ahead moves science, or at least my company’s website. today i tried to liven things up as i sent countless utility emails by including bits of poetry or jokes along with announcements of various software patches. it was quite a success. people like whimsy, especially when we’re engaged in some ugly brain-hurting task.

i was trying to watch the TV news today, and gave up entirely on CNN. they now have a sidebar with some information on it and two bars at the bottom at all times with weather, other news scrolling, and some weird web message board thing called “america’s voice” which is about as bad as you might imagine. It is now MTV, as the Jerkcity guys pointed out a while ago.

this goes along well with my blather about simplicity earlier. once you start gussying something up, eventually it all turns into a big terrible wedding cake. today’s mantra is:

LEAVE IT ALONE

Isn’t really work
Sitting in a big, curved room
Outside fall is here

I made a pretty good simple dinner tonight, and it got me to thinking about how we get good at things.

When I first started getting seriously interested in cooking, maybe 6-7 years ago, I tried to do a lot of things. Sauces, odd ingredients, lots of recipes from cookbooks, etc. It was a blast. Some of the food I made was pretty good, too, especially a couple of the fish dishes and some of the breads. What I realize now, though, is that the approach was all wrong. The foods were very complex and difficult to prepare, lots of steps were needed, and the result was a Big Presentation.

Tonight I made sauteed chicken breasts in a black pepper vinaigrette. There were a total of four ingredients and the whole thing took about 15 minutes, but it was much better than any of the food I made when I was being fancy.

Simplicity has its own well-known virtues. In this case it’s easy to see how good ingredients used sparingly were better, for example. But without having plowed through all those recipes and difficult dishes for a couple of years, I doubt it would have been so good. You can’t just tell people “fry up a couple pieces of chicken in oil with vinegar” and have it work. The sense of how ingredients work together, of what temperatures to use, came from all of those experiences with much more complex dishes.

So, when someone tells you that a complex skill or task is actually very simple, it’s probably true, but it still may be pretty hard to get to the really simple part. Complex, even.

Driving to work today, I saw a guy with a jeep wheelcover thing that advertised http://www.poomail.com, anonymous email. With a happy little piece of crap. I don’t understand things like this.

At work, i’m trying to document a procedure that isn’t really a procedure, mostly a series of necessary mistakes and flailing about that I do to make things happen. In the process of documenting it, I discover that it shouldn’t be done this way, or perhaps shouldn’t be done at all, lending a touch of absurdity to the day’s activities.

Question of the day: Is it better to be toughened by rough experiences and difficulties, so that life’s hard knocks are easier to bear? Or to be as innocent as possible for as long as possible, and bear the shock when the inevitable Bad Things occur?

One of those lying statistics you read in magazines says that we spend years of our lives looking for lost objects. I lost 90 minutes today to my wallet, which was finally found in the back yard on a table (!). I wonder what would happen if I just never found the object I was chasing. Would I end up like Sisyphus, chasing some unavailable missing object for eternity?

We had a meeting at work today in which the boss tried to draw an analogy between our challenges doing thingies with technology, and the battles for North Africa during the second world war. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the Antarctic Expedition Analogy we got handed at a previous job, but it was a bit comical. I imagine myself in goggles, clinging to a tank as bullets whistle by.

The boss is a cool guy, and I’m addicted to analogies also. For some reason mine always seem to involve animals.

“It’s a kangaroo rat solution to the problem. If you just jump straight up, you get away for a bit but the problem is still there when you land.” Then again, the problem is a bit surprised. I hope to surprise my problems by vigorous jumping.

One of our journals will be with you momentarily.

Journals as a writing format present some serious problems. For the reader, there’s not much more than voyeurism provided unless the subject is famous or otherwise interesting to others (most of us aren’t).

For the writer it’s even worse. Here are your choices: accuracy, self promotion, self-abasement: pick two. Or just flat out boredom.

Today I watched football for 5 hours and was paid for it. It’s a strange world. I sat there with my feet up and clicked away at keys making sure some trivial information was provided to others, bought a hat over the Web (I lose hats), and tried not to fall asleep.

Increasingly I think sleep is the natural state of humans and should be encouraged. Most of the crappy things I’ve experienced have been while awake.

Join me, sleepers, and snore away the next 50 years of war. My n key is breaking.