Category: ramble

New Year’s Eve

First an apology. To whom, I’m not sure. I turned off commenting on all the posts on this blog. I got tired of moderating spam comments. And, the fact of the matter is, I have never gotten anything but spam comments. So, I guess I’m apologizing to the non-existent group of non-spam commenters to this blog. That’s a weird concept.

Anyway, it’s New Year’s Eve today. I’m almost over the virus that has consumed the majority of the winter break. I have gotten next to nothing I planned to do over break done. I’ve spent the time with folks I love, feeling pretty bad. But I am hereby putting this behind me and leaving it in 2006!

Some of the neat things that happened this week:

  • Pam won me a BOEbot for approximately half price on ebay!
  • We found a Javelin Stamp Starter Kit on ebay. We’re still waiting to see if it will go for a price I can afford.
  • I got Kurt his Christmas present from me and Pam, a cell phone. He and Erin can stay in touch easier now.
  • I figured out which video camera I was going to buy in a couple of weeks. The Canon Elura 100 Digital Camcorder.
  • I figured out which digital camera I’m going to get for Erin (about the same time). The Nikon Coolpix S10.
  • I found a copy of Roger Zelazny’s The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles, 1-10 (Chronicles of Amber) which allows me to read the second half of the story! Great story by the way.
  • I subscribed to a bunch more channels on YouTube (65 at the time I write this).
  • I finally relaxed (2 days before I have to go back to the tension inducing grind but at least I did relax).

Enough for now. Happy New Year everybody!

Procrastinate, Procrastinate, Procrastinate!

It seems that I mostly write blog posts when I’m avoiding doing something else. Dave Allen, the Getting Things Done guy says that procrastination is okay as long as you have a good list of other worth while things you need to do while you’re procrastinating. I don’t know if blogging counts as worth while. It does hone my writing skills.

I think sometimes my procrastination is not due to dreading doing something but rather a subconscious recognition that I’m not through thinking about whatever it is I’m procrastinating about. This sometimes makes meeting deadlines difficult.

Observations on Writing

After all these years I’m finally learning how to write. Or maybe it’s just that I finally have something to write about. I’ve never been afraid of writing per se but I have suffered from my share of writers block when faced with a blank page and a deadline.

As far as my personal writing projects go, I’ve often written about writing, probably because that was what I was thinking about when I sat down to write. There is a kind of transparency that one strives for when writing. You want what you are thinking to flow from your mind to the page without being conscious of how it got there. I am a touch typist so the words flow quite freely from my mind to the computer. Also, when I am writing on a computer I am less likely to try to censor the stream of thought before I get it “on paper”.

When writing with a pen, I tend to think more but I am hesitant to just get something down because rewriting is such a pain. I was one of those people that tried desperately to make my first draft do double duty as my final draft when I wrote papers in high school. I never had to write papers in college. That was probably a good thing from the standpoint of keeping my grade point average up but a bad thing from the standpoint of getting practice writing.

I finally understand what makes a good sentence, not that I pay enough attention to that while I’m writing. I should probably read Strunk and White again to reinforce the criteria for good writing. I understand how to divide your piece into paragraphs. I’m told that my writing is quite readable. I guess practice is still the prescription for improving. As I said in a prior post, that’s a major reason that I keep this blog.

Posting for posting’s sake

Here I am, avoiding work because it is so depressing. Waiting for my copy of Getting Things Done to come in so that I can make an informed attempt at getting organized. My car is officially on its Very Last Legs so I am desparately looking for another one (in better shape than this one) that I can afford. I hate buying cars, shopping for clothes, and waiting on anything.

I usually do a pretty good job of finding something constructive to do. Is blogging constructive? In the sense that it is practice writing, I guess it is. It all depends on what (and whose) goals you’re trying to achieve.

There is so much that I want to do, it’s ironic that I’m sitting here at work unable to do most of it. I suppose I can call writing this blog “taking a short break”. It certainly helps improve my mood right now.

The Muse strikes …

I got back on the photography kick this weekend. I took a number of pictures, mostly of my in-laws new house. I have been accumulating quite a collection of contacts on Flickr. Many of them are extremely talented artists. They inspired me to actively pursue photography as art again.

While I was in the bookstore the other day I discovered that Tom Ang’s book Digital Photographer’s Handbook was out in trade paperback for a good bit less than the hard cover edition. It covers the spectrum from a brief explanation of how digital imaging technology works, through a catalog of the different photographic genres, a section describing common photographic challenges and tips for how to use image manipulation software to overcome them, and an extensive section on output options.

I joined a Flickr group called Utata. They publish a web zine that links to their images and discussions on Flickr as well as hosting original content. According to the about page,

Utata is a collective of photographers, writers, and like-minded people who share a compelling interest in the arts. We began (and continue to exist) as a salon-style gathering of photographers who came together on flickr. As a group we are continuously evolving; Utata is more of a process than a final product.

I hope this group helps me get into the swing of things.

Getting Things Done

I’m listening to Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles for July 30, 2006. He’s talking about Getting Things Done today. He is giving the hipster PDA a chance to organize his GTD implementation (check out pocketmod for some cool blank form magic). I resonate with many of his comments about GTD. I have to get a copy of the book and read it. I have looked at the tools and I agree that you should start with the simplest thing that could possibly work (with a tip of the hat to the XP folks).

I am getting to the point that I have too many things that I want to do that I’m not getting done. Life is too short. I owe it to myself to be more organized. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you are stagnating (and stupid).

I think I’m making progress on the psychological front with the realizations that I have had about anxiety being orthogonal to happiness. You can be both anxious and happy at the same time. Sometimes you can’t eliminate anxiety but you can manage it.

Enough rambling for today. I think I’ll work on making each day a little bit better than the previous day. I’ll try to record at least one improvement per day for a while to get in the habit. We’ll see how it goes.

More on Wikis

I’ve been taking notes on AgileWiki, a wiki implemented in Java by a team lead by Bill la Forge based on Rolonics theory which was developed by Norman Kashdan. The funny part about it is I was using instiki to take these notes. I have to admit, instiki is one of the best and easiest wikis to install and use for person use. I don’t know how to install it on my webhosting site yet and I don’t know how it scales but I’m going to use it for personal notes on my local system.

Wikis

I discovered a new free public wiki site today. It is called wiki.com. It has a lot of neat features. My test wiki is called occasional. Three guesses what the inspiration for that was. I liked a lot of the features of wiki.com but there was one thing missing. I could find no way to download my content to back it up. I emailed the support folks to see if I missed something. I’ll let you know what they say.

I’ve got this idea that a wiki would be a good way to develop the back story for a television series. I’m playing with instiki on my local system. I’ll figure out how to get it hooked up to apache and try and move it up to wildroseandbriar soon. Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be any one wiki that is the clear winner in terms of simplicity and features yet.

Prioritization, Multitasking and Dog The Bounty Hunter

Prioritization is an activity that takes a lot of attention. I feel that I have only recently started practicing it. I’ve been making lists and checking them twice. Actually, I’ve only been checking them once at most but twice has such a nice ring to it :-). I’ve also been reevaluating and reprioritizing which is something that I always neglected before for the most part.

I’m also multitasking a good bit more. For example, right now I’m writing this blog post and catching up on one of my favorite series of YouTube videos. I am watching “Telling it all Part 6” by geriatric1927 right now. This delightful old British gentleman has been sharing the story of his life, 8 minutes at a time. It is wonderful.

I have to get up very early tomorrow morning to take my daughter in for outpatient surgery so I have to wrap this up. I couldn’t let another day go by without writing something here. Right now, I’m going to go watch the rerun of Dog the bounty hunter getting married on TV.

Podcasts grow on you

I couldn’t understand why none of my podcasts were downloading today. Then I tried to download one of them manually and discovered that the external drive that I’ve been saving them to was full. I’ve been burning CDs all morning. I should have my free space back up to a reasonable level by the time I go home. Some of these podcasts I really want to listen to but I don’t have time during the day. I’ve got to figure out how to listen to them some other way, like at night when I go to bed.

At this point, I suspect I’ll never catch up but I can’t bring myself to throw them away. Thus, I burn discs to sit in a spindle until a rainy day when I try to figure out what they are and why in the world I wanted to save them.