the anonymous senator

Quantum of Solace redux - the 1959 short story

[This was previously posted elsewhere.]

As you're getting blitzed daily with advertisements for the latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, you're probably thinking they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel to use a title like that. And you'd be right. It is, after all, the 22nd Bond movie.

I'd like to issue you an invitation. To read it.

I promise, there are no submachine guns. No laser watches. No car chases. In fact, there's no violence at all. Quantum of Solace is a short story first published in the May 1959 issue of Cosmopolitan and later reprinted in a collection of five short stories titled For Your Eyes Only. It tells a sad tale of infidelity and marital cruelty in the British foreign service. Something of an experiment for Ian Fleming, it's not a spy adventure at all. While not the strongest of the collection, it's definitely worth the read, and will convince you that Fleming really knew how to tell a damn good story.

Among the Bond books, I always find For Your Eyes Only the most satisfying, perhaps because the novels are so formulaic, dependent as they are on a predictable story arc that includes capture, imminent death, incredible escape, and vengeance - a formula familiar from anything from the 1960s Batman television series to the Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt adventures. The short stories are more nuanced, with paradoxically more room to explore the moral uncertainty, drudgery and ugliness of the job.

I doubt it's in libraries anymore, but you can find worthless old yellowed paperbacks for practically free in a good used bookstore. I accidentally bought two.

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made myself a landing page

Because what's the sense in owning your domain name if there's nothing on it?

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twitter: it's nothing personal

Yesterday Jon Dale wrote a post gently critical of Guy Kawasaki's "How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter" where he concluded

So here's my plea (to all those folks that have started following me because I follow them or those folks who are ticked because I'm not following them after they started following me).  Let's not treat Twitter like MySpace.  Please, only follow the folks that are actually interesting to you, that you actually care about...and remember, if we see that you're following thousands of people...we don't believe you.

There's one thing I'd like to add. Lately I've been seeing a few tweets and blog posts where people get a little worked up about others unfollowing them without explanation - largely due to Qwitter. Someone (I don't recall who) actually went so far as to ask people not to follow just to check him out, but to read through his back tweets first and then essentially make a commitment to follow him for a while. This is ridiculous - twitter has over a million users and is completely open. It's not high school. Show some respect for the people who are giving you their attention by respecting their right to make the signal vs. noise decision based on their interests, time, geography, etc. It's nothing personal.

[PS - Ken Burbary also recently wrote on this topic.]

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just tired

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. Well, actually, I'm not sick, which is nice, because a lot of people around me are getting sick, but I am tired. I am probably going to fail my professional exam on Monday because I can't bear to study for it. The material is so boring it puts me to sleep, literally. The other night I was on the couch studying at 9:00 and woke up at midnight.  The crazy thing is that I'm starting to get back into the bad habit of staying up late because I feel like I should be doing something, but not actually doing it. Like tonight.  I never have gotten the hang of the Tim Ferriss "work hard, get it done, do it fast now so you can relax later" philosophy.

A pet peeve that's been bugging me lately is people who don't return email. Not work people, but friends. I don't expect anyone to treat my email as a precious hand-written letter. I don't expect a long, beautifully written reply, or a response from your blackberry within five minutes. But if I ask someone something I expect a response in a few days. I don't get responses often enough to demonstrate that it's apparently socially acceptable for social and non-work email to slip through the cracks. This probably seems unnatural to me because I practice GTD and so treat personal email as just another "inbox" with the same standards and practices as anything else - it just seems easier than maintaining separate mental rule sets. If non-work life is as important as work life, doesn't it deserve the same level of follow-through? It's nothing I'm going to hold a grudge about, but it's annoying.  I feel like I'm searching for other people who feel the same level of committment to their whole life as I do, and not finding many.  I don't know how to write this without sounding like a jerk.

In my continuing quest to follow through with committments to myself, instead of studying tonight I made this chart. Just curious.

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it's doubtful

Never doubt that a large group of thoughtless, committed citizens can overuse this quote. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

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letting your guard down

I've been ruminating on this all afternoon, because it rings true and it makes me think about what I want to say on the internet and how I want to say it. Also whether I should keep my non-personal and reader-free topical blog (incidentally, number 16 if you google my name), which I consider killing about once a week.

It's how Tim Ferriss prefaced a live interview question at BizTechDay about who he's going to vote for.

"This is a very important social media lesson: I don't go out of my way to offend people, but I don't go out of my way to avoid offending everyone. I think in social media, where whatever you say is immediately visible to the entire world, if you're just as honest with your audience, with the world, as you would be with your friends after two drinks, basically - so you're not quite to the stumbling, cursing sailor stage but you're letting down your social filter a bit - you will have diehard fans. If you have any skills, and if you're as honest with your potential audience as you would be with a friend after two drinks, you'll have diehard fans. You'll also have people who just decide that you are the antichrist."

I guess the question is do I want to put myself out there and let people know about my whatever-it-is, because then I'll be accountable to make some intelligent contribution every week or so that is actually interesting enough to read. To illustrate the direction things are going, yesterday I took the opportunity to wuss out and not give my personal card to a great jersey bike blogger who was attending a big 'ol seminar I organized for work.

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halloween wonderland

It's a winter wonderland here in Jersey, with the earliest snowstorm I can remember.  Bobbing for snowballs! Waiting for the great snowman to rise out of his snowball patch! Making ice o' lanterns! Okay, I'll stop now.

(download)

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click it

It finally clicked. I finally get why people like cameras the size of a deck of cards. I mean, I understood that people liked something small so that they wouldn't hesitate to take it with them. But I reasoned that you can save some money and get the exact same features if you were willing to go a little bigger. Plus, you'd get the option of inexpensive replacements for rechargeable batteries.  A camera the size of, say, a navel orange couldn't discourage me from carrying it, could it? Yes, it absolutely could. There's a fine line between "fits in pocket" and "carrying case," but that line makes a huge difference if you're going to be walking far, or don't want to bring a bag, or don't want to look like a tourist.  I guess I am the last person to figure this out.

Sometimes what's ordinary in my life changes so much day to day that it makes my head spin. To wit: Thursday night I headed straight into the city from work to meet one of my best friends in from Chicago, and her friend from London whom I have known online for a couple years, perhaps, but never met. Bars. Expensive appetizers. Walking the streets. Drunken texting. More friends. The "I'm with Peter in this bar" photo that's developing into a genre in my Facebook profile. Good one-on-one conversation. Then just like that the bell tolls and I am walking through a time machine and stepping into a cab and on the last train out of the city.

Then I am waking up 2.5 hours later and working, working, trying to do better. Coffee, latte. Picking up the kids, my beautiful kids, giving them dinner and a bath and putting them to bed, because K is at work.

Then I am home with the kids all day, K is at a conference, the weather is threatening rain. My mother is away, I am too lazy to travel far, have lost touch with many of my parent friends, the weather keeps us inside. It is a long day.

Then it is Sunday, and K is home, and we have places to go and errands to run, and the weather is beautiful.  I run to get bagels. Then I run just to run, and the boys want to come so I end up pushing a huge stroller. Later we buy winter jackets, and halloween costumes, then walk to the gallery for an art show. I feel like a real parent, because they insist on wearing their costumes to the gallery and we say sure. 

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coffeehouse with the boys

Saturday it was just me and boys, and we hung out in the coffeehouse as usual.

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mixed messages

From the streets of New York. I guess it doesn't matter, no one pays attention to these things anyway.

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