Limited Guacamole
Pop Quiz
Unnecessarily Neat
I was wrapping presents over the weekend and thought about how nice it is that most wrapping paper comes with a grid of lines on the back. Gift givers used to really need to pay attention to what they were doing to get a nice straight cut. Now it’s easy to get a perfect cut every time. What a wonderful innovation! It’s so ingenious, it must have been a Google 20% project. Everyone should be happy about this.
But then I got to thinking, what do I care if my wrapping paper is cut perfectly. I was perfectly happy eyeballing it before. What’s more, nobody else cares if you cut paper straight. Kids tear open present without giving a single thought about the paper. They just want what’s inside. They wontonly tear off what you so lovingly cut, wrapped and taped.
Adults are no better. Think about it from your own experience. When’s the last time you got a present and thought “Gee, these seems sure are neat” or “what loving attention to detail Sam applied to his cutting and taping”. Sorry, it just doesn’t happen.
Not only do people not care about straight wrapping paper cuts but the grid lines that make it possible also have negative consequences. Think about it, it’s going to cost more to print things on both sides of the paper. Don’t think you’re getting all that ink on there for free. Your wrapping paper is costing you more. Is perfectionism really worth the extra cost?
The cost of perfectionism has other costs too. It’s probably stressing you out, giving you high blood pressure, causing internal anxiety and outward shows of anger and aggression. You might find that every time your scissors veer off the line you start yelling at your children and kicking the dog.
But if health and relationships with those you love don’t move you in this discussion, there’s a more insidious consequence to these seemingly innocuous paper grids. Now that there are lines on the white side, you can’t use scraps of wrapping paper to make little To/From tags. You’re being forced into buying pre-printed tags that you might not even like.
I’ve always enjoyed using the paper I was wrapping with to make my tags. Now that I can’t do that, the joy of present wrapping has left me. Now all I can do is make my wrapped presents unnecessarily neat.
A Gift Horse
Look a gift horse in the mouth. If you look in the other end, you’re liable to have your teeth kicked in.
Ryan Davison
Don’t Be An Idiot
This morning I got an email from the Risk Management department where I work. The email was a list of bullet points about how to walk safely during the winter months. The tips were common sense and should be known and understood without an “expert” reminding you about it.
I usually just delete “don’t be an idiot” emails like this without reading them closely. But this time, for whatever reason, I read all the way to the end. I’m glad I did. Otherwise, I would have missed the absolute gem that was the last bullet point. It read:
- “When going for a walk in winter weather, carry a small bag of sand or non-clumping cat litter to place on an icy spot that you have towalk on. This will help give you traction and help avoid a fall.”
I can just imagine someone carefully inspecting the ground before each step they take and sprinkling kitty litter on the path just to make sure it’s safe. Or maybe, there’s a more efficient way of doing this. Hence the sketch above.
A Plea For Transparency in Advertising
Panhandlers and bums are becoming more and more honest and trasparent. It’s become fashionable for them to display signs saying something like “Not gonna lie, I need beer”.
Why can’t businesses be more like today’s forward thinking beggars? I’d appreciate the honesty of a commercial stating “We really don’t care about your needs, we just want your money”?
The Boss
Business Synergy
Joke Number 509
Other People’s Code
I like looking at other people’s code. Said in the right voice, that could sound quite creepy. But I like to see what kind of projects they’re working on, how they implement solutions, what languages they chose to work with and how many other people are using their work. So I’ll keep looking at other people’s code. At night. Through their window. While they work.
Sometimes, I’ll just go to GitHub and search for a language or maybe a keyword having to do with something I’m doing in one of my own projects. This usually gives me a couple of hundred pages of repositories to look through. I’ll click on page 99 or 100 of the results just to “randomize” what I’m seeing a little.
Over the last couple of weeks, I started realizing that I was only searching for code in languages that I was familiar with. Within those languages, I was only really reading code that I already understood or was familiar with. That didn’t sit right with me because I wasn’t seeing anything new or interesting. I felt like I wasn’t growing as a developer. I was staying comfortable and not challenging my skills.
So I decided to do something about it. I wrote a short little Python script (and later created a more convenient JavaScript bookmarklet) that randomly selects a repository and opens it. Ok, Ok, it’s not that exciting or inspiring. Nor is it original or even useful. It has a bug or two and should probably be developed a little more to give the user more options to filter things out.
But the idea was to gain exposure to new coding styles, languages, and technologies and on those points, it is a success! I have started a weekly habit of searching randomly using the bookmarklet and whatever result I get, I force myself to read through it and try to understand it. If I think the code is interesting enough I will try to implement it locally.
If you’re interested, you can find the repository at https://github.com/RyanDavison/RandomRepo . Feel free to fix bugs, add features or anything else. If you just want to play around with finding random repositories you can drag the link on this page to your bookmarks bar and click away.