A Day In The Life

A friend of mine recently complained that this blog is rarely ever updated. While hard to hear, I must concede that his criticism is absolutely true. I don't update my blog because I've got nothing to say. Instead I don't update it because I've go too much to say.

Rarely does a day go by without an idea for a new book, debt reform, urban planning or software engineering too name a few. Unfortunately the rest of my life has a tendency of getting in the way and few ideas ever reach fruition. So I thought of taking a different tack, what if I simply write about the "rest of my life"? The multitude of things that inspire, conspire or cause me to perspire on any given day. With that in mind here's a glimpse into a 'Day in the life'.

• All day long I've been listening to Best of you by the Foo Fighters. Haven't listened to it? You should. The lyrics are, as with any good song, worth reflecting on. I particularly liked Were you born to resist or be abused? I swear I’ll never give in. I refuse
  
  
• I walked 8 blocks to get lunch threading between high rises to catch some sunshine wherever I could. If you're building a city consider this; office towers may look impressive on postcards but they destroy all hopes of a vibrant street life. Towers block out all sunlight creating canyons of shadow for the unfortunate souls who have to live amongst them. I offer two solutions. First, follow the example of Washington, D.C. Create broad boulevards with buildings no higher than 10 stories. Second, create more green space in the city core. The nicest park near me is on top of a mall and you have to ride three sets of escalators to get there. Parks are not just for suburbs.
  
  
• Why do some people succeed in an organization while others fail? Look around office and see who's on top of the heap and who's under it. What distinguishes these two groups and how do you move from one to the other?
  

For the youngest Kapur

What was it, that you once said sitting in Canmore? "Passion is the most important thing". It's easy to forget that when life starts to drag you down. To help remind you I offer up some lessons I've learned while paving the way.

• Most of long chain gurus, cranks and messiahs that have illumined human civilization have agreed on one point: that it’s what you do every day, day in day out, that forms who you are. Not what you do on special occasions.
  
  
• Sudden flashes of insight might propel you forward, but those sudden flashes only came to people who worked with consistent dedication to learn the new, to master the old.
  
  
• But if you’ve done the training, the race will take care of itself.
  

The Buddha of Sport

From the article A Runner's Quest for the Ache of Life in the New York Times. Some interesting ideas of the role of suffering and sport in modern life.

• Dean Karnazes thinks that comfort, convenience and quick gratification - the Big Three of the middle-class American lifestyle - are not making us happy and that we should seek out more suffering.
  
  "Dostoyevsky had it right: 'Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness,' " he writes in his new book, "Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner"
  
  
• But in Mr. Karnazes' world of super-distance ultramarathon running, many of the conventions of ordinary life do not apply.
  
  He has run 75 hours straight, 262 miles down the coast of California. He regularly runs all night, 70 miles or more, and in fact dictated much of his book into a tape recorder that he carried while he ran. He has completed many of the nation's toughest 100-mile trail races in under 24 hours. He once ran a marathon at the South Pole, in running shoes.
  
  
• "In an ordinary race, a 10K or something, you're just running to race or to check your time," said Mr. Karnazes, 42, a married father of two and the president of a San Francisco health food company, as we ran on a trail west of Denver one recent morning.
  
  But an ultramarathon - technically any distance longer than a 26.2-mile traditional marathon - is not really a race at all in the ordinary sense, Mr. Karnazes said. A day and a night of running, he said, is more like a melodrama than an athletic contest - full of euphoric highs and gloomy, dispiriting lows. The emotional climax - the Dostoyevskian moment of suffering - comes when exhaustion and despair loom up and smack you in the face and the finish line seems unattainable.
  
  "That's exactly the moment I seek," he said. "To me, life is in the struggle, and I never feel more alive than when I'm struggling."
  
  
• But he also writes about the earthier side of ultramarathons, like the giddy joys of food when the body - he says his own has less than 5 percent body fat, about one-fourth the average American's - has become a raging furnace for the burning of calories. By his own estimate, he consumed nearly 28,000 calories while running for 46 straight hours in a race in California in 2000. The book even includes an appendix of what he gobbled, from a whole cheesecake to three large beef burritos.
  
  Other sorts of fuel are where you find them. In the deep places of the soul that ultramarathoners mine for the stuff of will power.
  

Rory O'Shea Was Here

are you saving your regrets
are you holding out for something new to forget
are you saving your regrets ... for me

~ By the band Mere

My dear, I am certain that you sent this to me because it is thoughtful and beautiful. Not knowing how true it was. But it is true dear. Very true, I am saving my regrets for you, and even that I regret.

Did you know?

In Hindi Puneet means Pavitr or Pure. I'm not sure that applies directly to me but it is worth aspiring to.

Code 46

If I had to give only one reason to love you, it would be your eyes, for the way you watch so carefully over those around you, the understanding that comes so quickly through them, for the way you notice beauty in the simplest of things, the way they constantly roam in search of knowing and understanding, and the beautiful heart that I see when I look in them.

The Kabul Express

Some Insights into the world from the heart of a war zone:

But it was mango season. The mangoes were cheap. They were cool, and sloppy with a sweet, spicy juice. To a throat rubbed raw by dust, by heat, by the choking soot of traffic, they were perfect. I was slowly beginning to realize that Afghanistan is a 1 percent country. The 99 bad things are what make the one remaining thing so indescribably good.

That's Afghanistan. You eat a mango in a minefield. Things that are easy have no flavor.

Weak Ties

In 1974, a Harvard sociologist made a seemingly unremarkable discovery. It is, in fact, who you know. His study asked several hundred white-collar workers how they'd landed their jobs. More than half credited a "personal connection." Duh. But then it got interesting: The researcher, Mark Granovetter, dug deeper and discovered that four-fifths of these backdoor hires barely knew their benefactors. As it turns out, close friends are great for road trips, intimate dinners, and the occasional interest-free loan, but they suck for job leads and blind dates - they know the same people you do. In other words, it's not so much who you know, but who you vaguely know. Granovetter called the phenomenon "the strength of weak ties." He had discovered the human node.

In a computer network, a node performs the crucial task of data routing, playing digital matchmaker to packets of information. In a social network, a node is the person whose PDA runneth over with people they met once on an airplane. Nodes host countless dinner parties, leave movie theaters to answer cell phones, and actually enjoy attending conferences. It seems like they know everybody, because they very nearly do - and most important, their connections are from all walks of life, creating a panoply of weak ties. Mensches with an intellectual bent, nodes perform invaluable feats of synthesis, bringing together thinkers, scholars, captains of industry, and the odd professional rugby player, all for the sake of adding new spices to their melting pots. Great books, products, partnerships, and technological innovations form in their chaotic wake, and one could make an argument that they run the world, if only by accident. But chief among the node's attributes is a tendency to stay behind the scenes, which raises an irresistible question: Who are these people, what do they do, and how do they do it?

~From Wired Magazine

To a Skylark

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

21st Century Living Lyrics/Rant

You know today I was only asked one question
One question all day, do you know what that was?
"Do you want this super-sized?"
You know, come to think of it
I'd like the whole fucking world supersized
"Super-sized guns"
Super-sized planes
Super-sized satellites
Think about how many more channels you could get with super-sized satellites
"Super-sized sales"
How do you super-size a sale?
How about we super-size third world debt relief?
"Super-size love"
Super-size honesty
Super-size government, come to think of it
Actually no, let's not super-size the government
I'd like to super-size death
I'd like to super-size a death with a coke
You know what we need?Some backup singers, make a little jingle
(It's alright, sooner or later) Kinda like that, you know
(It's alright, sooner or later) Let's super-size this song
(It's alright, sooner or later) Really, that's the goal isn't it?
(It's alright, sooner or later) If you can super-size the record, we'll sell more records!
(It's alright, sooner or later) It's a super-sized record
(It's alright, sooner or later) That is after all, our ambition

...

Ambition, ambition's a tricky thing
It's like riding a unicycle over a dental floss tight rope
Over a wilderness of razor blades
Ambition can backfire, ambition means more
Ambition means faster, ambition means better
I wonder if you can super- can you supersize ambition?
Does that make you ambitious, if you supersize ambition?
Around here our ambition hurts more than it helps
Around here our ambition throws a non-perishable item In the donation bin at Christmas
And it pats itself on the fucking back
Because it thinks its done something decent
Yeah, we're super-sizing ambition, make no mistake about it

~Matthew Good