In publishing there are two kinds of deadline—the deadline, which usually has a bit of margin built in for safety; and the drop-deadline, which is the absolute last second something can be done. One's The Eleventh Hour and the other is 11:59:59, you might say.
So, new deadline: The "Dogs" Baker's Dozen will appear on Wednesday, July 16th. The reason is, I've backed myself into a corner where I'm feeling pressured. I can't work when I'm under pressure. Which you might consider immature or even obnoxious, and you'd be right, but it's one reason I'm a blogger: if I could handle pressure and deadlines like a normal grownup, I'd have a more responsible position for an actual employer and you wouldn't be reading this. So it's a situation of get some, give some.
I'm sorry about this, by the way. But I know myself.
July 16th is the day after I've promised to report on the biphasic sleep experiment.
Clocks ticking
Speaking of which: In the middle of the night, with a yellow bulb in the table lamp, the screen brightness on my monitor turned down, and night-mode warmth (yellowishness) turned all the way up, I find I can't easily see the tiny little numerals for the date and time in the far upper-right-hand corner of my monitor. So I was pleased when the Internet answered my question about enlarging it by leading me to this new clock-face widget:
In case this might help anyone else, on the Mac you right-click on the desktop with your mouse (or maybe left-click, depending on how you have your mouse set up) until a menu appears, select "Edit Widgets...", then find the clock widgets and manually move one to the desktop. Then, go to System Settings > Desktop and Dock > Widgets (you might have to scroll down to find it) > Widget Style, and select "Full-color."
I chose "Clock I" because it reminded me of the round clocks high on the wall at the front of every classroom I ever sat in during elementary and high school. (This would be a good illustration to put here.) I learned of the variability of time staring at clocks that looked like that: the last five minutes of French class before lunch took forever to go by, and I swear slowed down progressively as time crept with agonizing slowness toward the bell; but the same kind of clock keeping track of the 55 minutes you could sign up for on the racquetball court let that time slip past like it was water poured out of a bucket. (I came in second in the school racquetball tournament my sophomore year, and I still want life points for that). Time can be measured, but the perception of time cannot.
More soon, for a variable value of soon,
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Kye Wood: "Ctein's article on Time ['What Is Time?' December 27th, 2013 —Ed.], and how it cannot be defined, that appeared in your blog, is one of the most thought-provoking things I've ever read."
B.J.Scharp: "Have you considered just getting a classic clock and hanging it on the wall? I've always been in the habit of removing all clocks from the interface of my PCs. I wear a watch, and I generally have a classic clock somewhere in the room, so to me it's just a waste of screen real-estate. (This is less of an issue with the bigger screens we have nowadays, but wasteful things are still wasteful. Just like our much faster devices are slowed down by less efficient software.) And an 'offline' clock has the advantage that it also works if the computer is off...."
Mike replies: Your comment made me realize that I don't use all of my 'screen real-estate' anyway. I have a 27-inch monitor but work in a window with a 23-inch diagonal:
Richard Alton: "Be gentle on yourself, Mike. With Butters having died, you couldn't have chosen a more emotional subject for the Baker's Dozen."
Gary Merken: "I know those clocks, from my public-school K–12 years outside Boston. My ninth-grade social-studies teacher, Mr. Penn, had a handwritten sign over the clock in his classroom. Mr. Penn's sign read, 'TIME WILL PASS. WILL YOU?' In other words, pay attention to the lessons! Don't watch the clock."
