Do we hear about Mozart playing kickball? I know, there wasn’t kickball. But if there had been, he wouldn’t have played it. Because you give up stuff.
So I guess what I’m saying is that being an expert in something requires frugality. It’s not just a spending frugality. It’s a focus frugality.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works . . . A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.
At Northwood High School, Honors Euro Lit is known by its acronym — HEL (pronounced hell) — and widely regarded as the hardest class at the school.
In order to get an A in the class for the first semester, my son needed a very high score — around a 98 — on the final exam, didn’t get it, and finished with a semester grade of 89.27 — a high B.
If he’d had at least an 89.5, the teacher would have rounded it up to an A. So out of 1,000+ possible points over the course of the semester, an 89.27 means you missed an A by only three or four points.
I’ve always encouraged the boy to be proactive with his teachers. Some people call this “sucking up” but I’ve been a teacher myself and I can tell you that teachers like students who are engaged and make an extra effort. When there’s a close call on a grade, those students may get the benefit of the doubt.
Being a public school teacher is unrewarding in many ways. You’re not going to get rich, for one thing. And you’re not going to be held in high esteem because the conventional wisdom is that public education in America is a disaster.
The only real attraction of the job is that every day you have an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. And even there, in most cases you will fail.
“Make sure the teachers know that you want to do well in their class,” I tell my kid. “Ask them what you need to do and they’ll tell you. They want to help you.”
After his final score was posted in HEL, he went in after school to talk to the teacher about his grade. They went over some previous assignments and exams, including a Macbeth exam where the teacher found a question that he felt he “didn’t teach very well.” He gave the boy four points back on the question, which gave him an 89.55 for the semester. That’s an A.
Father knows best, suckas! Academic success is not (just) about academics.
As design thinkers, the problems we are trying to solve are rarely our own—they are those of a particular user; in order to design for the user, we must build empathy for who they are and what is important to them. . . .
The best solutions come out of the best insights into human behavior. . . .
We engage to…
- Uncover needs that people have which they may or may not be aware of
- Guide innovation efforts
- Identify someone to design for
- Discover the emotions that guide behavior
I’m getting some coffee in the lunch room . . . no one else is present.
One of my colleagues walks in and says, “Are you talking to yourself, Paul?”
“No, actually I wasn’t saying anything.” Which I wasn’t. “Maybe you’re hearing voices,” I suggest. “And ironically, you were just insinuating that I was nuts.”
ME: In the future it is neither necessary nor desirable for you to greet me every single time I walk in the door. Unless a minimum of two hours has passed, the previous greeting is still in effect. In other words, if I come IN the door, and you greet me, and then several minutes later I go OUT the door, only to return in a matter of seconds, you do NOT have to greet me again.
LEWIS: Ha-ha. Good one.
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.
Fun for Poor People
- Eat sweet things.
- Run up credit card then kill everyone where you work.
- Love the wrong people.
Fun for Rich People
- Follow foibles of the poor on the local news.
- Wave to the poor.
- Talk about the plight of the poor at parties.
History painting, what a joke! There is only one authentic thing: to paint what you see.
Security fears dog online banking
— Yahoo! NewsNow that’s what I call lazy reporting. If they’d bothered to interview an actual dog, they would have found out that we don’t keep our money in banks because banks are run by Wall Street fat cats and we don’t trust Wall Street fat cats. Actually, we don’t trust any kind of cats.
There may be dogs online barking but there are no dogs online banking.
— Lightning
Twitter: 2010-01-21
- RT @capricecrane: T.S. Eliot: "The world ends not with a bang, but a whimper."
Sadly, so do most of my dates. #Overheard
Salmon Kings
Notes From Interstate 5
It poured rain all the way from San Jose to Los Angeles . . .
“It’s a good day for cows,” I say to my son, as we drive by a field of happy-looking bovines.
“It’s raining,” he points out.
“I don’t think cows mind a little rain. They get to eat lush, moist grass. Instead of dry grass. Do you like to eat a dry salad with no dressing? You don’t, right?” No answer. “I’m trying to think like a cow here.”
“My phone would go out right in the middle of a text message,” the boy says.
“That’s awful,” I say in mock sympathy.
“It is,” he says. “It was a thoughtful, heartfelt text message.”
“How thoughtful and heartfelt can a text message be? Aren’t you limited to 160 characters?”
“Not to Verizon numbers.”
“Oh. Well, that is disappointing then.”
We’re driving past an agricultural area with nothing but four- to five-foot sticks in the ground as far as the eye can see.
“What are they growing here?” he asks.
“Sticks,” I say. “It’s a stick farm.”
When I pass trucks on the highway, I always signal before pulling back in front of them.
Most people treat truck drivers and their vehicles just as obstacles to be bypassed. I treat them as real people with real feelings.
I think it makes life better for everyone . . .
Waving at the Computer
Last night in the hotel room, I was lying on one of the beds reading and my son was sitting on the other bed doing something on my computer. At one point, in my peripheral vision, I thought I saw him waving at the screen.
“Were you just waving at the computer?” I asked him.
“I was testing your webcam,” he said.
“Oh. Does it work?”
“Yeah.”
NARCh Winternationals – Day 4
Semifinal
This one was like a replay of the third round-robin game.
Final Score: West Coast Warriors 2, Devil Dogs 0
“They couldn’t buy a goal,” one of the moms said.
“Are you allowed to buy goals?” I asked.
“We need to make a new rule for that,” she said.
The Warriors went on to lose 5-1 to NorCal Riot Black in the 16U final. That score surprised me, since NorCal couldn’t score on the Devil Dogs and the Devil Dogs couldn’t score on West Coast.
I’ve got to find out if any parents stayed to watch the final. How did NorCal get 5 goals on the West Coast boys? Whatever they did, the Devil Dogs should start doing it . . .
Happy Hour
“What kind of tequila do you have?” I ask the bartender.
He says something that sounds like “Gizo.”
“I’ll have a rum and coke,” I say.
“What kind of tequila were you looking for?” he asks.
“Uh, something I’ve heard of.”
Twitter: 2010-01-18
Hockey Parents
At hockey tournaments, especially travel tournaments, there’s a lot of down time between games. I usually bring a book to the rink so I have something to do. Nobody else does this. Nobody. In hockey circles, I’m known as the guy who brings books to the rink.
This weekend, we’re at a tournament in San Jose. One of the dads from our team — I think he’s a copier salesman — says to me, “I can’t understand why anyone reads fiction.”
He says it, not in a rude way, but not in a complimentary way either.
I say, “Oh. Well, I can’t understand why anyone lives his whole life inside his own head and never gets curious about what life looks like to other people.”
So I probably won’t have to talk to him the rest of the season.
Later the same day, this guy knocks back a couple of double Scotches at a team dinner and proceeds to make gay sex jokes — loudly — the rest of the evening.
