My brother-in-law, jeff_duntemann posted here on why he believes idealism is a bad thing. I don't know if I exactly agree or disagree. I think that some idealism is a good thing and -- like most things! -- an excess of idealism is what's going to get you in trouble.

Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Well, yeah. If you spend all of your time searching for the perfect solution to a problem, you'll discard a lot of perfectly good, but perfectly imperfect solutions. As a result, you may never get anywhere. (I'm anticipating a problem of this sort at work shortly. We'll see how that develops -- or doesn't, as the case may be.)

The trick, in my opinion, is that you need to select your choices from the feasible set. Now, the feasible set isn't a fixed entity. It may get larger or smaller, sometimes due to luck, sometimes due to the choices that we make ourselves. Jeff mentions his college friend who wasn't interested in any woman who didn't look like a Playboy centerfold. That's not a choice that I'd make, nor does it appear to have been in his feasible set. But maybe it could have been, if he'd done the right things and made the right choices and had the right set of luck. We might assume that he'd improve his chances if he improved his own appearance, or perhaps if he made a lot of money, or even went into politics, just to pick some possible examples. Any of those things is a lot of work.

If you don't do the work, you don't improve the choices that are in your feasible set. You can even watch them get more constrained by the choices that you've already made.

Being lucky doesn't hurt. I'm 26 years now at a job that I got by being in the right place at the right time. And that job's resulted in a lot of things landing in my feasible set of choices.

Like my two pretty little daughters. :)

daisy_knotwise and I might have said, "It looks like no kids." Ideally, we would have been able to have children without going through all the hoops that we went through. But ideal wasn't what we got.

We got feasible. And feasible has turned out to be pretty darned good.

Look at your feasible set. And make your choices.

At FilkOntario weekend before last, I did a workshop on Forward Engineering a song, the objective of which was to provide some techniques that are useful when you're trying to construct a song. It struck me that the song that I just wrote -- Just Play -- is a pretty good example of applying some of these techniques, so I figured I'd write it up here for anyone who's interested.
( Cut tagged for length... )

I actually generally enjoy the antics of the Interfilk Wench Corps, as they're quite complementary to the antics of the Interfilk Auctioneer Corps, and help in the goal of having a good time and raising a good amount of money for Interfilk. That said, when things get out of control, two things happen. First, we have a danger of descending into something that's possibly a bit more raunchy than is actually wise. Second, we make the auction take a very long time. Given that I know that the Interfilk Auction Organizers Brigade is really trying to keep it down to an hour, that latter point is also something to consider.

So here's a modest attempt at codifying the Pirate Code (really more a set of guidelines) for how to handle an Interfilk auction (or any auction) so that it runs smoothly:
( All that jazz... )
Corrections and additions are welcome!

alicebentley notes in this post that Greg Ketter won't be in this year's Capricon Dealers' Room. (daisy_knotwise is not running the Capricon Dealers' Room this year and was not involved in this decision and did make sure that the dealers who had been in the room or on last year's mailing list got convention info.) I'm of the opinion that omitting Greg from a dealers' room is a mistake, because he works hard to bring a selection of books that are orthogonal to those that other book dealers bring, so by leaving him out you decrease the degree of diversity in the room.

Having gotten that out of the way and -- as a dealer and conrunner of long standing along with Gretchen -- I thought I'd try writing my thoughts about what the priorities of a dealers' room at an SF convention should be.
( Pontificating inside... )