|
| San Francisco |
| 2048x1536(475k) |
| 640x480(23k) |
First off, the last of the photos from San Francisco. A pretty standard skyline shot as we were about to pull back into the pier at the end of the cruise. I’m decidedly unsure about the way I placed the pyramid dead-center in the photo, and would probably try to frame this differently if I had a chance to do it again, but I’m not sure what I would change, exactly.
Yesterday was pretty darned productive, I think. Not everything on my to-do list got done, but I didn’t expect to finish everything up, and I got through most of the things I was worried about. Today I’ve got a similar amount of catching up to do, but it looks as though it’s reasonable and the items remaining on the list are mostly ones that won’t end up spinning out of control and turning into a multi-day ordeal.
Part of the improvement is that I tackled the tough things yesterday, but another part is that over the past year, since I started using Life Balance, I’ve gotten better at breaking large taskes up into smaller ones. Some mornings, the list looks huge, but that’s only because I’ve broken everything up into tasks that are an hour or less in duration, and it really helps me get a lot done when I need to. I still sometimes get sucked into exploding tasks, but now it’s usually because I have to deal with someone else who complicates things.
An example? Every time I have to deal with a “customer service” organization, I used to figure that was just a few minutes. Now I budget a full hour, figuring I’m going to be stuck on hold for a long time, and need to take the remainder of the hour to get my blood-pressure back down to normal afterwards. It doesn’t always take that long, but when things go well, I’m treating it as a pleasant surprise, rather than being grumpy when a five-minute task took an hour. Tuning my built-in pessimizer for the worst case seems to work well.
- Interested to know what information you’re revealing about yourself when you surf the web? BrowserSpy will help tell you. [claire]
- Kim has an essay about The Art Of The Compromise - Part I that I found pretty interesting. I mostly agree with him, though I might lean toward a little more absolutist (or nutcase) on politics, since I probably want less government than Kim does, but I think his outline would be a good start. Anyway, I figure it’s worth taking a peek at. [kim]
- The American Library Association has announced the preliminary results of a Study Measuring Law Enforcement Activity in Libraries. You know, the Law Enforcement agencies who
have never used USA_PATRIOT to get at library records
. The results? Most libraries haven’t had any requests, but there were at least 137 requests for information about what various people have read. To me, that sounds like a fairly large value ofnever
. [claire] - Think ChoicePoint’s data leakage was bad? IRS probing possible data security breaches, which has potential to be tons worse. About the only hope is that it seems that the GAO is the only one to have hacked the IRS. [instapundit]
- Mitch’s Attention, Boutique Writers! touches on something I was trying to rant about. Namely that many lefties immediately think that any support for Bush means I whole-heartedly agree with everything he’s ever done. Nope. No more than thinking that Clinton did some good things (even if he wimped out on the whole Lewinsky thing–I still think he should have just said
yeah, I schtupped her. What of it?
) means I like him. Processes like eminent domain are tools of the establishment, no matter which party happens to be in power, and it’s not the man holding the power I oppose, so much as the power itself. [mitch] - PARAMETERS, the US Army War College Quarterly has an interesting article on Preemption and the Evolution of America’s Strategic Defense. It’ll take you a while to read, but it’s a pretty thorough description of the evolution of the “Bush Doctrine”. [vodkapundit]
- Ya gotta like a movie that uses a tagline
People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
But it appears that V for Vendetta might be pretty flawed. Alan Moore wants nothing to do with it, but then again, he penned The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and while that was widely panned, I still enjoyed it. - There’s apparently going to be an anti-war protest in Minneapolis today. I wonder how the counter-protest will go…. [jim]