Niche Cards

I tend to follow my hunches. Reading a job post by Doug Boutwell sparked a little voice inside me to say, “Write this guy.” So I dashed off an email and this morning we talked on the phone.

Turns out, Doug’s looking for software engineers to help take his collection of totally rad Photoshop actions to the next level. Doug asked me what kinds of programming I liked to do, and I mentioned that I like implementing algorithms.

Now I’d just got done with thirty minutes of wacky brain training yoga before my call with Doug. So when I got off the phone, bits and pieces started to click.

Childhood memories

If you really want to figure out what you should do in life, go back and look at what you did as a kid. Dig through your memories. What you’re looking for is the thing that sustained you. You’re eight years old, and it’s a sunny summer afternoon. What are you doing?

I’m building something out of LEGOs.

Those little colored bricks where a window to another world. I had pirates that raided coastal forts, space lanes filled with intergalactic shipping freighters, and garbage trucks that plucked bean bags off my floor. But it wasn’t the stories that I was drawn to. In fact, as soon as I found a story for one of my creations, I’d pull it apart and build something new.

What I loved was putting the pieces together.

Delight was found in collecting disparate parts into a working model, and watching something from my imagination become real. Even today, that’s the kind of work that sustains me.

Creating software

Before you can go off and create something, you have to know what all the pieces are. The first thing you do with a LEGO kit is open up all the little baggies and follow the included instructions to create a model. The software equivalent is implementing algorithms from technical papers. It’s something I do for fun, because that’s how I learn how the different parts fit together.

The real joy in a LEGO kit comes after you’ve but the included model. Because then you know what all the pieces are and how they work together. Then you can let your imagination run wild and create something new. In the software world, that manifests as the creation of something like digital Dance of Shiva. Math and graphics and design all blend together to form something the world’s never seen before.

As a software engineer, I love orchestrating the creation of digital things. The best part is when I get to be part of a team, working with other people to transform the basic building blocks of sounds and graphics and algorithms into something new.

There is nothing better than a cheese covered stuffed mushroom. Especially if it’s a large cheese covered stuffed mushroom. Okay, maybe a cream filled bacon maple bar is better, but you can always cover your stuffed mushrooms with bacon.

Ingredients

• 4 portobello mushrooms
• 1 red bell pepper
• 1 small yellow onion
• mozzarella cheese
• 4 sprigs of rosemary

Directions

Cut the stems out of the mushrooms and place them on a cookie sheet. Slice the pepper and onion into strips and fill the mushrooms with them. Grate cheese over the mushrooms until they’re covered, then garnish with rosemary.

Preheat an over to 400°F. Bake the mushrooms for 13 minutes. You want the cheese to melt and the edges to curl but not brown.

Notes

This recipe makes four servings, one mushroom per person.

I tend to practice Shiva Nata fast and to music, often accompanied by other distractions, like the cat wanting to rub against my feet. Inevitably, this leads to things breaking down. I’ll be going along, one position to the next, and suddenly I’ll stop. My mind knows what the next part of the sequence is, but my body doesn’t know how to get there.

The silence that ensues is awkward, a horrible pause in a flowing dance. I feel to need to start over, to try again. But if I wait long enough, becoming comfortable with this extended gap between motions, the dance will resume itself.

Stillness is the genesis of motion.

I’ve had the delightful experience over the past few weeks of having lengthy conversations shortly after practicing Shiva Nata. The difference in the quality of these conversations is amazing. Before, I would find gaps in conversation uncomfortable. “What are they thinking? Why don’t they answer?” my mind would scream. Now, when I have to wait while someone searches for an answer, I stay engaged instead of day dreaming. When I pause before speaking, I no longer find the halt in discourse awkward. Instead, I see the silence as a necessary prelude to the spoken sound.

As time passes, this awareness fades. The longer I go between Shiva Nata and a conversation, the more likely I am to fall back into familiar patterns. But as I practice more, I find myself pausing more, purposefully creating spaces for words to fill.

This is a quick shrimp salad recipe that’s light on ingredients and heavy on flavor.

Ingredients

• 24 shrimp, minus their shells, veins, and tails
• 1 teaspoon curry powder
• 1 tablespoon lime juice
• 0.33 cups mayonnaise
• 1 chopped pear
• 0.25 cups chopped green onion
• 0.5 cups chopped carrots
• 0.5 cups chopped yellow pepper
• assorted salad greens

Directions

Mix the curry powder, lime juice, and mayonnaise. Toss with the shrimp, onion, and pepper. Sprinkle the pear on top of the salad greens, then spoon the shrimp mixture on top.

Notes

It makes 2 servings.

I’ve been doing self help stuff for 15 years, ever since my parents divorced and I figured it was all my fault. I spent that time feeling guilty, wishing that I could change, that I could be a better son, a different kid. I passed the time with books, either escaping into science fiction where feelings disolved with pills, or sucking down the teachings of Deepak Chopra, Og Mandino, Dale Carnegie, and anyone else who promised change.

It didn’t happen. My parents did not get back together. My life did not get magically better. Still I kept looking, searching, seeking. So much time passed, that my pain became a memory, and I forgot what I was looking for in the first place. But the need for change never left.

Then I danced Shiva Nata, bawled my eyes out, and felt something shift.

I asked Havi why this time was different. Her words were the same ones I’d heard from other people, her techniques the same kinds of things I’d done a thousand times before. Yet when I looked in the mirror I saw a person I liked, someone whom I didn’t feel needed to be different. What made her stuff special? What made it work?

It was the dancing.

All universal truths sound stupid because they’re not supposed to be heard with your ears. Dancing Shiva Nata exhausts the brain, so you bypass it, and connect directly to the only truth that matters, felt experience. Then things can shift and change because you’re dealing with what’s real for you, instead of trying to filter your reality through someone else’s words.

Way back in October of last year, I had an idea for a set of playing cards based on Dance of Shiva. So I started sketching little shivanauts in Inkscape.

It became apparent after I got through two or three, that I lacked the artistic skills necessary to bring my vision to life. So I posted to one of Havi’s Very Personal Ads, asking for a graphic artist who “got” Dance of Shiva. And Amy Crook posted on the same day saying that she was a graphic artist who needed a client.

Four months later, this is the result.

That’s a box of sixty-four Dance of Shiva cards straight from the printer. Each card shows one of the possible arm positions in Dance of Shiva.

If you’ve played around with my Dance of Shiva widget you’re already seen Amy’s artwork of the shivanaut. If you haven’t, here’s an example of the front and back from the 84 card.

Thus far, I’ve played Transquarters Memory and Spirals Solitaire with them, as well as a rummy variant. Solitaire is a nice challenge, because the cards don’t stack in numeric order, they stack according to the patterns of Dance of Shiva. Which makes my brain delightfully confused and results in lots of giggling.

If you want your own set, I have some for sale.

Back in January, I was hanging out with Kelly at Havi’s Destuckification Retreat, and she mentioned that it would be cool to have a digital Dance of Shiva that popped up on your computer and reminded you to take dance breaks. One month later, I haven’t got the reminder part working, but I did create digital dancing with Lord Shiva.

You can practice horizontals, verticals, transquarters, or spirals, all Level 1. The speed is adjustable based on how long you want to dance, and you have the option to hear the numbers too. Amy Crook did the shivanaut illustrations, and I did the card backgrounds with Acorn.

Download the digital Dance of Shiva

Installation

It’s a widget for Apple’s Dashboard, and Mac OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) or later is required to run it. Download the widget by clicking the button above, then unzip it, and double click the icon to install.

Usage

Clicking the shivanaut graphic on the front of the widget will start the dancing. Clicking again will pause it. There’s an “i” button in the lower right corner that flips the widget over.

You can choose from four different types of arm movement: horizontals, verticals, transquarters, and spirals. You can also set how long you want to dance for, and turn on spoken numbers. But if you set him up to dance really fast, the speech processing can’t keep up and you won’t hear any numbers.

“Taste this.”

“What is it?”

“A pecan.”

“It’s delicious! What did you do to it?”

“Cooked it for about three minutes in hot oil.”

“You mean you fried it?”

The best part of making pecan beef is definitely the fried pecans. They’re crunchy, oily, an oh so delicious.

Ingredients

• 1 pound top round steak
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 0.5 cups boiling water
• 1 tablespoon corn starch
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 0.5 cups chopped raw pecans
• 0.5 cups chopped onion
• 2 cloves minced garlic
• 4 cups chopped bok choy
• 0.5 cups sliced bamboo shoots

Directions

Slice the steak into thin strips. Blend the soy sauce and water then set aside. Preheat a cast iron skillet then add the vegetable oil. Stir-fry the pecans for 3 minutes. Remove the pecans. Add the onion and garlic and stir-fry 1 minute. Add the bok choy and stir-fry 1 minute more. Remove the vegetables. Stir-fry the steak until it’s cooked all the way through. Don’t cook it too long or it’ll get tough. Stir the soy sauce mixture into the beef. Cook until it thickens and bubbles. Mix the bamboo shoots in with the vegetables. Add the vegetables to the beef, then cover and cook for 1 more minute.

Notes

This is lovely served over a bed of rice. If you want less of a mustard flavor, you can substitute spinach for the bok choy and been sprouts for the bamboo. It makes about 4 servings.

For a long time, researchers thought the maximum number of objects a person could visually track was 4. But new research by George Alvarez and Steven Franconeri seems to indicate that the number of tracking mechanisms available is more of a fluid resource than a fixed one. The slower objects are moving, the easier it is to track more of them, up to 8 or more in some cases. The faster objects are moving, the harder they are to track, so the number that can be followed rapidly approaches 1. The resources the brain can use to keep track of things are flexible, but they’re a limited shared resource. When they’re all used up, the brain stops being able to track things.

If you hang out in the R&D section of a engineering company for long, you’ll notice the engineers keep notebooks. In addition to providing a historical record for what you’ve been working on, writing stuff down makes room in your brain for new ideas to surface. As Dean Allen puts it in Getting Things Done, “Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an ‘open loop’ pulling on your attention.” That includes the thoughts and ideas that are currently wondering around in your brain.

Putting pen to paper on a regular basis also gives you the ability to look back at the ideas you previously thought about. This can give you insights into your likes and dislikes, relationships, problems your trying to solve, what the next step for your business is, or whatever else it is you happen to write about. Of course, if you’re not in the habit of core dumping your brain, it can be hard to start. Here’s a few tips to get you started.

Find a notebook and pen you like.

I pretty much hated every journal I ever wrote in, simply because the ink always bled through the paper. I’ve been in love with Pilot Precise V5 pens since the 5th grade, and refuse to write with anything else. Finding a paper that could handle their crazy rapid ink output was hard. Then I found Eccolo journals. Thick, creamy, writing bliss, and the ink never smudges. Good tools don’t necessarily make you a better craftsman, but they definitely make the process more enjoyable.

Write about the same mundane thing every day.

If you’re new to the habit of writing, pick an aspect of your life for observation and simply jot a sentence or two about it every day. Maybe it’s what you ate for breakfast, or how long the walk to work took, or what outfit you wore. The point is to simply get in the habit of regularly examining your life. Make sure you date your observations. After a few weeks you’ll be able to go back and see patterns in your behavior. Maybe you always eat waffles for breakfast on Sunday, or you always wear sweaters on the weekends. Subconscious programming dictates even the most benign of our activities. Once you see a pattern, you can start asking yourself why it might be there.

Keep it secret. Keep it safe.

A friend and I learned Gregg Shorthand in grade school, ostensibly for passing notes without getting caught. That fear of having someone else read what you’ve written, and subsequently judge you for it, can be a huge deterrent to writing stuff down. One of the best solutions is to learn shorthand. In addition to letting you write a lot faster, it’ll pretty much ensure you’ll be the only one who can read your writings.

This weekend is Purim, so I made hamentaschen. I’m not Jewish, but I do celebrate Seder, and think hamentaschen have replaced springerles as my new favorite cookie. Mostly because you don’t have to wait a month before eating them. This is a reprint of Havi’s recipe, with notes about things I’d do differently next time.

Ingredients

• 0.5 cups of butter (softened)
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons orange juice (pulp free)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups white flower
• 2 teaspoons baking powder (not baking soda)
• 2 cups dehydrated figs
• 1 cup raisins
• 3 cups of water
• cinnamon

Directions

Cream the butter and sugar, then add the egg, orange juice, and vanilla. Combine the baking powder and flour in a separate bowl. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. Split the dough into a couple of balls, and stick it in the refrigerator for a few hours.

Put the figs and raisins into a pot. Add the water. It should just cover them. Bring the whole thing to a boil, then turn it down to low and let it simmer for two hours. Add cinnamon to taste and let it simmer a bit longer until it gets all gloppy. Remove it from the heat and let it cool.

Spread out a sheet of wax paper, sprinkle flour on it, and roll the dough out. You want it about 0.125 inches thin. Cut the dough into circles with a coffee cup. Place a tablespoon of fig filling in the center of each circle. Fold the edges of the dough over the filling so the cookie makes a triangle. Tuck the corners under each other like an Escher staircase.

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a cookie sheet and put the hamentaschen on it. You can get them pretty close, since they don’t spread out much. Bake them for 10 minutes, or until the edges and bottoms are browned.

Notes

This recipe makes about 32 cookies. If you don’t use pulp free orange juice you’ll wonder why you ended up with bits of dental floss in your dough. If you accidentally use wheat flour instead of white, you’ll need to add 2 tablespoons of gluten and 3 tablespoons of hot water to your dough in order to make it elastic enough to roll without crumbling apart.