Life is good

Immediately following a storm is one of my favorite times to take pictures, right up there with late afternoon light.

Today was a university holiday (Martin Luther King, Jr. day, one of those that most governments in the US get, but only some private employers), so I got to have an extra-long weekend. As always, I didn't get done everything that I was tentatively planning on, but I'm still extremely happy with the whole weekend. I did a fairly good job of focusing and gave quality attention to everything that I did throughout the weekend, which is the goal I'm truly striving for. I even made up a missed exercise session this morning, so I can still say that I exercised every day since I got back from vacation.

No playoffs today, so the TV was off for most of the day. When I'm watching it, I can see a remarkable difference in my ability to concentrate based on whether the TV is on. I'm not sure what this is going to mean for getting around to watching the various TV things I do want to watch, but I suspect I should do another significant purge of what I'm mentally committing to watching and focus on using music instead. Attention studies at Stanford have shown that attempting to multitask with any other input except music causes serious cognitive impairment, but music doesn't appear to have the same negative effect. I was one of those people who always thought he was good at multitasking, but most such people are nowhere near as good as they think they are.

When I first came to Stanford, I gave up TV entirely and didn't watch it except very occasionally at a friend's house for about seven years. It's occasionally tempting to do that again, not as completely but reserving it for video games, movies and TV collections that I know I want to watch, and the occasional rare program. I would miss good news programming, but Bill Moyer's Journal is going off the air anyway, and while The Daily Show is funny, I'm not sure I'd miss it that much. It would mean cutting way back or stopping watching the food shows I started watching, but it might be worth it. Worth additional pondering.

I still don't have all of the things I want to do in life all lined up and balanced — Debian and book reviews are the ones getting a bit short-changed at the moment — but I'm doing so vastly better than I was before vacation.