No, not your husband / wife… Nope, not mom. Not your brother or sister.  Of course, not your cat.  I’m talking about that stupid a-hole in your head that sees the other side to everything you do.  I recently went through a period about a week-long where everything was annoying, and that voice was loud.  I got upset a lot, was easily offended by others, spent a lot of time counting to 10, recognizing that the outside world had not changed that much, but something was going on in my head. Continue reading →

Ever feel like you want to do something new, but a little voice in your head says “oh… but you can’t”. Maybe you think about it again, and another voice asks “What if you don’t finish?”.  And then another voice pops up and says “they’ll think your dumb for not being good at that already…”

Maybe you want to build a website. Or learn to code. Or learn to dance. Or start a company. Or become a great cook. Whatever.

So instead you stop thinking about that new thing you could be doing because it feels bad. It’s like a tease, it excites you and you become vulnerable to the potential, and then those voices come in and cut you down, leaving you feeling silly and impotent. And the world is worse off for it.  And you are worse off for it.  Continue reading →

Heading into work today I was thinking about how we are the sum of the experiences we’ve had.  Our brains have been trained to recognize patterns in people and events and we use these patterns to “expect” what will happen next. Sometimes things don’t go the way we expected them and this makes us distraught, stressed, or upset.  And then the image of a PID controller popped into my head, as I’m sure it would have in yours. Continue reading →

I’ve been using computers since 1989. More than two thirds of my life has required interacting with a keyboard, writing papers, browsing newsgroups, writing software, building excel spreadsheets, generating power point presentations… I’ve done a little back of the envelope about how many keys I’ve pressed and it’s in the hundreds of millions. And I realize, I am hardly unique in this.

But I never learned how to type. I just learned to get by. Continue reading →