Saturday, July 30, 2011

Lanchester's Square Law

Accidentally rederived Lanchester's Square Law again, in a different way than I'd seen before. If your units are X times as good as mine and each of your units hits p of the time and mine q, then each of your units should take out X times as much stuff as each of my units. You unit takes out p*1 of mine, and mine takes out q*1 of yours, and yours are X mine, so mine takes out q*X my-units of yours. But yours are X times better so we'd better have p*1 = X * (q*X) or X = sqrt(p/q). You'll need 100/X to tie my 100.

A coworker mentioned a Jeff Atwood post that points to Luke pointing to Richard Wiseman. Yessssss.

I traded off going to my favorite restaurant for everyone else having a better chance of not having bad service there (Friday). Definitely the kind of trade I want others to make, so I made it.

I wrote up most of the stuff Anna asked for in her "retrospective please!" mail, but it's not quite done. I'll finish tomorrow.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Talking with Partners

Very nice day at work today, avoiding all the mistakes of last milestone and actually ironing out all the potential problems with partner teams before we start coding. Yay for that! I didn't do much of improvement note, though I am sneaking in random reps of pushups and leg lifts. I finished a novel... still not sure what to think about reading science fiction. It's a lot of fun but does take up a lot of time. Maybe some kind of fiction budget is in order.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Orbital Bombardment

Hm, woke up and went back to sleep this morning. I'll have to start Brandon's 30 countdown thing again. At work my PM made me super happy, he stopped by my office and said something like "just so you know you're having an impact on the world, I was in a meeting and they were like 'hey Chris can you get this statistic?' and I asked them what actions they'd take based on what the answer was like you do to me and they couldn't tell me, also I'm watching for when I'm rationalizing now and when I catch it I just do the opposite".

Neat!

Not sure about the opposite thing but hey it follows my other heuristic of "go to the other end of the spectrum first".

As for me, I hella procrastinated today in the name of "but my stuff's building". The random chime is great for not allowing me to make excuses, no excuse is a good reason for the paucity of "yeah I'm doing endorsed work now" entries today. So that's not great. Luckily I didn't totally do that at home, and I'm pretty sure I have a good activity for 2-weeks-from-now. Seeing that "opposing" goals don't actually interact too much just by trying some examples.

We played 3:16 and I'm burning through resources as quickly as I can, 'cause now it's in their best interest to just kill me and get promoted, jumping a bunch of levels. I think I can make Major before I get offed. Eric had some nice imagery for the result of me using orbital bombardment, my character was strapped to a red X over the hologram of where the planet used to be, interrogated by the Lt Col. 3:16 is living up to its promise.

Time for a shower, calibration exercise, and sleep.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Python

I am typing this while palming a dollar coin. Now, while palming one in each hand. It feels weird but basically works fine, with my right hand. Left gets cranky. Anyway, work was good today, though I got super lethargic at around 3:30. Dunno why but it means I'm sleeping more tonight. As usual it cleared up completely after dinner. :S

I ran some calibration drills and learned some more Python. I'd say if I improved this much per day on average I'd be pretty satisfied. But not ecstatic so there's room to improve at improving. Tomorrow I won't have a lot of time but I plan to collect my notes on the lw-meetup discussion and look for any major missing pieces, and make a quick plan on organizing the work I'll need to do to put it together.

Interestingly mousing is much harder than typing.

Undefeated?

This no-caffeine thing almost failed this morning but I compromised and got some decaf coffee. Whew! I got a big hit of less-motivation though, when I realized it was Two Weeks until M3 coding start rather than One Week like I thought. :S First off, I have no idea how I made that mistake. Second, once I realized, the thought kept popping up - "a whole extra week! you don't need to do anything right now!". I powered through it instead of fixing it, which was a mistake. Tomorrow if it happens I'm fixing it.

Frisbee was sweeeet. The opposing team was undefeated. We played a really good, tight game the whole way except for one dude getting pissy near the end of the first half (he managed to stop) and a bit of overconfidence during the beginning of the second half. I missed one really nice deep catch, sad cat, but made another couple and generally played some very good defense and above average offense. We won 15-13 and went out to dinner afterwards, about half a dozen from both teams. Now I have infinite cold noodles leftovers. Not infinite, but seriously about 5-6 meals. I managed to converse, both starting and continuing good conversations at dinner. I am sooo bad at it still, but I'm now able to see how bad I am by how much attention I have to pay to doing it rather than bad results. That's progress.

And I gave an intern a ride to and from dinner. True story.

Monday, July 25, 2011

LW meetup

Some memories from yesterday. Bring paper towels or napkins to the LW meetup. Also what are we doing next week? I'd host Space Alert, or some more-intense paranoid debating. :D And check to make sure my intuitions on Occam's razor make sense. My mom's coordinated her family to deal with my grandfather and aunt pretty well. This potato soup gets rather less liquidy on day two. I'm ready for some social effectiveness leveling at frisbee dinner and Tokyo night. I have no idea what the current political debt thing actually means economically or politically. I wish the Randi forums were better but they are not. Also palming a coin seems easier than I thought.

Some thoughts from right now: Fine, I'll write down thoughts that night, it works much better.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Coding fun

I'm going to start doing TopCoder algorithm competitions again 'cause those were fun and I've lost some of those skills - I can tell because I did some practice problems and they were fun but I had more trouble with them than I remember. The problems seem to be about the same difficulty level they were a few years ago, which is pretty impressive. Also I started learning Python, 'cause why not.

Today would have been a great day for rejection therapy at Marymoor. Too bad weather is friggin' impossible. But I got in some running, walking, and ping-pong.

I made my second potato soup, turns out adding more butter and more cheese is a really strong play.

Other than that, I did mostly do-nothing stuff today. Recovery, I'm calling it. I don't know whether it was required but it felt like it. So starting tomorrow I'm back in full-fledged Improvement mode, after a week or two of wait-what-am-I-doing. I've got my list of Important Stuff and everything. Most important is choosing the first One Focus Area.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Today is Yesterday

Yesterday, Thursday the 21st, I took my takeaway to heart and canceled my commitment to the combo most arbitrary deadline, most cost item. So I'm not going to give my presentation at work until 2.5 weeks from now, now. This is great. I felt so freed up. Now to make sure I don't accidentally procrastinate. ;)

I've been enjoying my TAM9 necklace, but the bracelet seems to have better (more visible) results.

Meditation was all right, but not in the morning, and only for 15 minutes. I want to get back to the morning - my working hypothesis for some of my sleep-related issues in the last week or so is whoops I started drinking coffee during the day again. So I'm stopping caffeine again to see what that does, starting tomorrow which is today.

I used some of my confidence interval (credible interval) skills to estimate my next milestone's tasks. Excited to see how they end up compared to my estimates! My overall time estimate was super-close between two different methods: 50% confidence, call everything normal, versus 90% confidence, call everything log-normal. I did the two over two days, recreating even the tasks for the second one.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Too much stuff

Takeaway: committing to a lot of things that require work at the same time is well worth taking plenty of extra upfront time to avoid.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Presentation O'Clock

No meditation today. Got up late, now I'm super sleepy, also I discovered a part of me prefers consistency in writing this to consistency in meditation or possibly my behavior-executer-thing for writing this just works somewhat better. Tomorrow I'm back, promise.

I checked in some bugs against strange motivational opposition. And I had a long talk with Lara about the CSS presentation, which was very helpful. Down to busy-work now before presenting next Tuesday. Also, Eliezer's implicit Bayes' structure post was directly responsible for my most significant contribution to Microsoft. lulz

Frisbee was fun, I played well, and we crushed the other team, which is a novel result. I handled some, kinda badly, but without reservation.

I am confused by this: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/6q3/link_the_bayesian_argument_against_induction/

TAM9 3: The Tamining

Fast forward to back in Seattle: Having a question/goal in mind feels like a good idea for me when doing insight meditation. Maybe eventually it will artificially constrain, but for now it's very motivating. And there are so many questions! I used "what does the breath 'look' like going in and out in my abdomen rather than in and out of my nose?" today.

Rewind to Vegas: Notes from today! Here they are:
Hyman's Maxim: Before you try explaining something, first make sure that there's actually something to explain.
Guaranteed-return managed mutual funds are a scam.
skepticmoney.com
Common Sense on Mutual Funds by John C Bogle
PR - the art of getting media to spread your message for you, for free
You have a doctor? Have her write a blog post once a month, and fax it to the media. They need to know we're a source! Remove their trivial inconveniences. To be there at the right time, be there all the time.
younghipandconservative.com
Wikipedia! Tell others who we are, they can't find us

Negative affect correlates with motivation to ignore counterarguments
attitude/performance correlates with resistance to persuasion
usually: while "listening" we are evaluating others and thinking of how to dismantle their points. New form: speaker can't go until paraphrasing others' points to others' satisfaction
1. explore common ground
2. statement of listener's position
3. objective statement of speaker's positiong
4. thesis (and show willingness to accept something from listener's side)
- at any point, listener may object and require clarification/accuracy
"Rogerian"

it's irrational to ignore emotions
lack of emotional awareness is bad... Spock was irrational
specific examples inoke emotion, vague don't
find concrete, true examples that speak to shared values and make me care

sleightsofmind.com
motion - neurons for that type get overactivated (tired) and opposite direction don't
neurons actually get *surpressed* by higher cognition so we keep attention on spotlight
attention to meta is all that allows putting attention on *all* relevant areas

sound bite as poetry! dense information communication
activisim: include interests of people not-like-you. e.g. Vote - Education, Employment, Marriage law - Sex, reproduction, classism - etc. widening circles.
Diversity of tactics - militants good for beginning, overcoming activation energy, but they will and should become obsolete later. They move the acceptable-discussion window and make moderates less scary
objective -> audience -> message -> tactics

mental illness denial? counter with migraines

Sunday, July 17, 2011

TAM9 2

Sad cat didn't set aside time for meditation today and so only got the incidental mindfulness during the day. Not good enough, kitty.

Here are notes from TAM day 2. Friendly PR directors are MAGIC
Sadie Crabtree:
How do we win?
1. What's the goal
2. Who do we need to talk to
3. What do we want them to do
4. Which values can we tap
5. What beliefs will be obstacles
6. What's the message and who delivers
2 Convince those who don't feel strongly not those strongly opposed or already supporting
3 Change behaviors of others, not their values. This also sets them up for cognitive dissonance.
4 Find shared values: honesty fairness feeling smart and respected feeling right and co fident about it not feeling cheated or taken in
5 Feeling control over circumstances, making sense of an irrational world, wanting to feel right and respected
6 Frames, and who is ot that will deliver the message? People trust people with whom they feel they share a common interest
Don't use: critical thinking, educate, skepticism, nonsense
Its not what you say that's important its what people hear

Campus groups - secular >> homeopathy
To measure something hard to measure that seems easily games, pick 20 ludicrous bit correlated things measure them and correctly add the evidence
PLACEBO read literature this is a panel of six folks who know what they're talking about at a skeptics conference and they all think placebos don't exist for non-mental phenomena in general
Regression to the mean
Use three arm tests to check placebos
Bias! Can't double blind placebo?
*Brainstorm all situations with subjective impressions as inputs
Placebo response changes subjects subjective self reported metrics eg pain nausea but not eg  olume of air breathed
Imagination is key to implanting memories
*Random reminder on designed schedule to want want desire desire etc instead of reward to ramp
Keep baby picture in wallet so it os returned
Carol tavris
Motivated cognition actually different brain activation
18.11 Pp 1947 1958 journal of cognitive neuroscience
Students who got self help that didn't improve their performance changed heir memories of how well they did beforehand so they thought the help did help
I.e. to change identity let yourself want to not identify with the characteristic
Anger - anonymity speed and lack of consequences. Can lw malw commenting take more time
Do NOT put people into a state of dissonance they will just side wih the.selves even more strongly
Exercise: how to instill a piece of identity then set up cognitive dissonance
*Childcare at skeptical (science?) conferences - RDSF sponsors now? Ask them

Phantom was awesome. First, it's good. Second, this production was good. Third, for me it has soooooo much nostalgia factor.

Also we're putting a solar sail into space!!

Friday, July 15, 2011

TAM9

Meditation comes after this post and before Penn's bacon donuts and rock & roll party today.
Here are my notes.
Whiteboards everywhere plzkthx
Why would their tactics work on us
9X10^21 / 10^22-10^24 stars
God will kill us makes them more or less threatening?
Set up testing station one minute
Singer!!!!!
6000 "Total" IQ what
Notice your confusion - of course they checked the electronics
Community of rationalists - mc called us this
Make sure that your question's a question!!!
George singing freaking amazing
Skepticism isn't just about being correct it's also about doing the right thing
 False patterns for pattern matching were far less costly than false negatives.
"Agenticity"
calc how egregiously they should be able to cherry pick, beforehand
There is a place for a magician in the lab whenever deceit could be involved. We deceive ourselves all the time. Is there a place for a cogsci bias consultant in the lab?
Straws plaster of Paris and a gerbil!
PZ sez 5 extinction events makes 6 data points 2 don't count as life was only aquatic and out of 4 the first three didn't result including intelligence so...
OMG Neil don't do the that's such a biiiiiiiiiig number thing
Phd is twice the evidence of scientist given phd that a person is not religious.

Also, harry potter was good. But I have been infiltrated, no single part was better than a certain shining moment in mor... :S

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Vegas

Meditation on a plane! Blogging on a phone. In Vegas for TAM9 but today is just walking around the strip. Should I play poker or write presentations or oh wait harry potter 7 part 2???????
I discovered I don't like typing more than a few words on this phone at one time. Or thought I did, it's getting better with practice.

Hunter

I decided to do walking meditation today, in the sun. Focused completely on teasing apart the sensations and motions in my right foot. I found 6 separate physical sensations, each of which (with effort and balance) I could stop after, labeled (in some cases prematurely) down heel roll ball push lift. I also spent some time paying attention to how (say) heel felt, then not walking and calling to mind the same sensations to see what just the mental aspect felt like, then walking again to see the difference between the purely mental part and the mental + physical part.

I went over the draft of my presentation with Ravi. Looks like it's going to work out great! We found some areas to tweak, some to radically improve, one that needs to be redone or cut, and I know of one which I didn't finish the draft for yet... but overall easily done in a couple weeks. Lara, Ravi, and I will go over it Monday so I'll finish  up the draft changes and paper prototype at TAM - or I won't, either way. :D

We played Hunter and it went well. For me. I felt on a whole it dragged, but I was holding up my end pretty well. This is in marked contrast to my normal feeling of vague inadequacy while playing a non-game RPG.

The 3 axes worksheet seems right as I remember, and worked well when I tried it.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Frisbee

This morning my stuffy nose was like all grrr and argh. But that didn't stop me and I got in some good practice. I really want to go an hour rather than half an hour, it seems there's a longish ramp-up before my mind calms down, and the most interesting things are always near the end. I'll schedule that for Saturdays and see how that goes.

This Saturday though I will be in Vegas! Who knows what I'll be doing schedule-wise. Yay TAM. Or at least I anticipate yay. I've never been to one before.

I was pretty motivated again today to write up the presentation! Not super-motivated but pretty. I've got a good draft now and I'll go over it with my coworker tomorrow.

Then: Frisbee. After a week off I was so ready. We had a very tight game, 13-15, and I learned (viscerally rather than intellectually) some good tactics involving how to cut and how to clear out in a useful way.

I put together a draft of a worksheet on 3 axes to explore the emotional brain's map near a goal and plan. I'd like to do the worksheet now, but it's late. If I don't then I'll do it tomorrow. If it's fine then I'll send it John's way.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Motivation and Dinner

I missed meditating this morning and didn't get to formal sitting until the night. That's unfortunate. Fortunate, though, is that I'm spending time noting more and more during the day - when walking to the restroom or between meetings or at lunch or whatnot. And I noted a thought I've never noted before, "explaining", when a legit reason for a thing I just saw popped into my head. Not rationalizing or story-telling, but explaining.

I was super-motivated during work, wrote up a note-version draft of my presentation, investigated and fixed some good bugs... I attribute it to talking about and getting excited about motivation yesterday. We'll see if there are long-term effects, magically! :) (Also this motivation is clearly evident in my log of what I'm doing when the mindfulness chime goes off)

I had dinner with John and then he and I and Ben talked/worked on career planning for a while. I feel like I don't have a good direction on the meta-level, like I never know what to do next when "working on career planning", like it's not broken down enough yet. Taskification. But I did get at least two very important things out of the evening... what I'm doing with my free time now is a choice on the career decision tree, and I have a feeling to investigate that I don't understand which manifests as a huge difference between a within-Microsoft job change and a change to another large software corporation like Google or Amazon. Realistically those two changes are not very different, but I feel far freer when contemplating what it would be like if I were currently at Google than when contemplating what it would be like if I were currently at Bing. I'm pretty sure this is Important and will work on it tomorrow night.

Hah, what are the odds. Fine, I'll enter "blogging" for what I'm doing right now, silly mindfulness chimes. :D

Monday, July 11, 2011

Meetups

I tried having a chime ring every 5 minutes while meditating, but my phone locked after the first chime (I eventually inferred) and I didn't want to stop to try to fix things. I'll get it set up before beginning next time.

Game 4 is written up, so that's good. I'm not sure whether to write up Games 2 and 3 in their original form or with the changes I've thought of or what.

The LW meetup was today and it was very good. This marks the first time I would whole-heartedly recommend someone not invested in LW meetups trek from the eastside with 520 closed. ;) I found out I have a motivation-draining block partway through the pipeline required to prepare my context sensitive spelling presentation for work, and simply finding the block was enough to reconceptualize it away. (It was an anticipation that after writing a draft I would look at the draft and deem the structure unworkable.) Then I chose a couple of methods to increase my motivation in general - breaking out a couple of necessary subparts, and moving the rewards timing sooner (intermediate presentations/reviews with some coworkers I'd already planned but hadn't yet been anticipating any social rewards from).

Talking about motivation was super-motivating. Or maybe it was that Andrew said he read through this blog, then I pictured reading through it, then I realized I've been tapering off in the last week or two weeks. So I quickly planned things to do for the next (short) week and then wrote up the first half of my presentation.

Afterwards David and I talked for an hour or so initially about how some of the games went, and quickly moved to designing a new game aimed at being happy with good decisions regardless of outcome. Turns out what we were doing feels in large part like extracting that aspect of poker from the rest of the game.

Then I went to sleep before writing this up. :)

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Space Alert: The Doubling

Today I did some hard running and then meditated in the park. Seattle in summer is good times.

I put together my resume. Such a simple thing but it was like pulling teeth. This area... I haven't found out what's so bad about it. But I haven't tried PJ's 8 directions thing either... Ugh is a very good name for ugh fields.

We played Space Alert with 10 people. That was basically great. But almost all of the greatness came from Space Alert, not the fact that we were playing two at once. In all I'd say the variant isn't up to snuff and probably won't be, there's just not that much room for improvement in the game.

Agh and somehow I missed writing up Game 4. Since tomorrow's Sunday I might as well do that now...? :( I should not, actually. Fine, I missed it for real.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Desires

I woke up late this morning, so I switched meditation to walking after lunch. At the end I checked for how long it took just standing to be able to visualize - after 5 minutes I could not. I tried again later that night, sitting, with the lights out, and I was getting something dim at 2:30 and got a sharp image of a taco at 3:40.

Yesterday I used Quixey to grab a random-alarm app for my machine at work. Today I noted what I was doing every time it went off - I'm distracted more than I thought!

At home I finished writing up Game 1 and posted it. Also I'm declaring the instilling-desire experimentation phase complete. A week of just noting did not move me toward a desire to clean the restroom, then another week of smile-reinforcement got me there easily. And a week of smile-reinforcement got me the desire to take a cold shower but did not remove my dislike for cold showers, so I'm guessing in general it's not a great plan to use this method on activities you know you actively dislike, just those you're fine with but hate to start. On the other hand Critch mentioned plugging his lust into grading...? I'll have to ask about that.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Space Alert

I thought I might as well check a bunch of postures to see how they feel, so this morning I sat in a chair. Seemed basically fine, easier to keep sitting up rather than slouching for some reason.

I find I'm rationalizing far less often in a way that I explicitly notice at the time. (This leaves open the possibility I'm just becoming better at hiding it from myself, or becoming worse at noticing it.)

I wrote up almost all of the first game we played Saturday, so that's good, but I haven't been spending much time at all researching problem solving, so that's not.

Someone wrote me up a quick variant for Space Alert that supports 8-10 people. (http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/671699/a-second-expansion-some-ideas) I'll be playing that this Saturday. Space Alert in general would be fun to play with the LW crowd... so I'll bring that up.

Oh and another independent person came up to me again today and said she thought I'd lost weight, this silly lengthening the face with facial hair thing is ridiculous.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

IFS

I'm pretty much locked into insight practice for a while unless I find a place I can go with air conditioning. It gets too warm to concentrate.

I signed up to give a talk at work on a project I did a few months ago, at the information flow level. This should be loads of goodness, especially if I can get other people to give similar talks.

I've been reading and doing a bit of practicing with the Internal Family Systems material. It's been fascinating so far. I have found several Protectors and an Exile, using Earley's terminology, including one very strange Protector. I got the image (metaphor ;)) of a spindly being that turned off a TV set which I was using to show situations to myself. It seemed right to call him Goofy as he brought up associations with Goofy. I am working in and around certain mildly traumatic events from my childhood during my parents' separation and divorce.

Schwartz and Earley's description of the Self feels remarkably similar to Anna's description of curiosity and Ingram's description of accepting and investigating whatever arises. Either they're all describing something similar or I'm being taken in.

Given me another month and I feel I'll be more confident.

Oh yes and I would like to buy 3-year poorly-priced options on Bitcoin plzkthx.

July 4th

Try things, right? Well, lying-down meditation in the morning isn't something I'll try again too soon. I didn't fall asleep but it required constant vigilance. Maybe it would have gone better somewhere other than my bed? Maybe. In any case I won't be doing that again 'til maybe I'm ready to investigate the sensations of falling asleep. ;)

Then: 4th of July party. Always epic, each year more so. We had about 30 people over at the Johnson's place in Bothell and the changes I have made since mini-camp are freaking clearly great for parties. I was in a state of mild shock for much of the time except it wasn't most of me that was in this state, only that part of me that I allowed to think meta during the party, the rest apparently did a great job being interesting and good looking and looking cool and stuff. And I mean each of those, separately, were far higher than they've been before. I got lots of compliments on how I looked, I had fun conversations with many people, some of whom I didn't really have on my "can have fun conversations with" radar, and I was quite comfortable lounging in a chair outside being the center of attention over 30% of the time in a circle of 4-10ish people for over an hour. Edit: that doesn't do justice to the long period of time during which I was choosing who I was most attracted to and Rohini and Ryan swapped shirts for me...

Also we collected more donations for next year's fireworks than we spent this year, already, and that doesn't count the amount David and I will spend next year...

Monday, July 4, 2011

People are here

I am continually surprised out how interesting insight meditation is. Especially sitting. I mean come on, I'm sitting very still for half an hour. How could that be interesting? Even though as I write this I realize I sit very still for much longer while watching a movie...

Today was in large part a Day Of Rest. After yesterday and with full knowledge that tomorrow's going to be crazy, I needed one. Still there were tons of people around 'cause of the 4th weekend and I did things with them, played games, had dinner, etc... but I skipped the hike and left gaming early, neither of which is at all characteristic.

Every time-unit or so, I did go clean up some of yesterday's mess. Now I have a couple stacks of papers to record and a hungry hungry hippos board to return; I'll get to one of those tomorrow but not both. :D

I looked at migrating to Wordpress but it seemed to take more than 5 minutes so I'll get to that later. One nice thing, I've gained enough self-knowledge to know that these "I'll do such-and-such later" statements are factual and a good idea, not just procrastination. I was kind of surprised to notice that.

Also: simply noting without rewarding did not lead anywhere down the mind-path toward desiring to clean the restroom. Starting now I will move to smile-rewarding and see where a week of that takes me.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Cognomancy

Insight today, with focus on separating physical and mental sensations. Then the meetup! Overall it went all right, with some high points and some parts that felt like they dragged. Actually I take that back, for a first attempt it actually went fantastic. But it took a lot more work to organize than I thought. Next time we're just playing whirlyball. :)

Afterwards, Pasta Freska and Commander. Now it's late, I'll write more about the meetup later.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Prep

This morning I felt as if I were at the back of my skull rather than behind my eyes, for maybe 5 minutes. Pretty weird... I basically spent all of my free time trying to get the last parts of the games/etc. tomorrow together. I finished the day with a bit more to do, but all of it pretty much known undones. I keep feeling slightly disappointed in the results because I know if I had another week the event could be better, but I think that's actually a rationalization - the real reason I'm disappointed is because I'm scared everyone will think it's lame. This is the haunted house problem, one part of me is actually pretty certain this is good.

Also I learned a brand-new awesome skill in preparation for tomorrow. And I'm writing this tomorrow so every time I write "this morning" or "tomorrow" I feel silly in a Playful way.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Too tired

Yep, I'm going to have to change some things around to get more sleep. This morning (Th) I was beginning concentration practice and felt very close to just sleeping several times, so I went to the other end and did some walking insight practice. Then David and I talked for half an hour - I've decided to ditch the 4th game for another, in its present incarnation it just doesn't work like I'd like.
I had trouble with The Experiment today and I'm not sure why.

I spoke with a dude at First Tech for a while, I've got concrete plans to get accounts and investments set up now.

At about 1:30 I realized I was sleep-deprived (as opposed to e.g. lunch-tired) and getting nothing done, so I went home to nap for 3h. Would this have been a good time to have some modafinil on hand?

John and I discussed meetups for an hour or so, coming up with several useful things like a control and experimental meetup, lists of topics we can present, and emailing people one-on-one.

I ironed out most (maybe all!) of the bugs with 2 of the games and now I'm set to write them out fully tomorrow. The third still needs additional scaling, and the fourth I have a version that will work if required but needs review since it hasn't been playtested or checked yet.