Just another WordPress site
I know you have rush hour traffic—all cities do. I wanted to know, however, why you insist on doing it on weekends too. Did you know other cities keep their rush hours on a Monday through Friday basis? Because, for the most part, they do.
Just letting you know.
Love,
Nick
Programming is kind of an objective thing. Code works or it doesn’t. This can haunt people who, to any extent, tie their sense of self worth to their current job performance. Starting some time Tuesday afternoon my personal stock plummeted as the IR Index climbed to five tickets, all of which I thought I’d solved already. Yet this afternoon I am happy happy happy. One issue was redundant code (I fixed one of two blocks of identical code) and the other was what we’ll charitably call “not my fault.” Now my ticket queue is on its way to zero.
And some people say programming is boring.
I woke up this morning from a dream where I was a consultant for company specializing in archaic measurements. We were contracting with various sports governing authorities to de-modernize various sports. The ‘why’ is unimportant–or at least never made itself known to me.
The work was kind of interesting. We were playing with ideas such as in North American style football the game would be played on a field of 20 rods. Teams would only get two downs and would have to move the ball 1 rod to reset the downs. Progress ground to a hault when a faction started advocating the 4 downs / 2 rods approach. This presented the opportunity for further factionalization apparently because there was suddenly another group who wanted to go with chains. The idea being to use a field of 5 chains and teams get 8 downs to move the ball 1 chain.
I asked to be moved to a new committee but baseball wasn’t much better. The disucssion was on how to measure the ball. One faction wanted to use barleycorns while another was interested in using nails. The barleycorn side thought that using fractions of a nail made little sense while the nail proponents felt that barleycorns were far too small to provide a meaningful number. They tabled the discussion and went on to how to measure the weight of the ball. This one was easy, apparently, and it was decided that baseballs would have to be between 30 and 31.5 zolotniks.
I woke up to the alarm which was putting out sound in the vicinity of several phons.
And, in a pre-emptive post-script…Yes, I know that inches/feet/yards/miles is just as silly and archaic. Also interesting, a megadeath is equivalent to an incident causing 1 million deaths.
I’m vaguely saddened by the fact that I post all of my bloggy-related stuff directly to Facebook. I get way more readership there. Here’s to trying to change that…
Of course, you can replace “visit Grandma” with just about anything and it would be equally true.
If only I weren’t so addicted to WoW at the moment.
Oh, and “Hi!” I’m still alive although the home server front is in total disarray.
An empty inbox just feels wrong…but I really like it.
I’m a habitual non-deleter of mail when it hits my inbox. I mean, sure, I delete the crap and mark the spam pretty regularly but when it is a message that requires action or a response and I don’t have time to do it right now, I’ll let it sit.
And sit it does.
Usually one of three things happen at this point. Most likely I’ll reply / perform the action required to clear this message in the next few days. If it gets beyond this point, though, bad things happen. Most likely it will sit until it becomes so stale it just doesn’t matter any longer and I delete the damned thing and feel tons of guilt. The last thing that happens is that it gets accidentally deleted in one of my bulk clearing operations.
See, for better or worse, my email inbox is my primary collection point. Oh, yeah, we’re talking GTD methodology here. My three or for personal email addresses and the auto-redirect from work all dump in to this bin. Now that I do CM at work I get 20 – 50 automated build status emails per day. My team also has a habit of CC’ing the team list whenever we work through a problem. On the one hand this helps with communication and gets more eyeballs on the problem quickly. On the other it generates tons of email churn when you’re not immediately involved in a particular problem.
But I digress. The point being that I sift several hundred email messages a day which, for most of you, is probably no big deal. Let’s just say I’m not the world’s best multi-tasker. So what happens is the inbox fills up with gibberish and eventually I go on a wholesale delete binge. I don’t want this to take all day so it involves some mental triage whereby I estimate the necessity of keeping a message around by looking at the subject, sender, date and what I can dredge up from memory. Needless to say, it is an entirely fallible system.
Add to this mix the tendency of my ISP to choke in mid-fetch and then do a complete dump of everything in mbox the next time my client goes after mail. Nothing like getting your last week’s worth of mail a couple times every day. Each time this happens the messages that require action have to run the triage gauntlet.
All of this to say that I know the solution to the problem. A basic tenet of GTD is process your collection points and move the stuff requiring action into an appropriate bin/list/what-have-you. Leaving your action items to mingle with your inbox keeps you from being able to trust your system and if you can’t trust it, the principle benefit of not having to remember everything on your plate at all times goes out the window.
So I made a point today of getting my GTD tool in order (yay OmniFocus!) and have managed to keep my inbox empty-ish for most of the day. OmniFocus is no longer stale. iCal is up to day and is an accurate reference tool again. In short, life is much better this way. I know in my heart and head that GTD works. It’s just my lizard brain that gets lazy and causes the system to break down.
So we’re not big on lizards any more…
Rick-rolling the Old Market with the iPhone rocks.
… don’t come a-knockin’
