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YouTube >
Added here so there’s a copy out of Google’s control..
2014-07-26 the issue was deleted.
my writing
All posts tagged my writing
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Update: Five Things is meant to help with this sort of thing.
So at some point you migrate from little scraps of paper to sheets of paper.
- Then you migrate to notes in your computer.
- Then you migrate to a documentation system.
- Then you migrate back to notes in your computer.
- Then you migrate to one big note.
- Then you categorize your notes.
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Then you review and prioritize your notes.
All the while, your notes have been gathering strength, preparing to assault your free time.
You open the flood gates .. and .. nothing happens. The very notion of a list is intimidating, and actually “doing” anything is based on inspiration. Priorities have shifted around so much over the years that looking at the list just gives a lot of “yeah, that ought to get done one of these days” instead of the burning-hot passion there used to be.
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One of the things that’s been a real killer for me using most wikis has been the syntax. None of them get it right.
MediaWiki has been bearable, and over time I’ve grown used to it. The problem is that nobody agrees on a remotely similar syntax. There were some early efforts to create a generally agreed-upon syntax, and it did fairly well.. but it’s still not used everywhere.
I’m not just talking about wikis, but about markup languages in general. Even something like Ruby’s RDoc decided on its own syntax.
And they’re all wrong. Seriously, who thinks that __this is italicized__ ?
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I strongly appreciate a single-application single-tasking environment, because it forces you into a totally different mindset from the flurry of activity and noise one always has on an everyday “multitasking” computing environment these days. But since most of my day is spent completely surrounded by multiple applications all vying for my attention, I’ve come to expect to be able to swap my attention around whenever I want.
But there are situations and applications which explicitly deny multitasking.
Seriously.
See also:
Update: I’ve put in my 10,000 hours – update
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Lately I’ve been reviewing my skills and interests, and sketching out what I’m interested in learning and accomplishing.
Malcolm Gladwell was on The Hour, and he talked about his “10,000-Hour Rule” from his book Outliers.
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I act in cycles. I am inspired by and I work on something new, and that inspiration shifts around. I also have a tendancy to drop and pick up projects in cycles. In the past I’ve dropped ideas for long enough for all effort to become meaningless given enough time, but these days I’ve been careful to cycle back to earlier ideas to scrape off the cruft and re-launch the project.
When I re-launch a project, I often find myself bringing significant maturity to the table. I have new ideas and techniques, and I take a kind of sick pleasure in redoing much of my previous work. This isn’t just a programming thing.. it applies to anything that I’ve been working on.
whitehouse.org has been permanently archived. Curious. I wonder if they were kidnapped and tortured as terrorists.
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Somehow my postings always have a couple of issues that I find after posting them. I always find myself editing and re-editing and re-re-editing a post to improve it, even though I scan it carefully a couple of times before the initial post. I guess I’m still a wiki user at heart.
My apologies to anyone who is subscribed via RSS, as they will probably be fed the original creation. =/
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The problem with developers is they fly off onto wild tangents without any consideration for usability.
I appreciate AJAX. I really do. The reason websites like YouTube are required to use this technique is to save on bandwidth costs.
The problem is that a site is totally unusable. Nomatter how pretty developers make their site, if it uses AJAX it will suck.
