Buenas Dias

Hola desde Ronda! Os escribo mas manana... hasta pronto!

Bored

So British Airways threatened to strike the week of my flight to Spain. Since I absolutely needed to be there before the 1st of February, I had to move the flight up to yesterday (Friday) instead of this coming Tuesday. I basically had 72 hours to move my stuff out of the apartment, attempt some semblance of cleaning it, and pack my bags to make my plane. I made it, oh so barely, but I left my parents with a pile of boxes to figure out how to store and Harry with a kitchen to clean. On top of this, I barely got to say goodbye to anyone... so to whomever should read this... goodbye!

I'm now sitting at London Heathrow waiting for my flight to Malaga. It is the last of my three flights, and I'm excited to get there. I reserved a room in a hostel while sitting here on the net, but have no way to print the reservation. Hopefully they will just accept it if I give my name... or turn the laptop on and show them the reservation.

Wireless in airports is not cheap. I suppose that if I spent a significant part of my life travelling, the T-Mobile monthly WiFi plan would make sense (it works at Borders to boot). But, just buying a day at time, it costs like $10. I guess it's better than sitting and doing nothing.

Only downside is that it's early Saturday morning back home, and no one is awake. I was trying to get some work done, but the VPN client doesn't like me so I had to send an email to the Network Admin that probably won't get answered until Monday. Oh well, Stumble will save me!

Hasta luego...

Stargate Movies

Just a quickie... MGM announced two Stargate SG-1 Movies which will star the entire cast from the SG-1 TV Series. Go MGM! Hopefully this avenue will be a success for them and Sci-fi gets what it deserves for the hard bargaining.

Why Podcasting Is Retarded

Oh my god, did I just say that out loud?

Yep.

Thankfully I'm not recording myself, or I could make you listen to me rant about how podcasting is retarded.

I simply cannot understand the reason behind podcasting something. It makes sense for a music show, where someone plays samples (or entire songs) in order to discuss them with a band or the audience. You know, like they do on radio. What I don't understand is why interviews and press conferences are suddenly being podcast left and right. There is a reason that radio was largely replaced by television and the internet. Listening to people talk is slow. It is much faster to see something or read something than to listen to it.

I won't even argue the video point. I'll just let that stand by trotting out the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words.

When it comes to text, you can skim. You can look for subheadings of interest. You can read a summary. Better yet, you can hit Ctrl-F on your keyboard and search the damn thing. With an audio podcast, you are forced to resort to a tactic that should have stayed dead with the cassette tape... skipping back and forth, listening for a few seconds at a time, trying to find what you want to hear.

Nevermind the fact that the term 'podcast' annoys me for the very fact that it's a trendy buzzword for 'streaming audio'. I will get over that eventually.

So what set me off? I actually came across a site today that only offered the article in podcast form. No transcription. To top it off, the podcast was almost an hour long. You only need to go to college to find out how little can be said in an hour. Speech is by nature slow because we have all these built in error-correction mechanisms (facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses for effect, etc.). Listening to an interview via an audio-only medium is even worse. We lose all the visual cues and are left with lots of pauses and enunciated speech. In short, the conversation is slow.

Humans are visual creatures. While podcasts may be suited to sounds that are hard to describe in words (music), they are simply a waste of time for things that are easy to describe in words (details about the release date of a new product, or an interview with some designer about his favorite tools). Please, stop chasing buzzword compliance with your website. Make it easy for your visitors to locate what they are looking for. Your podcasts and your flash intros may look really cool, but they just turn the average (highly impatient) internet user away.

Glorious Interweb

Apparently IU doesn't care nearly so much about Linux machines getting on their network. I guess that makes sense, as they are generally less prone to viruses and the like. So as long as I use my laptop in gentoo, I can enjoy the hugely fast connection. (I'm pulling down stuff from portage at 10mbps).

I'm nearly through season 1 of Rome. What a brilliant show. Season 2 starts tonight, but I hate waiting in between episodes, so I might just wait until this summer to watch it. Guess it depends on how hardcore the end of season 1 cliffhanger turns out to be.

I have been slowly updating packages on my laptop the last couple days. Went ahead and sprang for MySQL 5 and got the user accounts all worked out finally. Now I'm waiting for konsole to compile and update.

Anyway, not much has been accomplished due to Rome. At least with this big pipe I can update my system quickly. I guess that is something productive.

Sweet Victory

Woke up at 5:45 again!

Take that!

Now to find something to do until Kathy wakes up...

Early Riser

So this morning I woke up at a quarter to six... and actually stayed up. I hope to do this tomorrow and make it two days in a row.

In Indianapolis tonight. Jack has a nice apartment. Too bad the IU tech people are a bit nazi-ish and I can't get on the net with my computer. Anyway, I need to sleep now, but I plan to write more tomorrow. I just wanted to brag about waking up early. Wish me luck in the morning.

YouTube

Well that went well.

My laptop screen now turns off automatically when I close the lid.

Also, I now have flash working in firefox... so I can pointlessly burn my brain on YouTube just like everyone else.

Next up, getting my user accounts set up correctly so I'm not always running as root, since that is a big no-no. I'm sure any nerds that read this will cringe at the thought. I realize it's bad, but I'm new to gentoo and just never really took the time to set it up properly.

Getting close to going home. Can't wait to cook me some tasty hot pockets!

Strange

Well I came into the library today to try again. Another guy was here and having the exact same problems I was having yesterday. The strange part was that mine worked like a charm. Then, after he left, mine started acting up. So weird I can't even contemplate. I am back to stealing the cord.

Read up on how to get flash working in linux. Also how to get my laptop screen to turn off when I close the lid. Think I might go and get that working now.

Ferreting

So I found a library in Huntingburg that seems to have unrestricted internet access. However, since things couldn't go that smoothly, they have four access points running on the same channel. This creates a constant bouncing effect that essentially slows the wireless to a super-crawl. I am going to try finding a place where I can only see one access point, but my bet is the place is too small. I'm stealing a wire right now from one of their surfing machines, but my guess is that this will get me kicked out at some point.

On the way home I plan to try the parking lots of the local hotels. Only problem will be the power issue. Short of going in the hotels and ganking an outlet in the lobby, not sure how I would pull that one off.

Anyway, hopefully I won't get kicked out of here. Going to go map out the access points and see what I can find.

Blocked

Well, my plan to work out of the local library backfired pretty badly. They have some sort of firewall here that blocks everything but port 80 it seems. This prevents me from using my VPN client, map drives, or even sign on to AIM. Since all of these things are necessary to work, I can't work from here. Bah humbug.

Hopefully they will just let me make up the hours. The only other option is to use vacation time, which I was hoping to save up for Spain.

At least I can get to webpages. Used the time to update my address on all my accounts for when I leave. Also did a bit of banking and such. I can't even use emerge behind this firewall, let alone connect to my svn repository for the Magic site. I am too hungry to focus on reading, so I think it's time I pack up and head over to subway.

Doubt I will be back to post a daily goal, and without a good net connection I can't do much anyway, so this will probably be another hiatus. I'll try to at least read a good book or two.

Laughable

Ironic that I decide to start posting daily and then immediately post nothing for a week isn't it?

I guess I knew at the time that I didn't mean to post anything during Lan Party Week. I just forgot to mention it. We have the Lan Party every year around the holidays, and it's just like a vacation from reality. My days are consumed by building characters or trying new strategies rather than accomplishing anything useful. Wake up at 2pm, go to sleep at 7am, repeat. But it is always worth it, if for no other reason than the hilarious moments we have. (Thinking of the five on two gankfest of a DotA game we lost. Or a full frontal assault in the Party Wagon.)

Anyway, the gaming is over now. In fact, with Spain fast approaching and the impending time difference, I doubt I will be playing much of anything in the next six months. It just doesn't work when the prime US playing hours are 2am-7am Spain time. From a professional standpoint, this is probably for the better.

Working a short four hours in Topeka today, mainly to get my timesheet signed and prove I still exist. Then we are off to Indiana for about a week to visit Kathy's Grandma and Dad. It's nice to be able to travel and still work during the day. Switching back to a normal wake up time (6am is terribly early, but more normal than 2pm) has left me mildly confused so far today, but I hope to sleep it off in the car on the way. I need to dial my rising hour back to 1am in order to get on Spain time... but not too confident I will succede in that endeavor. Going to sleep at 5pm is just not compatible with a social life. Think I might just set my clock to Spain time and try anyway.

Hit up StevePavlina.com again today and read about entering the zone, increasing productivity, and living congruently. Two of these concepts I had at least hazily arrived at on my own, which gives me some confidence that I can at least correctly identify my problems. Being able to recognize problems is the first step to recovery... for alcoholics at least. Hopefully it applies to unmotivated programmers as well.

The get-in-the-zone (my term for highly creative state, not his) article essentially comes down to giving yourself large blocks of uninterrupted time and a small definite goal to accomplish. These are two things I have definitely recognized as much needed in my case.

First, I tend to think about the big picture two much, and the Magic site seems like such a monumental goal as to be too big. I need to scale things back to something I can accomplish in a day, or even an hour, with a clear path to getting started on it already laid out.

Second, my life seems to be constantly interrupted. Most of these interruptions are self-inflicted, as I check email, read online news, IM someone, or do random chores like getting the (snail) mail or organizing my desk. Other interruptions are environmental, like visitors, phone calls, or my day job. Obviously I can't blame anything on these people/things. It's not like they are trying to derail me. And it's not like I don't want to spend time on them. The issue is more that I need to carve out a block of uninterrupted time and stick with it, only permitting myself to deal with other items outside this block of time.

The article on increasing productivity basically says I should log my time and see where it goes. An interesting statistic from the article:

Studies have shown that the average office worker does only 1.5 hours of actual work per day. The rest of the time is spent socializing, taking coffee breaks, eating, engaging in non-business communication, shuffling papers, and doing lots of other non-work tasks. The average full-time office worker doesn't even start doing real work until 11:00am and begins to wind down around 3:30pm.

His assertion is that we usually designate (or someone designates for us) a block of time in which we are at work, regardless of whether we are actually working. This time is usally 40 hours, with regular start and stop times to make it easy to keep track of. The problem is actually that this is too much time. Our brain thinks: I have eight whole hours to work, what is the hurry to get started now? He suggests instead of trying to work an entire eight hours straight, just block off eight hours of potential work time, and work until you feel done for the day. It may only be a few hours, it may be longer. The point is that you aren't watching the clock, and hence are less focused on how much time you work and more on the work itself. An interesting thing to try.

As an aside, I find it ironic to even have these issues. Many professions have daily routines that easily fill an eight (or more) hour day and none of this is an issue. When I worked at the library, I never considered my motivation to work. There was an unending stream of books to shelve and a daily book-drop route to run, and it was a clear cut goal to get both tasks done each day. While this was monotonous because it was repetitive (the first time you shelve the same book you shelved a week before makes you feel like a hamster on a wheel), it was easy to keep busy, and time generally passed quickly. Now my problem is reversed. I have no clear cut goals and my time seems to drag on because I am constantly switching gears or searching out ways to pass the time, instead of just running on my wheel.

Anyway, this dovetails nicely into the third article I read, about living congruently. This was another thing I have kind of come to on my own, but Mr. Pavlina has articulated on his blog, making it clearer to me. To truly love your work, it must not feel like a job. A job is something you do from 8 to 4:30 on weekdays, and has nothing to do with your real life. A job is something that pays the bills. Doing work you love should be part of the whole of your life. You should want to talk shop with family and friends. You should want to invite both friends and coworkers to the same gatherings. In fact, your friends and coworkers should be the same people. You should work whenever you feel like it.

You gain positive synergies. If you keep yourself healthy, it gives you more conifidence in work and relationships. If you enjoy your work, it makes you seem interesting and passionate to your friends. If you maintain healthy relationships, you experience less distractions in the form of drama and this helps reinforce your goals.

He calls the phenomenon most people experience compartmentalization, and declares it doomed to failure. If you see the aspects of your life as seperate parts, all competing for time and attention, then one or several parts will suffer at the altar of the one you focus on. Work too much and you ruin your social life. Socialize too much and forget to take care of your body. Don't take care of your body and you become less energetic, and hence less able to work and maintain healthy relationships. Compartmentalizing creates a constant juggling act where you always focus on one thing at the expense of the others. If, instead, your friends are your coworkers and your health is a daily routine and you are excited about what you do, suddenly none of it feels like a chore. Remove the boundries and it's like these things are just part of your life, and not chunks of your day.

Anyway, tonight's goal is rather modest. Just want to get to Indiana and make several phone calls along the way (utilities, banks, insurance, etc). None of these are more than chores that need to be accomplished before leaving the country, but I doubt I'll get anything creative done in a car on two and a half hours of sleep, so I'm aiming low.

Hasta pronto.