Alex, at the bus stop in the morning. Sometimes he’s there when I walk by on my way to work, and we get to have miniature conversations for ten seconds or so. Here he is, cutting a dramatic figure.

When I walked into work the other day, a co-worker greeted me with this: “did you see the man?!”

What man?

Oh. This man. He had, it turned out, followed her downtown and into our building. Followed her all the way from the Gateway transit center out in SE. Scared the crap outta her. She gave me the basic rundown when I first poked my head into the basement cubby where we work, and so I walked around the building and, lo, there he was: guy in a blue jacket and a cap with gray hair and a doll.

He was off his meds, I hear, and pretty severely retarded even when he’s not. He got picked up and taken to a medical facility after a lot of handwaving by our supervisor at building security. Strange morning. On the one hand, please do not stalk and scare the hell out of people. On the other, poor bastard.

Brian and I have been talking about cover songs, and one of the things we both liked was the the notion of covering something of Sufjan Stevens’ latest album, Illinoise. There are several just incredibly good songs on the album (I think John Wayne Gacy, Jr, a fantastically economical portrait of said serial killer, is my favorite), but one we agree on as performable is (actually the second half of) “Come On Feel the Illinoise,” wherein Sufjan sings about a dreamtime visit from Carl Sandburg.

So this is a quick and weird rendition I recorded last Monday at the practice space. Lots of warts, vocals are strained — I wasn’t recording because I was excited to record, I just felt like I ought to because, well, I was in a crappy mood and doing something seemed like a healthier response than doing nothing.

Looks like I went and rolled myself an rss feed. Hurrah! Check it:

http://www.joshmillard.com/feed/rss.xml

Here’s a song that I’ve recorded before, and knocked out last Monday for the hell of it. Old bluegrass tune. This is also the first post to the Recording section, so I’m hoping it’ll work.

Fun with long exposure shots. Snapped this this morning on the way to work. Though at four seconds of exposure time, I’m not sure snap is the right verb. Let’s say I procured this.

It’s nearly November, and that means it’s time to write a novel, or fail trying. The impetus: National Novel Writing Month, a sort of double-dog-dare that I’ve taken part in every year since 2001. The goal is to produce 50,000 words in the space of November, which is a very foolish goal; but then, the whole enterprise is wonderfully, willfully foolish. Much more background can be had at the Nanowrimo site.

Each year, I have started a novel, and in the last four years I have finished one 50K mess and aborted three others which collected together would be about 50K additional words. I haven’t found a system, nor certainly even a successful formula — my one 50K winner happened in 2003, and I have since returned to failure. There is something humbling about launching enthusiastically, manically, into a creative venture like this only to find myself two weeks in, thousands of words behind, and rapidly losing momentum.

But I’m doing it again anyway. I have a few ideas kicking around, but nothing firm, and I’ve got about a week to psyche myself up, and I’m going for it, and it’ll be happening in something resembling real-time right here.

Stay tuned.

The photography stuff is working as intended now, but what about everything else? Have I broken anything?

If things are working, this post should be topped by a black and white shot of a no parking sign. I’m still working on some of the guts of the site, and this morning’s project is code-worded Operation Kodak Apollo.

Thesis: work as the partitioning of input-processing channels

Sometimes I think about my job (and not just my current one, but jobs in general, though I was thinking about my current job specifically when I got on this mental track) in terms of the input channels it occupies, and those it leaves open. I’m thinking both raw sensory input (hearing, sight) and more complex experiences (reading for comprehension, parsing (or ignoring!) graphical symbols, listening passively to music, listening actively to speech).

Generally, I’m happier with work that more consistently leaves me an open channel.

My current job has afforded me a lot of music-listening time. It’s the nature of the work — I’m doing a lot of reading and parsing and counting and typing, but there is almost no audio function to the work, and so I can listen to music eight hours a day if I am so inclined. (This has the adverse effect of exhausting the novelty of my music collection, however: I can understand better now how people spend so much money on CDs.)

The music channel stands open almost all of the time. What about language-audio? That’s a bit trickier — if I’m doing a task that doesn’t require any complex active language-processing, I can listen attentively to lyrics or even stand-up comedy. If I’m searching down a lot of word data, though, or parsing phrases instead of pattern-matching single words or symbols. (Ask my wife — I have a terrible habit of reading anything in front of me, and I’ll often lose a bit of conversation because the words on the screen completely hijack my language channel. People who can multiplex this sort of language processing amaze me.) Similarly, there are times when I have to just turn off my music if I’m trying to keep a running count of something — something about catchy rhythms combats my ability to keep a steady addition register going.

So I have an open music channel, with some exceptions. I don’t, on the other hand, get much free eye-time on the job. I’m almost always looking at something, and so I can’t do any reading — not just because of my previously-mentioned one-channel-of-language issues, but because I can only look at one thing at a time.

I can imagine other work environments that would introduce other channels, too — no doubt working in a bakery over-rides a person’s smell channel, as working on a factory floor would over-ride one’s audio channel. A closer (if more contrived) parallel to my own situation: working as a translator hijacks, rather than inhibits, the audio channel. It’s not that the translator (or the court stenographer, or the recording studio engineer) is deprived of audio input as a background activity — they are required to keep the channel tuned to work.

I think of all this, and write about it, in part because I’m pleased that there is an aspect of my current job (besides breaks and lunch) that gives me some unfettered recreational access to my sight and language channels. And with the new site functioning and allowing me to submit posts remotely, I can use that time to wax at great and unedited length about my ability to wax at great and unedited length.

So yes. The thesis: job satisfaction for me is based in part on the availability (and, I think, the variety) of open channels. Secondary, perhaps, to the portion of job satisfaction derived from enjoying the work itself, but that’s another topic entirely.