off-topic « Content Here

Archive for the ‘off-topic’ Category

Study finds coding to be more effective for procrastinating than blogging

Friday, June 5th, 2009

It was great to catch up with so many friends at the Gilbane conference in San Francisco this week. I spent literally two hours saying goodbye on my way out the door. One question that I found myself frequently answering was the reason for my recent blogging lapse. The short answer is that I have been very busy. But being busy doesn’t always keep me from lobbing posts into this blog. In fact, I often find myself more compelled to blog when I am immersed in interesting work.

The truth is that I occasionally use blogging as a procrastination tool. I blog to avoid important tasks (like writing reports and deliverables) that I can’t motivate myself to tackle. Blogging helps me warm up my brain and prepare me to really think. I guess when you look at it in that way, I am not procrastinating but preparing; after I publish, I am usually ready to work. So why the lapse? I have been using a better procrastinating tool.

I have taken on some application development work and I have found programming to be a more powerful distraction from my other work. When I get an idea for a blog post, I write it, publish it, and I am done. I am ready move on to that deliverable or report. When I get an idea for how to improve a feature of my application, I get sucked in and have a very difficult time stopping. There is always something more you can do to improve or extend your code. Maybe I will get curious about how something works and start exploring. I blink and 30 minutes have passed. Video games are the same way. That is why I don’t allow myself to play video games. But I will never entirely give up programming. Technologists who do rapidly lose their relevance and limit their options.

Based on my small survey (sample size: 1), I would say that, other than video games, coding is the most effective tool for keeping you from important writing work (or any other activity for that matter). Knowing this about myself, I usually take every precaution to avoid programming when I need to write. When I write my reports (in XML), I make sure to hire someone else to do the XSL:FO work for my rendering templates. I deliberately started blogging on Blogger because I knew fiddling with a blogging platform would keep me from blogging. I knew this would happen when I took on this development project but it was so interesting that I couldn’t resist.

I am wondering if there is some neurological explanation for this disconnect between programming and writing: that your programming brain suppresses your writing brain. My anecdotal observations seem to suggests others struggle with this too. For example, developers often hate to write documentation. I don’t think that is because of poor writing skills. Of course, it also be that documentation happens at the end of the project when developers are burned out. Does anyone else have similar experiences? What is your most dangerous procrastination device?

Posted in commentary, off-topic | 2 Comments »

How I Talked Myself Out of a Kindle

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

It takes me a really long time to buy a gadget. Over the course of months I deliberate whether I really need the device and, if I do, what options I should get. The current object of my rumination is the Amazon Kindle 2
and, right now, the pendulum is on the “not buy” side of the swing. Here are the arguments that are keeping it there.

I like to share books with my friends and family. The exchange of books can be a nice social experience. You loan or borrow a book and you have at least one person you can discuss it with.
I buy used books. Used books can be a great deal. I like to browse used book stores and tags sales to find interesting books at a reasonable prices.
The paper book just may be the culmination of reading technology. More durable than a papyrus scroll, cheaper than liquid crystal, what could be better than paper?
My personal library is a carbon sink. You see an overloaded book case, I see hundreds of pounds of carbon not released into the atmosphere. A Kindle would be powered by a coal plant on the other side of town.
I would rather read than talk about my reading device. I have hardly ever seen anyone actually reading a Kindle. Most Kindle owners that I see are too busy getting interrupted by strangers who have an opinion about the future of eBooks. A shy person like myself appreciates the camouflaging qualities of a nice boring looking paper book.

There you have it; those are my reasons. They are working for me right now but, in case you are not convinced, you can click through this Amazon Associates link
and put a little money in my Kindle fund (because that I know that I will eventually cave).

Posted in humor, off-topic | 9 Comments »

FeedBurner and Blogger

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

A funny thing happened to me a couple of days ago when I completed my move to WordPress by deleting Enter Content Here from Blogger. The old RSS feed (http://contenthere.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default), which FeedBurner somehow kept alive with new content posted on WordPress, suddenly went dark. The net result was that I lost my first 300 (or so) subscribers. To them, I stopped blogging after my eZ Publish Fork post on February 25th. Hopefully, these subscribers will notice the fetch errors and repoint to http://feedproxy.google.com/EnterContentHere (please spread the word).

What took me off guard was that the old RSS feed was being updated by the new site rather than the old site. I think this is because I elected to “merge my feeds” (or something like that) when Google bought FeedBurner. The readers who were subscribed to my old blogspot feed didn’t notice my warning posts and the fact that I made the old blog look really ugly by changing the template. They saw the new posts and clicked through to the new blog.

So, if you are thinking about moving off of Blogger, first read this post. Then, if you merged your feeds, remember to put a couple of warning posts on your new blog to let people know you are moving before you delete your old Blogger blog.

Posted in off-topic | No Comments »

Things now at 1.0 (plus a discount)

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

One of my favorite personal software applications is Things by Cultured Code. I wrote about Things a while ago in a long post of Mac applications that I like. Since that time I have increased my usage of Things. It is now everything from a to do list to a personal issue tracker for projects that I work alone on. Being able to quickly jot down a task saves you from breaking the flow of what you are currently working on. The iPhone application is there to receive tasks when I am not near a computer. The two applications synchronize whenever they see each other on a WiFi network.

The Cultured Code Team has just released version 1.0 of Things. The beta releases have been free but now it costs $50 ($49.95 to be precise). If you are also hooked on Things, you can use the coupon code “THINGSPRESALE20″ to get 20% off the list price.

Posted in off-topic, tools | No Comments »

Happy New Year!

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

[Photo of Northampton Massachusetts First Night Celebration by S Pipczynski]

Thank you for helping to make 2008 a great year. Let’s just hope that 2009 is not as bad as everyone expects it to be!

Posted in annoucement, off-topic | No Comments »

Change.gov content under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

Change.gov, President-Elect Obama’s transition website is licensing all of it’s content under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. I think that is pretty cool but I was wondering who owns that content anyway.

Posted in off-topic | 2 Comments »

Powerpoint as the Deliverable

Friday, September 19th, 2008

Increasingly, I am finding that clients prefer a slide deck (i.e. MS Powerpoint) as a deliverable rather than a regular document. The reality is that many people don’t really read documents and would rather their consultants not waste the time writing words that will not be read. As a consultant, I usually find myself having mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don’t like the idea of typing prose into a vacuum (and contribute to the tangle of content that they may have hired me to solve). On the other hand, at the end of the project, I normally have a lot to say and it is difficult to squeeze all this information into a slide deck that can be left behind and stand on its own. The resulting product tends to look like an epic novel is coffee-table book format – or like the slides in this You Tube clip.

Slides were meant to accompany a presentation and the best presenters only use them for visual cues to complement what they say. Slides written in this philosophy leave too much to interpretation without the presenters explanation. When my deliverable is a slide presentation I get around this limitation by packing a lot of explanation in the speakers notes. Recently, I have gone so far as to make foot notes in the slide that reference points I make in the speakers notes. The result is this strange hybrid that I am not quite sure how to characterize. It is essentially a document-like narrative organized around bold themes. People can just browse through the themes and drill into topics that are of interest. However, I suspect that few readers actually do this.

Sites like SlideShare ask slides to stand on their own and, therefore, seem to favor wordy slides. The ones with just pictures leave the reader in the dark imagining what the presentation must have been about. I have felt the compulsion to write presentation slides for a SlideShare reader and wonder if other presenters think this way too. In the extreme, I could see a presentation turn into a group reading of paragraphs of narrative. I hope that it does not come to that.

Posted in commentary, microsoft office, off-topic | 2 Comments »

If only Carl Sagan was alive to see this…

Friday, July 25th, 2008

The Google
blog posted that they passed the 1 Trillion pages milestone. They go on to say that the web is actually infinite thanks to websites like online calendars with “next” buttons that go into the future indefinitely. It makes my little corner of the web feel even smaller than usual. Even “billions and billions” seems small.

I remember hearing somewhere that Google is better positioned than anyone to handle large volumes of pages because their indices use a unique proprietary database and storage technology that can scale far beyond traditional relational databases. It looks like they are going to need it.

Posted in off-topic | 2 Comments »

Geo Services

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Re: Virtually There - Itinerary - In Date Order

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I have been playing around with services that help me keep track of where I am going and where I have been. So far, the standout application for me has been Tripit. You mainly use Tripit by forwarding the email confirmations that you get from various travel booking services that you use. Tripit parses through the confirmation email and identifies where you are going and when. It also is smart enough to put together several reservations as part of the same trip. For example, if I book a hotel for the January 10th and 11th and a train ticket that leaves on the 10th and returns on the 12th, Tripit knows that it is part of the same trip. I found the email parsing capabilities to be surprisingly accurate. I occasionally try to stump Tripit by forwarding emails from international travel or very small hotels. It almost always got it right. Recently, when using a client’s corporate travel service, I noticed an option to add my itineraries directly to Tripit (see screenshot). I wouldn’t be surprised if other travel services started to giving their customers this option.

Tripit provides a lot of upside for the minimal effort it takes to forward an email. For one, I get a nice little itinerary that I can print out. The itinerary has the address, confirmation codes, and telephone numbers of all the places that I need to be. It even has maps. I can also subscribe to an iCal calendar of my trips so everything is put right into my local calendar (I use iCal) along with my meetings. This helps prevent me from scheduling meetings when I am en route. My wife also subscribes to my calendar so she has all the details in her personal calendar as well.

The other service that I think I will start to use is brightkite. I will use this to post when I am at a particular place and I want to meet up with a friend. I like the features of brightkite. You can easily “check in” to a location either by address or by using a saved place (called a “marker”). Brightkite suppors a simple syntax that you can use over SMS. Plus you can Ping.fm to email in your location.

I have also tried Dopplr and Fire Eagle. Dopplr didn’t do it for me at all. You have to manually enter your trips. I tried to have Dopplr listen to my Tripit calendar but it was horrendously inaccurate. Dopplr had me taking all these crazy trips to various parts of the world and treated lay-overs at different airports as discrete trips. It wouldn’t be so bad if Dopplr was not counting my carbon emissions. I hated feeling defensive about all those trips I was not event taking. I closed my Dopplr account.

I am on the fence about Fire Eagle. I should feel very lucky that I have an account there. I hear that invites are very hard to get. But I don’t feel like I get much value from the service. Fire Eagle can listen to other services to find out where I am. I have it listening to brightkite. There are a number of other applications which I don’t use (like Dopplr, Plazes, and Navizon) that also talk to Fire Eagle. The only benefit that I see is that it gives Yahoo more information to serve me up better ads (which really isn’t a benefit for me) and search results (but I use Google search).

So, for now, I am sticking with Tripit and brightkite.

Posted in Web2.0, off-topic | No Comments »