Scott Milling Weblog

Media Consuming 8/1-8/3

Watched:

• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer - Came around on the Netflix queue. It’s watchable, but barely. Pales in comparison to Iron Man or the recent Batman films. On par with the first release, but it’s not a film to be sought out.
• This Film Is Not Yet Rated - Documentary on the MPAA Rating process with a lot of Director interviews for films that have been rated NC-17. Sex is more likely to get the NC-17 rating than violence. The review process is incredibly subjective, and the anonymous parents that give the ratings are not necessarily a perfect cross section of Americana. Worth watching, but in the end, movies are business, and I believe a business has the right to decide what kind of product it wants to sell.
• The Darjeeling Limited - I’m a Wes Anderson fan, so I dug the film. It’s a little loose in it’s spiritual backing, but immenently like able. Watch Rushmore and the Royal Tenenbaums, if you are left wanting more, then this film is worth a watch.
• Several episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Watching on Hulu streaming. Anna and I like our comedies. This summer we’ve worked our way through both 30 Rock and Arrested Development. Both of those shows are better than Philadelphia, at least so far. The humor is pretty dark, but I dig the city life treatment, and the bar scene is a rich palate to work off of. We’ll keep watching.

Played:

• Boom Blox (Wii) - Rented from Gamefly. Played over at 1106/Shakermaker house. Great party game with a nice variety of play modes. I don’t know if I would pay $50 for it, but I’d say it’s a good buy at a discount.
• Final Fantasy IV (DS) - Picked this updated classic up in preparation for our 2 Week Italy trip, but it’s ended up being my go to game. The original is one of my favorite games of all time, and it’s fun to re-experience a bit of childhood.

Starting Small

Large scale projects can be tough to do without deadlines, and I’m a natural procrastinator. The classes I’ve done best in have been the ones where the homework was required. While I hate this structure on the surface, the results are much better when you do the work. Seems completely obvious, but much like an alcoholic, the first step is admitting that you have a problem.

The working world does an adequate job of creating deadlines, timelines, and project gates, but for individual large scale products, it’s very easy to let the timeline be ignored and go play some more Xbox. There is always the bare minimum that you have to do to stay in a job, but as I’ve counseled many employee’s, the bare minimum will not win you any awards and accolades or that fat promotion. For personal projects, the bare minimum could be enough when the alternative is not doing the project.

David Allen of Getting Thing’s Done fame discusses how every idea that we don’t record and get out of our minds and into a trusted system is another ripple in the lake of our minds. He talks about having a mind like water, where when you cast a stone into the water, the reaction is in proportion to the problem. If you’re like me, then you have more than 5 major projects going on at a time. These projects could be work related, or just be things that you want to do in your life. It can be very disheartening when a project starts to fail or your expectations get out of line to what you can deliver, so my suggestion is to start small. While I try to follow my own advice - quieting the inner mind and staying focused will be my next challenge.

Recommendation on Feed Readers

If you don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping up with your RSS, be very leery about adding high volume sites like Engadget or Kotaku.  Inevitably, I get behind by hundreds of posts at a time and the backlog continues to grow if I don’t spend some time processing them.  I’ve got enough processing on work items/email that I don’t need another bucket to empty.

My recommendation: only add low volume Blog’s by author’s that you like and don’t want to miss their posts.  Low volume, in my opinion, would be less than 4-5 posts per day.

I still like to visit sites like Engadget and Kotaku, but a scan of the frontpage is usually sufficient for my reading needs.  Logging into Google Reader and seeing that I only have 100 Unread posts is a lot more welcoming than seeing 1000+ Unread.