Mad Times

I’ve been lurking in the Tiny Challenges community.

They’ve spent January on a variation of resolution setting where instead of spelling out a specific habit they select three words to serve as a kind of theme for the year.

After obsessing about how to pick and whether to use nouns or verbs or adjectives I came up with these.

clear

As in “clear the decks”. Focus on getting rid of stuff, eliminating unfulfilling activities, bad value expenses, worries, obsessions. It makes me happy that it’s both an adjective and a verb.

quiet

This one is similar, but more focused on things like meditation, getting outdoors, turning off podcasts once in a while, feeding my introvert self. Adjective, noun, verb trifecta!

next

Think President Bartlet’s “What’s next?” Stop faffing about and do the next thing. If it’s not clear what the next thing is then figuring out what the next thing is is the next thing.

All of which leads to my challenge for February: Clear the desk! I’ll be spending at least 15 minutes a day for all of February working through the piles of paper and non-paper open loops that make it hard to make progress on anything but maintenance. I’m going to tweet (@jeffy) my progress and see if that kickstarts a habit of writing on twitter (rather than just reading and retweeting). That’s not another challenge, just part of the same one.

In 2008 I read about 52 books which is pretty good compared to the last few years. There are a couple of reviews I haven’t posted yet. I’ll try to get those up soon.

We also watched a bunch of movies (about 80). Here’s a list of what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater (only 3 for me plus 1 more for Becky). Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it.

That doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before (a few repeats are included as noted). We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this.

Seeing them sorted by rating like this always causes us to rethink some of our decisions, but what’s here is what we thought of them shortly after seeing them.

In other anal-retentive data mining, we returned 113 disks to Netflix this year. In July we bought a set-top box that lets us watch Netflix stuff on demand over the internet. Looks like we’ve used that for 160 items since then which seems like a lot until you know that it counts individual tv show episodes. Here’s a summary of the TV shows we watched (we still don’t do cable or anything, so these were all on dvd or on-demand):

• That 70′s Show (season 5)
• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
• The Wire (still working on season 1)
• Pushing Daisies (season 1) Love this show!
• Criminal Minds (still working on season 1)
• Heroes (season 2)
• Coupling (season 1, 2, 3, & 4) LOVE this show!
• 30 Rock (season 1 & 2)

In 2007 I read a whopping 40 books (actually a few more than that since I’m counting reviews and a few of the year’s reviews encompassed multiple books) which is up about 20% from last year’s total. Not that it matters.

We also watched a bunch of movies (105 compared to 75 last year). The increase may be due to our each watching quite a few flicks solo that the other wouldn’t have cared about. Here’s a list of what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater (only 7). Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If only R appears then Rachel saw it with us. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it. “B, R” means I skipped that one, etc. I realize that all of this nonsense is really only of interest to Becky and me, but whose blog is it anyway?

That doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before (a few repeats are included as noted). We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this. If you’re wondering whether you’d like something on here, leave a comment or send email and I’ll expand.

In other anal-retentive data mining, we returned 126 disks to Netflix this year after switching to the three-disk plan in February. That includes most of the TV we watched this year:

• The Book of Daniel (complete series (cancelled in first season))
• Heroes (season 1)
• Joan of Arcadia (season 2 (last))
• Once and Again (season 2 (just Becky))
• Scrubs (first season)
• That 70′s Show (season 1, 2, 3, 4)
• Veronica Mars (season 3 (last))
• Weeds (both of us watched season 1 and Becky toughed it out through season 2)
• Wonderfalls (complete series (cancelled in first season) ended up buying our own copy)

Plus the series we sampled and didn’t continue past the first disk:

• Babylon 5
• Big Love
• Commander in Chief
• Dead Like Me
• Eureka
• How I Met Your Mother
• Star Trek: Enterprise (just Jeff)

It just occurred to me that I never announced here that I had decided not to photograph lost gloves any more. I think I said something on Flickr and forgot to bring the message back here to the blog.

I was starting to groan when I saw them instead of being amused and excited by the challenge of getting a new picture. I let a few go by and didn’t feel any remorse, so I’m done. Not saying I won’t shoot if I see something extraordinary, but the series is over.

One of my rules when I was photographing them was that I didn’t move or take the gloves. So now that I don’t have to hew to that constraint I’ve started collecting them. Not sure what might come of that. Maybe nothing. I pick up all kinds of stuff on the side of the road from nails to lost credit cards to a Jaguar hood ornament, so picking up the gloves is just another thing. Maybe when I’ve got a big enough pile of stuff inspiration will strike.

I’ve got a stack of eight books here that need reviewing. I’m going to try to buzz through them this week.

Sorry the blog has devolved into just cats and books, but for a domain called TomeCat, I guess that’s no surprise. I expect it will get more diverse again at some point. Thanks for staying with me.

If you see this post then you’re seeing our shiny new server. I need to replace all the recently uploaded images (I have them, just haven’t returned them to their rightful places). Otherwise things look pretty normal.

Email to tomecat addresses may be delayed for as much as a day due to systems caching the old address. If you feel you’re not getting through, try me at my gmail address jeff.youngstrom@gmail.com.

Now to figure out what to do with all this space.

The server move has been delayed so I’m going to post some stuff…

Mad Times is moving to a new server sometime in the next week or so (probably over the weekend). Hopefully everything will go smoothly, but if the site suddenly appears in safety orange type on a lemon yellow background or (more likely) fails to appear at all in the next week, take it as a sign that you need to spend more time outdoors and I’ll get things back to normal as soon as possible.

In 2006 I read only 31 books (a couple of reviews aren’t up yet). This is even worse than the 36 I thought was so scandalously low last year. All the same reasons apply.

We did do some pretty cool things this year that might have eaten some of my reading time.

• Went to the first annual Science fiction short film festival
• Had a big party to celebrate our 40th birthdays
• Had an art and craft sale at our house
• Learned how to do chain mail. And did
• Went to the Philippines
• Switched blog platforms to WordPress
• Got back into hand drumming, this time dragging Becky along
• Photographed lost gloves #69-111 (42)

We also watched a bunch of movies, so like I posted last year, here’s what we saw and what we thought of them.

The notes are about where we saw the movie and who saw it. “T” indicates we saw it in the theater. Other letters indicate who attended. The default is Becky and me. If only R appears then Rachel saw it with us. If just “J” or “B” appear then only the one of us saw it. “B, R” means I skipped that one, etc.

That’s 75 movies (only 10 in the theater) and doesn’t include everything we watched that we’d seen before. We don’t actually use stars when we rate movies, we use words. I’ve translated our “Don’t Miss” to ****, “Pretty Good” to ***, “Okay” to **, and “Don’t Bother” to * if that helps you make sense of this. If you’re wondering whether you’d like something on here, leave a comment or send email and I’ll blather on.

Okay, I’ve tweaked the blog template into a semblance of the old color scheme and layout. I’ve made a sort of peace with wordpress’s annoyingly nanny-like html editor. And I think I’m done mucking with the look and feel for the moment.

Let me know if you have any remaining problems with presentation or usability here at Mad Times.

Now I’d like to draw your attention to the unassuming link in the upper left corner of the page that says “book review index“. The page lists every book I’ve read since I started keeping track back in 1992 (835 titles at the time of this posting) sorted by author (431 authors) and includes links to the individual reviews (712 links) or completion notes (another 161) (total of 873 book readings).

Faithful reader Dan requested this feature back in the 1990s. I had big plans to build a database and allow dynamic search result generation and all that kind of good stuff. Obsessed about that for ten years, then spent a few evenings hacking up this completely static implementation that seamlessly accesses all three book review systems I have here on the site. There’s probably a lesson for me to learn here somewhere. I’ll have to think about it for a while and see if I can come up with an unambiguous statement of what that lesson is and then move towards implementing a full system to work around it.