End of summer

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Tuesday 11 September 2007 @8:59

I was in denial about it for as long as possible, but yesterday my classes began. I can’t pretend it’s still summer anymore. Although the summer wasn’t nearly as productive as I planned back in May (I believe in aiming high; realistic goals are for weak minds ), I did get two papers accepted and I made progress on a new manuscript that I’d like to submit by mid-October.

I also sharpened my tools, battled a web-spam invasion, built a new home computer, and changed my web host. Didn’t travel very far this summer, but we hit Block Island (RI) in May, and Boston and Montréal for a few days each in August. In the coming weeks and months, I plan to finish final revisions on my RNGzip paper for JCP, pound out the new manuscript with Stefan, organize my coursework ideas for AI and write something about that, and, of course, submit my tenure portfolio. Oh, and I’ll be going to Germany for ICFP.

Peer pressure

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Saturday 11 November 2006 @11:25

I had to see what all the fuss was about. I have been visiting ‘productivity porn’ sites like 43folders and lifehacker (and their associated flickr groups) off and on for a year. And last weekend I finally swung by a Barnes & Noble and picked up a Moleskine grid-lined notebook.

When I first opened it up, the experience was a bit deflating. I caressed the cover. I sniffed the binding. I investigated the pocket in the back. I don’t know what I was expecting… a shining beacon? A choir of angels? I guess it’s impossible not to be a little underwhelmed after the way these things are hyped on the Internets.

So I tried it for a week, sitting aside my usual cheap black-marbled composition book, half full. I carried the Moleskine notebook to meetings and seminars. I did some course planning and sketched some project ideas. I’m just up to page 12, and I have to admit it has grown on me already.

Having grid-lined pages comes in handy. It allows you to write landscape or portrait equally well. It supports very neatly-drawn ad-hoc tables. (I’m tracking meeting-time preferences for members of my committee on one such table.)

But more important is the size: 13 x 21 cm, which is a lot narrower than my old composition books, and a more extreme aspect ratio than even ISO 216 A-series paper. A narrow page is useful for typographical reasons, of course, but even for note-taking it seems to work out well. It’s hard to use my composition books on my lap or otherwise in the absence of a desk… but I guess that’s also partly because of the soft cover.

Anyway, I’d like to write more on my quest (and misadventures) to find suitable tools for project planning and task tracking. LifeBalance was fun for a while, but it doesn’t run on Linux, and the interface is too ‘widgetized’ for my taste. I set myself up on Backpack a few weeks ago; I like its interface and concept but there are certainly drawbacks for realizing the cross-cutting concerns of GTD (project view vs. context view). This morning I’m checking out org-mode for Emacs, and for now I’m amazed, but I’m still reading the manual. I guess once I manage to settle into something truly workable, I’ll write about it here. I’m sure to David Allen it’s a travesty to spend so long chasing down the perfect system rather than just getting things done. But to me it feels like a legitimate (but, so far, unending) meta-project to sharpen my tools.

Maybe call it Luddwrite

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Thursday 25 May 2006 @18:21

Designer Khoi Vinh posted an idea for a sort of word non-processor application, which he called BlockWriter. Though it doesn’t exist yet, he secured the domain name already… a nice touch. The motivation, as he describes it, is this:

I noticed a few years ago that some serious writers, at least in the early drafting stages of their work, were turning to manual typewriters as a method of sidestepping distractions… There’s no email to check on a typewriter, no beeps and pop-up reminders from other applications, and no access whatsoever to the Internet and its tantalizing abundance of productivity-killing diversions.

What’s more, a manual typewriter is a powerful antidote to authorial dawdling, that propensity to continually re-edit a sentence or a paragraph — thereby imparting the feeling of working without really working — instead of continuing to write new sentences or paragraphs instead. Unlike word processors or even the simplest text editors, manual typewriters don’t allow you to easily re-edit, insert and revise a sentence once it’s been committed to paper. This makes for an entirely different writing experience: the ideas come first, and the act of finessing them, of word-smithing, comes after all the ideas have been set to paper.

The application would have essentially two purposes (which could be served by separate apps). First, it would block out other distractions, perhaps going as far as to block the network. Second, it would pretty much act like a typewriter: the cursor moves forward only. You could use backspace to cross out previous words like this but otherwise you just keep typing and get the ideas out.

I can usually tune out distractions for long enough to come up with a few paragraphs at a time, assuming I’m actually interested in what they say. But I suffer much more from this latter problem: endlessly tweaking the words and the sentences. Writing in the small. Usually it’s more productive to get everything down, and then go back and tweak. The only way my dissertation got written was with me in a coffee shop with pen and paper (and, incidentally, no internet).

One of my favorite toys as a kid—before we had a home computer—was a basic IBM typewriter. It was electric, but didn’t do much more with the power than make the hammers move. I’d use it to write stories and plays, type up recipes, etc. Yes, I’m that much of a nerd. It has been so many years, that I never really thought about how a typewriter forces you to work.

Word processors (even their 1980s incarnations) encouraged endless tweaking of the words, and their WYSIWYG successors similarly encouraged tweaking of the format. It’s great that the software we have now lets us go back to insert, delete, and rearrange our text without retyping everything or sacrificing whole forests. But perhaps that flexibility has costs as well…?

Anyway, it will be interesting to see if anything comes of the idea. A hacker with more Emacs skills than I have could probably whip up a blockwriter-mode in under an hour. The first step would be to delete all keys bound to anything other than self-insert-command.