The cynical side of me says that this is an awesome way to avoid the problem of people signing up for your service, then not staying actively engaged.  Sure, you don’t have to check in too often, but you do need to check in…  Also, what will the fallout be if a server hiccups, clocks go wacky, junk filters hide the reminder messages, or whatever and e-mails that should only be sent when you’re dead go out while you’re still around?  It might be amusing to find out.

Those things being said, it’s made me ponder where I could use a technological dead man’s switch in my personal or professional life. Maybe I could rig something to auto-login and delete accounts on various websites/web services if I don’t use them within some period of time.  I’d probably lose my Facebook account, but it appears like that wouldn’t e too much of a loss.  Any other ideas?

So, with that in mind, I stumbled across an interesting website today: 750words.com.  I had no idea what to make of the name of the site, but they explain (keeping in mind that a typical page of writing has 250 words):

Morning pages are three pages of writing done every day, typically encouraged to be in “long hand”, typically done in the morning, that can be about anything and everything that comes into your head. It’s about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way. The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.

It is yet another “get it out of your head so it can stop blocking you from making progress” type exercise, in some ways analogous to GTD.  I love the idea of this, not that I’m about to take on another daily activity right now.  I think trying to write that much each morning would rather be daunting and stressful at this point.  I will file away morning pages as a concept to return to later, though.  They can get tagged Someday in my GTD files…

The author talks about Getting Things Done by David Allen, a workflow system based on getting all your tasks documented in a system, having a methodology for choosing the next task, and performing regular reviews of the state of your tasks.  All this is supposed to free your subconscience mind from having to try and track all these things and worry aout them.  In theory, it de-stresses you and makes you more productive by allowing you to just focus on the task at hand, because there’s nothing else to fight to remember to do (it’s all written down and reviewed regularly, right?).

Like the author above, I’ve been using GTD for a few years and I’m not always great at reviewing my tasks and getting everything written down.  I, too, need to reset things a bit.  So, tomorrow morning, I’ll be firing up my favorite GTD system (org-mode for Emacs), cleaning it up, documenting the todos littering my notepads and setting a time for my weekly review.  The more I used org-mode/GTD to drive my day in the past, the less time I spent rearranging tasks in my head (and on paper) and the more time I spent doing them…  Willpower, baby.

“If you think of willpower as something that’s biologically limited, you’re more likely to be tired when you perform a difficult task,” said Veronika Job, the paper’s lead author. “But if you think of willpower as something that is not easily depleted, you can go on and on.”

Well, with so many months of no updates here, no recent photos on SmugMug, nary a Facebook update, etc., writing something new was feeling like a big task.  But after re-reading that article I bookmarked last October, I figured I should grab a snack and soda and sit down to it…

They also found that leading up to final exam week, students who bought into the limited resource theory ate junk food 24 percent more often than those who believed they had more control in resisting temptation. The limited resource believers also procrastinated 35 percent more than the other group.

Well, that would partially explain my awful diet at this point.  Now I just need to apply this lesson to all aspects of my life and stop procrastinating on several tasks that I usually feel drained just thinking about.  This is step one.

Today, though, I’m off the schneid (at least for one post) thanks to an informative piece showing How to Draw an Owl.  There’s a step-by-step graphic and a few interpretations thereof, including:

step one is always “start,” and step two is always “keep going and going and going until you’ve nailed it.”

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…