Blog Design

Hard to say what I’ll get done.  I really need to put some ideas for what I want down on paper, so I can start knocking them off one by one.  As it is, the simplistic look isn’t really bothering me (I kind of like a simple clean look), so I’m not as motivated as I really should be.  Simply ending the weekend with a punch list will be a nice result.

Haskell

I started learning a new programming language earlier this week: Haskell.  This began a month or so ago, when I started using XMonad as the window manager on both my work machine with dual 1920×1200 displays and my 1024×600 netbook.  It’s a fantastic tiling WM that works great in both situations, but the program–and its configuration file–are written in Haskell.  I managed to hack together a decent configuration from plenty of examples and sample code, but it bothered (and still bothers) me that I didn’t understand the syntax.

Making Haskell more interesting (and difficult) to learn is the fact that it’s a functional language, rather than an imperative language as I’m used to from C/C++, Java, Python, and others.  While this should work well with my math background, it’s still a different way of thinking from what I’ve been used to for the past 10 years of programming…  I’ve been working through some material here and here and I’m looking forward to gaining some more understanding over the next few days.

I’m taking advantage of the Google Font Directory to bring some better fonts to the site, without requiring readers to have any particular fonts installed on their system.  Google hosts the fonts and most browsers are supported.  I’m using Crimson Text for the basic text and Inconsolata where a monospaced type is needed.  By the way, Inconsolata is a fantabulous font for code and is the default for my terminal and Emacs on every machine I can configure.

As for the name…  I just got sick of the old one and it was time for a change.  Then, at work over lunch, we were talking about serial communications, start/stop bits, parity bits, and checksums.  One of my coworkers became lost in a side conversation, missed a few references, and loudly declared a “checksum failure” and reset the conversation.  This seemed more than appropriate, so I’m running with it.

Of course, there aren’t a lot of themes that have this and a design that I like, so I’m starting with a basic H5 template, and will work from there.

Weekend Bliss, originally uploaded by vsacker.

Q: What does a Lensbaby have in common with drinking?

A: They both allow you creative focus on a variety of subjects.

I got two things I have been looking forward to for a while this past Friday: a margarita (or three) and a Lensbaby 2.0 lens for my camera. Amazon had a great deal on the last generation of this lens and overspending on our credit card allowed me to use rewards points to pick one up with no cash outlay.

I’m still figuring it all out, but it’s horribly easy to move the sweet spot of this lens around and get incredible blur radiating out from it. This is not a great image, but I love the focus on the drink while the stem and base of the glass dissolve nicely keeping the eye coming back to the drink.

I don’t know how many times I’ve written this post over the years. I blog for a little while, then get busy or blocked and the updates stop. Months pass then I write a post about how busy I was and how I hope it’s different this time. I’m sure I’ve written one or two here, and I know I’ve done them on other, now deceased attempts at blogging. So, this time it’s going to be different, right?

Well, it’s not.

So why start back up right now when I’ll only fizzle out in a short while? It’s simple: I feel a great urge to be creative and I can’t focus that energy; the excess is now spilling out into this blog.

I see all sorts of individuals around who have created awesome things on their own or with a small team, and I want to be a part. Look at:

• Stack Overflow
• BeatPaths
• ThumbJam

The first two are great websites that I frequent and the last is an iPhone application written by a co-worker of mine. All of them had a good idea that they took and worked for years and developed into something cool they could share with others.

So how does writing this help? In many ways it doesn’t. There’s no great idea that I’m kicking around this moment, trying to gather momentum or community around. But there is the catharsis of getting *something* out and into the world, which is my biggest problem. I can’t tell you how many 80% projects I have sitting around because they’re not quite ready for others to see. (I even have three or four draft posts from months ago that I never finished to my satisfaction and helped herald the great silence on this blog.)

So, I’m dumping this crap out there, as the first little buckshot in my shotgun approach to getting something into the world. A post here. A snippet of code up on Github. A new photo on Flickr. It just may be enough to get the creative juices flowing…

However, if you’re in the market for dramatic stories about babies under threat in a dystopian future, I suggest you scrub the Palin part of your brain and turn it over to George Saunders’ excellent short story “Jon”. It’s about a pair of teenaged paramours who have good reason to distrust the adults around them.

It’s a great story about a boy living in a product dominated existence, struggling with the upheaval in his life brought on by the impending birth of his child.  Can he give up the plush (but unsettling for the reader) life for his wife and child?

Plus furthermore (and I said this to Carolyn) what will it be like for us when all has been taken from us? Of what will we speak of? I do not want to only speak of my love in grunts! If I wish to compare my love to a love I have previous knowledge of, I do not want to stand there in the wind casting about for my metaphor! If I want to say like, Carolyn, remember that RE/MAX one where as the redhead kid falls asleep holding that Teddy bear rescued from the trash, the bear comes alive and winks, and the announcer goes, Home is the place where you find yourself suddenly no longer longing for home (LI 34451)—if I want to say to Carolyn, Carolyn, LI 34451, check it out, that is how I feel about you—well, then, I want to say it! I want to possess all the articulate I can, because otherwise there we will be, in non-designer clothes, no longer even on TrendSetters & TasteMakers gum cards with our photos on them, and I will turn to her and say, Honey, uh, honey, there is a certain feeling but I cannot name it and cannot cite a precedent-type feeling, but trust me, dearest, wow, do I ever feel it for you, right now. And what will that be like, that stupid standing there, just a man and a woman and the wind, and nobody knowing what nobody is meaning?

Just then the baby kicked my hand, which at that time was on Carolyn’s stomach.

And Carolyn was like, You are either with me or agin me.

Which was so funny, because she was proving my point! Because you are either with me or agin me is what the Lysol bottle at LI 12009 says to the scrubbing sponge as they approach the grease stain together, which is making at them a threatening fist while wearing a sort of Mexican bandolera!

When I pointed this out, she removed my hand from her belly.

I love you, I said.

Prove it, she said.

Anyway, I found it a moving story, and it triggered memories of another item I’d read years ago about a corporation-ruled world: “Jennifer Government” by Max Barry.  It’s a fun, entertaining read, with an interesting premise.  It doesn’t rank up there with my favorite books of all time, but it certainly had me turning the pages.  I leave it to Wikipedia to summarize the plot:

Hack, a low level employee at Nike, is contracted by one of his higher ups for an ambitious marketing campaign. The company is planning to release the new Nike Mercurys — which sell for thousands of dollars but cost pennies to manufacture — and in order to drum up interest in the items, Hack Nike and his partner John Nike plan to increase street cred in the worst way possible: by actually killing people who try to buy them. Hack, bound by his contract but unable to contemplate murder on his own, subcontracts to the Police, now a mercenary organization, beginning a chain of business transactions which could land Nike in hot water should word of the plot leak.

After several children are murdered at various Nike chains on opening day, agent Jennifer Government takes it upon herself to track down the perpetrators, even if she can’t get the funding for it. Along the way, readers are also introduced to Texas 20-something Billy NRA, an athletic man who gets in over his head, and Buy Mitsui, a formerly French stockbroker. Also involved is Hack’s unemployed girlfriend, Violet, who engineers a dangerous computer virus to sell to the highest bidder.

From: Jennifer Government (this version)

The latest evidence of my condition: for the second time in the last month, I made the coffee at work, only to discover that I had left out the grounds. There was a nicely used filter and carafe of hot water, with no coffee to pour in my cup. This foul-up comes on the heels of forgetting to grab keys for the right car this morning and forgetting my watch for the third day in a row.

It’s a damn good thing mortgages can be auto-withdrawn so I don’t have to worry about losing the house.

So now I’m stuck with a shaggy head of hair that hasn’t been cut in six weeks.

For the record, I know the title is over-provocative, but it wouldn’t really be blogging if it wasn’t…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6yfxwgRiM

• pneumonia
• croup
• reflux
• emergency rooms
• doctors
• viruses
• sleepless nights
• zombie days
• work
• family activities
• TV
• a healthy portion of “I don’t know”

A lot of those things were unforeseen and disproportionately affecting our 6 month old son. Many had a major impact on our daily schedules, mental capacity, and overall productivity. I certainly got
into a state where I was just exhausted and unproductive. Things just weren’t getting finished around the house and I wasn’t happy about it. I just couldn’t get up the energy to change it,either.

About a week and a half ago, I ran across an article on Hacker News about using org-mode in Emacs to implement GTD*. Well, I know Emacs as my standard editor and IDE in Linux, but the rest of that title was foreign to me. I read the article anyway and started to see a path forward for geting back on top of everything.

org-mode is simply a set of features that have been added to the base Emacs functionality which allow you to easily capture all your tasks, events, notes, and much more in a single place. GTD is the abbreviation (I almost said acronym) for Getting Things Done by David Allen, a well-known and popular book on organization of your daily life.

Well, in the last week, I’ve started to try and capture all the tasks I need to accomplish using Emacs. I keep a copy on my work computer and pull a copy every night onto my netbook. Every morning, I re-sync the updates I made overnight and I’m off and running again.

Since moving my tasks and calendar into this system I’ve been more productive and let far fewer tasks slip endlessly, both at home and at work. I’m still reading through the book, trying to understand more of the system, but it’s been a pretty good change for me.

[*] I think this is the article: How I use Emacs and Org-mode to implement GTD, but I don’t remember the exact one and I’ve lost the link.  Either way, I found that page to be extremely helpful.