I have often joked that if I won the lottery, the only thing I’d spend money on was an accountant to handle the paperwork. Though I may be a bit anomalous (in how much I hate wasting money and in how much I hate paperwork), relief from nuisance is incredibly valuable to many people. Just look at Apple’s Luddite-approved products.¹

However, as much as we might hate nuisances, they seem to love us. There are plane tickets to buy, and broken electronics to return, and utility bills to pay, and none of these is likely to go away any time soon.² The only question, then, is how we deal with them.

Shifting My Perspective

For me, the key to digging myself out from such piles of BS is changing my perspective. Instead of thinking of a boring task (with indefinite length — which makes it so much worse) as a nuisance, I’ve started to think of it as a siege. The task is the enemy, driven into its last stronghold, and whoever gives up first loses. Clearly, that can’t be me. I might be outing myself as a middle-school D&D nerd, but, in the right time and place, this can be practiced to great effect.

An illustrative example is provided by my experience paying taxes this spring. By mid-March or so, I had filled out all my tax information on TaxSlayer. I was just about ready to “e-file” my return, when I noticed that the program had failed to take the educational tax credit. This seemed odd to me, as I should have been eligible, but I spent several hours reading through the IRS literature just to make sure. Everything I read only confirmed my belief, but the program was resolute.

Down 15 bucks and more than a little peeved, I brought out the battering ram and gave TurboTax a try instead. Pleasantly surprised³ by the new interface (thanks Aaron Patzer?), I proceeded to re-enter all my information. Naturally, TurboTax said I owed even more. Setting my jaw, I called in the trebuchets and decided to just do the whole thing by hand. I typed, printed and mailed my return, and for a moment, it looked like the battle was won.

Then, in June, I got a letter from the IRS saying that I owed them a couple thousand dollars. And that I was being charged interest on the amount, and that a penalty would follow. Piqued, shaken, but resolute, I gave them a call. I explained my position, listed the exact worksheets and publications I was referencing, and held my breath. The arrows whistled over the city walls. After about 20 minutes of hold — punctuated by a couple of brusque requests for table and page numbers — the woman I spoke with had to admit defeat. Apparently, I had interpreted the tax code correctly, and it was their error. The gates burst open, and the nuisance was vanquished.

Taxes and Beyond

I have attempted to apply this same indefatigable attitude to all parts of my life. Following up with people via email, making sure paperwork is processed in a speedy fashion — it seems to be useful everywhere. I’m not doing chores, I’m sieging a fortress, and I’ll be damned if I give up. Each step I take in a slow-moving bureaucratic process is a step toward victory. Rather than feeling impatience or dread, I’m possessed by a strange sort of maniacal glee (well, sometimes anyway). Clearly, this can be taken too far — it is important to always be polite, and not to be seen as too pushy. And for some things, it’s just not worth it. The rest of the time, though, I think it’s good to enjoy the fight.

Well, I just finished up my first Android app. I wanted to do something that would be easy enough to act as a starter project, but still actually be useful — to me and to others. So I decided to build an unofficial app for Philip Defranco.¹ Although that’s not as creative as a wholly original app, I think it allowed me to ride Philly D’s coattails a bit and actually get some traction. After a few days, it’s been downloaded 189 times. That’s no Tap Tap Revenge, but at least it’s something I can mention without getting too embarrassed. And I really love knowing that there are people out there benefiting (just a tad!) from my work.

Now, for number two…

When I’m browsing a website, sometimes I find myself needing to search for a specific topic on the site. Some sites have their own search boxes, but, in my experience, such homegrown site searches tend to be disappointing. (They can, however, often be improved using a Google Site Search.)

Historically, I’ve typically resorted to opening a new tab and typing “g site:www.example.com query”. The ‘g’ triggers my Firefox custom keyword search for Google, and the ‘site’ operator confines a search to specific domain. Clearly, with a long domain, this can result in a lot of typing, so it’s always something I do reluctantly.¹

My first solution was just to beef up my custom keyword arsenal a bit, and map ‘gs’ to a Google search preloaded with the ‘site’ operator. This was better, but, again, most of my searches are targeted to the site I’m currently browsing. Typing the domain again, especially when it was already in the address bar, was a far cry from ideal. Unfortunately, the custom keyword syntax is pretty basic, and I couldn’t seem to find a way to grab that domain information.

Luckily, I hit upon the idea of using a JavaScript pseudo-URL. This would let me map a Firefox custom keyword search to a JavaScript snippet, and thereby pretty much do anything I wanted!

The snippet I used is:

javascript: var host = document.location.href; if (host.indexOf("http://") == 0) {host = host.substr(7);} else if (host.indexOf("https://") == 0) {host = host.substr(8);}; if (host.indexOf("/") != 0) {host = host.substr(0, host.indexOf("/"));}; document.location = "https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:"+host+" "+"%s";

I just mapped it to ‘gsl’ for Google Site Local. It is wonderful.

When consolidation occurs in these markets, we need to pay attention.

These are the words of Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller, on the proposed acquisition of NBC Universal by Comcast. He is the great grandson of the original John D. I guess after a few generations, an apple can cover quite some distance.

And another interesting twist — NBC Universal is headquartered in Rockefeller Plaza.

I love debate. For me, the line between a good conversation and an LD is thin, and mostly relates to time limits. Obviously, this love can be something of a challenge, socially speaking — though I do like to think that, as I’ve grown older, I’ve gradually developed a facility for “shooting the shit” or “small talk”, or whatever it is you call everything that’s not debate.

In general, other people seem to dislike debate-style conversations for two reasons: they don’t like the oppositional flavor of the discussion, or¹ they don’t see the point. I’m a competitive person, so I actually enjoy the first reason — as long as ad hominem attacks and other fallacies are left out of it. However, both the engineer and the artist in me are very sensitive to the second reason.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

As people say, you’re never going to convince someone who believes X of the merits of ~X, and that is doubly true within a single conversation. So why waste your breath?

In two words: perspectival cleft. This is a term that has been kicking around my head for a while now, and something akin to its meaning may have already been coined. But what I’m talking about is simple: the place where two reasonable people’s opinions diverge.² The place, in other words, where the disagreement is born.

The awareness of such a cleft can dramatically change the tenor of the conversation. Rather than attempting to force two people’s opinions to be parallel, you can simply work to uncover the exact location of the perspectival cleft. And once you do uncover it, it’s really a marvel. It’s sort of like finding a book that says one thing to one person, and something totally different to the other. Moreover, there naturally are reasons for the cleft itself. Identifying the cleft is a concrete step toward resolving them, and thereby the overarching disagreement. These consequences make the discovery of the cleft a practical goal — in addition to an amusing diversion — and thus one whose achievement is deeply satisfying.