casthegrumpy: some context for yahoo’s excellent

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casthegrumpy:

some context for yahoo’s excellent product management that not a lot of people know about:

remember yahoo instant messenger? i’m guessing basically everyone stopped using that after like the early 2000s. but until about two years ago, almost all of the world’s oil trading was conducted through yahoo instant messenger. every day hundreds of millions of barrels, billions of dollars in equity, was traded by a bunch of dudes through yahoo instant messenger. traders and brokers loved that they could be speaking with tons of people at once, and their compliance officers loved that there was a transcript of conversations and deals left behind for auditing and regulatory purposes.

but yahoo decided, perhaps reasonably on the surface, that they did not want to support this service anymore. they wanted to migrate the messaging platform onto something a bit more integrated and 21st century. except their new service was not compatible with any kind of conversation-recording capability, so traders would not be allowed to use it anymore for compliance purposes.

chaos. billion dollar companies all around the world were scrambling. how would they conduct their business? i know this sounds silly, but traders talk to hundreds of people a day, brokers are showing them markets all day long. phones are inefficient and not all are set to record. they explained to yahoo what the compliance issue was. they offered to pay – these companies can afford any kind of subscription necessary. they assured yahoo that a massive pillar of the world’s economy, as fucking insane as it sounds, is actually conducted through their service. just let us use it. (here’s a reuters article about it, and here’s a financial times article on it)

yahoo didn’t change its plans.

now everyone uses something else to trade the world’s oil.
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Now that I’ve set myself up over on Dreamwidth

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Now that I’ve set myself up over on Dreamwidth I’m posting there more, and I can’t crosspost from there to here because I have an IfTTT set up that posts everything I post here to there, and that would make some sort of infinite mess, I think. Anyway–

Am having one of those awful ADHD days of freedom where I pick things up, wander in a circle, set the thing down, wander some more, then realize I’ve lost the thing, and then do something else, and forget what I was doing, and then wander looking for the thing, and then find it again and forget what I had picked it up for, and then wander off again, and it’s miserable and I’m accomplishing nothing. 

I have to, have to get a bunch of sewing projects started for Christmas. I do! There’s a deadline and not that much time left! But. Where do I start? I need a pattern. Here’s a pattern. I need fabric. This fabric  might do, if I piece it. Oh, or this. No, that. This one for A, that one for B, this one for– I wonder where I put that other– oh hey I totally forgot I had this. Look, this too! Here’s another thing. I remember this thing. I just had to iron it– there’s the iron. If I– oh but the iron’s set up for this other– yeah it was with these– yeah I’ll just. *spends an hour ironing bits of things that have nothing to do with anything*

Where was I? Oh this pattern, I was going to make– I was– yes here– where was that, now? Oh, over– oh gosh this whole area’s all rifled through, now, I’ll never find, I’d better tidy– let me just set that over– oh this, though, I forgot I had this. I’d better take everything I find and make a pile out of it on top of the other thing I was looking for. Yeah, that’s a great idea. 

The laundry! Shit I forgot. Hang on, I’ll just– oh and I was baking bread, “Did my timer go off?” “Yes–” Shit, I’d better– there we go– ok now I’m baking bread.

How is it 4pm? On Sunday? Where did Saturday go? 

For my efforts, I have two curtain rods I had Dude hang, a loaf of bread baked, four loads of laundry done but only two sorted, several objects moved from one place to another, and here’s the punchline:

Not a single stitch of sewing done. Nor is the pattern cut out. Nor is the fabric selected. 

Granted, I’m complicating it by insisting on repurposing worn garments instead of buying new fabric, but I own enough fucking new fabric, I don’t need any more. So I do have one (1) old garment halfway seam-ripped so that I can measure whether the pattern will fit on this fabric or if I have to piece it to make that work.
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attention-deficit-dragon:Man losing stuff when you have

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attention-deficit-dragon:

Man losing stuff when you have ADHD is the worst. Stuff just like… vanishes. People will ask: when did you last have it? Well I don’t know dude. I just know it exists and I don’t know where it is currently doing that.
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to-do lists

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lazaefair replied to your post “Now that I’ve set myself up over on Dreamwidth I’m posting there more,…”

Your post is giving me sympathy panic. the only way I can get through that shit is by writing the entire to-do list down and breaking it down to the teeny-tiniest increments, AND continually reminding myself that it’s okay for me not to finish it. So when I find myself wondering what to do I can go back to the list to remind myself. And I can cross things off the list for that little dopamine rush.

oh my god I have SUCH a love-hate with to-do lists

i love making the lists, see, but the problem is that I have absolutely no idea how long a thing takes to do. I just don’t. So a to-do list for a single weekend might consist of three hundred hours’ worth of work, if you could actually do the math out. And the other thing I’m bad at is, on a large scale, understanding the dependencies of tasks? So I’ll tell myself that I need to Do Some Big Thing but then I have no idea where to start, and I’ll try to come up with smaller detailed things but I’ll get to that item and then it needs me to have done fifteen other little things first? 

I love lists. I write basically fanfic about what my life would be like if I could fucking do anything ever.

I have not been able to have friends over for about a decade because my house is too messy for anyone to get in the door. How do you fix that? 

Well, I know how you don’t. You write “CLEAN KITCHEN” on your to-do list, and then you think, well, ok, I need more detail, that’s just silly, and you write “MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” and you’re like oh I’ll have to sweep first, and you write “SWEEP AND MOP KITCHEN FLOOR” instead, and you’re all pleased, and you spend your afternoon at work daydreaming about how clean that floor is going to be when you get home. 

And then you get home and well, you can’t actually… mostly… see the floor in that room, and so you need to take out the recycling, and then you need to gather up all the film plastic recycling too, and you get that out the door and that’s great, and then you do the dishes, and that’s as much as I’ve gotten done this weekend, I’ve done the dishes like fifteen times because every time I go to do another bit of the big “CLEAN KITCHEN” to-do item on my beautiful list, there are more dirty dishes and I can’t do anything until I get those out of the way. And I’m also trying to do Christmas shopping and I really wanted to sit and write for a moment, well I’ll get to that later, maybe tomorrow, oh it’s Sunday already, well ok I won’t do any writing this weekend, fine, but I still have to– 

Oop, weekend’s over, maybe next time?

That’s how you go four years without sweeping your kitchen floor. 

So… no, to-do lists don’t really help me much. Lists are crucial– the Christmas gifts have lists to go along with them, and I’ve written down dimensions and things, and it’s possible some of them will get done now that they’re written down. Because things that aren’t written down don’t exist, to me, so they don’t happen.

But task lists don’t really help me much overall. I’m thirty-nine years old and I’ve never actually learned how to write a list of things that are actually possible in this world.

On Monday I’ll go back to work and look sadly at my list of what I was going to do this weekend (CLEAN KITCHEN was one two items of about twelve, and another one was PUT AWAY CLOTHES which is going to involve three rooms of the house and is a huge undertaking I’ve started working on about twenty times in the last two years, to give some idea), and then I’ll sit and start a new list and daydream about what it would be like if I were the sort of bitch who could actually write a reasonable to-do list and follow it.

At this very moment in my house if I had a kind of magical summoning ability so I could pull them out of the acres of shit in here, I could probably produce a stack for you of hundreds of to-do lists I’ve written myself, and not a single one of them has more than two items crossed off on it, no matter how many items there are. And I can’t throw them out until I finish them, or the tasks I’ve conjured will cease to exist.
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