The same girl that criticized me about ripping tags out of my shirt has now mocked me for my to do list.
Thus warranting the economic lesson about the merits of to do lists.
See, previous to "to do lists" people didn't know what to do. They were just standing around. Doing nothing. A lot like France. And then, an ingenious human came up with the idea to do things and thus composed the first to do list in the history of man.
He, along with other humans, started doing the things that were listed on the to do list. And thus production and GDP ensued and soon they were driving cars, brewing beer, programming video games and raising dachshunds. Yes, all the great things in life emanating from that first to do list.
Therefore, (on a more serious note) I am a big believer in to do lists. Much more gets done, more efficiency ensues, life gets easier and in general you are typically wealthier. I often opine what the economic consequences would be if society in general got into the good habits of putting together to do lists...heck I often opine what would happen to GDP production if women started dressing like Sophia Loren did back in the 40's. But, regardless, I would not be surprised if it resulted in a full 1-1.5% additional boost in economic growth. That translates into $140 -$210 billion in extra production.
Ahhh, but what a stupid idea. Like something as simple as to do lists would have any real economic consequence. Kind of like a "point and click interface" that would get rid of the need to know DOS.
Bah point and clicky interfaces; They don't scale.
ReplyDeleteOh they're great for an interface for a single person doing singular things, like running their blog, or surfing the web, but when you've got 17,000 servers in the field, and you need to update their firewall rules, tell me how quickly you can point and clicky that.
With Microsoft, you'd use SMS (not the text messages), but you have to pay for a license for every device that you manage.
With a unix based derivitive (Mac/Linux/Solaris/BSD), you can write a script that when given a list of servers goes to the remote server, runs some commands, checks the output to verify things worked, and exits.
If you had to point and click, human eyes have to parse messages on a screen (did I click twice, do I have to right click, which context menu item do I have to hit, what's the shortcut for Copy, is it C or O depending on the context)...
Or you have the servers contact home every hour, check a central database for their config, and if the config has changed, update it and restart the process. Even less work to change those servers.
Another example; company wants to sell us bandwidth shaping devices (Like what Comcast is doing for Bittorrent), but all the configuration is based upon a web server, not a command line. To change one rule (say, give all bittorrent clients in Los Angeles a maximum of 128kbps of traffic), one has to open a browser, connect to the device, authenticate, click on the rules tab, scroll down to try and find the rule (having to scan hundreds of other rules blocking kazaa/morpheus/gnutella/blubster/etc), to find the rule for BitTorrent, click on that rule, then back up in the top of the screen menu, click on edit, make sure they have popup-blocker turned off as it spawns a pop up window, click on the rule for the Los Angeles IP addresses, use a pull down box to choose 128kbps, click Ok, close that window, scroll back up to the top, click apply, then click save changes. Now go do that for the other 18 hubs.
For a post focusing on increasing efficiency, you end it with something that in practice in the real world of systems administration, makes things less efficient, not more.
Cappie! She's making fun of pulling out labels and your to-do lists?! Sounds to me like she's pushing you down on the playground my friend. I hope she's your type as men have generally proven that they are incapable of escaping a female pursuit (I can't attach the Economist chart on this, but I swear it is true).
ReplyDeleteShe's a good friend of mine who is hands down the best cook in the world. She'll just mention lasangana and practically every male friend is there knocking down the door. She then gets evil stares from the other females in the room as all the men are bowing before her.
ReplyDeleteUgh, Pete!!!!
ReplyDeleteI tried reading through that. You remind me of when I'd play doom with all the Csci majors back in college.
I knew somebody would be thrown off by the whole point/click interface comment. It was gonna be me, but Pete got to it first.
ReplyDeleteGranted, you can automate things in a point and click environment, such as bots in MMORPGs. Game designers do their very best to make it impossible to do this, but people find ways. It's just a bunch of work.
Anyway, I get by without to do lists. When I need to do something, I just go do it.
Also try "What NOT to Do" lists as well, or recommend them to friends who have trouble actually doing the things on "To Do" lists.
ReplyDeleteHey, now, not every female shoots her evil glances, but yes, virtually every guy breaks down her door when she mentions she's cooking.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing wrong with to-do lists, though, especially since our minds are full of more important things, right, Cap'n? Economics and warships, for example.
If you don't exercise your memory though, you'll forget more often, creating a greater dependency on the list to the point of you forgetting where you placed your list.
ReplyDeleteAs a lasagna fanatic, I can say with certainty that anyone who can make a good lasagna can make fun of my to-do lists any day. Provided that they share the lasagna with me, of course. :-)
ReplyDeleteTo do lists are awesome.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, "comment on CaptCap To-Do list post" was on my to do list.