Posts tagged “productivity”
Good code does what you need it to do and is ready when you need it. Testability, elegance, extensibility matter, but they're secondary. Late code isn't good code. Code that never ships needs no maintenance. Everything else is nuance.
I prefer RURL over TinyURL for shortening URLs because it's, well, shorter. I made a bookmarklet so I can quickly get a RURL for any page I'm on. Just drag the link to your bookmarks bar.
Quick life updates: found an indie club (Popscene), got a new bed, loving the SF sunshine and omnipresent hippies. Futurama refs aren't geeky enough here. Yahoo Widgets 4 launches Wednesday. Also bought a massive brushed aluminium computer. Giant monitors next month.
I just used Flickr to batch-resize photos for a friend's website gallery, not because I needed cloud storage or any web-specific feature, but simply because it was the easiest option available. That moment crystallized something: web apps are winning not on principle, but on pure user experience.
Five things I plan to do by October 2007: fix this blog software, walk the Thames Path to Greenwich, visit the London Wetland Centre, see Evita and Chicago live, and have dinner at The Ivy. Also, I want a new job, but tomorrow would be preferable.
Power's out in central London. Hundreds of us sit here, useless without our machines. Browsing on borrowed wifi, twiddling thumbs, wondering if this counts as a valid reason to leave early.
Working on this web2 project keeps flooding my brain with cool ideas. It's draining my notebook budget and my sleep.
Exam season begins. Going full hermit mode until June 5th, deep in geek territory. Also: curtains.
I'm refreshing CNN at 11pm waiting for the Pope to die, even though I don't care when it happens. I just need the information to exist so I can have it. I'm basically a lab monkey hitting a button for brain chemicals. I should probably go to bed.
Giving up broadband to cure information overload is like ditching cars for horses. The answer is to go forward, using RSS and email filters to cut the noise. This guy is an idiot.
Blogging every day makes it easier to find things worth blogging about. With a smaller sample size, something is always relatively more interesting than everything else in the period. The more you blog, the more you blog.
I love my iPod because it transforms dead commuting time into music-listening and blog-reading time, boosting both my mood and productivity. The massive storage means no pre-planning what to listen to, and the interface is the best available. It has meaningfully improved my quality of life.
Connecting remotely to your work machine just to play The Sims on your lunch break is not something a responsible employee does. Very bad idea.
One emacs config setting transforms it from an arcane key-binding nightmare to something that works like every other editor. A good reminder that good design is often invisible until you've experienced bad design first.
I've been using Wallearn to learn subconsciously via desktop wallpaper flashcards. Courses are scarce, so I made one for French regular verbs. Download it here, and grab Wallearn itself while you're at it.
Exams are here, so I'm shutting down the blog for real this time. No more updates until they're over. Hopefully I'll be back with good news.
Going offline to finish a report under deadline panic. Also, I'm now an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church (free, three minutes online) which should come in handy for pestering Christians.
My design process involves writing out my train of thought to compensate for poor short-term memory, otherwise I loop endlessly. The result reads like a schizophrenic arguing with himself. I used indentation to mark tangents, which proved genuinely useful.
Finally got the weblog back-end working, thanks to procrastination. If it's broken, you can't read this anyway.
The Internet is more connected but less decentralized than you'd expect. Also: multitasking is scientifically unproductive, which vindicates me against those seven-things-at-once braggers and should embarrass every boss who interrupts you fifteen times a day.
Revising is boring.
Working with MS Access? The MVPS Access site is a handy resource, and as always, Google has your back.
Windows users should switch to The Bat for email. It beats Outlook on every front: no bugs, faster, more features. One of the rare apps worth actually paying for.
