A story about "Welcome to the Monkey House"

Welcome to the Monkey House

by Kurt Vonnegut

This is without a doubt one of the best collection of short stories I have ever read. Period.

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A story about "Light"

Light

by M. John Harrison

This book is phenomenal, and I intend to read it again in about a month. It really stretches your mind on how a sci-fi book should be written. It really extends beyond current science fiction, further in scope than Dune, written in a fractured form similar to Hard-Boiled Wonderland, and oddly enough it makes you feel happy at the end. My only complaint is that the book is a little too sexual, and in the end it will turn off some readers.

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A story about "State of the Art"

State of the Art

by Iain Banks

I guess that it’s worth it. It’s one of the strangest series of stories that I’ve read in a while. I read this book because of The Wasp Factory. Totally different type of fiction. I am very impressed that both books could come out of the same author, and I plan to read Complicity really soon. If you don’t like science fiction you WON’T like this book, but don’t avoid this author, because his writing is amazing. Definitely check out The Wasp Factory if you get the chance, and check this book out if you like sci-fi.

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New habits...

Dawn introduced me to Covey's 7 Habits book, and I was looking carefully at the Venn diagram on Habits last night during my reading session. There are the three main circles of Skill, Desire, and Knowledge, and of course Habits was in the middle. Mathematicians draw these diagrams to contemplate what happens in each of the 7 regions, which leaves all of the two-without-one regions. Oddly, it made sense to label these three regions with negative monikers:

• Skill^Knowledge^~Desire=Procrastination
• Knowledge^Desire^~Skill=Ignorance
• Desire^Skill^~Knowledge=Addiction

This makes total sense to me. If you know why and how to do something, but don't want to do it, that's a natural definition of procrastination. If you know why to do something and you want to do it, but you don't know how, this is ignorance. If you want to do something you know how to do, but aren't sure that you should be doing it (or are willfully ignoring the consequences), this suggests addictive behavior.

Some questions naturally occur with this line of inquiry. If you don't know why you are doing something, is this the same as willfully ignoring the reason? I would suggest yes. You should have a moral reason to do the things you do. If reasons to possess a certain behavior are proven wrong later, you have a reason to change your behavior, and not taking this action shows dependence on the behavior. Does the broaden the range of addiction? Sure it does; even people who take vitamins after the suggested benefits are disproved are showing an addiction to the habitual action (and possible placebo effects of) that behavior. Isn't there a fine line between procrastination and ignorance? I would suggest that the perfection effect (being paralyzed by inability to perfect the task you're attempting) is a struggle between procrastination and ignorance, and is really just using ignorance to cover for your procrastination. This is indicated by the ease in which ignorance is cured (by research) as opposed to procrastination (where said research turns into aimless wandering).

Finally, after looking at these negative conditions, doesn't the Venn diagram seem kinda lopsided? It could be an effect of the internet; the increasing ease in which ignorance is curable allows for the other parts of the diagram to dominate. Something to think about.

Finished edits...

Well I cleaned some stuff up and got the Twitter feed... now if I remember to update it all the time, it'll be good. Also got a lot of other stuff done today. It was mainly sponsored by the hard drive crash on my old machine. Now my new laptop is hooked up to my flatscreen, and I can do a lot of stuff at once now. Also did the dreaded iTunes transfer. Wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it would be. In fact it was totally seamless, save for a couple of crashes because iTunes wanted to convert my .wma files and Windows totally didn't want that to happen. :)
Also got my butt in gear and transferred my files into GTD format. I'm now in the system. All I need to do now is get a good task manager program together. If I don't write my own, I'll use something else. It'll have to be stored online; I can't tolerate being tied down to a single machine. This is part of the reason I played around with Twitter. I only wish I could consolidate all of this information in one place. Hmmm... this could be an interesting development project. I'll have to crack open my Java books. Could be a lot of fun.

Playing with Twitter...

Unfortunately I got sucked in. :P All good. It'll be a quick way to update where I am from anywhere. I'm adding the badge as I type... we'll see how well it works.

Totally unrelated note...

I totally missed out on karaoke yesterday! The IT group at work went in my stead, and I guess they had a totally awesome time. Ugh. I guess there's always next week.