The Expandable Heart

I joined my ex-wife, Suzanne, this Tuesday to see a cat we had adopted some 15 years ago, beloved E-Bear, put to sleep. Sent off to heaven. We love you little buddy.

There were valid health reasons for doing this but still I feel sad. I did not live with him for the last 5 years, but still I feel sad.

The Power of Habit

What is it that our pets do to us? While they are making themselves at home in our physical homes they are, at the same time, making themselves some room in our hearts (or, less metaphorically, one’s capacity to love). One’s heart is said to ache in these times. The description is apt but, for me, sometimes also includes my stomach and eyes and nose.

I have a theory. Your capacity to love increases to accommodate a new loved one. Your many moments in each day become new habit loops, new neural pathways, that become a part of you. And then, suddenly, this deeply ingrained part of you can no longer act on their subject because they were built for your beloved pet, who is no more.

You can keenly feel all of the sensations that you will never get to enjoy again firsthand. Only in memories and in your heart. I treasure that I will always remember what it was like to live with E-bear. But in this moment, I’d rather have my cat. This will morph in time when I am able to see with perspective. Right now I just can’t yet. This is where I am.

Taking Advantage of My Unusual State

I am amazed at the power of habit in this case to be not only connected to my behavior but also connected with my emotions and my values. In this unusual moment, where certain senses and wits are dulled and other ones are sharp I have this guess to make:

Love can be built by just showing up, just choosing to be with some thing (some one), and being consistent about it. It can be practiced. But it does require that we choose to be there. Not occasionally and not only for the key inflection points of life but for the great many ordinary moments.

I don’t know for certain. I could be totally wrong here. But that’s how it feels to me. What’s my proof? Back in 2001 or so I cried when my ex-wife’s guinea pig, Hugo died. I did not think I was attached to him. All he did was eat and drink and live in a tank. Though he did have rapid movements and was fun to watch when he was chewing.

The little bastard had snuck in. I did love him. This one data point influenced my thinking a lot.

Questions and Actions

Given this thought about love… (and switching gears to human beloveds) I am inspired to ponder who would I want to show up for that I don’t show up for enough now? What can I do to start to change that?

With my encounters in the world with people I do not yet know… how would I feel about them if I just slowed down a bit and made chit chat? What could I do to start to change that? (idea: don’t always be plugged into my phone)

I’d love to see just how large a heart could get given practice.

Influencing with Integrity or Not At All

I recently saw an incident on Facebook where a person laid out his case for why Al Gore should be president. Although I hold some admiration for Mr. Gore as a public figure, I didn’t think it was a strong enough case to convince me and I usually steer clear of politics posts. But I did read through the comments… deep down inside me there still lives a small hope that a discussion emerges rather than unconstructive bickering and the sorts of ad hominem attacks that you see when you watch politicians malign one another.

Another person had decided to make his dissent known. And the original poster (OP) engaged in a style of debate I can only summarize as moral bludgeoning, which involves using the unquestioned moral sentiments of our day to make your opponent back down rather than taking his issues head-on. I saw the OP ask if the dissenter thought that he, himself, would do better as president. I saw the OP accuse the dissenter of hipocrisy.

Calling Bull

I saw the OP try to sell Gore on his military service during the vietnam war. And when the dissenter listed his reasons for being unimpressed, I saw the original poster trying to bully the dissenter as someone diminishing a veteran’s service record. The OP said he had to call “bull”.

All of this in the name of what? Did the original poster want the dissenter’s best interests? Was the original poster interest in hearing from anyone who disagreed at all?

I argue that the OP, thought he knew better than everyone else and wanted to be “right”. I argue that the OP operates from a mode that as long as his side is in the majority, they can do what they want. After all, isn’t that democracy? Isn’t democracy the most important moral rule of our day?

Now it’s time for me to point out some “bull”:

• if you post something that is meant to influence others but you only want to hear from people who agree with you, you probably have no sense of self-worth and likely attempt to substitute the agreement of others.
• if when someone on your “friends list” disagrees with you, you use every dirty trick in the book to try to take down their credibility and malign their character, there’s a 100% chance you have no real friends.
• if you believe that the majority has the right to do whatever they want… legally, you might be right. But morally, you believe in tyranny rather than liberty.

Influencing with Integrity

I would feel bad if I ended this post on a judgmental rant. So I want to talk about what I think influence looks like when it has integrity.

It’s natural to want to try to influence the people we know. To challenge them to rise to be the best sort of people they can be. But our motives for doing so may not always be honorable. And even when we think our motives are “in their best interests” the means have become accustomed to using may be poorly suited or downright inappropriate for the sort of relationship we have.

Influence with integrity begins with dialogue, and dialogue begins with listening.
Rather than using fear-based emotional arguments, influencing with integrity entails sharing a logical progression of facts that leads to an assertion. Rather than meeting dissent with ad hominem attacks and strawmen, it involves acknowledging the validity (however small) of the dissenters argument and explaining how they went wrong or saying why you wont.

My call to the world is to thoughtfully respond rather than to blindly react. An observation: The comments box on any blog or on social media are nearly worthless for dialogue of this sort. A dialogue of back-and-forth blog entries, however, might be just the right medium. If your thought is that we don’t have the time, then I could say the same thing about any desire to influence. It takes time to do it well and if we don’t care to do it well we should leave it to others who will.

That's What She Said: A Perfect Example of Habit Formation.

“Is this box big enough to even fit all of that?”

It pretty much begs you to take a swing at it, right? This is a perfect example of a habit loop. The trigger is a statement with phrasing that could be re-contextualized as an innuendo. The habit? That’s what she said!!!

I’m pretty damn sure no one is born saying it. And as of a few years ago, now EVERYONE has said it. Everyone has practiced at looking for the perfect opportunity to drop TWSS and catch people off guard during an office meeting with people you’re not supposed to talk dirty around.

There you are looking at the screen. The text is tiny! Someone says aloud: 

“That’s really small… can you make it any bigger?”

Laughter. Genuine raucous laughter. You couldn’t design a better reward for a habit loop.

Initially, to practice at dropping a TWSS is pretty much have to be doing it all the time. At some point it requires nearly no thought.

A Possible Design Pattern

So we have here a possible lead on a design pattern. It needs some refining but I love the possibilities.  

Given some new behavior you want to make second-nature, try to figure out a reward for it. Intrinsic rewards, i.e. those which are a natural outcome, are superior to extrinsic ones. 

Then go about practicing the new behavior in the desired contexts. It also helps if there is a clear trigger though I can’t seem to identify one for TWSS other than, “someone said something”.

(Photo Credit: Bradley Gordon)

#ABQ: Two Simple Questions

Two simple questions to actively practice your commitment to being a happier person:

What’s good in my life?

What needs to be done?

(#ABQ = Ask Better Questions)

Ayn Rand on Short Story Construction

Ayn Rand has this tendency to lecture about things in her writing. This drives some people crazy but for me, I love that she has fossilized some very clear thinking about what is and what is not.

For instance… Where is the line between a novel and a short story? Before I read this, I would have said something meandering, vague, and fuzzy:

The first requirement of a short story is that it must be built around one single incident. It can be an incident which is complete in itself, or it can be an incident which summarizes and climaxes a long development of events, but it must be a single incident, like a sharp focus. Otherwise it is not the construction of a short story, but of a novel, mo matter what the length. Length is not the standard by which one differentiates a short story from a novel; the method of construction is. One cannot take a broad view of a subject, such as one takes for a novel, and say: “I will make it a short story by telling it briefly.” One must take a subject which can be brought into one focus, one concrete incident, and build the narrative around it.

(From Letter to Gerald Loeb, vice president of E.F. Hutton and Co. dated Jan 15, 1943)

…but Rand has such stark views on things that you know exactly where she would drop a line and, if you’re not too busy taking the lecture personally, you can benefit from her clarity.

She goes on to discuss, in the context the particular story she has just read by Mr. Loeb, which incident would have been the crucial one to present and why. I’ll cherry pick sentences so that we get a more concise reading:

…you must show one scene between your characters in detail, with action and dialogue. that scene must be a crucial one, not just an incidental one chosen at random, but a scene that climaxes the rest and resolves the theme of the story..
What is the theme of your story?…
The scene in which he finds it out, the scene where the woman shows her real character and the man receives a dreadful, tragic disappointment… that scene must be written and presented in detail. Then you’ll have a proper short story form.
…the reader has been reading a long general narrative, getting acquainted with the characters and waiting for the climax when he would see them in action. That unwritten scene is the local climax. If the reader does not see it–nor any other specific scene–he feels cheated. And you cannot choose another scene for a focus, because in a short story it is the crucial scene that must be featured.

So… short stories should focus on the one crucial scene, we should see the characters in action and dialogue, and there should be a climax so the reader isn’t left feeling blue.

Got it! :) Now to get to the writing.

PS - You can buy Rand’s book of letters on Amazon.com.  I have really enjoyed reading a few letters each morning.  It is a very relaxing yet invigorating way to start my days.

Knowing What You Stand For

“

Knowing what you stand against is not the same as knowing what you stand for. They are both important . The former is often a strong initial impetus in your life. Discontent can be powerful activating energy.

Only by having decided what you stand for and what you are pursuing can you reject with a clear heart any diversions from your course, which become more plentiful as you show signs of succeeding.

”

— Francis Luong

Ayn Rand - from Letter to DeWitt Emery dated Sep 10, 1941

“As to my working for P & E–I’d be delighted, if I can really go ahead with the cause. No, I’m not going to get “damned mad” about being offered a salary. I told you that I had to have a salary if I were to give the work my full time, and I won’t be any good unless I give it my full time. The job I have now takes more than eight hours a day–sometimes it’s twelve and more–so I couldn’t do any real work until I quit this. If I were a capitalist, I’d much rather work for the cause as a volunteer–but, unfortunately, I am only a proletarian defender of Capitalism, than which there is no worse thing to be. If I were a defender of Communism, I’d be a Hollywood millionaire-writer by now, with a swimming pool and a private orchestra to play the Internationale. As it is, I have to work for my living. So I’m quite definitely for sale–all of me above the next–to anyone on our side who really intends to work for our side.”

— Ayn Rand - from Letter to DeWitt Emery dated Sep 10, 1941

The Words of Clements Vonnegut to His Would-Be Mourners

Clemens Vonnegut was the great-grandfather of the author, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. They were both German Freethinker Atheists.

In Palm Sunday, in the section of essays on religion Vonnegut the junior shares a copy of the text that was read aloud at his great-grandfather’s funeral, written by Clemens himself some 32 years before.

His words to his mourners were these:

“Friends or Opponents: To all of you who stand here to deliver my body to the earth:

"To you, my next of kin:

"Do not mourn! I have now arrived at the end of the course of life, as you will eventually arrive at yours. I am at rest and nothing will ever disturb my deep slumber.

"I am disturbed by no worries, no grief, no fears, no wishes, no passions, no pains, no reproaches from others. All is infinitely well with me.

"I departed from life with loving, affectionate feelings for all mankind; and I admonish you: Be aware of this truth that the people on this earth could be joyous, if only they would live rationally and if they would contribute mutually to each others’ welfare.

"This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure from life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false.

"We also with Knowledge, Goodness, Sympathy, Mercy, Wisdom, Justice, and Truthfulness. We also strive for and venerate all those attributes from which the fantasy of man has created a God. We also strive for the virtues of Temperance, Industriousness, Friendship, and Peace. We believe in pure ideas based on Truth and Justice.

"Therefore, however, we do not believe, cannot believe, that a Thinking Being existed for millions and millions of years, and eventually and finally out of nothing–through a Word–created this world, or rather this earth with its Firmament, its Sun and Moon and the Stars.

"We cannot believe that this Being formed a human being from clay and Breathed into it an Immortal Soul and then allowed this human being to procreate millions, and then delivered them all into unspeakable misery, wretchedness and pain for all eternity. Nor can we believe that the descendants of one or two human beings will inevitably become sinners; nor do we believe that through the criminal executions of an Innocent One may we be redeemed.”

Have mercy! I love the audacity of the last two paragraphs.

————————————–

Photo Credit: Sue Hasker

tags: #Vonnegut #Atheism

Casualties of the 2008 Deleveraging: One Long Friendship

Around 2009 or so, America had gone to shit. The housing bubble had just bust and people were losing their jobs and unable to pay for homes and unable to get loans to pay off their other loans like they had been doing the last few years. It was a mess!

I was a mess!

I had just read two profound works by Ayn Rand that were in the midst of reshaping my view about the world and about my place in it. Before reading these works, I was more or less a well-meaning liberal who hated everything that George W. Bush stands for. I didn’t much believe in God (I still don’t), and I more or less had a victim mindset.

After reading the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, my perspective shifted drastically. I become a well-meaning libertarian-ish who hated everything that George W. Bush and Barack Obama stands for. I still don’t believe in God but I moved from calling myself agnostic to calling myself an Atheist (though it wouldn’t be until later that I came up with the concept of the Engineer Atheist). I was trying to abandon the victim mindset and take control of my destiny.

Well… a lot of bad shit happens when you’re trying to make big changes in your life. I was struggling with questions on what I was doing and why. I left my wife. And I alienated one of my best friends, whom had become a long-distance relation at this point.

Love Lost… and for what?

I’ll be honest… when I think about what went down it’s so fucking stupid and pointless. Neither of us will care on our deathbeds whether or not the Tea Party is good or bad for this country. Neither of us will care much whether or not people were really racist and resisted everything Barack Obama did because he had a funny name and a dark complexion.

Wouldn’t life be better if we just traded notes on the things that mattered the most and ignored what we would discard in an instant if we knew that we only had a few weeks to live?

I didn’t know then as I do now that Facebook does not facilitate discussion. And we used Facebook as one of our means to keep in touch. There is a reason they only provide a LIKE button. Facebook is the land of CONFIRMATION BIAS.

Around that same time, I lost my friend, Dave Meyer, to our petty squabbles about news that I no longer watch or consider important. But I have been moved to reach out to him and I believe in what I am doing. The letter I am sharing this morning was written by me… and it was brewing within me all weekend and I think it is right and good. I am proud of myself for writing it. Enjoy!

Letter to Dave Meyer by Francis Luong, 2015-03-03

Dear Dave,

I have fallen in love with a new album. On the surface of things, it will seem conventional: Try! by the John Mayer Trio. I think it is from 2005 or so. The album is a live album feature a drummer named Steve Jordan and a Bassist named Pino Palladino. I suspect you are already familiar with the latter.

It’s been a long time since I have listened to a set of songs as an album, and probably even longer since they have moved me to dream of what it would be like to have assembled a tight group for touring and songwriting and recording. But that’s what this album has done for me. And, not so strangely, this has made me think to reach out to you because yours is the first name pops to mind when I think of who I would want to gush to when I am in love with music. Please consider this a compliment.

I miss our friendship. I miss your take on life. I’m pretty sure I was intolerable and judgmental about the time we stopped corresponding. I suspect you would find my tone to be quite different nowadays. If you would care to catch up with an old friend, I want to say to you that I am here. I am ready.

Love

Francis Luong (Franco)

Photo/Image Credit

https://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/5683562879/in/photolist-dqDfmv-9EeKer-bX3Y6s-a2tCRZ-gkDGv5-6skPJV-igtiFL-asaEtu-7Ak5B8-Kzbc9-6rztXa-9xMbd5-9fj4yw-bmKNsZ-4XbfF4-4eHBVL-7AoLrm-eb9Xdd

In This Post: The Terminator Meets Ayn Rand

I’ll Be Back…

I was way too young for it when I watched Terminator for the first time. But man, I do remember it. Arnold Schwartzeneggar was a perfect kind of unstoppable robot of the future with a very strange and severe voice. Over the years of watching his many films, his voice and personality have become familiar… perhaps because of his distinctive manner of speaking. Once you get used to his range of expression, he is hilarious, and subtle, and brilliant.

I had a similar experience with the speaking voice of Ayn Rand, which has a similar distinctive yet familiar quality. There was a period of a year in my early 30s where, having just finished reading Atlas Shrugged, I was listening to the recorded audio of a series of lectures Rand had done for the Ford Hall Forum.

If you have a hard time listening to the sound of her speak, you have my sympathy. The first time I heard her voice I was struck by how severe it was. She has a very distinctly Russian accent and even when she is expressing excitement, cutting disdain, or humor/wit, she is still VERY reserved and quit severe. But just like the Governator, I got used to her voice and the range of her expression, I could get more of a sense of her personality.

Ayn Rand: Excitable Fan-Girl

I am sharing this letter because I think it’s cute. Rand is depicted as a monster usually. I feel about her as I would a dear friend who really felt what she felt when she felt it. The letter below has a LOT of italics and I think there’s a girlish charm to it. Still it manages to come across as a bit… Russian… and fully, Ayn Rand.

Without further ado, I present to you her letter to Ev Suffens.

May 26, 1936 Dear Mr. Suffens,

Since I am an old, faithful admirer of your program, you know how I feel about it. But you are conducting a poll among your listeners and I want to register my vote formally. On the first question you asked over the air: do you want the Midnight Jamboree continued through the summer, I answer: YES!!! Most emphatically yes. Your program has become a household institution with us, like a visit with a friend each evening. If you were to discontinue it, it would leave a void no other program could fill. I don’t exaggerate when I say that I would simply be heartbroken, because the Midnight Jamboreee is the best, the most charming, the most amusing program on the air and the only one to which we listen regularly.

On your second question: do we want the program conducted as it is now for made more formal, I answer: by all means keep it as it is now. Its whole charm is the informality and your peculiar, inimitable sense of humor. The Midnight Jamboree is really Ev Suffens. You do play excellent music, but any other station can play the same records. If you were to turn into a formal, stuffy announcer, I would be bored to death. And I don’t believe that anyone would listen to three solid hours of formality. Artificial, pretentious, fawning pomposity is precisely what is wrong with most radio announcers and what gives the radio it’s slightly silly, inane aspect. Since there is no one on the air quite like you—why even consider giving up your charm and originality to become like hundreds of others?

We love “Oscar,” “Oswald,” “Rasputin,” and your whole family. They have become real characters to us, real friends whom we would miss terribly. My suggestion would be to have more of them, not less. As to the music, my vote is: more classics, particularly light concert classics such as you have been playing lately. Personally, I would say: all classics, but I don’t mind suffering through a jazz number once in a while if it’s necessary and if your audience demands it.

To sum up I say: WE WANT THE MIDNIGHT JAMBOREEE CONTINUED FOREVER AND JUST AS IT IS NOW. And I add a vote of thanks and a salute to the best program on the air and the man who created it.

You Must Leave Your Biases At The Door to Enter.

If you’ve read this much, I have a tiny bit more to say. If you’re already fascinated with Rand then I have no specific call to action for you. But if you’re on the fence about it, consider this:

A very large subset of people who are curious about Rand became aware of her because they were turned off by a grotesque and Picasso-esque caricature of her ideas. (I’d wager that if you took a measure of the total number of words that have been written, there is a greater volume of words written as caricatures than by Ayn Rand herself.) So though these people are curious, they are also pre-positioned to take a position of detractor and if they follow that road to the land of confirmation-bias, they will seek only proof that Rand is a villain.

This may or may not resemble your experience.

Well… for those who are willing to leave their preconceptions at the door, Rand has a lot of paradigm-shifting insights that she has shared with the world. There is lots to explore. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t. If you adopt even one nugget of truth that you see as wisdom, you will be that much stronger than you were yesterday.

But I only suggest checking it out if you are open to challenging your own ideas. If you just want confirmation that what you already believe is valid and correct and that everyone else is wrong, you need merely go onto Facebook and repost outrage-porn stories. Anyone can do this. It’s the easiest thing in the world.

I want to go beyond this. I am considering the question: what can I do that is so valuable to me (and mankind at-large) it will be remembered in 200 years? As I begin this journey, I am faced with this truth: I must be willing to face down and change who and what I am today to get there tomorrow.

Another Article on Net Neutering… But You'll Want to Read This One.

This morning I started looking into Fairfax County ordinances on cable because I had a brilliant idea that examining regulatory text would make the basis for a rollicking, farcical article. I only got a few paragraphs in. ZZZZZzzzzzz… BORING!!! But… Enough to figure out that a Fairfax County cable franchise entails $5k application fee and $500k bonds. Ouch. And that doesn’t include the franchise fees themselves.

The idea was going to be that we don’t have enough competition for internet services because of the pay-to-play rules that local municipalities have put in place, and really that’s a fundamental problem that we should fix to save the internet. God that sounds dry even as I write about it in the meta. I lost interest after working at it for a bit. And instead I wrote this little ditty instead.

I noticed that Net Neutrality (or Net Neutering, as I like to call it) remains a topic that still easily grabs my attention. Why does it? Because I know enough to see the political exploitation going on. Yet again, the masses, to which group I usually belong, are proving to be easily hoodwinked and it upsets me to see it. There is a sick combination of the fact that most people are ignorant of how the internet is composed and, more specifically, how peering is done.

I say ‘ignorance’ here without judgment. I wouldn’t expect most people to know how the internet is composed. A well-run utility is understood by its users through the components of its public interface. Using the car as an analogy: You might understand what goes on under the hood of your car but you don’t need to in order to work the steering wheel, the pedals, and the gear selector.

I’d like for you to consider this question: if most people are ignorant of the details of the technology and composition of the Internet, by what stretch of the imagination are they fit to make decisions on regulation? I can’t fathom it. But that’s what’s so clever about the other main ingredient of the Net Neutering campaign. Whipping the public into a frenzy of fear so that they clamor for increased government power.

This is achieved by mass media messaging designed to induce dystopian fears of an internet where only the fast lanes will get you anywhere you care to be, and the hippie free-love internet will starve to death. The dystopian fear leads the unwary reader to conclude that something must be done to protect the Internet.

Widespread Ignorance + Widespread Fear/Panic = An Exploitable Revolution

And the proposed solution is FCC regulation. Always more regulation… Worst of all is that the people flogging regulation operate on and promote the unquestioned assumption that a government regulatory body actually represents the consumer.

The so-called public interest is an indefinable notion since the only bona-fide common interests of all are defined in the lowest rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Food, shelter… these things are best handled by the free market.

The consumer, as a class of people, is a non-concept. Everyone who earns money is a producer. Everyone who spends money is a consumer. Thus, we are ALL consumers and we are ALL producers.

The classes as defined are meaningless and regulation is, thus, arbitrary… lacking any real rational basis for constraint.

I will be repeating this a lot so you don’t need to read or remember this next line at all: There is no precondition for government corruption that is more powerful than arbitrary power.

More Cowbell

Well, for those who want an antidote against this sort of manipulation, I have a prescription: Don’t panic!

How? We can use the same methods that we use to make sure we buy low and sell high in the financial markets! (No… I’m not saying we need to use dollar-cost-averaging and rebalancing… :)

I would like to quote Jack Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group, on this one: “Don’t do something, stand there!!!”. His advice helps us to overcome a very common cognitive bias toward action. It recognizes that we, as humans, are bad at predicting outcomes. We are bad at guessing where the market will be in 6 months let alone a year.

Well… we are really, really bad at predicting direct and secondary effects of public policy. Don’t panic! Don’t be manipulated! And think your way through it long term.

Here’s my strong conviction for the most effective long term solution to protect the internet: get government out of the way of new competition instead of ceding it more arbitrary power.

How to Train Your Dragon

(aka Clicker Training Your Cat To Let You Trim His/Her Nails)

Dear Heather,

I’m glad to hear that you would like to find a way to deal with the ever-growing claws for this cat that has become a part of your life. I’m sorry, but not surprised, to hear that the cat isn’t easy to handle. I had a similar experience with my domesticated but still very crazy Bengal cat, The Buddy, of whom you have no-doubt seen dozens of photos. If you haven’t, you can find them on the Internet.

The Buddy is the least domesticated cat I have ever known. He has exotic behavior to go with his exotic looks. Though I haven’t been able to get him to stop breaking into all of the cabinets in the house, he and I have developed an understanding about nail trimming. Because he is really food motivated, I was able to do it using clicker training.

I didn’t get a chance to ask you whether your cat is a girl or a boy but in the notes below I will assume he is a boy like The Buddy.

First Fundamentals: Motivation and Feeding Hygiene

Before you start clicker training, you will need a good clicker. I found that the ones on Amazon by Karen Pryor Clicker Training (affiliate link) had a clear sharp sound.

Clicker training begins with associating utter positivity with the sound of the click. This means you need to identify and select something that is a strong positive experience for your cat. The Buddy likes shrimp and ham so I used shrimp for our training, cut into pea sized chunks. The reward doesn’t have to be huge.

It may be the case that your cat seems like he doesn’t like treats. If the cat always has food available to him at any time of day, I would encourage you to consider working on feeding hygiene before trying to train. Revise your cat’s feeding schedule to a couple times a day. Cats that never feel hunger are, in my opinion, less trainable and more prone to health issues associated with weight. Also, depending on how much in the way of treats you are giving your cat, you may need to dial back the amount of food he gets for breakfast or dinner.

If you can’t find a way to motivate with food, you can certainly try to associate your clicks with praise and cuddles or time with his favorite toy (assuming he can’t use it without you).

Hooking Up The Clicker

Having made a choice for what motivator to use with your cat, we can talk about the next step: Associating the clicker with positivity. Here are two guidelines that have served me well.

1 - The Clicker is ONLY for Positive Reinforcement

You can’t use the clicker to get your cat to stop doing something but you can use the clicker to get your cat to start doing something. Definitely don’t try to use any stern corrective action against your cat while you’re in training mode. The goal here is to use the clicker as the overwhelming YES!

2 - Keep Your Sessions Short

Train only for a few minutes at a time and then let it rest. This is habit formation we are dealing with, creating new neural grooves in the cat’s brain-body, and you want to do it consistently and over an extended period of time. This will also serve to keep the motivator as a novel experience rather than one that is common and boring.

Now: Start Slow

With those guidelines out of the way, I present to you the first lesson.

For a week: Once or twice a day, have a 5 minute long training session that consists only of clicking and then giving the cat an awesome treat and some praise: click, treat, praise, rest, repeat.

What we are doing here is priming the cat to understand that the click means a treat.

Next: Shaping Toward Behaviors

Now that your clicker is hooked up, you can separate the click from the treat. The Click now serves the job of marking the EXACT point in time when your cat was doing the behavior that you are rewarding and acts as a promise that your cat will be rewarded. This time-independence is the main benefit of training with a clicker vs. just giving a treat which is imprecise on why exactly the cat is being rewarded.

For any particular behavior you want to have your cat do (or tolerate, in the case of nail trimming), you will have to experiment and design a stair-stepped path toward the behavior demanding more crude behavior during the initial phase and more complex behavior in the latter stages.

Getting Your Cat To Accept Nail Trimming

Here is a pattern that I used for nail trimming. Each of these steps was something I would repeat, without moving to the next step for a few days.

The goal with clicker training is to get him to tolerate my handling him without fussing. For each step, I would do the action and click/treat/repeat.

1. Pull the cat into my office chair into my lap with his belly and legs upward.
2. (Step 1) + briefly handling a paw and exposing his claws
3. (Steps 1-2) + grabbing the nail trimmers
4. (Steps 1-3) + put the nail trimmers up to one of his claws without cutting
5. (Steps 1-3) + cut a single nail
6. (Steps 1-3) + cut two nails.

Remember to keep the sessions short. 5-10 minutes at most.

I had to learn to be patient and adaptable: If The Buddy got too feisty (aka he was biting me), I would stop and try again some other time.

Also, I ended up having to keep the shrimp in the refrigerator because he was utterly unfocused if I had his cup of shrimp someplace he could see and smell it.

Getting Your Cat to Come When Called

This was a pattern I used to get my cat to come when called. Handy when I want to make sure he’s not trapped someplace before I close a door.

1. Choose a Cue!: I chose: knocking sharply twice on wood (knock! knock!)
2. Cue! and click/treat if he looks your way
3. … if he starts in your direction
4. … if he walks part of the way to you
5. … if he walks all the way to you
6. … if he runs in your direction
7. … if he runs all the way to you

Again, each stage here is something I stick with for a few days. The progression adds up to the desired behavior.

Your Patience and Imagination Are Your Limit

The true believers of clicker training say that you can shape just about any behavior. I stopped with behaviors that make having him in my life managable rather than going full on into complex tricks. That was the extent of my interest.

If you have read to this point, congratulations. This article is over 1000 words long! I hope you will consider just trying to work with clipping your cat’s nails. It may seem impossible now, but think of how much more of an achievement it is to slay (or train) dragons than it is to take another way out with all the drawbacks it may come with.

Weekend Fun: Yosemite on OSX

This weekend day, I am working to try to add an OSX VM to my OSX work system. It’s complicated.

Letter from Ayn Rand to Cecil B. DeMille - July 3, 1934

This letter to me is wonderful. I have started reading Rand’s Letters each morning and they are eloquent in style and are artifacts of an era when it was not possible to deliver words instantaneously to your intended recipient. The letters are crafted with great care given to context and intent that is rare to see in this, our age, of sensationalizing and professional rumor-mongering.

I love this letter because it is a heartfelt fusion of pride and gratitude. And Ayn Rand permitted herself the sort of pride that arises from hard-earned achievements. Rand only brushes with humility in the parts where gives credit to DeMille for his wise instruction and where she asks him to excuse her presumption that he might be interested in her gratitude or success. The former comes across as gratitude, the latter self-awareness.

I copy it here so that you may read it and so that I may benefit from typing it out:

Dear Mr. DeMille,
This letter is primarily to express my gratitude to you—at the distance of so many years. I have always wanted to tell you how much I appreciated your kindness and interest in me at a time when—if you remember—I was a very inexperienced, very bewildered and frightened little immigrant from Russia. I have waited all these years to show you that I had justified your interest in me, that I had something which you were kind and farsighted enough to see so far in advance.
If I have achieved any kind of success, I owe it to your instructions which I have remembered and tried to follow all these years. I have always hoped that I would not drop out of sight entirely, that the day would come when I would be successful enough to show you that you had not wasted the attention you had given me at my start in Hollywood. I cannot say that I have accomplished a great deal yet, but at least I am a writer and I feel that I can now thank you from the bottom of my heart, without asking you for help or for a job, just thank you and tell you that you have always been the person for whose sake I have wanted most to succeed, if you will excuse my presumption in this. 
I am taking the liberty of sending you a synopsis of my story Red Pawn, which I had sold to Universal some time ago and which Paramount has just bought from them as a probable vehicle for Marlene Deitrich. I am now working here on the screenplay. I would appreciate it very much if you would read this synopsis—not because I want to try and sell it to you, since it is already sold, but because I am very anxious to show you what I have accomplished, particularly since it is accomplished in accordance with your ideas as to story construction and situations. I am a little proud of this story and I feel that it is, in a way, the best manner I know of to thank you for your help to me many years ago. 
If you will be kind enough to read it, I will be very grateful if you would grant me a little time to see you afterwards.

I'm Not Slacking Off... My Code is Compiling.

I’m a guy that shuttles between his interests.  I always have been.  This is how I end up with a personal ‘business’ card that says that I dabble in photography, dance, music, philosophy and photography.

This blog has been silent for a number of days because I’ve been coding at nearly all hours of the day.  While focused on code, I tend to write less.  And that’s fine.  But you guys miss me though, right?  

So here I am to say that I am alive.  I haven’t forgotten you.  And that if you ever have to code in Ruby, using a good debugger goes a long way.  I’ve been using the one built into the RubyMine IDE by Jetbrains.  I have been using Rubymine since August when I started at Salesforce.com.  I can’t recommend this software enough. It makes the code easier to navigate and debugging much simpler.

Buy their software.  It’s good stuff.

–

The headline of this blog comes from xkcd 303:

…not that Ruby needs compiling but unit tests do need to be run and when you get a lot of them that takes a few minutes.  The library I am working on takes about 5 minutes to run tests that execute about ~5000 assertions.  

Lean, Agile, & the Evolution of Software Development, with Elliot Susel from The Innovation Engine Podcast →

Elliot Susel of AOL joins The Innovation Engine podcast to talk about agile, the Lean Startup movement, and the evolution of software development. Among the topics we discuss this week are the Three Ring Theory of modern-day product development, the concept of validated learning and why it’s so important to startups and, increasingly, large organizations, and why information radiators can be a powerful way to get a team to coalesce around shared goals. Elliot Susel is the Head of Product for Paid Services at AOL. In this role, he leads a team that performs Lean Startup-style concept validation and delivers products using agile methodologies. He previously spent 2-plus years at Curb, formerly known as Taxi Magic, where he was a Senior Project Manager and VP of Technology.

Ruby constructs: class, module and mixin - Matt Aimonetti →

An interesting resource on object oriented design. The author, Aimonetti, opines that people abuse classes, using them when there are no instances defined. #likebutton

He also describes the use case for Module mixins as perfect for shared behaviors between a number of classes. This is exactly along the lines of what I was thinking to create an Expect mixin for connection accessor classes for Telnet, SSH, and Serial.

Much as I prefer structured interaction with Network devices, it seems like we are just not there yet for the devices I have to deal with. This leaves CLI interaction as a necessary method to support.

The Engineer Atheist

There is a joke I have about engineers: The pessimist views the glass as half empty. The optimist views the glass as half full. And the Engineer views the glass as containing half the volume in liquid of it’s total capacity.

I am neither an agnostic atheist or a gnostic atheist as Pablo Stanley’s cartoon breaks it down.

I am the Engineer Atheist: I do not have sufficient evidence to believe in God, nor do I behave in any way as if God exists. And I believe that no one may claim existence of anything without providing concrete evidence ruling out all other possibilities. Though they can certainly speculate and hypothesize all they want. And they can go on their hunches all they want.

Agnosticism is, in my opinion, an ineffective paradigm for viewing theism. Rather than putting the onus of proof on the people claiming existence, it puts the onus on proof on those denying existence. But I really just don’t need to furnish proof if I opine that I THINK UNDERPANTS GNOMES DON’T EXIST AND ARE NOT, IN FACT, STEALING MY UNDERWEAR AT NIGHT.

Here’s a better paradigm: A person either behaves as if they believe in God or not. And a person behaves according to their stated morals or not. Really, I’m more interested in the second of these two axes, though the first often informs the second as we have been debating about Islam.

Claims are only one aspect of a person’s behavior. And though they sometimes get that person attention because they are obnoxious or outrageous, it’s often a lot of hot air. You need to look at a persons actions to understand what they truly believe about the world and the nature of existence. Though I argue that you really don’t even need to know that if they’re assholes or they kill people.

Look… here’s why we care whether or not someone believes in God or doesn’t. Beliefs make us powerful or poisonous. They shape everything about who we are and what we can and cannot permit ourselves to do. And when we see someone acting in a completely incomprehensible way, we want to fix that problem at what we perceive to be the roots.

I’ll take up the challenges of fighting bad ideas some other time. It’s a big topic.

Photo Credit: John T. Spencer

Focus Five: The Custom Morning Power Questions

So I’ve got an interesting thing going on in my life where I’m diving into the self improvement stuff like crazy trying to engineer a breakthrough for myself. The toolkit for this right now includes the Tim Ferris podcast. Ferris did a 2-part interview with Tony Robbins prior to the release of his new book, Money: Master the Game. During this interview, Ferris mentions a time in the past when he had been listening to one of Robbin’s audio programs, personal power, and I thought to myself that it would be nice to acquire a copy.

Well… it turned out that other people had the same idea because CD versions of Personal Power II starting going up in price about the time that I started shopping. So… armed with the unique asset of the tape deck in my 2005 Honda CR-V, I decided to purchase the audio cassette edition of this program for about $5 plus shipping. Massive win!

The program is meant to be a daily routine with a tape for each day of the week and a task at the end of each tape. The most recent task I’ve set my attention on involves custom crafting 5 morning questions that are designed by me, for me, to put myself in peak state. I’ve done a few cuts at this over the last few days and I’m likely to continue revising this list until it feels right.

Here are my 5 custom questions:

• What are a couple of things in your life that make you feel wealthy/abundant?
• What are a couple things you appreciate about friends, family, and people around you?
• From the last week, what are a couple ways you have grown, learned, disrupted patterns that were holding you back, or started new ones?
• What are a couple of things am focused on consistently applying or disrupting?
• What are a couple of things that you’ve noticed in the last week that make you think the world is becoming a better place?

The first two questions are designed to get me into a state where I feel the fullness of all I have to give to the people around me, who deserve everything because they’re awesome people too. The next two questions are meant to put me in a state where I fully feel purposeful and capable in regards to my mastery over myself and my mind. The last question is a bit of a challenge since the way the world is changing can feel daunting at times.

These are my questions. What are your questions? What would you ask yourself each morning to put yourself into a state of appreciation, focus, capability, and limitless possibility? I’d love to hear from you about it. @FrancisLuong

“There is always a way.”