Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

The Inner Dork: Hero in My Own Mind

The relationship of logic, language and computing is a fascination for me.  Thanks to an exchange with anderbill, I see a way to demonstrate some things that matter in that domain, providing insight for onlookers and computer practitioners about the semantics of software, including data.  In my usual compulsive way, I start gathering together the material, creating scaffolding and placeholders for more accretions, and initiating a new blog, Numbering Peano.  I use a diary and job jar to stay on track and advance the work I committed to Bill.  I told him I would have the final read-get-set-go entries up for him to build on by Friday (yesterday).

Then I seize up.

My inner dork takes over and I am obsessing about writing it just right.  I am constantly rewriting the first sentence, and each simple thought turns into a paragraph.  And that makes another.  How do I get out of this?  I'm blowing my cover.  What if I'm not merely a flake but all wet ... a, a, a crackpot?  Nooo.

Throw out the junk.  Save as draft and lighten up.  It doesn't have to be perfect.  We're going to have a conversation and we'll see where we go as we go. This is not about asking the cute redhead to dance.  Says you.

All right, lay down enough so anderbill can step in.  Then maybe we can add to the team for that blog.  Could be fun.  It's a lesson.  It's playing.

OK.  So, to see how it turns out, I have to turn it out.  Gotcha.  Ciao.  Ci vediamo.  Later, dude.

Not Listening to:

NPR : Commentary: Be Proud of Guilty Pleasures.  Over morning espresso, I'm telling Vicki about yesterday's coaching call with Henry and my assignment for when I notice being paralyzed-fearful-anxious.  Vicki laughs and tells me about some guy named Ford, heard on NPR while she was driving home yesterday.  Ford fesses up about his "inner dork" and the pleasures of science-fantasy.  She can just hear me talking.  I get over the momentary embarassment and conclude that unleashing my inner dork would be a fun thing.  Thanks to the internet and KUOW having their program schedule on-line, I find Paul Ford's account right here in cyberspace.  The only problem is that NPR requires me to grant them so many liberties.  I refuse to allow web bugs, but I grant them full mobile-code and persistent cookie permissions through my software firewall.  That isn't enough so I tell Internet Explorer that this is a trusted site (it's the liberal press, right? no big-brother there, ok?).  That makes no difference, there is still some error trying to run some object, and my outer geek has had enough.  My moments-of-truth tripwire goes off and I give up.  As far as I know, I have Ford to thank for "inner dork."

posted by orcmid at 6/5/2004 01:58:03 PM

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