Minor pimpage

The past week I've been enjoying a flashback to the '80's, courtesy of Brent Bourgeois, a minor pop star who has had only two hits to his name, the MTV-driven "I don't mind at all" and the weaker "Dare to fall in love." I have his first two albums, so I decided to rip them and put them on the MP3 player. (I didn't buy his follow-on albums because he'd found Gawd(tm) and had become a little preachy in his later years.)

The solo album is better than his first, which was a duet with Larry Tagg, although it didn't sell nearly as well. Songs like "The Real Thing" and the very unradio-friendly but cuttingly wonderful "Shit Out of Luck," about being an out-of-work studio recording artist, really work well. If there's pop music in Valhalla, it sounds like this.

And another for jatg, kyriani and those who spend their days hunched over the drawing board: Drawn!, a website for illustrators, artists, and other creative types who steal need inspiration.

Subversively hacking the environment.

One of the lifehacks gurus recently said something to the effect that he could leave post-it notes for himself all over his own home, but he couldn't do the same thing at work. People would notice.

I beg to differ. I hacked one piece of my office environment a few weeks ago. I put up a little post-it note in one corner of the glass on the refrigerator where my company dutifully supplies its employees with free soda pop. On it I wrote in my best handwriting "CFD."

CFD is one of those annoying diet buzzwords from the Eighties, so obscure that Googling for it brings up exactly nothing at all. It's probably the easiest to remember because it stands for one of those obvious things: conscious food decision. It's a pretty straightforward idea: Do I want to eat this? Why do I want to eat this? Is there a better way to get what I want? (Often, when standing in front of a 'fridge and I'm thinking that I don't know what I want, I'm reminded of the rule of thumb: if you don't know what you want, it's probably sleep.)

It seems to be working. I've gone from drinking three or four pops a day, down to two a day all of last week, to one a day on Monday and yesterday, and so far none today.

I've done this in cycles, which is bad. I'm hoping that this minor hack, one little thing, will remind me not to cycle back up to a three-or-four a day habit. The nice thing about this lifehack is that nobody else on my team will take it down becaue they don't know why it's there. It was obviously put there with deliberation so it must be important.

I'd forgotten how much I like this song...

I like what I see, it's important to me,
But I'm lost at the fine art of compromise,
And I like what you do, it's important to you,
But I've lost the ability to compromise.