Jay McGavren's Journal

Well, I didn't wonder how I stood it until NOW...

> “Now we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they > stood it. How grim it must have been to till the same > fields your whole life with no hope of anything better, > under the thumb of lords and priests you had to give all > your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters. I wouldn’t > be surprised if one day people look back on what we > consider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be > to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office > complex, and be told what to do by someone you had to > acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their > office and say “take a seat,” and you’d sit!”

http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

This is an article about founding startups, by the way. And in it, the author explicitly advises anyone with a family NOT to do so.

Dammit, dammit, dammit.

[Edit: Wait a minute… who cares? I’m more likely to get my name out there with an open-source project than with a startup anyway.]

More wisdom...

Find someone you respect, and emulate them. Your brain won’t work right if you don’t exercise your body.

We’re housesitting for Diana’s dad, who has a huge Mitsubishi HDTV… Like so many HDTV owners, they were watching standard-def shows, stretched to widescreen (which I can’t stand, but apparently no one else notices). After much poring over the manuals, I figured out how to set it up correctly. (The digital cable box was routed to the TV through co-ax, and the component cables (Monster brand, no less) were sitting unplugged behind the TV.)

Anyway, we’ve been watching that Planet Earth series. It’s the only decent hi-def content we can seem to find, but any description short of “fucking amazing” doesn’t do it justice. The color, sharpness, and detail are incredible - even Diana’s jaw dropped.

I don’t know how we’re going to go back to standard-def in a few days. Not only can we not afford new equipment, there wouldn’t be much content available if we could, and we might find ourselves locked into the losing side of the HD-DVD format war.

The HD revolution really will be amazing, but we’re going to be stuck in the lo-res ghetto for quite a while.

Watching the Propellerheads Reason tutorial videos… If the thoughts a person can have are shaped by the language they speak, then Reason is the language of electronic music (or, at least, a major dialect). Just learning a bit about the tools of the trade teaches you volumes about why music sounds the way it does.

Wisdom...

Here’s some important stuff I have learned the hard way, or have read and believe to be true.

Be cool. Be nice. Winners focus. Losers spray. [Not mine.] No matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back. [Not mine.] People are selfish. Projects that fight this fail. Projects that harness this succeed. 10% of people are assholes. 10% of people are really nice. Be brief. Latency happens. [Not mine.] Failure happens. Maliciousness happens. The last 20% of the work requires 80% of the effort. [Not mine.]

There’s probably more to be added here…