeway remains the same…

I never get tired of watching the rush-hour drivers toiling in 3 lanes of traffic on 101.

Every day there is a sea of perplexedness, frustration and boredom stretching 40 miles, endless hands dangling out of their car windows or fingers drumming on the steering wheel.

I’ll admit, I’m a little smug, but then I’m habitually sitting on a bus or driving with a passenger and I’m in the relatively supersonic carpool lane. At least until I hit Redwood City.
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There are lots of little signs that will tell you you’ve really started to settle into a life on the West Coast - regular social outings, the first time you can navigate from Santa Clara to Redwood City without a map, and my favourite - the first “you’re pre-approved for a credit card!” junkmail, which tells you that you’ve finally racked up some form of Credit Rating.

But even after the initial hard work is done and you really feel like you’ve arrived, there are still areas where you’ll find that you need to ever-refine your behaviours and expectations in order to increase your “comfort zone”. Are there five areas worth exploring with this in mind? Youbetcha! (more…)