base0.net » Work http://base0.net In Transition Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:15:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Writing and keeping at things. http://base0.net/posts/writing-and-keeping-at-things-/ http://base0.net/posts/writing-and-keeping-at-things-/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 had a plan to write my thesis proposal over the last two months, and then I would use these last two months of the year to finish some actual pre-thesis work and edit the proposal down to size.]]> Life for me lately is a constant struggle between things that I want to do and things that I have to do – then again, this has been the truth for much of my life. The current thing that I have to do is edit my thesis proposal. Some of you may remember that I had a plan to write my thesis proposal over the last two months, and then I would use these last two months of the year to finish some actual pre-thesis work and edit the proposal down to size. I didn’t have a problem writing the thing – the work went quickly and spreading it out over two months was definitely the way to go. However, now I have a 18,000 word thesis proposal breathing down my neck, waiting for me to do more research on it and edit it down to a more reasonable 12,000 to 15,000 words. I also need to come up with a good schedule which is reasonable and doable. I get the feeling that I am going to have to tone down my actual thesis work as it would probably take me more than a year to complete what is actually proposed in the thesis. I also feel like I will be at school doing lots of work over the next couple of months getting it edited to just the right amount – I feel like editing is a job which is never done, and I could actually work on getting it just right for a long time.

November, while also being NaNoWriMo, is NaBloWriMo, which is focused on people writing in their blogs. I like this idea because it’s much more casual and easier to do. Writing my thesis has shown me that it’s pretty easy to write 500 words a day, and I feel like that’s about the perfect size for a blog post, so I will probably try to keep each post around 500 words, without pastes and pictures and the like. So look to see a bunch more posts from me – I already need to catch up, I’m 4 posts behind. Diana is also doing the NaBloWriMo, but she is actually doing it on both of her blogs: Magickal Realism, the one for her business, and Fat Chic, her fashion blog. I hope she can get her posts written, and it works out okay.

In the past I have tried to post once every other day, and that didn’t work out very well, even though I had a bunch of ideas which were floating around waiting for a blog post. After a while I figured that I just only had a certain amount of writing in me per day, so while I was trying to power out my 500 words a day for the thesis, I couldn’t really blog. It was a pretty bad excuse, but it worked for me because honestly the blog is less important than the thesis. It might happen again, especially if I am spending a lot of time honing the thesis down to the bare minimum. That would be okay though, it’ll just be the norm for a NaNoWriMo attempt – a strong start and then not much useful at the end, and at least I’d be working hard on things that are important.

]]> http://base0.net/posts/writing-and-keeping-at-things-/feed/ 0 Late at night when the wires in the walls http://base0.net/posts/late-at-night-when-the-wires-in-the-walls/ http://base0.net/posts/late-at-night-when-the-wires-in-the-walls/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 After my iBook problems last week, I tried to install Debian on the thing. I have narrowed down the problem to something with the hard drive inside, because the machine seems to run fine and go through most of the installation without any trouble, but once I start using the hard drive, it completely freezes. I successfully ran the hardware test disc which came with it a couple times in extended mode, but I’m not sure that it uses the hard drive in it’s tests long enough for it to exhibit the problem. The failure seems to be somewhat random in nature, occuring at different times in the install process. Now I have the unhappy decision of trying to save this laptop which is more than 3 years old, or to attempt to buy a new one. Right now I am leaning toward buying a new one.

Honeywell seems 1.5 times as long this week, mostly because I’m making up for a day which I missed a couple weeks ago. Things have settled down there in terms of software failure, so I’m back at the normal coding which I am doing. The code uses Ogre, which is a handy 3d engine, making it much easier than learning something like OpenGL, and as a bonus adding portability. I am considering building some play applicaitons with the toolkit at home just because it would be fun.

Tonight I need to build a couple presentations covering some papers which were in CVPR this year to present at a reading group at Honeywell. It would be fine except that I am completely unaware of any of the recent history of vision research, so it makes it much harder to build the presentations. I hope I can finish them in a reasonable amount of time so I can watch Eureka tonight.

The TiVo Diet is still working out as expected. I discovered that I don’t really have anything to watch on Sunday or Monday of the week. I’m getting much more productive work done than I used to. One downside of the diet is that I tend to not want to just sit and veg at the end of the work day – I think it frustrates [lj user="ceilingsarecool"] a bit because I’m always going off to the office to do something on the computer.

I recieved and watched the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip yesterday. Being an Aaron Sorkin fan, I am excited for another of his shows to broadcast. Judging by the pilot, it should be a decent show.

Sidenote: Planet Debian seems to like one of my weekend weeviews a little too much, and is regrabbing it for the front page every so often. I can’t figure out why this is happening, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, in a couple more posts it should be off the RSS feed.

]]> http://base0.net/posts/late-at-night-when-the-wires-in-the-walls/feed/ 2 Work and Procrastination: A six-hour study of the (10+2)*5 hack. http://base0.net/posts/work-and-procrastination:-a-six-hour-study-of-the-(10-2)*5-hack-/ http://base0.net/posts/work-and-procrastination:-a-six-hour-study-of-the-(10-2)*5-hack-/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 (10+2)*5 dash courtesy of Merlin over at 43 Folders, and I thought that I would give it a try. The concept is fairly simple: work for 10 minutes, screw around for 2 minutes, repeat 5 times, and voila! you have filled an hour with 5/6 productivity.]]> Recently I discovered the (10+2)*5 dash courtesy of Merlin over at 43 Folders, and I thought that I would give it a try. The concept is fairly simple: work for 10 minutes, screw around for 2 minutes, repeat 5 times, and voila! you have filled an hour with 5/6 productivity. The first thing that I did was download a Konfabulator widget which keeps track of the time and pops up a warning box when you should be screwing around and working.

I worked for approximately 6 hours under this regime today at my Honeywell job, even though I don’t use task lists as diligently as I should there. I found that tasks which I regarded as small were finishing in a snap, partly because I wanted to get them done before the next 2 minute break, and partly because if I didn’t finish for a break, my mind didn’t just stop thinking about the problem. It was very advantageous to think about something else for 2 minutes and then get back to the action because it was like taking a fresh start. I was using the dash to do some coding (the major portion of my hours right now) – finding bugs that normally would have me staring at the screen for a couple minutes seemed easy when I was just coming back from a break. The only issues which I had with it was when I got interrupted by Workrave rest breaks (I turned off microbreaks) or a coworker. I am definitely doing it again, the next time I have an hour uninterrupted.

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