Topic: Progress report

(I’ve been tinkering on this post all weekend, and I wanted to get it out of the door before it’s next week. Here goes!)

I always forget, and there’s no good reason for this, how difficult it is to establish new routines and new habits. Two weeks ago, I moved for the second time this year. this week I started a new job and even though I have more free time than I did before, I’m still coming up at loose ends and I find myself wondering why I have a hard time concentrating and getting into “the grove.” There’s so much to do, so many tasks collecting dust on my todo list, and I’m only half keeping ahead of everything.

I have two things to report that I missed on the last update: I have new full-text feeds for posts about org-mode and emacs. Hopefully these will get included in relevant planets soon for your reading pleasure.

There’s also been some :discussion on the “Bad Org Mode Habits” post. You may be interested.

As an aside: the astute among you will notice that Matt Lundin and I have made a folk page that is automatically updated anytime there’s a page that links to or is tagged with Matt’s handle (i.e. “madalu.") This includes an RSS feed that he (or you) can use to track his updates and mentions. Use the edit page functionality to see how to make such a page for your own notification purposes.

Everything else on my list is pretty boring. I’m, slowly trying to follow my own advice in bad org mode habits.

The organization I was using for my lists and notes worked really well when I was commuting all of the time and working off of laptops on the go. Among other limitations, I think I basically had to give up any sort of really complex project. Now that I have more time, I can tend to more gnarly projects that I’ve wanted to tinker with that I just haven’t had the time for. Without a train ride and “home time” to define my free time for fiction writing and other projects, it’s been hard to adjust.

It has also been hard for me to get a real sense of how my free time remains limited (because that’s the nature of free time,) even if there’s a lot more of it to go around. Adjustment is always hard and changes, particularly big changes, have a ripple effect. Things I’ve been doing differently include:

• I’ve made some big changes to the blog post writing tooling, so that new blog posts are written in my org-mode files rather than in their own directory. (I updated the above emacs code with some shell functions that make the publication process easier (if you’re using that code.) This seems minor, but is pretty big in terms of how I’m using org I’ve never really used org for anything other than notes and one off projects. It’s a good shift.
• While I used to dock my laptop to the desk and use it with an external monitor, I’m switching to just using the laptop dock and working on the laptop on the desk. This might not be ergonomically ideal, but it feels better and is a bit more coherent. Particularly with the addition of a third laptop for work.
• I caved and installed emacs on my work laptop (Windows.) Rather than adapt all of my emacs crap to work with Windows, I’m basically copying and pasting the important parts, and starting from scratch. It’s not pretty, but it works. And being able to use emacs and do the things that I want to do there, is a good thing indeed.
• With only a few thousand more words to go on the novel. I’m taking a bit of a break to rethink things, and hopefully this afternoon rewrite a few outlines so I have a good way of drawing this project to a close. Then writing, then lots of editing and lots of other writing.
• A bit more than two weeks ago, I got a new cell phone. It’s a HTC Inspire (ATT “4g,") and I like it rather a lot. I still think that Blackberry does email and messaging better. This is a better computer to have in your pocket. The Kindle App is really usable. I have a text editor/note program that works great, and all the other little incidentals just seem to work and be there. If only the messaging where a bit better. eh.
• The new job is going well, though I’m still in the “I wonder what this will look like when I’m actually fully up to speed” phase. I expect that I’ll write even less about this job than my last job, and retreat further into “tycho.” I like this. I may, however, write some features of the new job: the fact that I’m using Windows on my work machine and various aspects of digital collaboration, which I still find fascinating.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print!

This has been a strange week. It’s strange, but not terribly surprising, that given a comparative expanse of free time with not a lot to do except write, that every little thing I’ve meant to do for a while but have been putting off suddenly came up and required all of my attention.

This isn’t to say that I’ve spent all of my time doing chores and running errands. I’m actually taking this as proof in favor of my general theory that writing and other avocational pursuits ought to be habitual and ongoing rather than the focus of occasional binges. But there are some things that take a lot of time and its worth binging on a little. This week, I got some writing done, but mostly did things like tinkering with my computers and tending to some long overdue systems administration tasks. I also switched to a new cell phone, oversaw delivery of furniture, sang, danced, and cooked. Not a bad week.

I do have some links and notes for you.

• I made a rough introductory page for my efforts to run the xen hypervisor on a laptop.
• There was some confusion this week as I reorganized the blog post files on the wiki. Basically, all blog posts are now in /posts/ directory (no more /posts/ and /posts/) with the different feeds generated by tags. So I did post some cool stuff, but it didn’t get out. This includes:
• Bad Org-Mode Habits about the best ways to use emacs' org-mode.
• Poetry Has a Purpose which addresses a little bit of literary theory/criticism/practice that got under my skin and into my head.
• I’ve imported a few recent discussions from Facebook threads associated with my posts here onto discussion pages pages, which I think you might enjoy:
• I spent some time this morning working on a system to capture notes into org-mode using procmail and my cellphone’s email client. See that here.
• Most of this post, excluding the links, was written on the aforementioned cell phone. It’s still not quite the same as writing from a computer, but for getting raw material out of my head, I kind of like it. We’ll see if that sticks.

That’s about all I have for now!

The new job starts next week, so I would say that my posting schedule may be a bit erratic. But if you’ve been reading tychoish for any length of time, you’re probably used to a far more irregular posting pattern.

I’ll see you on the flip side.

I wish there was a good way, in the context of a blog post or some other convenient digital media, to regularly say: “I’ve done some things, you may be interested in them,” and “I’d like to do some things, here are some notes of what I think I’d like to be working on in the next little bit.” I’ve yet to find a good way to get in the habit of writing this kind of post.

My instinct is to have something that I can template and automate pretty strongly so that I can mostly focus on doing things rather than writing blog posts about doing things. Or as is presently the case, blog posts blog posts about doing things. Oy. Ideas and suggestions on this topic would be most appreciated.

So what have I been up to? Well…

• I got back into writing fiction this week after several weeks away. I was in a difficult part of the story and life got very… full… and I stopped writing regularly. These things happen, but it’s good to be back at least some.

  After the work I did just last night, I realize that I’m much closer to the end of this novel than I had thought. Even if things go very slowly for the next few months, I think I’ll be able to get this thing done by the end of May. I just have to write about a thousand words to finish Chapter 11, and there are three to four little vignettes in chat per 12 to wrap the whole thing up. And it’s going to be awesome.

  I’m super excited to be done with this project and to be able to spend some time cleaning it up and making it an awesome text, but also being able to work on making other things I’ve written better, and to be able to write new things, with my undivided attention.

• I’ve updated the /posts/anti-rodentia and the associated discussion page with some changes that I think make the system work much better.

• I’ve upgraded to Firefox 4, which I really like a lot: it’s much faster, it’s much more minimal (visually) which is great. Also all of my plugins and extensions work without issue. Good job!

• I went through a blast from my past when I pulled together the queer theories page, which does some--at this point utterly redundant--definitional work about what it means to be queer, and potential limitations on queer identity/politics in the era of a broadly defined queer.

• I’ve started adding recurring tasks to keep me on track with writing and posting entries to this post. This means I don’t end up posting things months after I write them. As was the case with Mutt Sucks Less, a post I wrote many months ago and posted with some revisions last week.

• I made a folk page for frequent comm enter and discourse participant Matt Lundin that includes a snippet which makes a list (and RSS feed!) of all pages that link to “madalu” or are tagged with “madalu” (his handle). You can see this by editing the page, and use it when making your own folk pages. Which you should totally do.

Have a good weekend!