Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to technogeek1!!! Have a great one!!

Countdown to ConChord

Exactly one month from now I'll be eating breakfast in the Warner Center Marriott, getting ready for my Toastmaster gig at ConChord 21. EEEEP!!

Went over to Joyce's last night for some practice; we worked on the three songs in the tentative setlist that we hadn't worked on before: "Paper Wings", "Millennium's Dawn", and "Quiet Victories". Also worked on "The River".

There's still a chance that Joyce won't make it down to ConChord. She just got laid off last week (anyone -- especially a startup in the Bay Area -- looking for a senior tech writer or documentation manager?) and is currently dealing with some medical/mobility problems. So the setlist for my concert Saturday night is still slightly up in the air. I need to practice more of my repertoire than just the setlist, though, so that's ok. I figure on running through about half the set plus a couple of other songs every day.

It's not at all clear whether I'll be able to get a single of QV put together in time for the con.

Gaming the system: WeightWatchers as an RPG

Games Without Frontiers: Fun Way to Lose Weight: Turn Dieting Into an RPG

A friend of mine recently slimmed down on Weight Watchers. She joined two months ago, and in just a couple of weeks, she'd shed 10 pounds. She'd been trying for a year to lose weight, but nothing worked -- until now.

Why did Weight Watchers work so well? For a really fascinating reason: because it isn't a normal diet. It's something more. Something fun.

It's an RPG.

[...]

Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers' points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you've used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up -- by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren't apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I'll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!

Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells -- whoops, I mean foods -- you can still use with your remaining points.

(From this post by bercilakslady on healthy_fen.)

So, would that be a first-person eater?

River: PSA: Shouting at you

Colleen frequently accuses me of "shouting at" her. I finally figured out exactly what's going on in that process. It's fascinating.

If I'm in the middle of saying something and the noise level suddenly rises, for example a truck going by or somebody starting the vacuum cleaner, I'm going to raise my voice in hopes that I'll be heard over the noise. This also happens in the brief interval between when I figure out what I'm going to say, and when I start talking.

Now, you may remember me mentioning that I don't multitask, and that there really isn't room in my little bearlike brain for more than one of listening, thinking, and talking. So, when I'm talking, I'm not listening. If you start talking, for example trying to interrupt me, my bearlike brain isn't going to be able to tell the difference between your voice and a passing truck. I'm going to raise my voice, and you're going to say I was shouting at you.

I'm not going to argue over whether trying to be heard is the same thing as shouting at you; it feels the same to you. I'm sorry I mistook your voice for a passing truck; I just couldn't help it.

(Note that, if you talk while I'm thinking about what to say next, I'm just going to miss the first few words and stare blankly while I try desperately to both make sense of what I heard and reconstruct what I was about to say.)

Now, I'm also told that I have a tendency to rant, and not leave anyone else an opening to say anything. This also happens when I'm simply blathering; I'm not sure whether the difference between rant and blather is important to anyone but me, and it's not relevant here in any case. The point is, you might be tempted to try to talk over me and hope you'll be noticed.

You won't be. I'll shout over you, and won't hear much, if anything, of what you're saying. Here's what to do instead:

One thing you can say is "Basingstoke". That's the keyword that essentially means "calm down and stop blathering" -- I will eventually wind down my rant and listen to you.

If that doesn't work, or you're in a hurry, say "Shut up!" More than once, if necessary. I'll shut up, and I won't be offended. Honest. I'll be startled, but not offended; in fact I'll be pleased because you remembered what to do. You see, I know that this is a problem. I'll work on it, but it's probably going to be hard, maybe impossible, for me to fix the fact that I can't distinguish your voice from a passing truck while I'm talking. But I've given you a workaround, and I'm not going to be offended if you use it.

Music time

As I mentioned earlier, Colleen has decreed that the hour between 9 and 10pm is for me to work on recording or other, hopefully related, music projects. Tonight was the first opportunity to put that into practice, if you don't count 8-9 yesterday at Joyce's.

In the event, what I ended up doing was relocating my microphones so that I could record within reach of the new workstation, with its large monitor. That, of course, also required moving the associated preamps and the head-end of the M-Audio Delta 1010 interface. And their associated wall-warts, and the power squid they were plugged into...

Took more like an hour and a quarter, all told. And I spent the 45 minutes after that practicing.

Productive evening, in other words, even if I didn't get any actual recording done.