A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I’ve gotta say, I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated and malcontented with myself lately. One of the unintended consequences of working for myself trading is that I’m not really doing much creatively any more. At least when I was programming, before the xp coach switch, I was contributing cycles of my brain to a project. Sure it was a dull project, but there were more than a couple interesting problems that required some thinking that wasn’t altogether straightforward.

On the trading side, I’m finally getting to a point where I have some reliable success ratios. But even at it’s most sophisticated it seems to boil down to “See that？　When that happens, and this is doing this, and that thing over there looks like that or like this, then hit that button and you’ll get free bacon.”

Now I like free bacon at least as much as the next guy. But the interesting part of trading is figuring out what all the things are to look for so that you know when the button would turn green. It’s mildly interesting. It’s certainly challenging. But what it’s nothing close to is creative. Honing the process consists of adding rules so that you can be more and more sure that you’ll get bacon.

Then, over time, your bacon works with you to help you get more bacon with each “gimme bacon” button press.

Yay bacon.

Strewn throughout my apartment are books about programming, the headiest most creative thing I can think of. On my various hard drives are millions of lines of code that have come out of my head over the last 15 years. Sure, most of it is schlock that I could reproduce in remarkably short order. But there’s some good stuff in there.

I’ve got journals, notebooks and textfiles full of ideas plots and plans for all the great things I was going to do and write.

And every once in a while I say “oh fuck it” and I close down the trading software and open xemacs (remember xemacs? I wonder how Sacha’s book is coming) and I stare at the blinking cursor…then go run through HL2 or Crysis either on “freaky nobody survives this difficulty” mode or “bouncing a bunch of tennis balls on the keyboard would finish these games in an hour” mode; and I yawn through them.

I’ve gotten so far out of the creativity habit that I don’t even post here any more. Not really.

Sure, this is an exception. But eyeball the word count. It’s really quite an astronomical exception of late.

I didn’t want this to happen even though I watched it as it did, and did nothing.

Now I could end there, put my wrist to my forehead and mourn how hard it all is, but it’s not. It just takes a bit of determination. The easiest thing to motivate against is adversity. Unfortunately that doesn’t really work so well when I’m in a comfort zone. Things are going pretty well by anyone’s reasonable estimation. It’s just not good enough. (I’m not known for my reasonable self-expectations; a trait which backfires rather spectacularly.)

There are a couple of approaches I can take I think

(sidebar: anyone out there have a eee pc and notice that keys sometimes double-strike? I get duplicate letters and symbols every once in a while.)

I can set aside scheduled time for doing stuff. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea. My trading success is biased to the first hour or two the market is open in a way that even I can’t ignore. Scheduling noon to 3 in the afternoon to do other stuff sounds like it might be fruitful. Also on the table is taking one day a week off with the same purpose.

I do feel like I need a project or three to get going on. There are a couple applications I’ve been meaning to write and some toy type code I’ve wanted to explore. (The imminent release of Spore has got me thinking about playing around with AI again. Nothing terribly complicated. I just want to see what I can do.

There’s also the hardware projects. The arduino orb was something I’d had almost fully wired, but then lost steam.

See, one significant problem is that I don’t KNOW anybody who does any of these things. Sure, I could go hang on #joiito again (and probably should… I can’t believe I’m saying this: “for my sanity”.) But I need to sit in a room (bar) and get myself all worked up in to a froth about creating, building, writing.

Perhaps meetup.com is a decent place to start? There’s the MakeNYC guys too. But I don’t know if they meet with any frequency.

A plan. I need a plan.

Because I know what happens: The inertia of creativity will drive me very far, once it gets rolling. But I need help with it.

And, as expected, I get to (what I hope is) the bottom of this post and I start thinking about how much I wish “meetup.com” would auto-link and “MakeNYC” would link to a google search as it’s what amazon refers to as “statistically improbable.” And how “statistically improbable” should search the site for a previous post of the same title if it’s there, and auto-link it the way Radio Userland did.

I wish I had all the old “Universal Church of Cosmic Uncertainty” posts up here instead of just the old 0108194 posts.

See what happens? ;-)