rare pattern in a world of tech, design, Drupal & such

I now own two recumbent bicycles: a HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte, which is short, and a Rans Stratus XP, which is quite long indeed.

I got the Street Machine last weekend, purchased at my "local" recumbent bicycle shop that's 50 or so miles away in Fort Collins: Spring Creek Recumbents.

While recumbent bicycles are not exactly unknown or unseen in the bicycling mecca of Boulder, there isn't a single bike shop that sells recumbents. I don't know why.

In fact, Spring Creek seems to be the only serious recumbent bike shop anywhere in Colorado. I'm just glad they're in relatively easy driving range.

They're also very knowledgeable and friendly. They have dozens of models of recumbents and even quite a few trikes. And they have quite a few that you can rent by the hour, so you can try some of the models out for extended periods before making any buying decisions.

Anyway, twice before this spring I went up to Fort Collins to test ride some of the various SWB recumbents they had. I confess I was lusting in my heart for a SWB bike.

Don't get me wrong. I love my Rans Stratus XP. I've ridden quite a few miles on that bike, considering that it's been largely winter since I bought it. But I wanted something shorter. Lighter. Easier to maneuver when not riding (e.g., when parking it at the office).

So now that I've done a bit of riding on the Street Machine (which yes is a pretty dorky name – what you may or may not expect from a German company), I can say that it is definitely quite different from the Rans.

No surprises there. For example, the riding position on the Street Machine is a bit more compressed than on the Rans, which has me working different muscles, which I figure is a good thing. The Rans is really more like sitting in an easy chair with pedals. The Street Machine is much more of a sport machine.

What did surprise me was that the biggest adjustment for me would not be the higher bottom bracket, which has me pedaling much higher off the ground, or the under-the-seat steering (more on that below), but rather the short wheelbase with the small front wheel.

Every time I hit a deep dip, such as the rain gutters that cross the street in a nearby neighborhood, I get this feeling that I might actually endo on this thing!

The feeling is exacerbated by the front fork shock absorbers, which bear the brunt of the shock but leave the front end of the bike dipping a bit further than I'm so far comfortable with. I trust the engineering, so I figure I just need to get a bit more accustomed to this feeling, but it was something of a surprise.

One feature I love, though, is the under-the-seat steering. This tends to bring the front wheel back up under the rider a bit more than more "conventional" SWB bents like the Bacchetta Giro, but I liked being able to relax my arms while steering.

And, I confess, the pivot joint at the head stem of the handlebars typical in the SWB made me very uncomfortable.

Spring Creek had configured the bike with the mesh seat, which appealed to me as well.

The final decider for me on the HP Velotechnik vs. the Bacchetta Giro, which was my other leader, was the full suspension. It really makes a difference on the regular bumps and seams you get on streets and bike paths. I'll just have to get used to the feeling on the bigger dips ... and avoid them when I can.

All in all, the HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte is a wonderful ride. Doing some Googling for this post, I found Bentguy's post on his own, where he says:

I ride an HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte... (ooooh, sounds cool). It is cool. It's a short wheel base recumbent with full suspension and rides like a lazyboy on rockets. It's as fast as a bike that is this comfortable can be. And it's a mule in that it can carry a ton of crap... and I do.

I'm going to be using the Street Machine as a commuter bike, and the Rans Stratus XP for longer rides. At least that's what I've been thinking. But the HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte is billed as the ultimate touring bike, so maybe I'll be changing my mind in the coming months.

Twitter

There's been much a-Twitter about the alarm surrounding the Swine Flu. People griping that SARS, Ebola, bird flu, [fill in the blank] didn't wind up being much, so why get worked up now? Everybody's over-reacting, they say.

I think the cynical response is overly-cynical and perhaps a bit to happy to declare "boy who cried wolf" and laugh or sneer.

Reality check:

Highly contagious? Check!

Fatal to healthy adults? Check!

No vaccine in sight before fall? Check!

Spreading quickly? Check!

This is a little thing that is very bad and could get very big very quickly. I don't see the alarm as overblown (though Egypt's destruction of all the pigs seems a bit ridiculous). We're an interconnected world now.

Shutting down the schools seems to be an obvious step. This is how you try to stop pandemic: By eliminating the mass-infection opportunities that we have.

If nothing comes of the swine flu, I think it could in part point to why such aggressive measures were indicated. It's if it gets really bad when we can say shutting the schools was perhaps too little too late.

So count me as skeptical of the proud, cynical skepticism out there. Just because you've run stop signs without consequences doesn't mean you want to continue doing it blithely.

/soapbox

Googlesemantic webYahoo

First, some context

Henry Porter, an opinionator granted a regular podium by the Guardian, has written a bit of a rant claiming that we're victims of Google, a "monopoly."

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

The article is full of these kinds of claims, all largely based on what seems to be either a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Web, or a lack of understanding of the word "monopoly."

The core of Porter's ignorance, willful or not, is revealed in this statement:

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is true only if you think that things exist on their own, and that their relationships to you, their relationships to each other, do not exist, or are not worth looking at, let alone making available for use -- let alone making relevant to our day-to-day lives.

Google provides a means of finding relevance in that sea of stuff out there on the Web. It's like a mega-index of the "book" of the Web. That relevance was largely hidden from us before search engines. To find relevance, one had to ask friends, browse libraries, analyze the Dewey Decimal System, dig up Yellow Pages, rummage through desk drawers to find that one tidbit of information you want right now.

That is hardly "nothing."

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter."

Thomas Jefferson was also against a strong judiciary, which in hindsight sounds pretty foolish, imho. But Jefferson aside, there's no indication that what newspapers are in function -- delivery systems for filtered information -- is not going anywhere. It's just the newspaper industry, and the infrastructure and market that enabled the paper to be printed, that is going away. News is still happening. It's just that how we're getting it is changing.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

I don't like how US-owned search engine companies are going along with the Chinese Government's restrictions on the Internet, either, but let's be clear: It's the Chinese government that is censoring the Internet. Google is going along with it, along with much of the rest of the American economy, let's face it. This is about corporate collaboration with government constraints on what we consider "American values," and not about a Google monopoly or how Google is anything but pretty darned typical these days.

Now in many ways Porter is like many other people who have enjoyed the privilege of being given a special podium from which to pontificate and opinionate, who is upset that the market is shifting such that people who haven't been given such privilege are able to not only publish, but actually find an audience for what they publish.

How dare they? "Those bloggers!" is the cry we've heard over and over, often while pointing to the most outrageous or inane examples as cases-in-point -- ignoring that the vast majority of people "in print" also tend to produce an abundance of useless, inane, erroneous, misinformed information as well.

Until search engines, the only filtering agent people had was the editorial board of the local paper or the book publisher or the magazine. Now our filtering agent reaches beyond those sources -- although those sources, when right, get the most relevance -- to include others, including people who never went to journalism school, and never were given a paycheck by a media conglomerate. Oh the humanity!

So now Google is the dominant search engine, and thus potentially is a huge influencer in what sources we can find to be relevant to our needs, wants, desires ... to our lives. Such power Google has!

But is Google a search engine monopoly? Really?

Remember in the '90s? What was the dominant search engine then? Yahoo. Microsoft, with all its market dominance on the desktop, really was having trouble competing.

Google pushed Yahoo aside. How? By providing better search results. You searched Yahoo and got some good results and lots of spam and pr0n. You searched Google and got better results.

Relevance was the ticket to Google's successful insurgence. And relevance is why Google still dominates.

Relevance is a commodity. Nobody owns it. Nobody controls it. Relevance is not even a scarce commodity. There's always more relevance. Better relevance.

Want to defeat Google? Build a tool that gives better results. In other words, be more relevant than Google.

Yes, Google has a magnificent physical infrastructure worth a crapload of money.

But even in these hard economic times, there are plenty of craploads of money out there to build a new tool to defeat Google. It wouldn't even take a huge crapload of money, as craploads of money go, since server infrastructure costs are going down.

No, the scarcity is in the innovation. The imagination. The engineering to guide what that crapload of money would build.

Microsoft has been trying and failing, and nobody can accuse Microsoft of being short on craploads of money.

It's the relevance that Google has, and it has it only ephemerally. All it will take is a tool with more relevance, backed by a relatively small crapload of money, to whittle at Google's market dominance, or even knock it off of your default home page. Maybe it will be a new search engine. Or a new social media paradigm. Or something we haven't even imagined yet.

All we know is that we don't know what it's going to be like just a few years from now. Blaming Google for that is like blaming the weather vane for this afternoon's rain shower.

Hat tip to Dave Winer and others for Tweeting the Guardian link.

TwimailerTwitter

Twimailer is a nifty service. When someone follows you on Twitter, Twimailer sends you an email that has more info than what Twitter sends you, including how many people are following that person, and their recent tweets -- all helpful for you to decide if you might be interested in following that person.

However, Twimailer says that to use their service, you have to change your email in your Twitter account to point to them. As many have pointed out, even if you trust Twimailer, it's not really a secure practice. After all, password resets go to the email address of record.

Chris Messina has posted a way to use Twimailer securely using GMail. If you use Gmail, check out Chris' post.

However, if you use a desktop application for your email, and use an email service aside from Gmail, you still can use Twimailer securely. I'm going to use Mail.app as the example here, but this can be done in just about any desktop mail app -- any that can do "redirect" on a message from filters or rules.

1. The first part is the same: Sign up for Twimailer, as Chris explains:
   

   To get started, they just need an email address to send your notifications to. Twimailer will assign you a unique email address like twitter1234567@twimailer.com. Set this aside (copy it to TextEdit or something).

   Don't follow their instructions in their howto video.

2. Next, go to your email program and find an email message from Twitter with the subject line saying that someone "is now following you on Twitter!". In Mail.app, open up Preferences and select Rules. Click on "Add Rule".
3. In the window that pops up, filter so that any message that "Contains" in the "From" field something like twitter-follow-youremailaddress=example.com@postmaster.twitter.com is where the rule is enabled. (The "youremailaddress=example.com" snippet is how Twitter references your email address at youremailaddress@example.com.)
4. In the lower area, "Perform the following actions:", change the action to "Redirect Message" to the email address Twimailer gave you. You might also have the Rules system stop processing that message. In the end, your rule might look something like this:
   
5. Optionally you could have the original Twitter email deleted or moved to another folder.

That's it, that's all. The workflow may be different in different email apps, but the redirect function is the key.

As Chris says:

It seems to me that this kind of feature improvement is something that Twitter should really do itself, but of course it’s great to see someone from the community pitch in and add incremental value until Twitter gets around to it.

At the same time, putting Twimailer in between you and Twitter’s password recovery mechanism seems unnecessarily dangerous (i.e. Twimailer could go down, get hacked, sold or might be simply be implemented insecurely (consider Spotify’s recent security breach)). I actually have no insight into these things about Twimailer, but I’d rather not take any unnecessary chances.

I welcome comments about how this works for you in Mail.app or in other mail programs.

Twitter

Yesterday, Twitter turned three. A week before was my two-year Twitterversary. So that pretty much made me a late early adopter. And while I'm really enjoying Twitter now, back then I didn't get it. Not yet. Pretty much not at all.

I admit, these past few years I've pretty much rushed to sign up for any and every new online social or productivity service that sounded interesting. They all had strangely spelled (or simply strange) names like Flickr and del.icio.us and furl and Vox and Joost and Plurk. And those are the ones I remember, maybe even still use.

But pretty much most of them never stuck. It was just too hard to work them into my life. Too weird. Too difficult to use. And many I never tried out at all. Too uninteresting or too ... creepy, some of them.

When I signed up for Twitter, it was already something of a buzz in tech circles. I had looked at it for many months but never got around to actually signing up. It never really clicked in my head that it would be interesting. And after I did finally sign up, I found it alternatingly boring, distracting and challenging to work into my life. While I searched for people tweeting interesting things and followed them, I avoided anybody too prolific. At that point, following only people who posted a tweet an hour was about the max I could handle. A tweet or two a day was more like it. Otherwise I couldn't keep up.

In trying to make Twitter work for me, I did not follow people tweeting boring things, like "Drinking coffee" or "Waiting in line at the grocery store." (I still don't find that banality interesting. Who cares?) I was interested in people tweeting about interesting things – news, blog posts, events, or even just how they felt about that morning coffee or waiting in line at that moment.

Then something changed.

At some point, I crossed a threshold – a breakthrough point where I was no longer trying to track and read every single tweet of those I was following, and now getting a more impressionistic gestalt of the aggregate twittering. And I think that's the real trick about Twitter. You're a bird in a tree with thousands of birds around you, all tweeting. The tweets that interest you catch your attention. You may miss things, but the big stuff gets retweeted. And the more people you follow, the more sources that might toss out something interesting.

It's a liberating moment, when you reach this point in Twitter. You're freed from the need to track everything. What you catch you catch, and what you miss you miss (and likely would have missed anyway, if you weren't twittering at all).

It took a while, but Twitter eventually grew to take a place in my daily life that did not even exist before. There is no clear real-life (as in 3D, face-to-face) analogue. Twittering is communication in a way totally enabled by the technology, the applications. We simply could not be connecting transiently, ephemerally with so many people at the same time without being alone in a crowded room.

Now I'm using Twitter more and more, and while my Twittersphere has grown I've found Twitter to be ever more interesting and relevant to my life. But I was a late adopter, even after adopting, and stumbled quite a bit along the way. It can be a bit unnerving at times, especially on those occasions when someone unfollows me.

So if you're Twittering but not quite getting it, maybe you should try just diving in. Follow a lot of people. Browse. Engage.
And Tweet your passion.

And when you're too busy, don't worry about it. Twitter will be there when you're ready.

Here are some women you might want to follow:

• @kathysierra
• @blogdiva
• @laurennroth
• @agahran
• @thatwoman
• @webchick
• @add1sun
• @stacedout
• @pingkate
• @vdebolt
• @MichelleCox
• @AmyStephen
• @missrogue
• @gwenbell
• @mollydotcom
• @tresha
• @lauriewrites
• @LizaK
• @emmajanedotnet
• @leisa
• @lizriz
• @lizhenry
• @debroby
• @kanter
• @CaliLewis
• @zadi

Cross-posted from BlogHer.

Battlestar Galactica

Warning: Spoilers!

If you've been like me, wondering where the hell Battlestar Galactica has been going, the return of the show this weekend has (will) probably answer(ed), and with some excitement and a few huge revelations.

Yes, I'm going to talk about them here. That's why the spoiler warning above.

Revelation 1:

The planet (presumably Earth, though we have seen no real objective proof -- no half-buried Statue of Liberty....

..."Earth" was nuked some 2,000 years ago.

Personally, I think the show would have been better served if they had left us on the cliffhanger last year just arriving at Earth. Then there would have been a lot of anticipation.

--Then, with this revelation of the nuked planet, we would have been rocked and in more emotional tune with the characters (which turns out to be very important with the suicide-themed plot points in the episode).

Still, this starts to fill in the metastory about what happened to put into motion the events we've been following in this series.

Revelation 2:

They find Cylon Centurions.

But they aren't any model known by any of the Cylons we know. Similar, but different.

That's huge in itself, but then we learn....

Revelation 3:

All of the human remains they find all over the planet are in fact not human: they are Cylon.

Whoa!

I'm still trying to digest just what that might mean. How are Cylons and humans different? (That's been a running question throughout the show.) Are the current seven Cylons of the Cylon civilization (if you could call it that) really from this "Earth" and not developed by the Colonial Cylons themselves?

How does this fit with the first Colony-Cylon war, when young Adama found the proto-hybrid project?

Revelation 4:

The other Four Cylons are from this "Earth".

Chief flashes back to before. He's walking through a kind of farmers' market when there's a bright flash – a nuke. As the blast wave hits, we flash back to present. Chief is rocked. On the wall next to him is a charred silhouette (which will resonate with any dedicated Ray Bradbury fans): his own remains.

They ask the question themselves: How did they die 2,000 years ago and find themselves living light-years away in the Colonies? Why don't they remember? What does this mean?

But this isn't even the topper.

Revelation 5:

Starbuck finds her crashed Viper ... with her charred corpse. Dog tags seem to confirm it's her.

And it totally freaks out Leoben, who throughout the series has seemed pretty un-freak-out-able. Why does Leoben run away?

It was a bit too easy how Starbuck ends up not telling Apollo what happened. It might have worked had the series left us hanging with hope in Earth's orbit, and then kicked off this half-season with the then-would-be-truly-shocking revelation that Earth was a charred wasteland. Then Duella's suicide and Adama's near-attempt would fit; we would feel the acute disappointment along with the characters.

But as it is, we had months to digest the wasted Earth, and that left us fairly removed emotionally from that shock.

But overall this episode was jam-packed with revelations. And it left us with even more questions.

Only a handful of episodes left. I eagerly await them.

iPhoneOmniFocus

Task management can be a challenge if you have a lot of stuff going on. "Urgent" things are always distracting you: the phone rings, colleagues interrupt you, a client asks for help, emails, newsletters, snail mail, IMs, Tweets....

You could be buzzing like a bee, getting a whole lot of things done, but not getting done the right things.

I would love to be using a Franklin-Covey Planner program on my Mac, but they don't make one for Mac. So the choices are:

1. Run the Franklin-Covey Planner on Wine or Windows using Parallels;
2. Run the newer Franklin-Covey software on Windows using Parallels;
3. Use the kludgey online version;
4. Use the Franklin-Covey system on paper; or
5. Adapt an existing Mac-friendly app for task management, with workflows to make it as close as possible to Franklin-Covey.

I've tried the first four, and after total fail with each, I'm now going with the last option.

And I think I found something with OmniFocus.

OmniFocus and Getting Things Done

I've been trying out OmniFocus off and on since the OmniGroup was doing private alphas. They have come a long long way. The app is much much improved now. They've really nailed some usability shine.

But I confess that the main reason I went back to OmniFocus (after working with Things for a few months) was that there's an OmniFocus iPhone app that syncs with the desktop versions over MobileMe. (So far, Things has syncing across wireless, but not via MobileMe.) And the iPhone app itself is quite robust, including geotagged contexts (which is helpful when out and about running errands).

That said, I'm not a GTD acolyte. Dogmatists can bark at the urgent and the easy. I don't have the time, and need to focus on the important.

OmniFocus and Franklin-Covey

The Franklin-Covey method involves a daily review of the tasks to be done. Each item is given an A, B or C, or left in a long-term "sometime" pile.

A

Must be done today.

B

Should be done today.

C

Could be done today.

In OmniFocus, I use the flag feature to mark the A items.

Context isn't everything (but it sure helps)

One of the wonderful things about OmniFocus is the Context feature. You can sort your tasks by context -- where you are, what program you're using, etc. At first I had a hard time figuring out context, but now I've gotten the hang of it.

What Franklin has that GTD doesn't

The needs are not covered.

1. To live.
2. To love and be loved.
3. To feel important.
4. Variety.

Governing values are not covered.

Long-term objectives are not covered.

Those things are more homeworky than specifically task-related, but you are supposed to work those things as reference points to make your prioritization process easier.

Speaking of prioritizatin.... If you have too many things to do? There is no prioritization, no automatic escalation. You have your top things, flagged, and the rest. Getting out of reactive mode and into proactive mode seems to be pretty much outside of the GTD system. You're on your own there.

In OmniFocus, I use the color coding for what's due in the next 24 hours and what is now past due to sort of have an upcoming lower priority list.

It's not perfect, but it's something ... a kludge to make what otherwise is a pretty cool and useful (by being available by all my Macs and my iPhone) app.

For some sage advice on getting over last year, check out paulag01's BlogHer post.

Blu-ray

I never had the opportunity to see this film in a theatre, and the existing video versions were pretty murky when it came to the shadowy dark scenes. This movie is very unusual and requires some patience to settle into its pacing, but once you do, you're in for a ride. But with those murky scenes before, you'd get kicked right out of the story and wonder what the heck was going on.

No longer. This Blu-ray transfer is excellent. My only complaint is that the color saturation seems a bit washed out. Some of the stills in the extra features have the saturation you'd expect. But this is a minor quibble. Maybe David Bowie's orange hair would get all blown out in full saturation.

That brings me to David Bowie, who is really quite wonderful in the film. Enigmatic, androgynous yet masculine, and very other-worldly. If you're not old enough to remember Bowie, he was a star back then, and still pretty fresh off of startling the media world with his oddity. He had some very big hits, and yet you really couldn't quite peg what kind of music he was making. It was truly original.

This was his film acting debut, and he's really good! Very compelling, and totally convincing. You never have what you might expect, a cringe moment where see the rock star instead of the character.

Maybe it helps that his character is totally bizarre anyway. But he's right there in character, in the reality of the moment always.

This Blu-ray is worth getting, most definitely.

Resolution time. It's the occasion to institute changes. Or at least resolve to change. It doesn't always work out, does it? The diet gets dropped. The fingernails get bitten. The cigarettes get smoked. The exercise gets blown off. And that's that. Right?

Maybe not. If you've ever had trouble shaking an addiction or behavior that ends up not serving your needs, you might find some hope (and results) in this analysis of addictive behavior, courtesy of Hyrum Smith, founder and creator of the Franklin planning system.

This post isn't about planning or time management. It's about the five-step cycle that drives our behavior.

I know I know, you probably believe this is just a bunch of hokum. (We'll get to beliefs and how they affect behavior in a minute.) But I'm not prescribing anything here. This is just a look at how behavior happens. I think it's empowering.

(These notes are drawn from a Franklin videotape called "Gaining Control." As far as I can tell, it's long out of print. And since then, the Franklin Institute became Franklin-Covey, and Hyrum Smith has gone on to other things. If you find this interesting, there are some links at the bottom of this post to some tape and book resources where you can learn much more on this.)

"The Reality Model"

According to this analysis, there are five steps to human behavior. Here's the breakdown.

1. Human Needs

We each have four basic human needs.

1. To live.
2. To love and be loved.
3. To feel important.
4. Variety.

If we are lacking any one or more of these needs, we may end up trying to fill them in.

File this away. We'll get back to it.

2. Belief Window

We all have beliefs, principles, convictions that determine how we interpret the world.

In the tape, Hyrum uses an example, "Men are better than women." Another might be, "My self-worth is dependent upon never losing an argument."

3. Rules:

These are "If...then..." statements, using the principles in the Belief Window has the premise.

Following on Hyrum's example: "If I get in an argument, then I must win."

4. Behavior Patterns:

These are the actions that result from the Rules. Thus, in the example case, "I" can never back down in an argument.

5. Results:

Here's the question: Will the results meet my needs over time?

If "I" never back down in an argument, never compromise, never acknowledge someone else's point, then is that making my life better?

Natural Law:

Hyrum Smith then makes these interesting points:

1 - If the results of your behavior do not meet your needs, then you have an incorrect principle on your belief window.

Your actions are the results of your principles on your Belief Window.

2 - Results take time to measure.

Sometimes it takes years. Look at smoking. Or heavy drinking.

3 - Growth is the process of changing principles on your belief window.

You can't change the behavior if the principles causing that behavior are not addressed. If you believe, "I can't stick with exercise programs," then you can try starting a workout regimen but you probably won't have much success sticking with it. If you believe, "Older women cannot be attractive," and you feel old, then dressing up will feel like an exercise in despair.

4 - Addictive behavior is the result of deep and unmet needs.

This is the one where I think Hyrum really hit on something. We haven't talked about those Human Needs since they were listed. But this is where they come into play. When one of you needs is not being met, all your energy goes to filling that need. And if you have a principle on your belief window that is not serving your long-term interests, then odds are good that it's a result of an unmet need.

"I'm unlovable" could lead to a lot of self-destructive behavior. "I'm ugly," "When people get to know me, they won't like me," "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself".... All of these are principles that could be resulting from unmet needs. And thus the behavior resulting from those principles will not change unless the principles in the Belief Window change.

How to translate New Year's Resolutions into actions

So drawing from the behavior loops identified above, here's how to change:

1 - Identify the behavior.

2 - Identify possible principles driving the behavior.

3 - Predict future behavior based upon those principles.

4 - Identify alternative principles.

5 - Predict future behavior based upon new principle(s).

I would add this: Make sure your basic human needs – survival, to love and be loved, to feel important, and variety – are being met. Because that's the foundation of those principles.

This doesn't mean it's easy.

Just identifying the principles can be tough. Figuring out how to change them? That is more work than you can do in one afternoon. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes it takes one day at a time.

One of the principles on my belief window is that if I understand something, I can change it. I think it's true. And now that I've blogged it (which helps me feel important and gives me an avenue to share a little love), I'm going to start putting this reality model to work in my life.

Resources

Hyrum Smith goes into all this much more. This blog post is just a thumbnail. Perhaps the closest available items where Hyrum covers this are:

Check out the book on Google.

DVD

Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki (Japanese title)

*** mild spoilers ***

He's not ready with the witty verbal quips – just the opposite, actually – but Detective Azuma is otherwise not all that unlike Dirty Harry. He slaps teenage punks around, would rather beat up than arrest drug dealers, and doesn't hesitate to run down a cop killer.

The plot eventually becomes about Azuma's investigation of a drug syndicate and how it's controlling more than it seems. But I have to warn Dirty Harry fans: This is no Magnum Force. In some ways, the Dirty Harry films are fairy tales compared with this movie. They are also much more sharp and focused in the western cinematic tradition. Violent Cop is very Japanese in understatedness of plot.

For those who like to see other cities, other cultures, like I do, there are lots of scenes on the streets of what might be Kyoto. (Filming location info is not currently found on Wikipedia or IMDB.) Much of the story takes place during the daytime, so there's much to see. (City streets at night could be almost anywhere.)

Interestingly, the movie was originally conceived as a comedy. IMDB:

The original script was a comedy. Kitano was then very concerned about the audience recognizing his acting skills and he didn't feel that a comedy would allow him to act nor allow the audience to abstract from his comic TV personality. So he rewrote the script, removed all comedy and turned it into a drama.

One wonders what elements of the final film could have been comedic in another context.