ZenLinux Blog

I live within a reasonable distance of Blue Job Mountain, and find it a convenient short hike to do on a whim. I’ve probably been hiking it not quite every other weekend since late September. There’s a fire tower at the top and some great views when the weather is clear.

The past few times I’ve hiked it I’ve been timing myself, and just making small goals to improve my ascent progress. This morning I have a new record of 13:48 for the half-mile, 400-foot climb! Conditions were pretty much ideal this morning because when it’s wet it can slow you down quite a bit, as the trail is fairly rocky.

These photos were taken from the top of the fire tower, which I didn’t photograph as I have plenty of shots of it already.

Well, it’s been a week, and the experiment is over. Unfortunately, I had to use IM for a couple of hours yesterday to firm up plans to head to Boston with a friend who was unavailable by telephone (thanks a lot, Billy!). At any rate, the point of the experiment was still made. The verdict? IM: you can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it. 🙂

I can’t see myself doing without IM entirely, as it would wreck what bit of a social life I do have. At the same time, I’m going to be much more conscious about when and how I plan to use IM when I log on, and will probably limit it to a few hours each day, and then turn it off. As with many things, moderation is key.

The Boston event I referred to above involved attending a talk given by Noam Chomsky. It was an interesting overview of the state of populist movements in Latin America, and a striking contrast to what we consider political issues in the U.S. In places such as Bolivia, elections were over issues such as local control of natural resources, particularly land and water rights, and the human rights of indigenous people. A person like Evo Morales wouldn’t have a chance in a U.S. presidential election today, where our last White House race consisted of two people who attended the same ivy league school, were members of the same Skull and Bones elite society, and who were funded by incredibly concentrated, private interests. Most Latin American countries face difficult challenges because foreign investment is so deep – unlike East Asia, where strong internal investment helps to prevent these countries’ political systems from being manipulated so thoroughly by foreign countries. It was a thought-provoking lecture on issues I was very unaware of.

Haha, I found this appropos article on reddit just now, about a PC World writer who stops using PCs for a full 20 days. I won’t be trying that out..

I had an incredibly productive evening working on CampaignLever. Everything just started falling together, and several features are now working. The key to motivation is to see continual progress, and that was certainly the case during this productivity boost.

It’s been over two days since I started my week without instant messaging, and I’m definitely noticing the differences. Am I feeling more productive? Yes. I also feel I’m more efficiently focusing on whatever’s in front of me, whether it’s an e-mail, article, or code I’m reading. I think that’s a big plus, and it would easily be worth it at this point just to swear off IM forever if there were no downsides to this.

But there are downsides to it. I already feel disconnected from a lot of my friends whom I communicate over IM with regularly. Surprisingly, short chat sessions with them make up fairly meaningful connections I have with them. Often times we’re exchanging interesting URLs over IM. As a budding entrepreneur, this frequently revolves around product ideas or interesting market research that I find very useful. I’ve sent out a few of these kinds of updates via e-mail now, but no one is responding. I don’t blame them – IM is just too convenient for these types of exchanges. Share a link or an idea, and get feedback from someone in real time. There are also many social plans that get made over IM, and I’m wondering if I’ve already missed an opportunity to grab lunch or a beer with some of my friends.

I’m certainly going to continue this productivity experiment, but as of now I’m thinking when it’s over I am definitely going to continue using IM, but I may end up managing it a bit differently, such as limiting the time I’m on-line (my “Away” status is generally ignored by most poeple – they just see my user icon and fire off a message). Perhaps using something like Campfire would also be easier to contain from an interruption standpoint.

Inspired by Kathy Sierra’s extremely insightful post The Asymptotic Twitter Curve, I’ve decided to stay unplugged from Instant Messaging for a full week. That would be until next Friday around 3:15 PM. It’s true that IM is the most frequent mental interruption I deal with daily. I’ll report on how this productivity experiment goes on this blog.

A person I work with whom I admire for his focus and drive makes a point of never using IM because of its interruptions. I have the feeling he’s onto something.

I’m rounding up people for the first Ruby/Ruby on Rails user group meeting in New Hampshire. We’re tentatively looking at meeting on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 from 7-9 PM at Morse Hall (Room 301) in Durham.

The meeting topic will be getting the group going, and I’ll be happy to share some of my favorite ruby/rails resources for development as well as following the (sub)culture. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you’re interested in attending – sgarman at zenlinux dot com.

My trusty Eclipse ergonomic computer monitor lamp bit the dust a few weeks ago (not the bulb, but the unit itself), so I decided to go hunting for a new desk lamp. Admittedly I’m picky about these kinds of things, so it took me several visits to various places before I found something I liked. I noticed that a lot of the lamps are halogen-based and have special bulbs. I didn’t think much of this and the one I liked happened to be this type. It had an adjustable dimmer knob so, I figured I was all set.

But when I finally turned the thing on at home, WOW, was it hot! The stream of light emanating from it felt like it was also capable of cooking whatever you placed underneath it. I hoped the dimmer knob would be the saving grace, but it didn’t help much in the heat department. It also caused the lamp to make an annoying buzzing sound when it wasn’t on full-brightness. Argh.

My home office is warm enough with all the computer gear and aquarium equipment I have, and I decided this lamp was just too much. If you’re looking for a dual-function light source and space heater, give a halogen lamp a shot. But mine is going back to the store and I’m getting one that takes normal incandescent bulbs (which I’ll replace with an energy-efficient compact flourescent to reduce heat even further).

I thought discussing my coding environment when working with Ruby on Rails might make for good blog fodder, so here it is:

• Ubuntu Edgy with the GNOME desktop
• Jedit programmer’s editor
• Jedit plugins ProjectViewer, Sidekick, RubyPlugin, and WhiteSpace
• Firefox v2
• Firefox extensions Firebug, Webdeveloper, and the DOM Inspector
• Subversion for source code version control
• bash shell

I have a dual-head monitor set up at home and give jedit one desktop area and share the remainder between Firefox and several terminal windows. My basic terminal setup includes the following:

• One terminal in the rails project working directory, to run rake or perform svn commits.
• One terminal running script/server.
• One terminal running tail -f log/development.log.
• One terminal running the mysql interpreter so I can poke at the database manually.

I’ve found this setup to be productive as I’m coding, particularly as I keep an eye on the logfile for ruby errors. Also, I keep a bookmark toolbar folder of frequently accessed web and rails development sites, including:

• The Rails API documentation
• A DevGuru CSS reference
• Prototype documentation from the Scriptaculous wiki
• The W3C HTML tutorial, for those times when I need to double-check my basic understanding of HTML

Since ruby is such a concise language, I actually spend the bulk of my time dealing with HTML/CSS issues. Firebug makes it easy to pick elements from a page and analyze their CSS styles or DOM location. Jedit has some nice intellicode-like auto-completion features for ruby, but it slows the editor down quite a bit and so I’ve got most of that turned off. The API docs are easy to use, and I often learn something new by reading them directly.