Brainwaves of Sken

Hi all. :)

I’ve clearly been way busier than normal – I do read as much as I can, though I confess to a few skims here and there.

Another thing that’s been keeping my journal rather bare is that I share all of my cool links in google reader. Go ahead, check out reader.google.com – the best part about it is the sharing feature, actually, which can be automatically populated with your gmail contacts, if you choose.

It’s pretty basic in a number of ways, but I don’t require much from my RSS reader.

Meanwhile, back to the grind. We’ve just found out that no one in our company is getting a raise this year (joy of joys), but no one in our publication is getting downsized, either, so yay for that.

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from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Stanford Magazine reports on the applications from psychological research Carol Dweck’s work, which uses careful experiments to determine why some people give up when confronted with failure, while others roll up their sleeves and dive in.

Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure—and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, “really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns.” Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.

Attribution theory, concerned with people’s judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for our tendency to explain other people’s actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped “shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions—why it matters what attributions people make.” Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use…

…[S]ome of the children who put forth lots of effort didn’t make attributions at all. These children didn’t think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: “Failure is information—we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” During one unforgettable moment, one boy—something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type—faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, “I love a challenge.”

Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they’d hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while—so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized—and, with colleague Elaine Elliott soon demonstrated—that the difference lay in the kids’ goals. “The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something,” Dweck says, and “learning goals” inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than “performance goals.”

I ask for your thoughts. I very much agree with this. I think that probably the single most important idea that has shaped my life is how I process events – the struggling I went through as a pre-teen when it came to “social failure” (and how hard I took it), and the ease in which I accepted and adapted to “intellectual failure” (or challenges). As I got older, I stopped seeing that social awkwardness as a shame-inducing failure, and started asking myself how I could change my pattern and perspective.

Man, if only I’d been able to do that a decade earlier. *chuckle*

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I’m trying not to lose my mind at work, it being 2pm and us having another two stories to film and edit before 3.

So instead, I’ll do what I started this morning, which is start a meme! Yay meme!

So, do this: Comment or post one or more pictures of your daily life. They could be typical or atypical, but if you go to school, work, work at home, or take care of the kids, show me part of your day.

Bonus points for good stories. :)

I’ll start! (click on the links for my gallery)

My desk. All of my biggest messes are on the outer edges of my desk, conveniently invisible for this shot.

The host for our video. I’m following along on the script to make sure things turn out as planned.

My intern checks the teleprompter while we wait for some last-minute changes from the producer.

The view from my desk of Detroit.

Your turn!

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It’s been a long time since I’ve written about the Crazy Secretary Lady. I’m not sure if it’s because she got a talking-to by the boss, or if she’s kept her conversations on the DL, but today’s a doozy. Despite my headphones (which I scrambled for the minute I could see the way the wind was blowing), I am now all too aware of her son’s troubles with the law. He’s going to have a really hard time if the law catches him not registering his address – a lifetime on the sex offender registry.

A darn shame.

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From 52 to 48 with love | original post

I feel like a total dork for saying it, but As I got further down, there were kinda some tears.

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It is difficult not to snap at people today.

Yesterday, at the last minute, the bosses decided it was time we put up an interview we shot with GM’s Wagoner – which required titling and audio modifications for every exchange in a 10-minute clip. Ultimately, between that and critical errors in the admin system that we have no power over, I was at work until 5:30 (when I normally should leave at 4 not that that ever happens), and had to immediately get to a computer and finish once the admin system was back up.

Working from home isn’t as exciting when you’ve already put in a frantic full day.

Fortunately, Sheryl and Melanie were kind and thoughtful last night – I zombied my way to their place, set up and finished my work after awhile, and they fed me nachos and hugs.

I know it’s silly, but WoW was down last night, and I was rather looking forward to the release of killing gnomes and fairies. All things good, essentially, must die.

Instead, I set up the S-VHS deck Randy kindly lent me and the break-out box that’ll let me capture from it. I went through the endless, endless process of setting up drivers and software to use it. If Pinnacle were a reasonable company, they would make a standard set of plugs that you could use to capture in Premiere; but no, no they are not at all reasonable, never have been. Fortunately I can edit in Premiere after it is captured.

I successfully captured an hour of Lucy’s family life, from 1984 to 1985, including her first successful visit with Santa and the easter bunny, as well as Christmas Day.

Despite her advice, I stayed up way too late. Part of that was picking up a random book in my room when it was already one in the morning – a monumentally stupid idea I attribute to already being too tired to think.

Thus, no surprise, I have what feels like an icepick in my temple, and any criticism, no matter how productive or well-intentioned, requires my concerted effort not to result in a maiming, T-rex style (if T were a reasonably intelligent but cranky video editor/director who could use another 4 hours of sleep).

Oh, and the first thing my producer tells me is that our first interview on location in Novi tomorrow is supposed to be at 7:30am. Fuckin’ A.

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The script is way late because the auto companies keep coming out with catastrophic news, and we can’t nail it down and shoot it. GM halted trading on its stock because it announced it is running out of cash.

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If you go to http://change.gov/page/s/yourvision , you can tell the new administration what your vision of America should be. I thought, hey, what the hell:

I want a country where community service is rewarded and encouraged. I want a country where people are eager to help each other. I want a country where a civil union provides full legal benefits to ALL, and marriage is what churches do. I want a country that invests in its own infrastructure, with an eye toward making it better, not just repairing bridges weeks before they would collapse.

But mostly, I want flying cars.

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So, I have this “torch lamp” that’s halogen in nature, and I’ve never really liked it – it has two settings, “dim” and “bright”, and the bright setting only works for 15 or 20 mintues before it turns itself off to preserve itself.

Well, the dim setting died, and Lucy asked if I was going to replace the bulb. I said no, because I was kinda looking to get a more conventional light. Meanwhile, I keep forgetting, and I turn it on, and experience a very, very, very slow rave as I type at the computer.

Until this evening, when it started flickering in an ominous way. I probably should have done something, but y’know, there were lolcats to look at.

Finally I got up to look, and saw a bit of smoke, and smelled the beginnings of an electrical fire. Woohoo! I tried to turn it off, and apparently the switch melted such that it just spun in place.

Thank goodness I didn’t forget about it before I left the house. The column itself was intensely hot.

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So you’ll have to forgive me. ;) This has been in my head all day:

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