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Akatombo Web Log

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Incremental Progress on many fronts

My decision to cut down the amount of media I take in yesterday only translated into a partial shift in actual practice today. I spent very little time surfing the Internet today, and almost no time in my RSS reader, but I spent a lot of time with podcast playing in the background while I worked on other things, which is probably keeping me from working at peak efficiency. Tomorrow I will limit my podcast listening time to the commute to and from the office (about an hour) and the trip to and from the dentist (another half hour); that should be enough podcast listening time anyway.

Today my attention was spread over work on a lot of things, and though I didn’t make huge progress in any one thing, I knocked quite a few things off of my to do list. We are preparing a more powerful server to take over for the server that is currently hosting all of our websites so I have slowly been getting it ready to go. It will run on FreeBSD 6 and I already had that installed. Today I finished up installing all the ports that I need and did some planning for the data and configuration migration that will need to take place before things are ready to go. I hope to get the server up and going over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays so I’m not spending many large blocks of time on it.

I came much closer to finishing a client project that involves translation, web design, and programming work. I just have four more items on my list of things I need to do on it before I can hand it over to the client so I hope to have it done tomorrow if all goes well. I keep finding little ways that the site could function more smoothly, so I have been doing quite a bit of complimentary programming work to fix little annoyances in the underlying content management system. I always try to throw a little bit extra in for free, but this particular client was very patient when the illustrator he hired didn’t get things done in time to meet the deadline for getting the project finished before we had to start on the CEATEC JAPAN 2005 website, a project that pretty much monopolizes our time for a good portion of the year.

I also did quite a bit of work on organizing the tools we use to manage our work-flow—trying to consolidate where our information is kept so that we minimize the number of repositories we need to keep an eye on. Finally on the personal side I did some updating on a wiki that my girlfriend and I are maintaining containing information related to our house hunt (we are working on buying a new house, remodelling an old one, or buying some land and building a new one). Well, I’m sure that I am the only one that could possibly be interested in this, and it is getting pretty late so I’ll wrap it up here.

Monday, November 28, 2005

Input Overload

I’ve come to the conclusion recently that I take in too much stuff.  Through RSS, podcasts, television news, video games, Internet surfing, and the constant feeling of need to research more information on whatever it is I’m currently working on; I’ve been leaving myself with way too little time to think and create for myself.  Since I’ll be working on something very soon that will require me to be as creative and “all there” as possible, I need to wean myself down from this daily onslaught.  I’ve decided to go this week without tv (not a problem), a maximum of a half hour of rss feed browsing per day, podcasts when I’m riding my bike (one earbud in, one ear clear) to the office and back, no video games except on weekends (this is pretty standard for me lately anyway), and no more than 3 minutes away from my project for research at a time unless it is something I need to find out, and not just something I want to know.  How do you keep your media consumption down?  Do you find that it helps you to output more or better?

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Trying my hand at Applescript

Well, I technically already missed a day since it is 2A.M. as I sit down to write this, but I think we’ll count it.  I have to get into bed soon so I’ll be brief.  I decided today to try my hand at writing some Applescript for the first time.  I set to work on what I thought should be a simple Applescript to select a random entry from my unread messages smart subscription in NetNewsWire.  The plan was to get the headline count of the selected subscription, generate a random number between 1 and the count (n), and then select headline n from the subscription.  I could not for the life of me figure out how to select a headline in the NetNewsWire gui via Applescript.  I scoured the web for NetNewsWire Applescripts but could not find a single script that was selecting headlines, so maybe it is impossible, but it seems like something a person would fairly commonly want to accomplish.  I suspect that it is possible, and that it is just my complete lack of knowledge of Applescript that is hindering me.  Anybody out there know how to do this?

Akatombo Media is off for Thanksgiving from tomorrow (today actually) through the weekend so I most likely won’t be writing here either as I’m trying my best to stay away from computers on my days off.  Technology is a horribly addicting thing, and I need to try to have a life outside of my laptop screen.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Back in the Saddle Again (hopefully for real this time)

It has been entirely too long since I’ve written anything here, or anywhere really.  A combination of being extraordinarily busy all the time (I guess if it is a constant situation it isn’t really extraordinary is it?) and just not having inspiration to write anything that I thought visitors to the site would find interesting conspired to leave the site static.  I’ve decided enough is enough.  Until I start writing, I won’t be able to come up with anything to write about, so I’m making a commitment to try my best to write something on here daily, interesting or not.  There is a quote from Van Gogh, which I believe came out of a letter to his brother that I find very appropriate to the situation:

Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don’t know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, You can’t do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of ‘you can’t’ once and for all.

--via Wikiquote

Let’s just hope that this doesn’t mean I’m going to cut off my ear and mail it to a prostitute that I’m enamored with or something, the first problem is how would I choose?  I’ve got some interesting stuff coming up for Akatombo Media, and I’ll likely be giving little hints to what I’ve got coming up as it develops.  Anyway, I doubt anyone is still reading this after the lengthy dry spell, but I’ll try to write daily anyway, and maybe I can win some readers back.  Finally, a minor stylistic change, I’m not going to write