Buster Butterfield McLeod posted a photo:

bustermcleod: Did not die.

bustermcleod: The moment of reckoning is here.

Buster McLeod added an entry about get a complete physical:

I thought I’d have to deal with all kinds of name issues since I’m registered at Swedish under a different name, but it didn’t seem to phase them! And I got an appointment for tomorrow morning which is pretty awesome. My PCP must not be very busy. Well, I’ll fix that with my barrage of paranoid requests. Oh yes.

Here's my first attempt at representing all of the elements of the Facial Action Coding System:



(See all 42 facial action codes...)

Okay, so I want to make a body language dictionary.  Where you can look up poses, postures, faces, placement of hands, arms, legs, tilts of shoulders, how this little movement means this and that little movement means that.  Not for reference, of course... but rather for pure enjoyment and whimsey.  We already know the body language dictionary inside out, but sometimes it's fun to have our knowledge projected back onto us.  To swim around in it.

I suspect that something like this already exists, and that it's not that great.  I found this, which isn't quite right because it's sort of confusing.  I also found this, but there aren't any pictures.  I remember making these Nervasana Yoga Pose cards way back when I was into making things and they had poses for missed eye contact, slouching at a desk pretending to work, and other things.

What are the new poses for our new life?  Laying on the floor listening to a purring cat machine pose?  Self-portrait with a digital camera pose?  Text messaging while walking across the street pose?  Wearing ironic clothes pose?  Hailing a taxi pose?  I think this dictionary would be a lot of fun to make.  Or is it just my allergy medicine talking?

Oh!  And then we could cross-reference it with the hierarchy of emotions.  And wrap it around my 12 commandments for extraordinary living.  And include animals of the Egger Zodiak, and whatever else makes sense and doesn't make sense at the same time.  Yay or nay?

erikbenson posted a photo:

A couple people come by the co-op

Erik Benson added an entry about implement GTD:

I was lucky enough to attend the seminar on a last minute invitation from the GTD crew. I’m so glad I went. 43 Things has always been a bit close to “Getting Things Done” by the coincidence of our name and Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders. The coincidence extends in the way we both emphasize getting more out of life… make it up and make it happen was one of our early slogans. People use 43 Things to manage all levels of their vision… from the runway to the 50,000 foot view, but GTD really fleshes out some good ideas for how to turn goals into “desired outcomes” and “next actions”.

The odd thing is that I’ve sort of resisted the whole GTD movement up until now because of my impression that it was a bit too OCD and that my own personality was happier sort of living in a flexible chaos. After reading the book and attending the seminar, though, I now see that the GTD program is a lot more flexible than I was giving it credit for. Strangely, it also has a lot in common with completing the Artist’s Way (another of my goals). And it has a lot of overlap with other books I’m reading on life coaching, self-development, cognitive science, intention manifestation, visualization, social sciences (status anxiety), life hacking, and even quantum mechanics.

So, in the spirit of retrying things I don’t like (where the thing I have always disliked is hyper-organization and deliberate planning of tasks), I’ve decided to implement GTD and see how it bounces off my existing lifestyle. A 30-day trial. I’m actually very excited about it. This will involve getting my email in order, setting up my home and work offices, getting a filing system, doing the daily and weekly reviews, and trying to live the zero inbox lifestyle for a bit. It would be crazy if I could pull off a 180 on my organizational habits… as recently I’ve missed property tax payments, paid tax twice, and have missed a few electricity bills due to my current hopes that important issues would find me “just in time”.

A couple concepts from the book that really interested me are the weekly reviews (something I’m already doing in a slightly different context), the reticular activation system, the comfort zone, and outcome visualization. These ideas keep turning up everywhere I look and I think there’s some real important stuff to be uncovered there.

Buster McLeod adopted this goal

Erik Benson visited this place

Erik Benson added an entry regarding complete a triathlon:

I don’t know much about triathlons but it seems like a good activity for the low-attention span generation. I’m thinking that I might start “training” for this (which means researching on the internet how to actually spell “triathlon” and then figuring out how long each segment typically is, looking for hotels to stay at in Hawaii (because why not reward oneself for participating in a sporty event by doing the sporty event in Hawaii?)) today. Who knows when the running/swimming/biking training portion of this will start.

A crazy idea has entered my head. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Why? That’s where the ideas of a culture/person go when they want to gain a mass audience. Or rather, that’s where they used to go.

If you think about memes as independant entities, you can imagine that they sit down and play poker every once in a while and talk about the best ways to replicate themselves. They use existing modes of transportation (spoken language) to build new modes of transportation (the book). After a while, the book becomes a better mode of transportation than speaking and so the main bulk of the really important ground-breaking communication moves to books. And it stayed there for a long time. Maybe until television and movies came along. But because the group of book memes was once so powerful, it also tried to defend itself from being replaced by the visual broadcast medium. Near the end of the book’s legacy, they really pumped up the quality of creativity that was happening and all the classics from the 16th century (Shakespeare) through the 19th century, and the 20th century was arguably a century when the book meme lobbyists made us think that nothing had changed, and we continued to strive for the power that books had in the previous centuries. But something had changed. People were no longer reading books as their primary vehicle for information and ideas. They were now watching television.

Hence the decline in the importance of books even though the production of books (which continued to become easier and cheaper) was still increasing. But when books stopped being read by everyone (you couldn’t talk about that year’s most popular books at a party and expect everyone to have read them… which I think was much more likely to happen in the 19th century and earlier, at least in literate societies), then there came a negative feedback loop that led some authors and idea-makers away from books as their primary distribution model. Memes diverted into the television and movie mediums and flourished there.

What I’m wondering now is if software is the next medium that memes will inhabit. This entry by Tim Bray called Language Fermentation, combined with my instincts about how technology is going to change this world in the next 50 years, make me think that programming languages, along with the distributed bottom-up evolution of applications and ideas, will carry the biggest ideas of the 21st century. Not movies. Programs. Sound like hype to me, and maybe just a bit of a programmer-centric view of the world (being a programmer myself, how convenient), but even after all my self-doubt filters have been applied to this theory, I think it still survives as a possibility. And one that would perhaps make me switch modes in my life goals… to move away from the structured text of fiction and to more aggressively focus on the structured text of code. Does anyone buy this?