Silver "whiteboard" to the rescue!
Apr. 2nd, 2005 06:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneRemember how I mentioned I'd bought some whiteboards recently? There are two 12" x 12" square panels that are meant to tile a wall or just hang out without being mounted (no heavy backing, no plastic rim, no pen holder). There is also a mid-sized whieboard with a rim and holder (and even two magnets) and a larger silver-colored whiteboard that really had caught my eye.
The silverboard is just shy of 18" by 24", came with three magnets and seemed so classy. My plan was to use the silverboard in the office as a focal point for brain splats about projects.
My regular thinking patterns are web-like: one idea triggers a few others which lead down a lot of loose paths. I'm not always able to express the trek the thoughts traveled, just the sum of the endpoints touched by the web. I have to backtrack in other explain what I was thinking and thus make a set of conclusions. When I am handed a task, the web in my head throws out some node results but will keep rolling them in my head until they all get out. This helps me to recall stuff but it also prevents me from finishing a thought because I become too hung up on holding onto the thoughts before I forget them. I have to get them into a visual plan so that I can prioritize them. Some of the nodes won't be useful at all but I can conclude that faster by getting the thoughts out on a surface.
When I'm working on building or fixing a computer (or handling most computer tasks), I take written notes. While my handwriting is slow and increasingly atrocious as I get older, I know I can flip back to a page and reread results. I use three colors of pen: black for regular notes or thoughts, blue for screen output, and red for command names or input I gave the computer. This allows me to know at a glance whether I'm seeing a screen dump or a brain dump. I don't use other colors because I don't need them and I can't guarantee I'll be able to find green or any other color in an office.
Brain splats are really how I get thoughts going from a rolling jumble into a set of activities. I just came up with the term but I think it describes the process succinctly. I start writing, much of the time in paragraph form but increasingly in outline form. As I write, I can see priorities and refinements I need. I then cross stuff off or rewrite to sort. The brain blows the nodes onto the canvas in a splat of mental paint as physical ink and I can carve what is useful from the mess.
I found out recently that the whiteboard is very useful to me for this process. I can write, change colors, erase, rewrite and transpose. In fact, I'm starting to think a tablet PC would be useful for this task (which helps me to think what I'd purchase if I bought a new laptop sometime in the summer). While I type at a decent speed (45 or 50 wpm), I find a few simple lines can connect my thoughts very effectively. Maybe a Wacom tablet would be useful...
I got the boards home. The one that was supposed to replace the warped one on the fridge wound up in my bedroom where it gives me a place for less-awake thinking. It's going to stay there. I wrote the words "Bonfire of creation!" on the silverboard. Then I noticed some of the colors seemed ignorable on the silver background in the incandescent light. So I ignored the board for a few weeks. I also ignored the office for a few weeks as I waited for spring to start. That room is the coldest in the apartment (to think the previous tenants used it as a bedroom for a baby frightens me). I did at one point try some other markers and got better results. I have some pen-sized markers with finer points and another set which are more faint but more useful because they have erasers on their caps.
Today I walked into the office a few times in an attempt to clean. Each time I looked down at the pile keeping the office door from closing and winced. The base is a mid-height computer tower with my VA Linux 2U case balanced on top of it. Another midtower case stands next to the load-bearer but only for sympathy. On top of the 2U sits a cardboard box that once held several crates of clementines. Now it holds a jumble of CPUs, wires, slot cards, mice and the remnants of several scavenging runs. All of this is good material but none of it made sense. It stared back at me and screamed "give us homes!"
I was talking to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
graciana on the phone. She had mentioned that I should come up with an organizational plan first. I realized I'd been avoiding this because I wanted to "make a dent". I didn't want to get theoretical and stare at my navel about the meaning of the office space as zeitgeist. Cuz let's face it: we spend all day in offices and go home to replicas of those offices and aren't happy about shoving ourselves into cattle pens except that we have no idea what to do when we aren't in our cattle chutes. I wanted to clean. However, I wasn't cleaning: I was avoiding. Maybe thinking, something I am decent at, was in order.
I needed to see what kind of classification is possible. Suddenly I saw the one device I needed for thinking: the silverboard! I erased the color squiggles and "Bonfire of creation!" and started creating. I started thinking about what made the most confusion in the room: computer slot cards. I had no idea where to put them. How should I sort them? So I simply wrote "Hardware: slot cards: NICs, USB, Firewire, video cards, sound, dial-up, dead, other". Then I started tweaking -- noting that it didn't matter what type of video cards I had so long as they were together, I wrote "(ignore type)". Then I added other categories and itemized their sections in a string (pointers, wires, CPUs, mobos, heatsinks, cases).
Then I realized I needed to make a line for dead equipment. I put this in blue. The line assignment reads "classify by ressurection %age, separate for later triage". Then I set up a section for media and came to another line best written in blue: "eventual plan: movetafkar's old bookcase into office, move cinderblock platter around (out?), have all computer books in there & organized by: historical, theory, OS, admin, programming, esoterica".
The path to cleaning and organization opened up. Suddenly I can see what I need to do and how to approach it. Great! I can get started because i have an end I can desire. I can see a purpose to this -- turning the jumble into a room dedicated to a task.
By the way, I'd like to say a few words about Karol Wojtylas. I am an agnostic or atheist or heathen, but I grew up Catholic. I went to Catholic school for six years and was an altar boy for four of those. I was not a big fan of some of his statements. In fact, his conservative stances led me to conclude at the age of 13 that I could not submit to his will because it got in the way of the path of empiricism. However, he was a more of a figure than a person to me.
As I've gotten older, my respect for his intellect and linguistic skill has grown. He wiped away the asshole stink from a position that gave us Pius IX's bullshit "papal infallibilty" in his last-ditch effort to subvert the unification of the Italian states and gave us Pius the XII's pro-Nazi handjobs. Those guys had put the pus in Pius; John Paul II put interaction back into a dying church.
Too bad it's still dying. Women aren't equal in Catholicism. Frankly, women aren't equal in a lot of religions. Why do women stand to be members of churches they can't lead?
He brought Carmelite spirituality to a faith that had become run by the haunted. He brought Catholicism out of its anti-Semitism. I honor his work. I cannot return to his church but I can hope a mind as well kindled as his will sit as Bishop of Rome. This is like hoping for another enlightened despot. We're getting tired of despots in the world. Maybe only I am. The news brings up Robert Mugambe (elected despot of Zimbabwe) but never mentions he was only working in the model Sir Ian Smith, Bigot of the Empire, had left him.
Karol Wojtylas was not the only pope in my lifetime but he was the only one of my conscious life. It's hard to imagine anyone else in that place. Not bad for a boy from Wadowice to become one of the emotional leaders of the world. Too bad he couldn't marry, have kids smart as he was, be a real man in his community. Priests are purposefully emasculated, which I feel gnarls them. If his children are the youth he inspired, then fine. He inspired me to spend my life seeking a faith based on equality and process.
-non habemas papam so have a popadom
The silverboard is just shy of 18" by 24", came with three magnets and seemed so classy. My plan was to use the silverboard in the office as a focal point for brain splats about projects.
My regular thinking patterns are web-like: one idea triggers a few others which lead down a lot of loose paths. I'm not always able to express the trek the thoughts traveled, just the sum of the endpoints touched by the web. I have to backtrack in other explain what I was thinking and thus make a set of conclusions. When I am handed a task, the web in my head throws out some node results but will keep rolling them in my head until they all get out. This helps me to recall stuff but it also prevents me from finishing a thought because I become too hung up on holding onto the thoughts before I forget them. I have to get them into a visual plan so that I can prioritize them. Some of the nodes won't be useful at all but I can conclude that faster by getting the thoughts out on a surface.
When I'm working on building or fixing a computer (or handling most computer tasks), I take written notes. While my handwriting is slow and increasingly atrocious as I get older, I know I can flip back to a page and reread results. I use three colors of pen: black for regular notes or thoughts, blue for screen output, and red for command names or input I gave the computer. This allows me to know at a glance whether I'm seeing a screen dump or a brain dump. I don't use other colors because I don't need them and I can't guarantee I'll be able to find green or any other color in an office.
Brain splats are really how I get thoughts going from a rolling jumble into a set of activities. I just came up with the term but I think it describes the process succinctly. I start writing, much of the time in paragraph form but increasingly in outline form. As I write, I can see priorities and refinements I need. I then cross stuff off or rewrite to sort. The brain blows the nodes onto the canvas in a splat of mental paint as physical ink and I can carve what is useful from the mess.
I found out recently that the whiteboard is very useful to me for this process. I can write, change colors, erase, rewrite and transpose. In fact, I'm starting to think a tablet PC would be useful for this task (which helps me to think what I'd purchase if I bought a new laptop sometime in the summer). While I type at a decent speed (45 or 50 wpm), I find a few simple lines can connect my thoughts very effectively. Maybe a Wacom tablet would be useful...
I got the boards home. The one that was supposed to replace the warped one on the fridge wound up in my bedroom where it gives me a place for less-awake thinking. It's going to stay there. I wrote the words "Bonfire of creation!" on the silverboard. Then I noticed some of the colors seemed ignorable on the silver background in the incandescent light. So I ignored the board for a few weeks. I also ignored the office for a few weeks as I waited for spring to start. That room is the coldest in the apartment (to think the previous tenants used it as a bedroom for a baby frightens me). I did at one point try some other markers and got better results. I have some pen-sized markers with finer points and another set which are more faint but more useful because they have erasers on their caps.
Today I walked into the office a few times in an attempt to clean. Each time I looked down at the pile keeping the office door from closing and winced. The base is a mid-height computer tower with my VA Linux 2U case balanced on top of it. Another midtower case stands next to the load-bearer but only for sympathy. On top of the 2U sits a cardboard box that once held several crates of clementines. Now it holds a jumble of CPUs, wires, slot cards, mice and the remnants of several scavenging runs. All of this is good material but none of it made sense. It stared back at me and screamed "give us homes!"
I was talking to
graciana on the phone. She had mentioned that I should come up with an organizational plan first. I realized I'd been avoiding this because I wanted to "make a dent". I didn't want to get theoretical and stare at my navel about the meaning of the office space as zeitgeist. Cuz let's face it: we spend all day in offices and go home to replicas of those offices and aren't happy about shoving ourselves into cattle pens except that we have no idea what to do when we aren't in our cattle chutes. I wanted to clean. However, I wasn't cleaning: I was avoiding. Maybe thinking, something I am decent at, was in order.I needed to see what kind of classification is possible. Suddenly I saw the one device I needed for thinking: the silverboard! I erased the color squiggles and "Bonfire of creation!" and started creating. I started thinking about what made the most confusion in the room: computer slot cards. I had no idea where to put them. How should I sort them? So I simply wrote "Hardware: slot cards: NICs, USB, Firewire, video cards, sound, dial-up, dead, other". Then I started tweaking -- noting that it didn't matter what type of video cards I had so long as they were together, I wrote "(ignore type)". Then I added other categories and itemized their sections in a string (pointers, wires, CPUs, mobos, heatsinks, cases).
Then I realized I needed to make a line for dead equipment. I put this in blue. The line assignment reads "classify by ressurection %age, separate for later triage". Then I set up a section for media and came to another line best written in blue: "eventual plan: move
tafkar's old bookcase into office, move cinderblock platter around (out?), have all computer books in there & organized by: historical, theory, OS, admin, programming, esoterica".The path to cleaning and organization opened up. Suddenly I can see what I need to do and how to approach it. Great! I can get started because i have an end I can desire. I can see a purpose to this -- turning the jumble into a room dedicated to a task.
By the way, I'd like to say a few words about Karol Wojtylas. I am an agnostic or atheist or heathen, but I grew up Catholic. I went to Catholic school for six years and was an altar boy for four of those. I was not a big fan of some of his statements. In fact, his conservative stances led me to conclude at the age of 13 that I could not submit to his will because it got in the way of the path of empiricism. However, he was a more of a figure than a person to me.
As I've gotten older, my respect for his intellect and linguistic skill has grown. He wiped away the asshole stink from a position that gave us Pius IX's bullshit "papal infallibilty" in his last-ditch effort to subvert the unification of the Italian states and gave us Pius the XII's pro-Nazi handjobs. Those guys had put the pus in Pius; John Paul II put interaction back into a dying church.
Too bad it's still dying. Women aren't equal in Catholicism. Frankly, women aren't equal in a lot of religions. Why do women stand to be members of churches they can't lead?
He brought Carmelite spirituality to a faith that had become run by the haunted. He brought Catholicism out of its anti-Semitism. I honor his work. I cannot return to his church but I can hope a mind as well kindled as his will sit as Bishop of Rome. This is like hoping for another enlightened despot. We're getting tired of despots in the world. Maybe only I am. The news brings up Robert Mugambe (elected despot of Zimbabwe) but never mentions he was only working in the model Sir Ian Smith, Bigot of the Empire, had left him.
Karol Wojtylas was not the only pope in my lifetime but he was the only one of my conscious life. It's hard to imagine anyone else in that place. Not bad for a boy from Wadowice to become one of the emotional leaders of the world. Too bad he couldn't marry, have kids smart as he was, be a real man in his community. Priests are purposefully emasculated, which I feel gnarls them. If his children are the youth he inspired, then fine. He inspired me to spend my life seeking a faith based on equality and process.
-non habemas papam so have a popadom
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Date: 2005-04-03 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2005-04-04 04:41 pm (UTC)As soon as I figure out *how*...
no subject
Date: 2005-04-04 11:38 pm (UTC)I didn't want to give in, honestly I didn't.
Then they took my out to the bike rack behind the caf and pounded my face into the grill.
Now I'm a shell of a man. Maybe an Exxon.
-and that shell is of course bash