Recovering from yesterday...

Today was a pretty hard day for me, mentally, because yesterday was going to be a hard act to follow, from the perspective of work productivity.

On the other hand, yesterday was physically a hard day, because I put in a whole lot of hours to, um, produce that productivity.

Which is ironic, because as of right now, I am little closer to where I need to be next Wednesday, unless I light a fire under my butt, except that there's one there already.

Does any of that make sense?

* * *In other news, I was a bit dismayed to hear the President put forth the ridiculous proposition—among others—that

Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Whoever wrote that for the President is either ill-informed or intended to mislead.

What we know today as the Internet started out as a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and its purpose was to engage computer scientists in building a network that would be so robust in its architecture, that it could survive a Soviet first nuclear strike and retain sufficient connectivity to enable the United States to retaliate in kind. Basically, "government research" created the Internet to defend the United States.

I remember when the only high-level domains on DARPAnet were .mil, .edu, and .com (for defense contractors). Access to the net was strictly controlled (because, after all, it was a military project), but eventually, a number of efforts undertaken internally at universities (e.g., gofer) and not officially sanctioned by the DoD lived to see the light of day over the network and momentum began to grow to put the network to other uses, eventually snowballing into what we today know as the Internet.

So while the original idea may have been the result of a government RFP, the result—today's largely freewheeling, free-as-in-speech Internet—is certainly not the result of government planning of any sort (as witness the numerous, repeated, and often successful efforts by governments around the world to control their citizens' use of the Internet). Companies started to make money off the Internet because it was there, not in response to some kind of master government plan.

Had there been such a plan, it's pretty plain that the result would have resembled the Postal Service more than the Web.

Cheers...

Remembering Stephen Covey...

Stephen Covey and Hyrum Smith pretty much "switched on the light bulb" for me as far as time management was concerned. Between the former's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the latter's Ten Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management, I find myself in a better place than I would otherwise have been had I not read their books.

Back when I lived the life of a corporate employee, I could not help but notice that all the fine words about "living a balanced life" sort of withered and dropped away as time passed. The bottom line was, if you didn't end up working 80-hour weeks, you weren't working enough.

I reached a turning point shortly after being laid off at Borland, while interviewing at Microsoft (believe it or not, I had a voicemail inquiry from Redmond upon returning to my office after having been told the news). The Microsoft interview was one of those deals where, after the preliminaries, you are interviewed by about a dozen people for about 20-30 minutes each. What made my antenna quiver was the way each interviewer reminded me—using pretty much the same wording every time—that Microsoft was not a life-sucking vampire but expected employees to live a life balanced between work and family. I took that re-echoing sentiment as a warning, and moved to Pagosa instead.

Years later, I passed a FranklinCovey store while out shopping on a Sunday. I was already a customer, and wanted to buy something, I forget what. But the store was closed, and a sign visible to passers-by said this was so that employees had an opportunity to "sharpen the saw," presumably in any way they saw fit. While I was disappointed the store was closed, my respect for the company went up.

Stephen Covey helped me improve my life. For that, I am grateful.