Cleaning up duplicate comments suck. I blame Disqus, seeing as how I haven’t changed anything in the backend that has to do with commenting. I guess it could also be with WordPress.
But that’s beside the matter… I’ve been cleaning out all the duplicate comments that seem to date back to September. No biggie.
Still thinking about what to do with this blog… I’ll get back to you. In the meanwhile, I have quite a few broken images to fix.
I can’t really explain the need to track things. For some reason, I’d like to come back to the time when I didn’t know anything about web development and watch the whole process of me becoming better. I guess I want to sell books on it or something.
These past couple of days, I’ve turned it down as much as I can. I just went and did it. I went and starting futzing around with the server, trying to become better at being a sysadmin.
I just did stuff. And the scary thing is, I don’t remember exactly, command by command, thought by thought, what I did. In the end, I got a working server out of it, with a blog that’s running much faster than before.
Looking back, I’m realizing that I really should have kept just a little bit more track of things, but really, the more important thing, and by far the more important thing, is that I got something done.
Not only is depth of knowledge important, so is the breadth. It’s kinda like going through Wikipedia, jumping from one article to another. I think it’s almost tied down to the desire to track, because after all, I strive to learn from mistakes.
While I was going at it with my sysadmin-ness, there were many places where I could have gotten off track and spent time doing something else. Even… “learning” to blog more consistently. But nope, I kept it quiet.
It’s the need to stay free flowing, in other words. But I need to learn to focus at times when I need to. And that time is now.
The problem here is that I tend to sand away at knicks and corners until I don’t even have a product anymore. Well, I guess at that point I have to adapt and sell the remains.
But seriously, this entire HanMeta business took me so long because I wanted to have it all “correct” the first time. The funny thing is, I still don’t know what “correct” is. It was stupid of me to try and create this perfect company without actually building a company.
This goes back to failures in StatusFix also. The need to have that perfect process to make sure that all of my friends were developing code in perfect harmony… useless.
The fact is to produce something awesome, not perfect.
This doing business is much more fun than I could have imagined. It’s also ridiculously difficult and annoying.
I have much more to do. Just keep watching.
So much work in the past couple days, coupled with the fact that I’m still trying to cope with the insane flu I caught while coming back from Seattle.
I am now fully hosted on Slicehost. I am afraid for my server’s life, hoping all of my server administration was done correctly and without holes. It was fun wearing the sysadmin hat again, and for such a long time too… definitely learned more about how the heck Apache worked… never ask me to write up a virtual host file up again, because I still don’t know why it didn’t work the first time.
But yes, things are mostly back to normal here. Still have a couple plugins to set up, a few UI changes I’d like to make, but definitely liking how the site’s a lot snappier than it’s been in the past. Here’s to my 256MB slice holding up okay.
My balance is running low at NearlyFreeSpeech, and I’ve decided to consolidate everything to Slicehost. It’s going to be a fun couple of days. Expect some weirdness in the meanwhile.
Ugh, it happened again. I keep over-writing. Keeping it short.
Good thing I have Twitter and all the past tweets of this weekend, because I don’t quite fully remember what happened this past weekend. Being up for at least 36 hours is never a good thing, although, somehow, I found the strength to keep going. (Her name is Caffeine. Our relationship was complicated, and now, it’s about to get broken.)
This past weekend was weird. I was up for at least 36 hours, doing such tasks like:
But the whole point of this post is not to talk about what I did this weekend, but what I realized I had to do. And I know, it was January, 11th… let’s keep that out of here as we talk about world domination plans.
I finally continued reading Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely. What came next was not caused by what I actually read, but what I took to heart while reading it. I don’t even remember what it was about… something to do with Bill Gates.
The realization was to be even more ruthless with my time. Even more so than I am. My ways of overthinking needs to end. A testament to this new way of life was how I went about writing this post. I just kept whittling it down and down until this post happened.
It must be because of prepping for a trip to Seattle this weekend, but I feel the need to accomplish something before then. Today has been a throwaway day because… I’m still recovering from the mess of this weekend.
But seriously, I need to blog more short posts. Make more things into multi-part blot posts, or something.
I really think it should be called something else… but I think the Internet has decided on naming it as such.
I heard about it two days ago, when I saw in my feeds something about Calendar About Nothing. It seems like this concept was borne and named after this post on Lifehacker.
What am I talking about? It’s a simple concept: Just keep the streak of “X”s going. Don’t break the chain.
Looks like there’s a Don’t Break The Chain! webapp that is a bit more generalized. Of course, I’d go a bit further and start creating multiple calendars per user, sell it as an iPhone app, blah blah blah…
But really, this is quite an elegant way to get some stuff done every day. Good way to keep track of the things that you’ve done also.
Second Google search is for this page, where the author has generated two pdf versions of this calendar for easy printing.
You can’t improve the efficiency of a process that doesn’t exist.
As with many things, this makes perfect sense in my mind. But I’ve been going about my projects as if I didn’t know this plain fact. This condition is quite similar to premature optimization, but I think it’s actually worse. With premature optimization, you’ve got some functionality that you’re trying to reduce into fewer lines of code or CPU cycles. Here, I’ve got nothing.
Here’s an example of this: Currently, I’m in the process of moving all of my sites to slicehost. I’m carefully deciding what kind of directory structure to use for them… and in my view, I’m very annoyed that I can’t just pick one method, and stick to it until later down the line, I have to fix it.
Instead, I keep thinking about my options, the cost-benefit analysis to what I do here. The “visionary” in me steps in to take control and ends up wreaking all kinds of havoc on productive work.
I think it’s when I became just a little bit more cognizant of the world. In high school, the world seemed quite small. That was around the time I started going into web development a bit more than just fiddling around with HTML here and there.
At that point, I didn’t know what was good or bad code: It just had to do something useful. These days, the requirements have been stepped up to much higher standards.
I think another reason for this weirdness comes from a desire to record everything. Record my failures as well as my successes, so that one day, I can or someone else can come in and figure out what really happened.
Slowly and painfully, though, I’m finding out that I actually do this fairly naturally. Not only that, I believe everyone start fabricating things about their past anyway, and so one’s reality and beliefs change as a function of time.
The solution? It’s not to write about it, which is what I thought it was. The solution is simple. You want it?
Some will call this “application”.
Really, it’s just to rise above oneself and just do.
“Be Awesome Instead” was 2008. 2009 will have to be just “Be Awesome”. I don’t have any other choice but to be awesome.
Sidenote: I haven’t had a post that varied in length throughout the writing/editing process like this one in ages. It’s time to write regularly again.