HowTo from the Phoenix Master of Comedy

The masters spracht : "Everyday, write something that's like a joke."

Get out of bed, think Setup, Twist, Punchline, write something. What's the setup? What does it mean? What else could it mean? Report it.

In the last couple of months alone I've come up with 20+ jokes. Think about it. In all the 10 years before, each time an original joke occurred to me, I gave it its own post on this blog.

Designer's Toolchest

This'll be a full-fledged presentation in the upcoming days, but for now, to boost your productivity, consider developing expertise/familiarity in/with the following :

Perl, the swiss-army knife of scripting languages. Once you have savoured perl, you will see that you must know your data. And, when you internalize the fact that you must know your data, you will be more organized and start spotting patterns and solutions much faster.

perlTK - rapid fire GUI development for a better user experience. This is for those once-a-year times when your project will go much faster if you just had a better way of doing something. User experience is king. You must enjoy what you do if you do a lot of it.

AutoHotKey, the shortcut to Windows scripting. For all the hype about Linux, it has failed to deliver a method of scripting routine interactions.

HTML/Word/Powerpoint - when you have to sell yourself. Most things you'll want to do to make yourself look better only take a few minutes and most of the answers are already online.

Excel - Dashboard your way to success. We are all drivers or pilots all the time. Having access to the data that matters to you is the key to your success.

Cadence - The IC design suite with a user interface that could stand to lose a few pounds.

People skills - get the ball running faster and smoother. Politics is a fact of life. Get with the program. Be upbeat. You can make anyone's day with an uplifting remark or a joke or a witty observation.

Mindset : Think innovation, think victory, think initiative, tenacity, proactivity. Look for worthwhile things to do and do them without being told. Make things happen - where there's a will, there's a way - look online, participate in forums, make a nuisance of yourself till you've found the solution. Use paper - write down the possible outcomes and get to the future first!

ALT-ESC - The third dimension in productivity. It's amazing how many people (including my nice IT support guy) don't know about this trick in Windows (you can set your keyboard shortcut on Linux to do the same thing). How many times have you seen poor people click on the title bar and move the window to see what's beneath it? All you need to do is hit ALT-ESC and lower your window. Save yourself time, energy, money, hair, seed, etc.

Enjoy!

Essential All-The-Time AutoHotKey

Have you noticed that tables are so much nicer looking when cells are filled according to a theme? This is trivial to do with HTML, but Bill decided to make it really hard to do with M$ Word.

With Word 2007, all you do is select the cell, which Bill also decided to make hard to do (the trick sometimes is to just drag the cursor precisely to the boundary of the cell and hope for the best. With the leftmost cell, triple-clicking usually works. Then, you should see the Table Tools menu button on the very top bar, click that and you should now see Shading and Borders menu options surface. Anyhow, I just found that out, and the AutoHotKey snippet I have here doesn't apply to that unfortunately.

With M$ Word 2000 or older, you select the cell, then, Alt-o to go into the Format menu, then b, to pick Borders and Shading, then s to get to the Shading tab and you can then pick the colour you want. Which lends itself to this snippet that you should probably add to your Johnny-KDE-Style-Easy-Window-Drag script. Man, how much have Johnny and Rajat contributed to the well-being of the human race by just boosting my productivity?

SetTitleMatchMode, 2
; default is 1

; This is the setting that runs smoothest on my
; system. Depending on your video card and cpu
; power, you may want to raise or lower this value.

SetWinDelay,2

CoordMode,Mouse
return

^!RButton::Suspend

; M$ word, send key/mouse sequence to get the borders and shading menu on
; a table cell. Note, cursor must remain in the cell!! :)
$!b::
IfWinActive, - Microsoft Word
{
 Sleep 200
 Click 3
 Send !o
 Send b
 Send s
}
Return

Enjoy!!

Six Keys to Excellence

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeisterhas found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

How to Create Comedy

Never forget : Craft and Technique will trump Talent. If you rely solely on talent, then, one fine day, when you lose "it", you won't be able to create anymore because you don't know the underlying process.

To write a joke, start off with words at random. For those words, find more than one meaning. Write a sentence using the word. What do people normally conclude when they hears this sentence? This first sentence is the setup.

Written jokes work best with twists and punchlines. Performed jokes can depend solely on exaggeration.

Unix Directory Recursive Copy File Damn the Link

cp -L -r

will copy the actual file instead of the link. Sometimes, the links will persist and annoy you ad nauseum.

Vancouver-Seattle Border Crossing Tips

Friday afternoon - bad idea - expect 2 hr wait in the heat while you inch along in your car. Canada is idle free - so I had to keep shutting off and restarting - almost 20 times total. Engine off means no AC. Go figure.

Get plenty of drinking water on hand unless you want to pay multiple dollars per bottle to get some from the guy with the pushcart.

Then, inside the building, no restrooms, no water, go figure.

That's Educational Art - Super Art

What do you think of Allan Gilbert's masterpizza? (1873-1929) "All is Vanity"

Ask Me about the MatchFaker

Can't lie. Things aren't going particularly well with this expense account. At the happy hour where we first discussed the prospect of business, all I heard was "We have to work together. The best thing about you is you've got good teeth." The teeth thing kept coming back again and again. Once she had me committed, it was, do sessions with Joann to develop "edge." No matter how nice you are, there needs to be that se.ual tension otherwise, there just isn't that chemistry. Really? If you knew this much, why not tell me this upfront so I could save the money I gave you and spend it on that instead and then I might be able to do without your services?

Anyhow, one of the early emails was :

I feel my service is well worth
My cost and I have offered you a discount and allowed payment arrangements
And we are still negotiating ?? This is not car sales and I feel like I have
Come down on my service above and beyond. I hope you understand where I am
coming
From. I really like you and want to represent you and I look forward to
talking:)


My take : honesty is the best policy and what goes around comes around. I haven't given substantially to charity in a while, so I can take a hit on writing this off. All part of the recent lifestyle upgrade I did. I did have second thoughts when I first visited her office - folders with peoples' names scattered on the floor near her computer. "My boyfriend wants to organize my computer, but I'm clueless about that." 


I probably should have been firm on the trial. Well, that's what I'm going to tell people from now on. If you get an email like this one, beware :


 I also really like you and feel confident that
I can
Get you in a relationship. I already have a couple of great girls picked out
and we
Need to move on this soon.


My experience - all three intros so far have been huge disappointments. One no-show, one really mean and one golddigger (it's always the one you least expect.) The "need to move soon" should have really given me pause.

Bossidy and Charan on Leadership

In a good evaluation, the leader looks closely at how the people under review met their commitments. Which people delivered consistently? Which ones were resourceful, enterprising, and creative in the face of adversity? Who had easy wins and didn't push for better results? And who met their commitments at the expense of the organization's morale and long-term performance.