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An article in the Washington Post describes some suprising effects of offering external rewards and punishments to people already performing tasks because they derive intrinsic value from them. It seems that science backs up the idea that if you love to do something and someone offers you an external reward or punishment for it, you will begin to loose your intrinisc interest in the activity.

This is an interesting observation. It would be very difficult to draw a broad conclusion from it , however. There are so many other factors involved when it comes to human motivation that making sense out of all of these studies is a real challenge.

I suppose the only real, solid principle out of all of this is that humans perform better when they find intrinsic value in something. This is common sense (or at least ought to be). Any good military leader will tell you that the soldiers don’t do what they do for you, they do it because they see value in it. There is definitlely something in a good leader that inspires and causes the followers to exceed even their own expectations. However, the real drive comes from within the individual follower and a good leader knows that. A good leaders knows how to inspire his people to get what they already want. That’s why they follow him.

“Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

The New Atlantis has a great article on psychology research and anecdotal evidence that suggests human’s performing more than one task at once experience a significant drop in productivity. It’s a good read.

Does this explain why so many office workers seem spacey?

“Most software design is lousy. Most software is so bad, in fact, that if it were a bridge, no one in his or her right mind would walk across it. “ - Charles Connell

This is an excellent paper on Software Engineering. The parallels between great architecture and great software design are very useful. After all, when constructing an abstract, what is more useful than examining the order in the architecture of physical buildings? Why shouldn’t it carry over to the imaginary?

Read about it here.

Well, it’s been 12 days without smoking! WOOT!

It’s been challenging when I’ve been out drinking. It’s surprising just how much I want to go outside and smoke with everyone else when they light up. I’ve been able to resist the urge and have been a lot better off for it. I’ve always been a social smoker, so I have a habit of smoking when I drink. It’s getting easier now as I learn that I can have fun without smoking.

(oh - btw… wanna know how I got that pic in this post? I simply looked it up on Google and dragged the thumbnail view from Safari to Ecto (blogging software). HA! How cool is that?)

I’ve owned Macs now since 2004. Four years later, I continue to be amazed by what I can do on these things. It’s not that OS X is so much more powerful or feature rich than Windows or Linux, it’s the way in which it’s put together, it’s “flow”. Yes, “flow”. That’s the best way to describe it. When you begin to connect the dots and realize how you can do your work on the Mac, it leaves you in an almost zen like state. An example:

This is how I created the blog post below:

I opened my blgging application (Ecto) and created a new post. I then exposed the Sidenote application by moving my cursor to the left of my desktop. Then, I hit command+shift+4 at which point the copy crosshairs appeared. I dragged the crosshairs and boxed in the area of my screen that I wanted to capture. When I let go of the mouse button, it captured that portion of the screen to a .jpg file on my desktop. I then moved my cursor to the upper left corner of my desktop which activated Expose. Expose showed miniaturized windows of all of my running applications. I clicked on my blogging application (Ecto). Poof, Ecto popped up front and center with tons of other application windows behind and to the side of it. I then hit command+option+h and all of the other application windows were hidden (removed from view, but still running in the background and available through the dock or alt-tab). Now, I could see my desktop and Ecto only. I found the screen capture jpg easily because every picture is represented on my desktop in a fully rendered thumbnail picture. I dragged the jpg into my Ecto blog post window, resized the pic, and pressed a button to post it. BLAM!

Is that magic or what???

Sure, I could probably simulate all of that on Widows by downloading 20 clunky feeling applications loaded with adware and spending an hour configuring them, but, honestly, why? I only use Windows to manage servers at work, develop in Visual Studio, or play games at home now.

Here is a cool little app that places a text note box on the left side of your screen. The app remains hidden until you drag the cursor to the left boundary of your screen and then it pops out. You can save multiple notes. This is really convenient for those little details that you need to capture on the fly, but don’t want to create a full blown document for. It’s also a much better approach to dealing with this issue than having a myriad of sticky notes floating all around your desktop.

Sweet.

Ron Paul is still here! Join the movement. Stand up for what you believe in or continue being a political lemming voting for the lesser of two absolute evils.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

So, I need to do some screen captures for a presentation I’m doing and I’m working off of my Mac. I’ve never done a screen capture on a Mac before, so I looked it up on the internet. What a pleasant surprise!

I LOVE MY MAC!!!!

In order to do a screen capture, all I have to do is hit SHIFT+CMD+3 for the entire screen or SHIFT+CMD+4 and crosshairs appear which I can then drag around whatever I want to capture! Just drag and click, poof it’s saved as a .jpg to my desktop. If I just want a copy in my clipboard (which is more often the case) I simply hold down the CONTROL key while dragging or clicking. WOW! Now that is damn cool!

Another thing I LOVE about my Mac is that I can save any document or web page as a PDF by simply selecting PRINT and SAVE AS PDF.

Yet another thing I LOVE about my Mac is that while I am typing almost anywhere, the OS puts a red underline under misspelled words. In many apps, I can simply right click the word to select the proper spelling or look it’s definition up in the built in dictionary.

Life is GOOD when you use a Mac!

As of today I have decided to quit smoking for good.

Very interesting article from the New York Times…

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE4D9173CF93AA35757C0A964958260

This is the best explanation I have read.