Last month, Todd and I ran across this article (via Consumerist) about how Charlie Munger, the Vice-Chairman of Warren Buffett’s investment company Berkshire Hathaway, used to set aside one hour each day to work on personal side-projects for himself. I like this idea for a couple of reasons:

1. One hour is about all the time I can spend on a project right now.
2. It’s such a small amount of time that the pressure of producing something “epic” is kept at bay.

Over time, these little actions will yield big results. It’s not a new idea, I know. But it’s easy for me to get caught up in a mental gumption trap, believing that I shouldn’t or can’t start something right now because I don’t have the time to give it the attention I feel it deserves or needs. Of course, that is complete and utter bullshit.

Over the past week, I’ve been trying to keep this in mind, working on various side projects I’ve intended to get around to someday. Not surprisingly, at the end of each hour, it’s satisfying to have been able to work on something that’s been sitting around in my head for weeks, months, and years.

After doing this for just one week, a couple of things become obvious:

• I still watch too much television.
• I don’t get enough sleep.

And these two things greatly influence how well I do other things throughout the day. I need to fix that.

As the article asks

“…if you aren’t satisfied with your current situation, why not work for yourself an hour each day? Instead of just idle dreaming, set aside specific time for action. Perhaps the key is small chunks of time, but at regular intervals.”

How very Kaizen. How very Bird by Bird.

At the end of the month, I’ll have a better idea of which projects I’m actually enjoying spending time on, and which ones I’m better off ditching.

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For my three readers that stop by on a quasi-semi-regular basis, you’re probably stunned to see a new post here. It’s nice to be surprised every once in a while, isn’t it?

The thing is that writing has been on my mind lately, and I’ve been pondering and cobbling together bits of a story that will eventually become a full-fledged novel. I haven’t written fiction in a long time, and I’m mentally stiff and creatively out of shape. What I wrote this weekend took way more effort than I expected. It was the creative equivalent of trying to eat a candy apple.

They say the more you write, the better you get, but I wouldn’t know because I’m always restarting from square one. One of the reasons I started a blog was so I would stay in the practice of writing something — anything — no matter how little, on a regular basis. Even if I wasn’t working on anything else, I could mentally shadow box here. Obviously, I made the mistake of neglecting this space. Then again, maybe I needed to be away from it for while, so I could miss it, and get to that point where I wanted to be back here, you know.

Well, for better or worse, I’m back.

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So, most of the people in my Inner Circle know that a few years ago, Todd quit keeping a personal blog. Well, under threat of being forced to watch Richard Simmons’s 20th Anniversary Edition of Sweatin’ To The Oldies, he’s back on The Tubes. His blog is here.

Oh, yeah. He and his wife, Yuko, had a baby boy, Lio, on Saturday. (Yep, you read that right.) He doesn’t have a blog entry posted yet, but don’t let that stop you from going over and saying hi.

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Flock, Inc. The Social Web Browser!

Okay, I’m not really all that jazzed about Flock. I’ve tried it before and thought “meh”, but it’s been a while so I thought I would give it another go. This is just a simple test post to see how well it works.

I usually use Ecto at the house (Mac), and ScribeFire on Firefox when I’m at work (PC), but I try to give other options a fair shake if they look promising.

If any of you out there use Flock, feel free to give me  a few tips on how to use it, or let me know some of the features you like.

This concludes the test of posting a blog entry with Flock.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock, web, browser, Ecto, ScribeFire, Firefox, Mac

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One of my favorite lines from Scrubs (and there are many) is something Dr. Cox said: “I’m fairly sure if they took all the porn off the internet, there’d only be one website left, and it’d be called “Bring back the porn!”

Well, guess what? They might not have taken all the porn off the internet, but there is a site called — and the following link is NOT safe for work, BTW — Bring Back the Porn.

I think it’s funny that the prediction was made by a character named Dr. Cox.

Also…in other porn-related news…

I saw this entry on Gizmodo and wanted to see what my site was rated. As Gizmodo entry points out, the rating tool (obviously “for entertainment purposes only”) “rates blogs by searching for keywords in your front page content.”

So, I put my URL in and here’s what Numskullery is rated.

Not bad, I guess. But, then I put in the URL for Bring Back the Porn.

Ha!

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I’ve been moving our sites over to Dreamhost because they have such a damn good deal on hosting that I really couldn’t see why I shouldn’t. They offer lots of space with weekly increases, and unlimited domain hosting, which is enough space for me to work on any project at any time.

My new hosting space also came with a free domain, and I chose fuckablerobots.com. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The thing is, now that I have it, what do I do with it? I considered maybe using it for a political blog or for bashing religious fundenmentalists, which are, given the current state of affairs, two areas of lunacy too closely related for my taste. I can’t see that being fun for long, but I think it’d be nice to have people reference Fuckable Robots in “serious” political and religious “debates”.

Stumped about what to make of this domain, I started thinking, “How many fuckable robots are there anyway?” So, for now, Fuckable Robots will be used to list, uh, fuckable robots. I’ll probably only add two or three a week, but if you have any suggestions/nominations email them to suggestions-at-fuckablerobots-dot-com.

Just admit it, you’re probably thinking of a robot right now that you’d fuck.

By the way, in case you’re wondering where I got the name, watch this and all will be illuminated.

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Okay, I got a little tired of Movable Type always having to rebuild all of my pages before I could see the changes throughout the site, so I switched to WordPress. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was saying that I didn’t have any plans to switch from Movable Type. Shows you what I know.

It’s an update-in-progress because I still need to put everyone’s blog link back up, and I’m not sure of the best way to do that just yet. But it’s too late to go back now. As for as blogs are concerned, this is the first time I’ve ever been able to import material without ripping a hole in the fabric of space and time.

I’m pretty happy about that.

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I’ve used pMachine, Blogger, and Movable Type. I’ve installed GreyMatter, Scoop, and WordPress, and played with each of them for maybe an hour or two. I’ve always been more comfortable using Movable Type, which is what I’m currently using for this blog, and I don’t have any plans to change that anytime soon.

I’m kind of the hold-out, I guess, because over the last couple of years, several friends have switched from Movable Type to WordPress. I’ve often thought I should revisit WordPress to see what all the fuss is about. So, that’s what I did last week, and I have to say, I like WordPress…a lot.

The ridiculously easy Famous 5 Minute Installation is jaw-dropping and eye-bulging. Plug-ins and themes are easy to install and switch, and there’s plenty to choose from. I could probably set up a half-dozen WP blogs in the time it takes to get one MT blog up and running. I can also create a page (like an About Me page, let’s say) from within WordPress. When I did this years ago using MT, I had to copy the main index page and delete all the bloggy code stuff before adding my text. Doing this in WP is so easy, it makes me want to cry.

I’m about 98% sure that any new blogs I create will use WordPress, I like it that much.

Also, every once in a while, someone asks me about starting a blog (hard to believe, but not everyone has one yet), and I go through the usual options, but when costs and hosting and set-up become an issue, I usually recommend Blogger. It’s free, and it’s easy. I think, when pressed to name a good, free blogging platform, most people (including current WP users) would say Blogger, just off the top of their heads.

But I think it’s worth letting people know (or reminding them) that you can also get a free account on WordPress.com. So, if you’re thinking about starting a new blog, or want to try something different, you should consider it.

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I’ve been using the image of the man in the flying machine for a few years now. It was part of a clip art book and disc called Transport Pictures on the bargain table at Barnes and Noble and costs me about $5, I think.

I had originally gotten it for another image on the disc, one of an old steam-powered car that looked like a rocket. But as I looked through all the images, one particular image stood out to me, and I knew immediately that I had to use it…somewhere.

It was the perfect image for me: a man in a flying machine. It had Numskullery written all over it. There are at least two kinds of numskullery: The first is truly the low-brow boneheaded stupidity like the kind associated with the current administration; the second is the kind that often involves people daring to think differently, and whose ideas are often criticized by people of the first kind of numskullery. But sometimes, it’s hard to tell the two apart.

And because I thought I would cover both kinds on the blog, the man in the flying machine seemed like the perfect embodiment of stupidity, and intellect and courage often called stupidity by stupid people.

For the past few years, I’ve just thought it was some neat clipart image, but it turns out that the flying machine, called the Albatross, was built in 1856 by a French naval officer, Jean-Marie Le Bris. (I just learned this last night while looking for a different picture of an early flying machine for this post at Deeper Motive).

The picture on the left was photographed in 1868 by Nadar. The one on the right is a replica of Le Bris’ Albatross by M. Jen? Kiss (link).

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