A thought I had while arguing a point & thought I would share. The point presented was that we crave drama in our lives, drama that mimics a fairy tale.

What we want out of life are tangible sign posts along the way of our life’s journey, not drama. We want moments of sublime importance to usher us into our next life phase. Drama is a poor man’s substitute that doesn’t quite fit the bill.

Plus – I think many of us have had too much drama in our lives and that doesn’t make our lives any more like a fairy tale. It certainly doesn’t fill any void either.

What we are genetically (physiogenically that is) predisposed to needing are the “magical moments of threshold crossing”. Or, to use a more universal term, rites of passage.

The drama is a substitute for the fact that the predominant religion of the 20th Century and beyond (that would be Science), has stripped us of those all-important rites of passage that our psyches have relied upon for hundreds of thousands of generations, leaving us adrift is a sea of primordial subconsciousness desperately looking for signposts.

I have become convinced that technology has done more to hinder focus and excellence than it has done to help. Technology injects our lives with too much information at once and forces us to switch gears quickly and frequently. Neither of those things are known to be healthy or productive in our everyday existence. But, I can’t blame technology. It’s simply the tool. You can’t blame a hammer for your clumsiness when you miss a nail and hit your finger.

I recently took a step back and examined the way I use technology. I realized I was contributing to my own lack of focus by always trying to accomplish several tasks at once. Email, checking a website, writing some code, writing a score, updating social media sites, IM, twitter, et al. I was attempting extreme multitasking, and it really wasn’t working. As we all know, multitasking is a simply doing several things poorly rather doing one thing well. So, I had to ask myself why I was doing this to myself. Unfortunately I didn’t have an answer other than “because I can”.

I decided to end the madness. No longer to I leave my email client running all day. I check email when I have time to check it, read the messages waiting for me and then respond (or act accordingly) to the messages. I even turned off the scheduled email check on my iPhone. I no longer let a phone call interrupt my flow. If I can’t stop to take a call I let it go to voice mail and will call back when I can focus on the conversation. And being both technical and creative I have found that they are mutually exclusive brain modes. I no longer try to code while trying to design, write or compose. It simply doesn’t work. I set aside time for each and focus solely on that task.

In the 2 weeks I’ve been doing this I have found it to be very liberating. I am more present when I am doing any single task and I find that the organization that is imposed by a single task approach has made me more productive and has helped give me more time for myself.

Perhaps Albert Einstein was right when he commented that, “technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.“.

No, I’m not referring to the recent news of Swine Flu from Mexico that may (or may not) have reached the New York area. I’m talking about PC virii, well the Conficker virus to be specific.

So, I know that at least a few of my PC using friends have recently contracted the Conficker virus because a very private email address, that has never been posted anywhere, is now receiving tons of spam daily.

I’d like to personally thank all those people for not having working anti-virus software and also for buying a PC when they have no idea how to harden it to keep it safe from these types of attacks. I now have to spend my time changing this email address and alerting everyone who had it about the change to stop receiving the spam.

Over the years I have used just about every system available: DOS, AppleDOS, ProDOS, UNIX, Classic Mac OS, Windows, OS X, Linux, et al. In this day and age there is no good reason to buy a PC. Microsoft is still building Windows around a DOS core. Yes, that’s state-of-the-art technology for 1982! I don’t care how much Microsoft has spend marketing “the latest & greatest”. It is still based on technology that is coming up on 30 years old, with 30 year old security holes that never envisioned an always online world. It’s archaic attitude toward privacy & security is laughable or, I should say, would be laughable if so many people weren’t actively using it an exposing the rest of us to these gargantuan security flaws.

Here’s a hint – if you don’t know how to manually edit the registry, don’t know which services to disable (or set to manual) and have never heard of msconfig – buy a Mac. You know, everyone should just buy a Mac anyway. If you can’t afford a new system right now – wipe your hard drive and install Ubuntu.

Sometimes GMail makes me smile…

Spam Is Evil

As I enter this new year I made no new year’s resolutions. I didn’t expect everything to be suddenly better or different in any way. I just look at the passage of time as one moment moving to the next moment. As each moment is lost we let go of what was (or what could have been) and embrace what is.

I think we, as a culture, spend too much time in anticipation of the good that will come and become completely oblivious to what is happening around us in the present. We are effectively squandering time in an attempt to get to that “someday soon”.

Nothing has become clearer to me as I live my life than this simple truth: now is all I have. There is no guarantee of a tomorrow. If I keep putting off those things that are really important I may never have the opportunity to get back to them.

So, more so than Happy New Year I want to say to everyone “carpe diem!”

As I took Emerson (our dog) out for his morning “duties” I was surprised to walk out into the first snow of the season. It’s not often we get snow in November these days. I’m sure it will all melt this afternoon as temperatures rise above freezing…but none-the-less, it’s a treat to walk out into the season’s first snowfall.
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