I’ve been meaning to post, but can’t quite put together anything coherent right now. Things are hopping at work as we beta test the new release of our software, so that’s been keeping me busy. Speaking of work, if you want to see where I spend all day, stop by the Fog Creek Open House […]
Category: journal
The Glory of Bach
A few months ago, I mentioned the Washington Post story where they got Joshua Bell to busk in the Metro. It prompted a blog post about the importance of context, but it also made me realize I miss having music in my life. I actually started listening to the audio of the performance for a […]
Donation Culture
Several of my friends at LiveJournal considered the permanent account sale recently, trying to decide whether to pay to make their account permanent. The ones who did often framed it to themselves as their way of saying thanks for a service that they have used extensively. I eventually decided against the permanent account, as I’m […]
Team player
This has been a week of reflection for me for several reasons. I’ve been thinking about what constraints are necessary for me to be successful. After reviewing situations in which I achieved great things in the past, I realized that a common element of those situations was being part of a team I cared about. […]
Happiness and Satisfaction
I’m almost halfway through my summer “vacation” from classes and it’s time to pause and reflect on what I’m doing with my time off. One of the joys of having free time again is being able to waste it, but I’m finding that spending time in certain ways doesn’t make me particularly happy. For instance, […]
What I know about blogging
My mentor from the Columbia program, Jon Williams, recently started a blog, and asked me if I had any advice about blogging. That got me thinking about what makes for a good blog, so I’m sharing my thoughts here. The blogosphere is intensely competitive in terms of the attention economy. When blogs I read link […]
Embracing constraint
A friend recently told me about his vacation where he felt surprisingly productive despite not having access to his normal resources (he only had a carry-on bag of clothes, a laptop and a couple books). Because he had fewer choices about what to do, he just picked a task available to him and started working […]
Discipline
I was talking to a friend over the weekend, and somehow we got onto the topic of discipline. I think we had been talking about PhD programs. We’re both generalists and tend to have interests that are broad rather than deep, so there’s no intrinsic appeal to the idea of getting up each day and […]
Thinking by talking
I had a teddy bear moment today. I was trying to debug something at work, got stuck, asked one of my coworkers to help me, explained the problem to him, and said “Oh, I see what’s going on” without them saying anything. I guess I should bring a teddy bear into work so that I […]
More art
A couple years ago, I wandered into a small gallery in SoHo and saw a piece of art that I liked and surprisingly could afford, so I bought it. Since then, whenever I’m in the neighborhood, I stop by the Ward-Nasse gallery in hopes of another find. It turns out that the gallery is a […]
