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Posts published in May 2008

Don’t Get Overly Ambitious

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If you're going to blog once a day for a month, it's important not to get overly ambitious about the articles you're going to write each day.  I started off with the idea I'd finish all the waiting blog posts I had sitting around, write down my definitive thoughts on several key topics, et cetera.


The outcome of this bright idea? Well, sitting "right next" to this article in Qumana is a blog entry on "delusionaries" which proved too big to chew in a couple of small bites.  So I'm going to spit this one out, cut it up into smaller bits, and try again.  Stay tuned.


-Anthony



How Easy It Is To Fall Off the Wagon!

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Not even the first week and I skipped a blog entry.  Shame on me - and I was even online yesterday.


It's very easy to "fall off the wagon" - to decide to change how we want to live our lives, but then let our day-to-day habits, plans, and interactions carry us through a course of actions that contradicts that.  A Christian theologian would make some noise about the fallibility of man; a cognitive scientist would natter on about automatized behaviors, capture errors and the illusion of conscious will.  But the long and the short of it is that we're really bad at this.


I can point to a number of wagons I've fallen off repeatedly: regular exercise, martial arts training, doing the physical therapy exercises for my knee, calling all my friends at the beginning of the month, taking the laundry out of the dryer as soon as it beeps.  But other wagons I hang on to tenaciously: feeding the cats twice daily, watering the lawn, attending the weekly and monthly writing groups.


At first blush this is the diference between things that have immediate feedback (mewing cats, wilted plants, written stories) and those that don't (it can take months to notice changes in your waistline).  But I find that this even applies to things that don't have immediate feedback - like writing my "weekly snippets" at the Search Engine That Starts With a G, a performance tool that I regularly use even though I'm the only one that apparently reads them.  True, if you don't send snippets you get reminders about it; but most people ignore them, just like I ignore many, many other automated reminders I get.  So that's not it either.


So some wagons are easy to fall off of and others are easy to hang on to.  Why is that? I could go off and do a typical blogger speculation, but let's leave it at this for a moment: why are there some things that are so easy to decide to do (or not to do) regularly, while other habits are so hard to make or break that it seems nearly impossible?


'jes wonderin,
-the Centaur



Insignificance

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Created via Automotivator, which I found after seeing a Livejournal post (itself found via Planet Lisp) in which its creator, Zach Beane, created a motivational poster for all the smug lisp weenies:



I may not program in Lisp much anymore - probably less than once a month or so, compared to my Top Five (currently Javascript, Java, C++, Bash and Python) - but I do now have this poster hanging in my office at the Search Engine That Starts With a G. Already it's gotten quite a few questions ... :-)


So, on the note of doing things wrong and personal insignificance ... here's some random bits about some changes in the works.  This is one of the first blog posts I've done on my new Macintosh, which replaces my beloved but fried Blue Slab of Coolness and my beloved but stolen old Powerbook.  Having used it for a month or two now, I do so wuv my my Mac and it's crappy user interface, which does just enough right to almost make me ignore its massive gaffes (like switching between two windows and the screen suddenly reshuffling the z-buffer heights of all open applications).


But it's really flipping over into usability thanks to a trick I learned combining Spaces and VMWare, letting me switch back and forth between Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard with ease.  (Apparently the new MacBook Pros are some of the best laptops to run Windows Vista.  Who knew?)  VMWare is slick because it lets you run Windows Vista on your Macintosh in a virtual machine - it's even smart enough to use the partition set up by Apple's Boot Camp dual-boot solution - but it really didn't get hyper useful until I learned the Spaces trick.  Spaces (a warmed over version of the virtual desktops feature popularized by the X Window System) lets you create several "virtual desktops" you can switch between via control arrows - and once you do that, you can give one of them to Vista in full screen mode.


I can't remember the blogger who recommended this trick to me (Mossberg? Some Lifehacker article?), but using Space's control-arrows to switch desktops actually has proven easier in practice than using VMWare's (admittedly hyper-slick) Unity mode.  Unity, like Parallels' Coherence mode, sounds great because it puts your Windows windows on your Macintosh desktop like any other Mac app.  However, using Spaces to put Vista on its own desktop means the Mac apps and the Windows apps get their own OS desktop features like the taskbar, destktop icons, etc.  Looking at the Lifehacker article on Parallels I linked to above, I suspect that I could make Unity work much better; but this is working well enough for me to get stuff done now.


Also this is a first post using Qumana, new blogging software which narcissistically inserts some adware which you can see here to the lower right. --->


Powered by Qumana


Qumana has been so nice to me so far (WYSIWIG mode, automatically snarfing URLs out of the keyboard when you insert links, etc., etc.) I'll leave the ad in just this one time. 


SO click on some links above and give our "sponsors" some love. :-)


-Anthony


AnBloWriMo

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Recently I heard a friend say "2008 was the year the bloggers died" - because almost all of his friends who were bloggers stopped posting. Well, shame on us. SO, in the tradition of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) I announce Anthony's Blog Writing Month (AnBloWriMo) in which I will attempt to put up one post per day for the next month. Hopefully this won't amount to boring all of you to tears, but will instead serve as a useful reminder to me to get my backlog moving again. Of course, those two things aren't mutually exclusive...

Here goes - this counts as number one.
-the Centaur