Tag Archives: TIC

Today I choose to embrace the trivial (TIC00066f)

The PolyBlog
October 1 2020

In the beginning there was TP

I confess, my title went for a small play on words. I also confess that I love trivia games. Ever since I was about 13 years old, and we got the original Trivial Pursuit, I have played trivia games out the wazoo. I don’t care if it is done competitively or cooperatively or even solely, I like the Q&A formats.

I liked watching Jeopardy, particularly as it has lots of questions in a row, but it is almost too fast at times. In a few cases, I’d like to think about the answer for a couple of seconds to talk myself out of some stupid random guess. Alternatively, a lot of online trivia and even the pub offerings by Buzz are the opposite problem — too much delay in between rounds and questions.

Flash forward to the late 1990s

A little over 20 years ago, I was doing a lot of stuff by email list. Movie reviews, humour, book reviews even. But I was also running a weekly trivia game. I ran it on and off for about 4 years in total, spread over 5 years, and it varied in format a bit. Sometimes it was 10 questions, all week to answer. Other times I tried 5 questions a day, different categories. And the format that worked the best for me was three questions a day. People were encouraged NOT to Google answers. Or Babelfish / Alta Vista answers since Google didn’t exist. But I was averaging about 60 players a week, most of whom I had never met.

From time to time, I would get overwhelmed with life and think, “Why am I doing this?” It was fun, but it was taking too much time. Even with a lot of workflow automation, I still had to mark scores relatively manually. And one day I got a thank you note from one of my players that I had never met.

She and her husband had low vision. And so they loved getting the trivia questions by email rather than off a website. They could use their assisted reading devices to print out the emails on a braille printer, and then they would sit down for breakfast. They would discuss the questions, estimate what they thought the answers were together, and then, after breakfast was over, they would try to confirm or refute their guesses. Using encyclopedias that were printed in Braille. She said that sometimes it would take them half a day. Going from topic to topic, getting distracted by other interesting info that would lead them somewhere else in their search. They didn’t care if they got the right answer, they just cared that they could do it together and it was FUN trying to figure it out.

I saved that email for a long time so that any time I felt like it was taking too much time to run the game (20-30 minutes some days, maybe 2 hours on weekends to wrap up the scores), I could have a reality check that here were people spending 3+ hours per day just PLAYING by game, searching and learning and having a grand old time. It was like they had a joint puzzle to solve, just like you see people working on crossword or jigsaw puzzles together.

Am I bringing back PolyWogg Trivia? Or it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Super Quiz(let)?

Eventually, life intervened. I have always wanted to get my trivia game going again on my website and have people come on the site, play questions, get scores, etc. Of course, on a website, you need to alter the format probably to multiple choice, otherwise I’m back to the same issue of having to mark stuff manually. Several times in the last 15 years, I’ve played with formats to try to get it working on my site, but never quite found my solution. Maybe it’s an app instead of a website, I’m not sure. My favorite part of the game was when I introduced a feature I called Quizlet. Five clues to name a person, place or thing, with clue one on Monday, clue two on Tuesday, etc. Each day, the value of the Quizlet dropped. It was VERY hard for anyone to Google those answers, you either had to be inspired somehow or you’d likely NEVER guess it in the first couple of days. Usually Wednesday was the tipping point. It was great and I enjoyed it WAY more than the regular trivia game. Some players HATED it because they couldn’t get perfect every week.

And with all the work I’ve done on my site in recent months, you might think this was leading to some big announcement that PolyWogg Trivia Is Back, Baby! But it’s not. I’m really just talking about the role Trivia has played in my life for a long time.

I’m still the 13-year-old kid sitting at the trailer out at the lake, reading card after card by myself because nobody wanted to play anywhere near as often as I did. Later, when we were a bit older, we bought Super Quiz. Kind of pitched at times as “trivia for regular people, not Einsteins”. The benefit of Super Quiz was that there was no board, so you got points for each right answer (not wedges just on specific spots on the board) AND you had a choice of level of question — level 1 was supposed to be undergraduate level; level 2 was supposed to be graduate level; level 3 was supposed to be Ph.D. And the harder the question, the more points you could get. You had to get at least 3 points in each of 6 categories and 35 overall to win, with no more than 10 in any one category. But there also came SQ II and SQ III, and we had all of them in one box. So when we played as a family, we could choose 6 categories out of 18 possible ones, and we didn’t have to play the same ones. For example, there was one we called “Movies – Green” because it was in a green box, and had movies from the 80s and onward, so it was good for me. “Movies – Pink” were about older movies, often pre-1970 and often 1940s and 50s, and so was good for my Mom and Dad.

We relied on the honour system that we wouldn’t choose 6 easy categories. Usually we figured that 2 had to be harder for you. My wife would have loved the format as she is good in Geography, and we had a Geography Category (from Super Quiz I), Worldwide (from Super Quiz II), and Travel and Leisure (from Super Quiz III).

One other difference from Trivial Pursuit was that some categories had built-in clues…so if you took Famous People (SQ1) or Celebrities (SQII), it would give you the first letter of the last name of the answer. So maybe you would try for a higher-level question.

We also implemented a rule we called “drop-down” to encourage ourselves to go above only Level 1 questions. If you choose any of the three levels and got it right, you got the points and could go again. However, for drop-down, if you chose a level three question, and got it WRONG, you could try for level two. If you got IT right, you would get your two points but you couldn’t go again. Sometimes we played that you could drop down again to Level 1, but sometimes we thought that was too many chances and only did one drop down level. Usually we would divvy up the various boxes amongst all the players so we all had 3-4 categories to read. If we had one of the categories we wanted to answer at some point, we would just swap boxes with someone when we got to that category.

Did I already confess that I loved trivia?

Researching trivia options for work

And so, as part of our workplace charitable campaign, it seems only natural that I am organizing a trivia game for our branch. I had only done one virtual game recently, so I went looking for others online. Andrea knows of one that a friend runs, and I’ll hopefully be able to check that out one night. In the meantime, a friend invited me to join one run by a guy in the U.S. who used to run bar trivia in a pub and now offers it online with weekly games.

I played tonight on my friend’s team, and it was a lot of fun. We were considering having the guy run a game for us, but alas, the cost is too high and we’ll have to do it ourselves, plus I’ll need the Qs to be bilingual. We’ll work on the format over the next week or so and beta test some options, but I’ll try to keep it simple.

Yet even with tonight, I’m already seeing some of the challenges. The game tonight was six rounds, and each round was about 10 questions with 8 minutes to respond to them all. The guy uses a Google doc to share the Qs and track / score the results, and while it isn’t “pretty”, it functions just fine. For me, the real challenge was the eight-minute limit. It practically invites you to Google answers. Which is not really trivia, more like puzzle-solving. Which is fun too. But it often is what turns me off in online games. Too much time between questions and/or rounds.

I also noticed that even between Canada and US, and all of it in English, there were a few cultural centricities that will only be amplified when it comes to all players being Canadian but the game needing to be bilingual. Certainly there are pop-culture questions that would work just fine for the anglophones that would leave the francophones scratching their heads, and some easy ones for francophones that anglophones would have no chance at answering without Alexa or Siri on their team.

Jacob and I played on the team for the first hour or so and then he went off to bed, and I continued for another hour. Plus lots of opportunities to just chat between rounds. Almost too much in a normal world, but in a COVID world? A great way to spend the night. Definitely outside my limited bubble of late.

Today I choose to embrace the trivial, and play virtual trivia with a friend.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to work the plan (TIC00065f)

The PolyBlog
September 30 2020

There’s a classic cliché or slogan in the time-management and personal planning industries about “planning the work and working the plan”. It basically is a form of “plan and execute” or “plan and do”, but it is more than that…it takes into account that you did the work to do a proper plan, taking into account the variables you had, and you came up with something viable.

Implementation though prompts a number of reactions. First and foremost, there are the rigid thinkers who will follow the plan all the way to Hades. Doesn’t matter, they have their orders, even if they gave them to themself, and they will not deviate it from it no matter what the evidence or results are telling them. Second is the other end of the spectrum…it is the type who knows that a battle plan never survives engagement with the enemy, and because they misinterpret what that means, they jettison the plan at the first sign of ANYTHING that deviates from the plan and wing it for the rest of the implementation. Their attitude is you can’t plan for everything so why worry too much about planning for anything. Get a basic idea and GO.

But in the middle is the workman who knows that a good plan is mostly about the process of building the plan. Understanding what the variables are. Understanding the interdependencies. Understanding the resources available, the starting point, the ending point, and the flexibilities to get from one to the other. You don’t “implement a plan”, you work with it, tweaking as you go, keeping what works, adjusting what doesn’t. A good framework helps you know where you’re going; building the framework helps you know what your capacity is for getting there.

I had a pretty good day today. We have set ourselves a basic 9-5 workday, with Andrea taking a break at 11:00 to spend time with Jacob when his class breaks for first rest/recess and me taking a break at 1:00 p.m. to have lunch with him. This morning, Andrea had a dentist appointment at 8:00 so we were up and out the door by 7:30. She had her appointment, everything is on track for her dental work, I picked her back up, and off we were home. With a pit stop at the grocery store to get milk, fresh bananas, and some ground beef for tonight’s dinner (tacos).

We were back to the house by 9:00 a.m., before Jacob even started his class. Nice.

My morning schedule wasn’t too pressed, first meeting at 10:30 so I had time to get ready, with a pre-conference call just before it to agree on what a co-lead was going to cover and what I would cover. Then the meeting, went reasonably well, some good follow-up, and on to the next thing.

I had a couple of impromptu meetings in MS Teams, set up a bunch of groups so we can stay organized going forward, got some buy-in and support to lead a couple of initiatives we want to do across the branch, and it wasn’t even lunch yet. I grabbed a snack, and started writing a speech. More like speech modules, but I did it up like a big inspirational speech that I’ll have to tone down tomorrow into more digestible chunks, but I gave my creative side free rein, and it felt good to flex those muscles.

I had lunch with Jacob, then back into the digital world of working from home. I finished the speech, handled a few other things that had cropped up, tasked out a few other things, and generally kicked butt and took names most of the afternoon.

I’m not sure exactly where in my career I would say I was my “best self” as an employee, firing on all cylinders and being uber productive, but I know it isn’t “today”. Still, I’m probably firing at about 80% of my previous capacity, and feeling good about the way forward.

I even found time today to reach out to offer some online support to two communities, where newbies are struggling with stuff that is a level beyond their capacity. I reframed it and explained what they needed to do (and how to understand it, which is part of my jam), and they were off and running again with renewed optimism after hitting the frustration wall.

Dinner was simple tacos, Jacob is doing piano theory and hanging out with Andrea, and I’m figuring out a couple of small web puzzles. And then I treated myself to a small binge of episodes of Monk from Season 3.

Today I choose to work the plan and today it worked well. It won’t always be that successful, but I’ll take the victory lap for today.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to look for some COVID humour (TIC00064f)

The PolyBlog
September 28 2020

I have no interest in people who want to argue that some people find everything funny, however inappropriate, or the huge social conventions that go with it. I’m a little bit closer to certain British comedians and satirists who believe you can and should find whatever humour lies within anything. Not to make fun of anything you can, but to find the natural tenets of humour that run through our lives, however dark or at least non-illuminated some of them are. However dark the current times, however bleak, there are still moments of amusement to be found, even if just in cynicism that it will only get worse.

Today I went looking for some of that, and not surprisingly, it was easy to find in various memes or mask layouts. Some started with some pop culture themes:

  • Social Distancing Social Club;
  • Buena distancia social club (i.e., a take-off on Buena Vista Social Club);
  • I find your lack of social distancing disturbing (i.e., with a Darth Vader image)
  • I will wear my mask here or there, I will social distance everywhere (i.e., like Dr. Seuss)
  • In Fauci, we trust. Trust science, not morons (i.e., for US politics)

Others made references to introverts (ignoring the huge number of Bigfoot images with the slogan Social Distancing Champion):

  • Stop! I’m not social distancing, I just don’t like you!
  • I’m a social vegan. I avoid meet.
  • I saw people through the window today. That’s enough social interaction.
  • Social distancing: It’s like a vacation for introverts.
  • Ewww, people.
  • I can’t people today.
  • When social distancing is over, let’s not tell some people.
  • It’s too “peopley” out there.
  • I was social distancing when it was rude (i.e., a bit different from the numerous ones about doing it “before it was cool / trendy / hip / required”).

Others still went for slightly quirky:

  • Camp Quarantine
  • Social Distancing Mode ON
  • Zero hugs given #SocialDistancing
  • Wanna hangout with me online?

And then there were the ones whose patience has run out:

  • If I Can Punch You in The Face, You’re Too Close
  • Back off Boogaloo
  • Back up buttercup
  • Stay out of my hula hoop
  • Just shut up and wear your mask, Karen
  • If you can read this, then you’d better be wearing a mask

But out of all of them, there were four that I liked more than the rest. Three of them in particular as I think they actually work as something you could wear on a face mask or a t-shirt.

The first was simple…it was an image of a Zoom call, and it simply said “Zoom University”. All students are dealing with some form of that, from kindergarten all the way up to graduate courses at university, and it would work really well as a traditional sweatshirt, in my view. It captures a lot of the zeitgeist of freshmen who are starting university this year wondering where their degree is even coming from or what exactly they’re paying all that tuition for, if they even registered this year and didn’t opt for a gap year.

The second was a simple mantra summary of current life: “Eat, sleep, repeat. Living the #SocialDistancing life.” An alternate version said, “Eat, sleep, social distancing, repeat. Living the dream.” There is a lot packed in there, particularly for single people living alone.

The third was a small play on words for the innuendo of “doggie-style”. The picture showed two men separated by a dog on a six-foot leash. The phrase that went with it was: “Social distancing, doggie-style“. I don’t know that I would wear this, but there are some people who walk their dog who quite like the meme.

The last one is also a play on words, and it is my favorite. The picture is of a person doing yoga, in Lotus position, with the words “Namaste six feet away”. One of my favorite comics in the last year that I’ve seen had a similar pun, where one character says, “Namaste” and the other says, “Nah, I’m gonna go”. The reason this one is my favorite is that it works relatively linearly, i.e. “peace” from six feet away, or literally, “Stay six feet away”.

Are any of them uproariously funny? Nope, but the topic isn’t funny. Millions are dying around the globe. The death experience for those infected are horrible, often isolated and alone, and struggling to breathe. And yet people have found the humour that lurks in the shared experience of social distancing, however cynical.

I needed that today, and so I choose to look for some COVID humour.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose to grind it out (TIC00062f)

The PolyBlog
September 27 2020

For my website management, it is probably trite to note that some parts are more enjoyable than others. Writing posts is fun; managing plugin updates is not. Solving gremlin issues is not.

A few months ago, I revamped the site. Mostly because I had accumulated enough little management issues that my site was running slow and I was starting to notice irregularities in different posts. You would expect that if multiple people were posting on a site, the back-end admin area might get a little cluttered. People might save photos in odd places, for instance. But my site is all me. Everything should have a place and everything should BE in that place. More or less.

Most of the time, nobody would ever notice. Except a lot of my posts are part of various series of posts. And on one page, I used “blah blah blah – blah blah” as the title, and on the next, “blah blah blah: blah blah and blah”. A dash in one case, a colon in another, and inconsistent wording for the blah part. Most people wouldn’t notice, but in some cases, it was off enough that it made me question what the title SHOULD be i.e, what was the goal of the post? Not simple pedantic naming conventions but actually what I was trying to communicate.

The images and tables were messed up in a number of places, and some people had noticed enough to point it out. But overall? It just needed an update.

So I did it. The last time I will be able to do that manually from start to finish, partly as I am close to 1500 posts in total. That’s a lot of chickenfeed.

I still have about 150 posts that are messed up somewhat for photos, and I’ll eventually “fix” those in the fullness of time. They’re fine as they are, I just flagged them so that when I finish some photo updating, I’ll fix those too. I’ve ground through a couple of layout and table issues in the last week. But I had a big one that was outstanding.

My book reviews list was not complete. I have 190 BRs on the site, all live. I failed to notice that #160 was messed up for format when I went through them earlier, but I caught part of it tonight. Anyway. The real issue was that the index only listed the first 50. There were another 140 to add to the index, and while I have a lot of the info in a spreadsheet, each item in the index needs to link to the proper post with the review.

I had done about 10 at a time previously and each batch was taking me over an hour to get into shape. I split it into a bunch of stages so that I could assembly-line-bulldoze some updates earlier, and it fixed the majority of layout issues in batches, but it still left me with the index not done. I figured this was something that would take me several months to update, perhaps 10 here or there, or even 20 in a day.

Earlier today, I started looking at it differently, and seeing if I could tweak my Excel spreadsheet to put all the info I could into a single “paste” and then just edit the remaining missing pieces. In the end, it worked. I added 130 records at once, complete with full HTML code for the links, and then just manually pasted the URLs one by one into the website’s database table. All together, it ran about an hour. The whole thing? Up and running? In about an hour? Woohoo!

Months worth of work the old way, and because I decided to just grind it out a bit today, I dug in, found a faster way to do it, and saved myself a ton of work. Plus moved my markers on what is “next” on my to-do list.

Today I choose to just grind it out on my website and update my Book Reviews index.

What choices are you making today?

Today I choose choices over outcomes (TIC00061f)

The PolyBlog
September 25 2020

Some days it is really hard not to measure my commitment to making conscious choices simply by the outcomes that result. But the process of “making choices”, of doing so consciously, of recognizing what choices I am making rather than drifting, is the intent. It doesn’t mean I’ll end up with a perfect outcome or even a better outcome.

It is about being aware of my life and the choices I make throughout the day.

As a small sideways digression, people are sharing a popular twitter feed this week about advice from Nora Roberts about balancing work and life, with the idea that instead of saying you’ll keep all the “life balls” in the air and prioritize those over work ones, her advice was that there are glass balls that are fragile and plastic ones that aren’t as important. So you prioritize glass ones over plastic ones. Some days that means you might prioritize a big work project over a walk with your kid. Not that you prioritize all work over your kid, but that big work things are important too and sometimes small life things are in the plastic category. It’s a popular meme / series that gets shared, along with Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff / Know Your Priorities, blah blah blah, but honestly it is mostly worthless since the real challenge is when you have two glass balls in the air and you can only reach one. THAT’s the challenge, not plastic vs. glass, those are easy.

Anyway, the digression is that while the metaphor and methodology breaks down, the real value to me is that it reinforces the recognition that you are indeed making choices. And sometimes those choices are made with the best information you have available and it just doesn’t work out.

This morning, Andrea had a big dental surgery appointment. It wasn’t in our shared calendar last week when I booked a weekly chiro appointment, so I booked it for 8:30. It gives me enough time to get back home to start work. Then Andrea’s appointment overlapped, but we discussed it and decided that I could fit both in — take her to the dentist, rush back across town to the chiro, rush back down to the dentist. It was a good decision to allow me to keep the appointment, which my back needed, albeit rushed. So we did.

Except getting back to the chiro was more hectic than I initially expected. The highway was clogged so I rerouted, and some annoying traffic, but made it, and I thought I was late as I normally go for 8:15. I forgot I had bumped it to 8:30 this week, so I actually hurried only to sit and wait. No biggie. And my back decided not to cooperate. Whereas normally I can get three good adjustments down my back, we tried 7 adjustments and only 2 went a little. For my neck, normally I get good releases on both sides, and this time my left side refused to release at all. Whine. We do a bit of electro-stimulation, which I normally do on my back, but since my back didn’t release, I had to do it sitting up. I don’t know if I slept wrong or was just tense from rushing, but again, I made the right decision, just didn’t lead to a great outcome.

Back downtown to get Andrea, didn’t want her waiting too long, made it in time for the end of her appointment. But no Andrea. Sent her text, no response. Which meant she was still with the dentist. Wait a bit. Wait a bit more. Move the car to an open parking spot. Wait some more. About 25 minutes past when she was supposed to be done. Hmmm. I phone the clinic who informs me that the appointment was not 1 hour, as Andrea had thought, but THREE hours. Wait, that’s not what we were supposed to do. They changed the approach to the appointment from what they’d originally discussed, she didn’t even know. Again, right decision, but now I’m looking down another 90 minutes. The nurse checked, actually they’ll be done in 30 minutes. Do I want to park in the free underground parking (normally cramped lot) and wait in the waiting room? Umm, during COVID? How about never?

So I drive over to a Tim Horton’s. Again, perfectly reasonable decision based on what I knew. Except I didn’t know half the roads were ripped up nearby nor that the Timmy’s I was going to actually doesn’t have a drive-through. And considering the sketchy location, not the best place for health protocols either. Okay, I’ll drive a bit farther. Again, construction was TERRIBLE. Slow going, finally get to where I want to be and huge lineups. Much longer than I have time for. So again, I make the right decision and head back. About half-way back, Andrea phones to say she is done, and while I would be about 5 minutes away normally, it was almost 10-15 by the time I made it.

Okay, let’s go home. No, wait, we have to stop for prescriptions. We have a good pharmacy we use, normally it is super-reliable. Today the woman wants to push me to pick up the pain meds tomorrow. Yeah, no. I need them now. She’s in the car waiting. Oh, okay, how about after 12:00. It was only 10:30…I negotiate 11:30 and head out to take Andrea home. She’ll have to settle for Tylenol in the meantime.

All right decisions, just not breaking my way.

I do a dance at catching up on work for an hour, but I’m really just shuffling meetings and poking people for info. Nothing really productive. I have to miss my weekly divisional meeting because that’s when the pain prescriptions will be ready, and so I decide to just take half the day as leave. I could have taken the whole day, and I don’t know if either of them is the “right” answer, but it’s functional anyway. I go back to the pharmacy, hoping to be quickly in and out, but no, they have to talk to me about the new prescriptions.

Meanwhile, while I’m standing there waiting to talk to the pharmacist, I realize I’m standing about 10 feet or so from someone in a mask who is actually there for a COVID test. I don’t need to be anywhere near them, so I kind of wander into some other aisles to wait to be called. Did she have COVID cooties that I needed to run away from? Probably not, but I just don’t need to be there. Grab some other items, get the info on the prescriptions, back home, hand everything over and try to work.

I was really struggling to concentrate. So I’m ticking off little items. Nothing important, just small to-do list items. Again, the right decision since I couldn’t focus on big things, but mediocre results for the day.

Lunch with Jacob was McDonald’s for a treat, and Pizza Hut for dinner to celebrate the end of the first week of school. Good decisions, blah for outcomes. Not very healthy.

Then Andrea — yes, ANDREA — suggested we go out for ice cream since it is one of the few things she can eat. Sure, work our way over to DQ to go through a drive-through, and it is in SLOW MOTION delivery. I took the long way to get there which was fine but then we sat in the line for close to 20 minutes before we got a small cone, a small sundae, and two Misty Freezes instead of the two Misty Slushes we ordered (Freezes add ice cream). It was clear the guy was new, was having a bad day, maybe even a bad first day, and I was too tired to ask him to correct the order. I figured we’d make it through, but of course, as it turns out, Jacob doesn’t like Misty Freezes with the ice cream added. Sigh.

I felt like the whole day I was making good decisions, even the “right” decisions, in conscious ways, prioritizing the right glass balls, while plastic balls rained all around us. It felt like a crapfest of a day for outcomes. Each one seemed to go slightly wrong.

But that’s the rub. I can’t control many of those outcomes. I can just control that I’m making conscious choices as I go. I could have cancelled my chiro and had NO adjustment; I could have showed up at 9:00 and just waited across the road for an hour; I could have waited for the prescriptions for an hour; I could have heated up leftovers at home for lunch and dinner; I could have gone to a different place for dessert; I could have taken the whole day off. And the outcomes wouldn’t have looked much different.

The “goal”, if there is one, is to be aware of the choices I’m making as I make them, which I did.

Today I choose choices over outcomes.

What choices are you making today?