Random Musings

a.k.a. Miscellaneous, not pertaining to development or architecture

How I start my day

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

If you hate my habit of parenthetical asides in my writing, I think this entire post qualifies as one, so scroll on my friend, scroll on…

I find it hilarious that I have a reputation as a hard worker, because I was constantly told as a kid how lazy I was. I remember reading a “Humor in Uniform” story in Reader’s Digest about a lazy soldier that kept getting transferred to the most difficult assignments his commanding officer could find. Once the lazy soldier was in the new assignment he would find a way to make the job easier, a talent that was clearly a mixed blessing. In that soldier’s memory, I do things like write all of my posts in my (currently) longest-running blog so that when I create back ups I don’t have to go to all of my posting grounds, only two (https://money.theitsolutionist.com is deliberately separate, and only on the same root domain because I’m cheap)

Anyway, back to the actual subject (which is actually related to my seques), which is how I start my day every day…but first, one more aside: This will be my first post on my new Substack publication “My TBR List”. And, of course, it isn’t about something on my TBR list. (total non sequitur, I have been planning a post about how ADHD may be contagious if everyone you live with has it). It’s about something I read every day. Coming back to the lazy soldier thread, I had Perplexity.ai do the writing for me. Which started as an exercise in laziness except I was also a bit lazy with the first prompt, so the following is the result of four prompts and re-learning the trick of first giving a generative AI a writing sample and asking it to describe the voice and tone, then incorporating that description in the post. I still don’t think it got that right, but the sentiment is there, and I have already spent way more time on this post than if I had just written it straight up (but would have missed out on all of the fun of coaxing Perplexity to do my work for me bidding.)

How a 20-Year-Old Habit of Reading Non Sequitur Still Starts My Day Right

Some habits stick around longer than you expect. For me, one of those is reading the Non Sequitur comic strip every morning at https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur. I started this ritual more than twenty years ago, and it’s still the first thing I read online each day. It’s a small ritual, but it sets a tone I appreciate: a little humor, a little reflection, and sometimes a nudge to think differently before diving into the day’s noise.

Why Non Sequitur Works as a Morning Habit

Non Sequitur isn’t your typical quick joke. The name itself means “it does not follow,” and that’s a perfect description. Wiley Miller’s comics often take unexpected turns, mixing absurdity with sharp social commentary. Sometimes the punchline hits immediately. Other times, it sneaks up on you-a joke that sticks around for a minute or two after you’ve read it. That’s part of the charm.
What I like about starting the day with this strip is that it’s both light and layered. It pokes fun at everything from bureaucracy and politics to everyday human quirks, but it never feels mean-spirited. Instead, it’s like a gentle reminder that the world is often ridiculous, and that’s okay. Humor can be a way to keep perspective.

Characters Who Feel Familiar

The recurring characters add another layer of connection. Danae, the skeptical kid, often voices the kind of dry, no-nonsense observations I find myself thinking but rarely say out loud. Then there’s Obviousman, a superhero whose power is simply pointing out the obvious-something we all wish for in frustrating moments. These characters aren’t just punchlines; they’re reflections of the parts of ourselves we recognize, especially on days when nothing seems to make sense.

Humor That Rewards a Second Look

One of the reasons I keep coming back after all these years is that the humor doesn’t always land on the first read. Sometimes I have to pause, reread, or think about the context to fully appreciate the joke. It’s a little like troubleshooting a problem-you don’t always get it right away, but when you do, it feels satisfying.

Why This Habit Still Matters

In a world that often feels overwhelming and repetitive, having a small, consistent way to start the day with a smile and a bit of insight is surprisingly valuable. Non Sequitur reminds me that it’s okay to question assumptions, to laugh at the absurd, and to keep a sense of humor-even when things don’t follow the script.
If you’re looking for a simple, daily habit that mixes humor with a little food for thought, I can’t recommend Non Sequitur enough. It’s been a quiet companion for me for over two decades, and I suspect it will be for a long time to come.
Would you like me to help you format this for your Substack or add any links or images?
If you found this interesting, please share.

© Scott S. Nelson

TIL a Cool PowerPoint Designer Hack

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

I don’t consider myself creative or artistic. The artistic bias probably goes back to school, where the requirement of an art elective ruined my chances at a 4.0 grade average (and exemplified by my Featured Image attempts, which even AI can’t seem to help me with).

The creative bias is that I usually can’t do it on demand. I’ve also learned that if you get out of your own way, creativity happens fairly naturally. This is similar to how Douglas Adams describes how one learns to fly. Anyway, one way to get over a lack of creativity and artistic sense is to let AI tools do it for you, and one that I find really handy for my handicap is PowerPoint Designer. (For those who think Designer isn’t AI, marketing is clearly doing it’s job, and perhaps missing the point, and here is proof— as long as the link is valid).

Personally, I don’t mind boring slides. I actually like have really basic slides where the purpose of the slide is for people to remember what we’re talking about when their minds inevitably wander. But, sometimes I am creating slides for other people, or need to meet the expectations of people with different opinions on the matter, so I need to make them a bit less boring, and designer is a great way to do that. One frustration I have with designer is that it so often gives me this message: Microsoft PowerPoint Designer "Sorry" message.

Usually this can be fixed by simplifying the slide, i.e., remove the cool graphic you added and let it focus on the text. Or you can split the graphic and text into separate slides and then combine the results after the magic happens.

Oh, and one word of caution: Copy your original slide before letting Designer have its way with it, because sometimes the new formatting is no longer easy to copy and paste.

Back to the cool hack part. My second annoyance with Designer, after it apologizing for having no suggestion of how to improve my work that clearly needs improvement, is that it gives so few suggestions. This seems to have gotten worst, and I suspect it is because those data centers are saving cycles for the AI that the marketing folks are calling AI. Recently, it was only giving me four or five options, many of which were just minot variations on the themes, like this:

PowerPoint suggestions for a slide with plain bullets.
PowerPoint suggestions for a slide with plain bullets.

I wasn’t too thrilled with any of the options, but I picked one just to move on and make some progress. Maybe an AI image would spruce it up enough (in the end, it did). Being the paranoid person who has lost early versions that I wished I could go back to, I made a copy first. Usually, when I make a copy, I start working in the copy. But this time, for no particular reason, I went back to the original…where Designer was showing entirely new options based on it’s own modification:

PowerPoint Designer suggestions after accepting a suggestion.
PowerPoint Designer suggestions after accepting a suggestion.

It seemed I had accidently cracked the code to get more options, like in the good ole days before everyone was using these tools, too. Just to prove my theory, I tried repeating the process, and sure enough…

PowerPoint Designer Keeps on Designing
PowerPoint Designer Keeps on Designing

I didn’t really find  an end to variations, though I admit that the quality of options generally declined, with an occasional interesting one coming up here and there. Full disclosure: this may have just been the raw material I started with, but that is back to my bias against my own creativity.

So, that’s my big discovery for the day. Well, there were really more, but I have to get back to “real work”, until this writing stuff actually starts paying some bills. Forward this to your friends (or enemies) if you would like to contribute to this hobby.

If you found this interesting, please share.

© Scott S. Nelson

Why People Never Listen (to Me)

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

I received my weekly James Clear newsletter today. I almost filed with all the other newsletters I subscribe to and just never seem to have time to read. But then I remembered that I’m on PTO, and Clear lives up to his name, so I jumped in. Then stopped in my tracks when I got to:

“You have to work hard to discover how to work smart. You won’t know the best solutions until you’ve made nearly all the mistakes.”

My first thought was “Hmm”, followed by “that makes sense”, and then “but what is the point of trying to teach people how to do things?”.

I mentally spun on this for a while. I know that I learn from others (directly or indirectly via person, print, or video) faster if I have had some experience with the topic and struggled with doing or understanding, or at least dissatisfied with the results. I’m also familiar with constructivism and similar concepts where some level familiarity, even if only having heard the term in passing, makes it easier for the mind to grasp and incorporate details when they are presented.

Then I realized that what I struggle with is some of the qualitative terms in the statement, i.e.,

“You have to work hard to discover how to work smart. You won’t know the best solutions until you’ve made nearly all the mistakes.”

Is it impossible to learn how to work smart without having worked hard? If a student, mentee, trainee, etc. trusts the person teaching them and is highly and intrinsically motivated to learn, I think they can do so without the prior high level of effort. That said, I think that the skill of teachers (generically rather than academically, and based on skill of transferring knowledge as well as knowledge of skill) and the motivation of learners have been steadily declining and that this circumstance as an exception has become fairly rare.

As to the second of Mr. Clear’s sentences, I might be putting too fine of a point on my umbrage. I believe that one will appreciate how much better a solution is than alternatives if they have witnessed the outcomes of the others, and that appreciation will increase with experience over mere observation. I do, however, take issue with “nearly all” at several levels. The first is the fuzziness of it. Is it all but 1? Is it 99%? And I really truly believe that some, with that fuzzy level being at least less than half, of the mistakes is more than adequate for some people, especially those that are either impatient (while motivated) or highly self critical (a motivation that tries the patience).

My  protests aside, I think James Clear’s statement is accurate often enough to be accepted as a general (if not a hard and fast) rule. I am positive in my belief that his experience with people in this context is much broader than my own.

I do tend to wander in my writing, so let’s wrap up the thought on why people never listen. They do, but the absorption, retention, and results of that listening vary between individuals and over time. Some folks will get it right away because they are motivated and trust the source (and sometimes that motivation is just lack of self trust); some will have to prove it right before they believe it, and then they may experience the source has their own actions (not all, but some); some will filter it through their own thinking until they reach a threshold where they will try anything, even something that is presented as proven already to be effective; and some will just never get it, for a variety of reasons that could be it’s own book, let alone blog post.

No matter the motivation or outcome, if you are trying to share wisdom, be wise enough to know that you may need to both vary and repeat your message to eventually be heard. If you are trying to learn something, you may want to apply what you know earlier and more often so that you are well prepared to know more.

If you found this interesting, please share.

© Scott S. Nelson

10% innovation, 90% stay out of their way

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

Google had the “20% Time Project”, which was an initiative to encourage people to innovate unsupervised. According to a page in  Wikipedia (found using Perplexity.ai,  as most of my research these days), this resulted in things like AdSense and Google News. The Wikipedia entry and other research shows that it had its issues, too. Few people did any percent, and some called it the “120% Project” because the work happened beyond the regular work day.

Official or not, many companies have some type of program like this, and I’ve worked at a few where they were both formal and informal. The formal ones have some type of financial incentive to them, and the informal ones are generally a good way to accelerate career growth. There are many ways to measure the success of such programs. Increases in employee engagement; broadening of skills (which increases organizational capabilities); competitive edge as better (or even disruptive) innovations evolve; the attraction talented new employees; and things people haven’t even thought of yet because of the nature of the topic.

The innovations that pay off go through some stages that are similar to regular old projects. There is the discomfort stage, where something is identified as bothersome at some level and wouldn’t it be great if something were done about that. There is the ideation phase, where someone thinks that they have a way to make it less bothersome (or more cool, which is a legitimate bypass of the discomfort stage). There is the experimental stage where various things are tried to fix the problem or improve the solution (or sometimes both). Then there is the demonstration stage, where someone shows others (sometimes a someone from an earlier stage) what the experiments have yielded. The demonstration and experimental stages may iterate for a while, until either the commitment or abandonment stage occurs. Those last two are not only similar to regular old projects, they are the start of regular old projects.

One interesting thing about the stages of an innovation is that the “someone” at each stage may or may not be the same someone. There are solopreneurs where they are the someone from start to finish, or at least starting at the experimental stage. Which final stage comes in to play has lots of different influences. Some innovations are clearly awesome from the start, while others seem great in isolation but have impractical issues during or after the ideation stage. Others can be killed by skipping or re-ordering stages. As mentioned, some stage can be skipped because they may not be necessary (though I believe the discomfort stage always occurs and is just not always recognized as such). The biggest problem can occur in re-ordering the stages, especially moving that commitment stage anywhere earlier. It is usually helpful to set a time frame for the demonstration stages. Having an expectation around when the demonstration will be provides the urgency that is sometimes necessary to shift from motivation to action. Gathering estimates and milestones before that first demo is a good way to influence the lifecycle to ending in abandonment. It takes away the sense of ownership, playfulness, and excitement and turns it into a job too soon.

This problem has been observed in several psychological studies, none of which I had the foresight to take note of when I heard of them but Perplexity did manage to find a decent article on the “Overjustification Effect” , which is to say it isn’t just my opinion. One simplification of the phenomenon is that something that is interesting and motivating in and of itself becomes much less so when someone else tells you it is, or tells you how to be interested, or demands that you explain exactly how you are interested.

There is a related effect (which I am too lazy to find references to, but trust me, I’m not making it up) where someone that is instinctively talented at something is studied to determine how they do that thing they do through questioning and validating those unconscious processes, cease to be good at it. Usually it is temporary, but sometimes it is permanent.

All of which is to say that if you want your team to innovate, let them come up with what they will be innovative about, come to an agreement on a time frame where they can demonstrate progress, and then get out of their way. Trying to set detailed steps and milestones for innovation will greatly lower the odds of getting to a point where defining detailed steps and milestones will lead to an innovated solution.

If you found this interesting, please share.

© Scott S. Nelson

AI as a mental crutch

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

(Feature image created with DALL-E, providing feedback on my image proompting skills)

Every couple of years I find myself building a new Linux virtual machine baseline for some project. Even though I’ve documented the process thoroughly the last few times there is always some quirk that has me starting mostly from scratch each time. This time I started off with setting the home page in Firefox to perplexity.ai and using it to find all of those mundane commands I forget three weeks after going back to Windows for my day to day work.

This time I hit a snag pretty early in that I was getting an error that made no sense to me (the specifics of which aren’t relevant to this train of thought). Perplexed, I asked Perplexity “wtf?” in my best prompt formatting (which, admittedly, is a WIP) and it gave me a few things to try. Some (not all) of them made perfect sense and I gave them a try. They failed.

I compared everything I was looking at against a similar appliance and didn’t see any obvious differences. I tried variations of prompts with Perplexity to get a more directly relevant response, which either resulted in what had already been suggested or even less relevant responses (I did mention my prompting skills need, work, right?).

I then tried ChatGPT, which gave me the same answers that differed only in their verbosity and longer pauses between response blocks.

Finally, I ran the same search I started with in Google, which returned the usual multiple links from our old friend Stack Overflow. I did like I did before using GPT backed by LLMs and narrowed the time frame down to the last year to eliminate answers 10 years out of date (and sometimes links to my own past explanations that are equally out of date) and found a summary that looked closer to my actual problem than the bulk of the answers (which were clearly the source of the responses from both GPT sources I had tried earlier).

And there was my answer. Not just to this one problem, but to the kind of sloppy approach I had fallen into using AI. The thread started with an exact description of the same problem, with lots of the same answers that had been of no help. And then the original poster replied to his own thread with the solution (a habit of frequent Stack Overflow contributors I have always admired and sometimes remember to emulate), along with how he wound up in the situation. Again, the specific error isn’t relevant to this tale, but the source is using the the first search result that seems to answer the question rather than reading it all the way through and seeing the subtle difference between what was needed and what was provided.

No AI response will tell you about the screw ups that caused the problem (are they embarrassed for their human creators or just don’t think it’s relevant?) and the path to realizing the mistake and then recovering (and learning). But real people will and that is how we learn from each other.

So having copilot proof your work is great and using promoting to get a start on something you’re stuck on is a great productivity boost. But relying solely on the technology to do all the work is how we wind up forgetting how to think and learn and build better technology to give us time to think and learn. In short, don’t trade the mental crutch for a creative wheelchair.

If you found this interesting, please share.

© Scott S. Nelson