Monthly Archives: December 2008

The War On Paper: The End…?

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I got my first real laptop during my Junior year in college. It was the PowerBook G4, the one before the last revision before the Intel transition.

Because I’m so forward thinking, I decided to start my journey to rid the world of paper. I started taking notes on the laptop. I shunned physical Post-it notes for the much more electronic Stickies. iCal would be open all the time to make sure I took down group meetings. OmniOutliner was the app of choice (since it came free with the computer).

Sidenote: After using OmniOutliner, I realized that I wanted them to be in plaintext files… I still haven’t gone through all my class notes and fixed this yet. One day… batch processing FTW.

But today, as I was going through the Cocoa book (Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X), I found myself desiring to take notes on pieces of yucky, non-indexable, paper-cut-prone, not-so-green (since being green tends to be the cool these days) dried wood pulp.

Maybe it’s because of my recent wrist problems… that might have to do with it. I was going through some of my older notes, and happened upon the math textbook I was writing. For some reason, I decided to codify everything I had learned about math I had learned in high school. I’m not too sure when I started writing in that wire-bound notebook, but I think it was around Junior high, looking at where I stopped with Trig and such.

Sidenote: I remember back then when learning was much easier. There was only a handful of things to memorize and to spill onto a test piece of paper. It wasn’t as bad as college, in terms of things asked to be answered and things “taught” (after all, the “learning” occurred outside of the classroom, a side-effect of the ineffectiveness of a large percentage of lectures). Wow, someone’s bitter? Moving on.

But alas, I am now in the market for some paper. Maybe Livescribe? This may be the best of both worlds.

Which reminds me, I have tons of reviews to write up… Darn this ambition to write every single application idea I have.

One Year Ago…

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One year ago, HanMeta, LLC came to life. And so now we enter into year two.

When I look back, it’s very interesting to see how much I did and didn’t get done. I definitely started something, but at the same time, nothing really materialized, as witnessed by the lack of any product releases.

I’ve learned to have a balanced view in all things, not just with respect to HanMeta: That while I may aim for the stars, it’s okay to have fallen short of the goal. After all, goals change over time, especially with experience and knowledge in knowing that those initial goals were foolish to begin with.

I’ve been restarting my efforts in trying to create a product with HanMeta. The waves of productivity waxed and waned throughout the year, with certain things in my life or in the world triggering them. There have always been roadblocks along the way, mostly created by me.

There has always been this desire to make sure that everything is used towards something. Metrics and organization are both very important, but to an OCD person like myself, it because a crutch to not get anything done. It’s yet another thing to occupy my time, rather than building awesome things.

To add to that, I’m always looking out of the formula for success; the silver bullet. All the while, I know that such a formula doesn’t exist. It must be why I like systems that can be reduced to absolutes. Games provide me with this system, and I’m seeing my business-oriented self come out a lot more often while playing such games.

But alas, there will always be lessons to learn.

The question is, now what? Now that Year 1 has gone by like this, what will Year 2 be like?

Well, much more awesome, right?

The roadblock now is… passion. I can probably tack on focus to that also. There are just too many things I want to do with HanMeta, and due to this scattered focus, I can’t get anything done. A couple of blog ideas here, a podcast there, and a B2C project idea all the way over somewhere…

It’s time for a list. And to think a little bit more methodically about what to get done.

I sure hope when I write another one of these posts in 2009 that things would have changed for the awesomer, indeed.

WordPress 2.7

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Sure took my sweet time in getting this updated here on the blog. K2 came out with RC7, and updated that too.

I’m in the middle of a switchover process again. I’ll update the blog when that happens. For now, this is all I’ve got.

Definitely digging the new UI and all the new features of the web interface. Wee! I may have to go back to using the web interface, rather than busting out the MarsEdit.

This really should be it’s own version number, but WP doesn’t like version number inflation. Update, people, update!

The Cause of Procrastination: Difficulty

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It’s so hard to start blog posts these days. So I’ll start like this.

I’m once again only beginning to realize how hard things will be. And this is a good thing. Of course, difficulty is in the eye of the beholder. Some may thing that my (restarting) regimen of going to the gym daily in this subzero weather is difficult.

I guess the viewpoint changes when one finds the task at hand to be interesting or rudimentary. Interesting to the point where there is nothing else in the world that person can do to scratch the itch of feeling purposeful in the world or rudimentary to the point where there is no way not to scratch it (excuse the double negative).

A Look Back

It’s been a tough eleven months. Struggling with all sorts of medical problems, to which I have not seen the end to really… all the while, fighting myself to commit to work and projects.

Of course, video games took a hold during the last half of this year, which I have yet to write on because of said obsession. But I can feel it in my bones… if I could find blogging not so difficult.

At one point, the words to type sparked out of my fingers. I believe that was around the time before I found Twitter. Twitter became a crutch; a place to quickly throw out an idea or a remark and be done with it. It’s definitely a useful tool grown out of a definite need of a lot of people (just not sure if it’s most people, but who cares about them, right?). Since then, it’s gotten harder to post a lengthy comment on anything, really.

But you see, this post in it of itself is the purest embodiment of procrastination. It’s easier to write a blog post than to code, at this current juncture in time: It’s easier to write about it than to do it.

It’s time to make some hard changes to make sure things are kept interesting. It’s time to cultivate good habits so that things become rudimentary.

Historian/Documentarian/Procrastinator

One huge takeaway from today is the realization that this incessant need to record and to analyze everything in life is borne from the innermost desire to procrastinate. Why look to the future when there’s so much in the past?

All the while, I agree with that innermost desire… that things do need to be recorded. Things like financial data that can prove useful. But what happens then? It gets difficult again, seeing the amount of freaking data I’d have to filter through. Remember the blog unification project? I haven’t touched that for months because of how annoying the dataset is.

So I get stuck. So I get confused. I turn to the next shiny object and think about why I got attracted to it in the first place.

A nice tall stack gets created. Stack overflow? You betcha.

When i think about the crazy super important people in history, they didn’t keep a Life Management System running around somewhere, thinking that one day when they get famous, they’ll use that data to share it with others.

The Blog

So that brings me to another thing about this blog. Is it really just a chalice for my brain to spill into? I keep coming back to this point because everything I do must have a purpose. It just has to.

Why? Not sure. But with that kind of viewpoint, I’m bound to do some stupid things. I’ll chew on this why question later while I’m doing something boring.

Previously, there was a desire to monetize everything I did. While that desire still exists to some extent, I’m seeing that purpose doesn’t have to include money.

So maybe this blog is to just increase my influence? To whom? To the few that read it?

Back To Procrastination

During this last month, I’m going to give it yet another go.

What is “it”? It’s comprised of a lot of things that continue to exist on my list. The question is do I make this list public and make sure that I am forced to do most of it through crushing guilt in not being able to be the person that I promised to become; “The Checker of Checklists”.

More later. Must sleep.