Monday, October 6, 2008

My Experience With the Sublime

One experience that stands out for me is the night I went out to see the Mars Volta in London. I do not think anything has moved me like this show. The Mars Volta is a rock/latin/prog band from California and I have been following them since 2002 and even before that when they were known as At The Drive-In. I can remember this show like it was yesterday, it was at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. It was an indoor venue and I got a spot in the balcony.
I couldn't wait for the band to come out. I was sitting in anticipation for nearly an hour and when they came out, I simply lost it. I can remember dancing to their music in a way that I have never danced before. It was simply amazing. After the show my adrenalin didn't stop pumping for nearly an hour. I felt something very special that night.

Another time I have experienced the sublime is when I first heard Lupe Fiasco. Lupe is a rapper from Chicago and his debut album Food and Liquor is one that I can listen to the whole way through again and again.

I loved reading the Goosebumps books by R.L. Stien back when I was just a little chap. I was very young back then, but I felt sense of rapture every time I read one of those books. Once I started one, I couldn't put it down until it was finished.

Another time I felt completely moved by an artistic medium is when I played Half Life 2. This game was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I remember beating it within a week because I simply could not put the game down. I was engrossed by the Bladerunner/1984 esque story line. The combat was frantic and every battle I went in to made me feel like I could never pull through.

And now the list of other notables
Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir"
Saving Private Ryan
Good Will Hunting
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six
Nintendo 64
Myst
Gran Tourismo 3
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Final Fantasy X
Madden Football
Metal Gear Solid
London
Seattle
San Francisco
Flying for the first time
No Country For Old Men
A&P
Film Making
2008 Election

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Clearing Out Crap

I just watched a really interesting video of one of Merlin Mann's talks at a Google conference in July 2007. The gist of this talk is uncluttering one's e-mail inbox to bring about a sound process to their life. For google employees, their inbox can look like a battleground. Emails reside in this jungle vying for the top position in the owner's priority list.

Merlin's idea is the Zero Inbox. What this means is that a person's inbox should have literally zero emails just wasting away in this electronic prison. I have seen people with inboxes that contain fifty to a hundred emails and I wonder how they can even keep track of all that stuff. I don't claim to be very good at all when it comes to organization, but I actually keep a system that works remarkably well for me.

When I receive an email, I always ask myself what this email means to me. If the contents of that email are fairly important, I will put it into one of several areas. I have 2 areas where I keep important dates and documents. My source for holding deadlines and meetings is actually a blog just like this one. I don't operate it like a normal blog because that would be detrimental to me staying organized. It was a bit of a process, but through experimentation I worked it out. When I first started it, I would put in an entry every single day; however, the entries would become too numerous and I found myself sifting through lines and lines of stuff that didn't indicate whether the tasks were done or not. I reduced the blog to one single post. I update this post whenever a new task comes about. I color code the tasks in a way that makes sense to me. Tasks that need to be done are in a black font, completed tasks are red, meetings are blue and ongoing tasks are coded green.

Next, for documents I keep a very rudementary system within my computer. I keep documents in a document stack that contains several folders. Each folder has a subject and documents go to their respective subject folder. For example, I have a classes folder within the stack, within that folder I have my current semester folder. Within that folder I have folders that go along with my classes that I am taking. My other folder contains all my old classes and every document I have collected during my college career.

This system is far from perfect and I am constantly trying to figure out ways to make it better. I guess that's the fun thing about life, you always find ways to make things better.