Motivation is such a subjective thing. Like most people, I like to work on things that are at least a little challenging intellectually, but sometimes, just seeing the end result and knowing that I did it is reward enough to make the tedium bearable. A few years back, I did a bunch of very tedious work that synchronized video of conference speakers with their slide presentations NM INBRE. The idea was to create a Flash presentation that showed the video of the speaker, but displayed static images (taken from the PPT presentation) representing the auditorium's screen. This saved a lot of bandwidth compared to streaming a composite video of both the speaker and the actual screen, and in the 2006 timeframe, really was necessary.
So, I had “capture” video from tape from two sources (speaker and screen); scrub through the two resulting videos, recording slide translation timings; export and trim images for each slide; compress video into appropriate formats; import images and video into Flash, and enter the timings that I recorded; etc etc. All that multiplied by 10 or more speakers, it took me over a month to complete. Kind of like mowing your lawn with a pair of fingernail clippers. I automated as much as I could, but given the number of tools that I had to deal with, I really didn’t have time to automate very much. So, I just became a robot for a month or so. But the end result was very nice for the time, and despite lack of intellectual challenges, was one of my proudest accomplishments that I was able to make myself stick to it. In fact, I even did the same robot work again the next year. I’ve always been meaning to get to automating that type of work... On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 2:19 PM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote: > "Interesting vs. boring is orthogonal. So, there's interesting-hard and > boring-hard. I'll accept money for either type of work, though I much > prefer interesting-hard ... obviously." > > How about engaging, imaginative, educational, or surprising work vs. > detail work. Doing detail work may be delayed gratification or it can no > purpose other than to respond to extrinsic motivation. Remove the > extrinsic motivation (money), and it is boring and depressing. > > Ok, if one is tasked with making an app to print checks, it could be > educational to learn how to put widgets on a screen or to do page layout. > What that discovery process is over, either another naïve person is needed > or extrinsic motivation. > > Marcus > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >
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