Input vs. Output

Work is kind of slow these days, so I'm taking some corporate training classes online, like "Influencing Without Authority" and "Critical Thinking," and the best thing about them is that they have all sorts of great pictures to illustrate their points.



I know this is basically a case of the smug, cynical employee making fun of the corporate videos to prove that he's too cool for The Man's brainwash material, but they shouldn't make it so easy on me with pictures like this:



The training I've been going through at work reflects a trend appearing in other parts of my life lately - specifically, a trend in my input to output ratio. 

For example, workplace training can be considered input: the trainee receives information from an outside source.  Workplace duties, for most people, can be considered output: in my case, I produce documents, tweak and install software, troubleshoot the system, etc.  Lately, circumstances have dictated that I've had to spend more time doing the former than the latter.



Creativity can also be thought of as an input/output system.  Reading is input, and lately I've been on a tear, finishing Hunter S. Thompson's posthumous oral biography, the entire Scott Pilgrim series of graphic novels, and Alan Cooper's assessment of why tech products suck all in a relatively short amount of time (for me).  However, this is my first written blog post (output) in over a month, while before that I had a streak of several posts no more than two weeks apart.

My guitar/piano practice (output) has been on the decline as well, or at least not as satisfying, and the ideas that I do get around to recording never seem very good to me the next day.  I envy my friends who seem to be better disciplined in this area; I'd expect that they make practice a priority, whereas I can never pick up my guitar until I've replied to all my emails, screwed around for a while, checked all my daily websites for updates... and by then it's usually almost time for this 9-to-5er to get ready for bed.  On the other hand, I've been listening to a shitload of podcasts (input) - Kevin Smith's SModcast and Dan Savage's Savage Lovecast are two of my favorites - and trying to pay better attention to what I like and don't like about the music I listen to, hoping that it can help me improve the stuff I'm recording.

Even my alcohol input seems to be on the rise lately.  But that's not so bad - until you input too much and are forced to output it.



There's no formula for the correct balance of input vs. output in everyone's lives.  In many cases, input facilitates an increase or improvement in output.  It's been fun to talk about this idea with people to sort out which activities are input and which are output - like if you go to the movies with your friends, watching the movie is input and discussing & deconstructing the movie afterwards is output.  This concept has been floating around my brain for a while now and I'm interested to hear other people's input (or output) on it.

Stories of the Road, issue 29: Vermont Trip Puppet Recap

New songs! Ahh!

After a consistent two weeks of too much stress and not enough sleep, my body decided that it was going on strike.  I woke up Friday morning aching from head to toe and I've barely left my bedroom since.  Luckily, I've used what little strength I could muster up to post a new set of songs on my MySpace page!  Say hello to the new Tiger Stance EP, Bee Dances.  All of the songs can be downloaded using the links on the MySpace player.  There are a lot of stereo parts that will sound better with headphones on and since most computer speakers sound like cheap garbage I would encourage you to listen to the mp3s on your portable media player of choice.  All of the new songs were made in Ableton Live, and I have to say that Mike Una and Mike Doughty are right: Live is the fucking bomb.  My upgrade to Live 7 showed up on my doorstep last week and you can be damn sure I'll be taking it for a spin once I'm back at full strength.

The old songs have been moved to my Box.net account and will remain there available for download.  If anyone knows of a better service for posting music, I'd love to hear about it.

Three cheers for the metric system!

Last night I was reading a book called Time and the Art of Living, which is a collection of meditations on time by an English professor named Robert Grudin.  I'm in the middle of a chapter in which Grudin is advocating metric time, which would be a system built upon our base-10 numbering system, and I have to admit that it's making a lot of sense.  24 hours in a day?  60 minutes in an hour?  Why make time that difficult to manage or calculate?  And what's up with this clumsy system of 7-day weeks, and months that not only don't line up evenly with those weeks but are also of different lengths?



It turns out that metric time (or decimal time) was actually adopted by the French during the Revolution at the same time as metric spatial measurement.  According to the website A Guide To Metric Time, there were:

• 10 days in a metric week (called a dekade)
  
• 10 metric hours in a day
• 100 metric minutes in a metric hour
• 100 metric seconds in a metric minute

Grudin suggests in his book that each year could be made up of 12 months of 30 days (3 weeks) each, with a vacation period of 5 days (6 in a leap year) to account for the remainder.  We could make up 3 new days of the week, and the days of the week would always fall on the same dates every month.

Unfortunately (in my opinion), the French ditched metric time in 1805 after a glorious 12-year run.


(This is a picture of an actual metric clock from around the time of the Revolution.)

As long as I'm complaining, what's up with this crazy language of ours?  The vowels are pronounced differently based on context, there are all sorts of conjugations specific to certain words, I can't end a sentence with a preposition for some reason... wouldn't it just be easier if we all learned Esperanto, the language created by L. L. Zamenhof in the 1880's?  Esperanto was designed to simplify pronunciation, spelling, and conjugation, in the hopes that it would become a universal auxiliary language.  The characters in the 28-letter alphabet (based on the Roman alphabet) are always pronounced the same way, and conjugations are universal - for example, singular nouns always end in -o, plural nouns always end in -oj, present tense verbs always end in -as, etc.  The global Esperanto community is estimated at as many as 2 million people, with somewhere between 200 and 2,000 native speakers.  There are movies, magazines, even college courses conducted entirely in Esperanto.


(Esperanto's flag, worn as a lapel pin to help speakers identify each other)

Esperanto is built well and is supposedly easy to learn, especially for those who already speak a major European language, but over a century after its inception Esperanto still suffers from a lack of exposure, and English is currently far more universal than it appears Esperanto will ever be.

Both metric time and Esperanto are great ideas that could never get a foothold.  I don't plan on learning Esperanto anytime soon, but I would love to own a metric timepiece.  How cool is that clock from the Revolution?!

Technorati Tags     blogging

quickies

Just a few quick updates from Johnny HQ.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, there are already multiple bands named Sub Rosa including one local to Chicago, so I've decided to change my band name. From now on I'll be putting up music under the name Tiger Stance, which appears to be a unique band name after a little bit of Googling and MySpace searching. I just changed the name of my Sub Rosa profile so there will be no re-friending involved.

Also, I'm trying to put the finishing touches on a new batch of songs to post on the MySpace page, which means I'll have to take the old songs down. The songs are all available for download from the page and I'd love it if you all grabbed copies. I just uploaded the mp3 files again with all of the ID3 tag information populated, meaning that when they are imported into iTunes or any other music program they will have the artist information, album info, and even album art all filled in.

I started a new project this week working with Microsoft at their office in downtown Chicago. There are some very smart dudes & ladies working there. It's intimidating.

Soon to come: a blog about good ideas that fail. In the meantime, please enjoy this video of a "real" air guitar that debuted at CES this week.

Stories of the Road, issue 28: Escape from LA

Thursday, 12/13, was my last day working in Beverly Hills, so to commemorate the occasion I wore my favorite suit. On our last night in town, our dinner was comprised of great Italian food and cupcakes. The only celebrity I spotted while I was there: Jon Voight, in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton.

LA was the most interesting and most glamorous location of all my work assignments - not my favorite but pretty high up on the list. While there, I could never shake the thought that somewhere, at that very moment, while I labored away in front of a computer reconciling my client's bank statement, people far better-looking than I and far richer than I'll ever be were doing things I can't afford to do with famous people who I'll never meet. Of course you can really say that at any time of day no matter where you are; the idea just seems a little closer, a little more omnipresent in LA. This is a terrible thought to carry around, I know. I blame Bret Easton Ellis.

I spent a lot of time out there thinking about why people (the American public in particular) are so interested in the lives of the rich & famous, about how psychological research has shown that attractive people are perceived as being more intelligent & successful & friendly, about whether or not I even give a damn about being rich or famous one day. It was an interesting experience and I think I came away from it with the right ideas. Spending an extended period of time exposed to that lifestyle can fuck with you, even the people who live there admitted that to me occasionally. LA has an energy and a magnetism that I don't fully understand, and from which I'm not entirely immune.



Thanks to everyone who came out last weekend to make our party such a success! Special thanks to the evening's performers: Oreo Dory, Blazed Doughnuts, Paul Parts, Secret Sceptre, and Daniel Knox. I've posted a gallery with about 20 of the best pictures of the evening. The gallery contains a Blazed Doughnuts video, which is also featured on YouTube - and has somehow collected 150 views before I even told anyone it was up. There's a video of Paul Parts' silhouette playing a song as well, but it's not as nice as any of Victor's videos from that evening.



I walked to the Arlington Park train stop after work on Tuesday and the race track has put up a Christmas light show. It costs $10 to drive through in your car or nothing to walk through if you come in through the back entrance.

Searching for John Horstman

I expect that almost everyone reading this has Googled their own name at one point. Three years ago, I held the 10th spot among the Google results for "john horstman" with a link to my senior design project web page, Audio Spatializer for Headphones (now replaced with an abbreviated description here - awarded Most Marketable project of Spring 2003 and totally the idea of my friend Jon Boley), and had another hit on the next page of results with a link to my Physics 398EMI project, "Modification and Assembly of a Fender Deluxe Reverb with Patchable Ring Modulator" (super-boring monster lab write-up here).



All of the top 9 other spots were held by John Horstman of Elgin, IL, who was arrested in 2001 for carrying a gun in his fanny pack while out for a bike ride in DuPage County. Evidently, someone had reported a man exposing himself on the bike trail, and when the police stopped John Horstman as a potential suspect they searched him and found a 9mm handgun and loaded magazines. (John Horstman was not the flasher and the handgun charges were later dropped.) There are a number of gun advocacy web pages that discuss this incident, one of which begins with: "John Horstman did not set out to be a hero on Tuesday, July 25th..." This John Horstman retains the coveted top search result to this very day - which means that anyone who Googles "john horstman" will see a web page that reads "Yet one day when John Horstman of Elgin, Illinois, decided to take his unloaded gun with him, concealed in a fanny pack..." as the first link. Imagine how reassuring this was when I was job hunting.

A few more John Horstmans have jumped into the mix and knocked me out of the first page of results. John Horstman result #2 is from Fulton, MO, and earned his search result standing by catching a record-breaking crappie.



According to Wikipedia, "Henry John Horstman Fenton (1854-1929) was a British chemical engineer who, in the 1890s invented Fenton's reagent, a solution of hydrogen peroxide and an iron catalyst that is used to oxidize contaminants or waste waters. Fenton's Reagent can be used to destroy organic compounds such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE)." Right on, Henry John Horstman Fenton!

John Horstman, 13, of South Middle School in Arlington Heights, collected and created 388 Health Kits for Church World Service. Wooo! John Horstman!



This John Horstman is one of the top results of Google Image Search for his position on the Maryland-Delaware-DC Moose Association Board of Directors (plus he is a sharp dresser):



The highest-ranked page that returns a result for yours truly comes in at a respectable #17, and it's my recently-revamped homepage, johnhorstman.com. I'd like to get on the first results page someday, and maybe, God willing, all the way up to that #1 spot. At least I still own the top spot for "john karl horstman"... on the list of results for the University of Illinois student government elections as a write-in candidate for student trustee, student body president, chief of staff, and a number of other positions.