The vast majority of work product is mediocre at best. It takes an incredible amount of time and effort to raise its quality to a point where one might consider it to be ‘reasonably good’. But sometimes, you run into output that is simply superlative in its quality. A cultural factor may be at play here, for certain niches of society seem more inclined to produce such output if at all.

Consider, for example, the “Basic User Manual” of the memoir package for LaTeX typesetting, available in PDF form and linked from the package page. This supposedly “basic” manual is a whopping 625 pages long, with roughly 10 editions of the material since June 3^rd, 2001. But it isn’t the length of the manual alone that is impressive, what stands out is the degree of care that’s clearly been applied to creating the manual. At the outset, it slyly misquotes Ambrose Bierce — the definition seems fitting, but doesn’t actually exist in Bierce’s satirical work, The Devil’s Dictionary.

memoir, n. a fiction designed to flatter the subject and to impress the reader.
With apologies to Ambrose Bierce

From then on, it proceeds to explain useful terminology, but always with a sense of mirth hidden behind the curtain that’s waiting to pounce.

The point system was invented by Pierre Fournier le jeune in 1737 with a length of 0.349mm. Later in the same century François-Ambroise Didot introduced his point system with a length of 0.3759mm. This is the value still used in Europe. Much later, in 1886, the American Type Founders Association settled on 0.013837in as the standard size for the point, and the British followed in 1898. Conveniently for those who are not entirely metric in their thinking this means that six picas are approximately equal to one inch.

And here’s a brief explanation of the ms printing option, where the author clearly means business:

this tries to make the document look as though it was prepared on a typewriter. Some publishers prefer to receive poor looking submissions.

Every detail is attended to with care, and subtly reveals the richness of thought that went into it.

Another excellent specimen within this rarified space of high quality work is the manual for TikZ and PGF, a graphics typesetting system. Once again, the manual oozes quality, as it walks the reader through numerous examples of everyday usage.

One wonders why, then, is it so difficult to encounter — or create — high quality work in our day-to-day lives? Is it like the lottery — you hear about the winners all the time, despite the 1 in 292,201,338 chance that they’ve had to beat?

Source: xkcd.com by Randall Munroe. License: CC BY-NC 2.5

Today, we drove a little further out, to Longmire near Mount Rainier, to hike the Rampart Ridge Loop trail. This is another easy trail with a total length of 5.28 miles and elevation gain of 1,456 feet (if you return via the Wonderland trail as we did, instead of doubling back). The peace and quiet during the hike was absolutely worth the 2-hour drive it took us to get there. In fact, we encountered no one else during this hike except for a couple of people at the very end. I rather enjoyed this communion with nature, punctuated with conversations on random topics like speculative science.

Although, we were promised excellent views of Mount Rainier, we came across none, or perhaps we missed it behind the clouds. It’s ironic that Mount Rainier is ever present and easy to spot from Seattle and Bellevue, but much harder to find when we’re right at its foot.

The trail had a number of quaint little bridges over small streams, one of which seemed extremely rickety. The national park has some spectacular trees, and this trail is no exception.

I found some specimens of ‘Common Beargrass’ (xerophyllum tenax), ‘Devil’s Club’ (oplopanax horridus), and ‘Cascade Oregon-grape’ (berberis nervosa) along the way.

On the way back, we stopped at Narada Falls. This waterfall flows into the Paradise river, which runs parallel to the Nisqually river and eventually joins it.

The glorious Narada Falls, on the way to Paradise.

We got some coffee and soda at the Elbe Market Country Store. There are several statues of Bigfoot in front of and around the store. The light blue waters of Alder Lake by the road here was quite a sight to behold.

I’d mentioned earlier that I had abandoned (rather, left frozen) my WordPress website optimix and moved over to writing here instead. Today, I wandered back to see how things looked (much like one visits an old town that they had lived in previously). I realized that something was wrong, equations that I had typeset in LaTeX using the KaTeX plugin weren’t rendering; in fact, they were throwing an ugly error. I looked further into my WordPress admin page to discover that auto-updates were unavailable for the plugin. Then I headed over to the plugin page on the WordPress website, to learn that the plugin had been “closed” (whatever that meant) as of July 9^th, 2024, because of some “Guideline Violation”. What the heck!?

Fortunately, it turned that the already-installed plugin was actually working just fine, all I had to do was unblock JavaScript in my browser (which I’d turned off by default via NoScript and forgotten about). For now, though I don’t get further updates for the plugin, it continues to function correctly.

I am still curious to know what that supposed “Guideline Violation” is.

I’ve been mulling over an idea for Getting Stuff Done™ that I think could be highly effective, but I haven’t had a chance to prove it out yet, so here goes. The aim is to define a 100-day plan for any objective that you want to accomplish. For some time now, I’ve been wanting to build a structured text editor, so I’ll use it as an exemplar of a 100-day plan.

tl;dr Define an objective, then break it down recursively into a linear sequence of smaller items; on every day that you can prioritize the objective, pick the next item and make it happen. If it turns out that the item is too large to complete in a day, break it down into smaller items. Don’t worry about gaps and distractions as long as you’re able to spend time towards your objective at least twice a week. There is no end date…but you will likely get done sometime within 6-12 months.

Background

The concept of a 100-day plan comes from two existing and popular tools for planning and execution. The first is conventional goal-setting, where you establish a time-bound target state that you wish to achieve. A goal has a what, when and a why clearly spelt out, together with exit criteria. The second is the concept of a “90-day plan”, where you organize a team to work towards goals that complete within a 90-day horizon (in business days). We adopt these ideas with a twist: in a 100-day plan, we don’t track any dates; instead, we are opportunistic about finding time to work on the things we want, recognizing that there may be other potential priorities at home and work taking precedence.

Details

A 100-day plan begins with you carefully thinking through what you want and writing it down as the “objective”. There is emphasis here on the words “you” and “want”. Don’t work on something that somebody else wants, or tasks you can’t articulate the value of (to yourself).

Objective: Build an interactive application for creating, modifying, viewing, and querying syntax trees through text-editing and command-execution interfaces, that supports arbitrary user-defined grammars. So what: Operating on syntax trees is an intuitive and powerful way of developing and maintaining software, and I want to advance the state-of-the-art of tooling on this front.

Notice the two-phase expression of the objective in terms of both “what” and “so what”. The latter is an important part of any goal expression, tying this goal to a higher level purpose that has been established a priori. It keeps your work grounded and minimizes “yak shaving”.

“Yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.”

Illustration by David Revoy. The character Pepper is depicted literally shaving a yak. License: CC BY 4.0

Notice that the objective stated above has no target date. This is a distinguishing characteristic of a 100-day plan — you don’t worry about when it is going to get done; the journey matters more than the destination. Instead, you mark off each of the days that you’ve made substantive progress towards your objective. You celebrate your successes and ignore your failures, which is as life should be.

In the case of my project, I can break it down into the following items:

Users can launch the command-line application and use it to:

• Create, modify, view, query files using built-in or user-defined grammars.
• Define their own grammar.
• Define their own queries.
• Query files using a built-in grammar.
• Create and modify files using a built-in grammar.
• View files using a built-in grammar.
• Parse the buffer and get reports of syntax errors.
• Query arbitrary text files with built-in queries.
• Save files to the filesystem.
• Create and modify arbitrary text files.
• View arbitrary text files.
• Load files from the filesystem.

I think this is a good list of items to begin with, though I expect to break them down further as I learn more. Notice that I’ve worked backwards (from top to bottom) to break things down. So the next step is to start from the items at the bottom and complete them one by one. My hope is that each item is small enough that I can complete it in a day and tag the item with the date of completion, otherwise, break it down further.

I was heavily inspired by Your Life in Weeks for the idea of a 100-day plan — a worthy next step would be to turn it into an analogous visual tool.

I wrote this poem circa 2012, about 13 years ago. I think Try is about reconciling the messiness of real life with the romantic idealism of one’s inner child. You might draw parallels between this poem and Richard Linklater’s trilogy of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight.

• Come, my darling sit with me,
• Where else would you want to be?
• It breaks my heart that I made you cry,
• But despite it all you know I try.

• You’ve been here in this room all day,
• All this time, just a touch away —
• But there is a wall between us now
• I’d break it down if I only knew how.

• Perhaps that teardrop left a trace
• As it slid down silent upon your face,
• A moment’s hurt, an agonized look —
• What price to give back what I took?

• My heart stood still as I saw your pain,
• Will anything ever be the same again?
• Maybe tomorrow will wash this clear,
• Maybe we don’t have to come back here?