I watch the Colbert Report and the Daily Show every day after work. Last month I was seeing a screen for just seconds between commercials: a brilliant pink screen with the word “Tired” on it.
I assumed I was hallucinating from exhaustion.
It stopped after a while and I didn’t think about it any more. However, I just saw a screen on the TV saying, “Intensive Computer Unit.” “ICU” down the side of a white screen, with the words across. Is this another hallucination?
I remember when I was in college it was widely held that TV commercials and movies contained subliminal advertising — screens that showed for such a short time that we were not consciously aware of them. It’s hard to image why T-Mobile — clearly the brand in my hallucination — would want to tell dinner hour viewers they were tired. And I can’t even imagine why anyone would want to associate computers with an ICU.
In any case, I was very happy to stop work today. I am hoping not to work this weekend.
This week included a meetup, a classroom read-through of Othello when about half the class showed up on a rainy Friday, and lots of client communication, as well as rather less writing than I would have liked. Rescue Time shows me at 80% productive over 44 hours, which is right on target, but a lot of that time was spent on web analysis, checking analytics for issues, troubleshooting site issues, and so forth. Productive, yes. Billable, no.
In the book I am currently reading, The Year without Pants, the author explains something about big projects with loose supervision:
- We do the things we like first.
- After the things we like are gone, we do the hard things that we don’t like.
- Because the hard things are left till the end, later changes have cascading effects.
It’s something to think about.