Archive of September 2008

Finding my Productive Sweet Spot

Different people are more productive at different times of the day. For me, it's none of the weekend, and during the week (providing I'm still awake) the hours of 11pm-2am. Apart from causing some quite irritating problems with being tired and instead not being able to do it, quite a lot of the time I can.

Last night was quite an example. I wrote two blog posts, merged a few lists, sorted out my GTD app and cleaned it out from the last few weeks, merged a few files and stared into space wondering what to do next.

It doesn't happen everyday, it's quite impossible, I'm somewhat prone to needing my decent amounts of sleep. Tonight was a bit different though. I needed to get some work done for the next day, so I didn't stop at all and I drank tea all evening. Maybe the light caffeine kick is what I need, or the constant level of working?

The trouble is is that I wasn't *that* productive all night. It did only start from about 11pm by the point that I had finished doing what I had needed to do for the next day. This got me thinking.

I wasn't sure if it was because I really didn't want to do the task, whether it was the tea, my lack of tiredness, my zen like action of cleaning stuff out, or the rather large event - buying my motorbike.

Too many variables.

The adrenaline from buying the bike didn't help. The bidding war, the impending "oh, shit, over budget" afterwards, then sitting around for a while stopped me from working, so that's that out of the window.

I didn't particularly want to do the work that I needed to do, I do have a habit of at least trying to do stuff before a deadline (often fails though), and during doing that work, it was boring, hard and mostly uninviting. That put me off, until I had finished and the wave of good feeling after. Oh, wait. I didn't actually finish all of it. Some of it I'd gotten tired of doing and the rest was dependent on doing the bit before. This means that I didn't get the "finished that" wave. Another out of the window.

After I got home, I didn't actually stop. I kept going from when I got home, a break for dinner and then back to it again with constant amounts of tea and music.

That may be it. Not stopping; if I stop, I loose interest and I find easier things to do.

Tiredness, as I write this it's nearly Tuesday, I slept for most of the weekend, so that could be it. I can stay up, so I will. But that just explains why I am here in the first place and not in bed, right?

A light caffeine kick - in the form of lots of tea could explain why my concentration is still with me. By being able to stay up constantly without slowing down means that I can't stop, which puts me back into the loop.

And that's the problem. Our bodies are annoying, but what I have realised tonight is that I will be trying this again, to see if I get the same reaction, if I do, then I've hit something, if not, then well, I'll need a new method.

People often criticise people talking about being productive, because surely, by them writing it, and others reading it it isn't really being productive, it's just talking about it.

It's partly true, but I'd still have to write this post tomorrow, so by me doing it now it's much better. It's the people who read it that have the problem...

September 30 @ 09:36 PM | 0 Comments

I'm a biker, in the loosest of terms...

I've been a bit quiet this weekend, but that's because I've been buying a motorbike. Well, within reason, I don't actually have it yet, and the auction only ended at 7:30 tonight. Which brings me to not having any money, but having a rather nice East German, 1984 motorbike.

I'm unwilling to use someone else's photographs (most are rubbish too), so I'll have to stay at an explanation.

It's a 1984 MZ ETZ 250, built in East Germany and imported. It's 234cc with a 22kw engine which is just below my legal limit on an A class motorbike license. (The limit is 33kw).

Why this bike?

This is something which I thought I should explain, I've never bought something like it before, especially off eBay, so I'm rather in the dark about that (in terms of knowing the guy who had it, etc). The easiest way to do this was to give you a nice bulleted list.

  1. It's physically close to me.
  2. It's cheap(ish).
  3. It's powerful enough.
  4. It's a classic bike.
  5. The parts are cheap.
  6. They're pretty amazing in the reliability department.
  7. They're easy to fix.

I'm rather happy with my purchase, although I did go quite a way over my budget, it's still relatively cheap, although I do still have to buy quite a bit of equipment and acquire my license. (I can't use it at all on a provisional.)

I had originally imagined spending £250 on it, but I ended up going up to £311 in the bidding war at the end, for which I couldn't pull myself away from. There is of course the instant appeal of getting one as soon as you seriously look at them as a viable (er, toy) option to go and actually buy one. But I have noticed that even nationally they aren't particularly easy to pick up, when I was looking at this one there was at least 300 parts, but only two full bikes, one of which (the one I got) has a (supposedly simple to fix) gear problem.

I've always wanted some old, classic and reliable for my first bike. I quite like the idea of going along the old country lanes on a Sunday afternoon zooming along (within the speed limit of course) and finding different places, but still being able to head home after and pull it to bits, work out how it works and put it back together without having to worry too much about it.

The classic bike persona seems to fit me quite well, I'm not a fan of closed helmets (from trying on practically every one in the Farnborough motorcycle shops over the weekend), and I'm quite complacent about having an open fronted helmet, goggles, leather jacket, and er, GPS?

All of this is to come though, I have to sort out the problem of getting it home first, it's 15 miles away and the car I have available to me isn't particularly large - so it's not going in there. Logistics is my big problem here. I need a van, basically.

I don't have a license, insurance, or any protective gear, let alone the skill to ride it, so that's out of the question.

I never realised it would be that hard to find someone who could do it for me, in the return for something. I could of course rent a vehicle, but it would be a bit pointless if I could try a bit harder and do it for free, right?

I do have something on the table though, through a friend, in exchange for some web design work, which although can't practically scale, I can live with that.

Time now to get a Haynes Workshop manual, protective gear and some lessons...

September 29 @ 10:11 PM | 0 Comments

A Computer Science Undergrad Book List

Over the last few days I have been scouring the internet for a nice, clean, user-friendly guide for Computer Science related books. Everything I found was, obviously from Universities and in some ways quite specific. I wanted a list which would list a good amount for reading before University, not in a rush in the weeks before freshers.

So, I decided to make one...

My main aim of this is to list a number of books related to the subject at Undergraduate level and to give you some useful offsite links, which so far, I haven't found. I am also going to list a few places where you can get books without paying the full retail price.

I am only going to touch on a few subjects, but this is down to my own knowledge, rather than stuff I know less about, like the maths side. I am also focusing on the slightly less mainstream books - so no books on Linux.

Books

General

Programming

Networking

Online Material

The great thing about this is that it's free. I've only chosen a few for this revision, so don't expect a large list.

I will say that I am yet to read any of these. That is something to do with the fact that I have just found them...

Bookstores

In my searches for different bookstores, mostly finding student auction sites I was both surprised and disappointed.

Ones which were recommended did not have any of the books I wanted listed (The Book Depository), Amazon were mind-bogglingly expensive which left one. AbeBooks.co.uk.

They seem to have a large range, which, most importantly included the books by Andrew S. Tanenbaum which I wanted.

I fear that this is a rather short list, and that's because it is, in the next few months I will be updating this, so bear with me...

September 26 @ 09:04 PM | 0 Comments

Stuck deep in the App Stores' Success

Regardless of all the criticism, the App Store has been very successful. Since I started using it I have 21 apps. 4 of which I have bought.

The single most important reason why I feel that it's worked is the price that the developers have set. The most expensive app I have bought is £5.99, whilst the cheapest was £2.99. By not setting the prices far too high above what it is really worth has meant that people are more than willing to buy them.

On scouring the various sites in which you can get these apps for nothing (read: bittorrent), the majority of those which are available are the well publicised ones, such as Spore. It seems that, for the individual developer, Apple have produced a way for people without millions to spend on marketing to get at least a fair return on what they put in.

I am of course not entirely siding with Apple on this, some apps which have been blocked/banned were quite useful and worthy apps. For this, I see no reason for them to not exist. You can of course understand some apps, such as NetShare which would indeed break contracts which Apple is bound too, but for stuff like the recently talked about Podcast app, seems pointless.

If the problem is there, isn't right to be solved?

On the other hand, I've been having some quite good experiences. The four apps I've bought are listed below.

  • DataCase - Allows me to copy over files, folders and documents and view them on my iPod.
  • Things - a GTD app, which syncs with the Mac version. Keeps my tasks in hand.
  • MindMaker - allows me to draw mind maps, although I can't get export them.
  • TextGuru - turns my iPod into a perfect blogging/word processing platform, I can send files to and from it and, it supports nearly all of the file extensions known to man.

If you've noticed, they are all productivity apps. Mostly because it's so nice to write on and having my iPod is usually quite convenient when I am bored. Like the old idea goes with the lack of the need to carry your laptop around on the go, I don't.

Although, I still want a little black eee pc...

September 25 @ 04:03 PM | 0 Comments

How to Get Started in Blogging

I've been meaning to try and explain my experiences and what I have learnt since the start of the year for a while now. 9 months and 11 days later I feel that I can share something. And, I needed to explain a few pointers to some one anyway.

I find blogging good fun, when I have content to write that is. When I don't, it turns into a bit of a nightmare. Self-imposed deadlines lead to creative block, which leads to no post. No post leads to.. oh, wait.. Nothing much at all.

That's the thing with blogging, when you first start, you are doing it mostly for yourself, readership is low and whilst wanting to increase this quickly you realise that it isn't as easy as it first sounded.

When people start blogging, they are usually a web-nobody. I still am. Blogs started by people who are already known are a bit different, as they already have loyal followers - before the first word has been placed down. You need to remember that you need to please your visitors, to make them come back, to keep them interested and to make them talk about your site.

In this article, I aim to outline a few points which will lead to your instant downfall, all of which is my own opinion, of course.

Poor Grammar

This one shocks me. I cannot understand how people can aim to reach a wider audience than their circle of friends if your grammar, spelling, punctuation and the other various bits and bobs are utterly awful.

The odd spelling mistake, typo, lack of full stops can be ignored, and so can you get away with deliberate mistakes - providing you make these rather clear.

This is a problem because people will stop reading quite soon. It's easy to fix though, just make sure what you write naturally is pretty good. For me, it's worked great. On a general note, I don't need to proof-read, and although being rather poor practice it saves me quite a bit of time when I impose deadlines.

Posting Often

Which brings me on to the next point, regular posting schedule.

It is often said that content is king. Within reason, it is. Blogging, at the end of the day is all about pushing out regular content in the way of a journal. This will only work in a practical sense if you have a set amount of times a week, to blog. If it's longer than a week, you risk loosing visitors, and too many times a day you will have a full time job on your hands.

In the first 6 months I set a plan to blog every day, regardless of whether or not I had something interesting to write about. If I didn't one day, then I would leave it till the next and adjust the post dates to make it look like a continuous number. In some cases I ended up blogging more than once a day, but not usually more than the two. Since then I have relaxed my plans a bit. If I don't have anything worth saying, then I don't blog. There really is no point in sitting around trying to force a post out of you when you really aren't in the mood for it.

This has gone quite badly this month as for a week or two I didn't blog at all. I was rather busy doing other things I could not afford to sit down and spend an hour trying to find something to write. At this point, even getting my feeds read was a major problem, to the point where I totaled up a value of 120 open tabs in NetNewsWire.

Self imposed deadlines, can, in many ways work rather well. It forces you to push out something, which keeps the search engines happy and keeps you interested. In a way it is comparable to you spending a few weeks out to constantly blog, then set this to automatically post throughout the rest of the year so you don't have too. This method would mean that you'd get bored. When you had content to write, you wouldn't want to, and in the mean time, you'd end up just staring at Statistics rather than blogging.

What must be said here though is that a lot of content does not equal decent content. If you are pushing out 3 posts a day all by yourself which each add up to 400 words each, then you will end up with quantity over quality. Quality, regular content is what you need to aim for.

Statistics

If you don't know what your visitors like, then you don't know what to write about.

In a way, I am quite guilty of this myself. The amount of page views on the project I spent upgrading my iBook is phenomenal. However, I'm yet to finish writing it up. I started it at the start of the year.

With that put aside, you need to register with something like Google Analytics, or Whoopra, or Sitemeter to try and see what is going on.

This is of course generally just SEO stuff, I'm hardly an expert at this.

However, it is very important. Like I said earlier, then if you don't know what to write, then you can't aim your content towards users, which, lets be honest, is what you want. You do want people to read your content.

Branding

Blogger.com, isn't a great route for success. Out of all of the sites that I read, rarely any of them are hosted by a free blogging site. Although it may work for some (for example woork.blogspot.com), it probably won't work for you.

This does of course mean that you will have to pay. It's a fact of life, unfortunately. There are many hosting companies on the market and I'm not going into that. However pretty much any host will be fine for the two engines that I am going to list below.

  1. Wordpress
  2. Chyrp

Wordpress is practically the default for most blogs. It's open source, it's free and has loads of addons.

From themes, to caching plug-ins, it is all there. It is most probably the best one to get going out of the box, without having to write a single line of code. This is because most of it is already there.

My personal favourite though is Chyrp. It's lightweight, it has plenty of addons, it's open source and it's free.

It's also much easier to install than the Wordpress, which makes it way ahead of its game. Unfortunately though, it's quite young and it's not yet out of Beta. Although the code is very stable (it's practically bug free), this means that there aren't many themes or add ons in comparison.

For most though, this isn't such of a problem. Theming is easy, most of the things that you will need are built into the main app and support is easy to get hold of.

Being much more efficient code compared to Wordpress, it also runs much nicer on older machines and much, much faster on others.

Note: My blog is a poor example, as it's full of javascript and external site pull ins, using old code and not optimised at all on a reasonably slow Mac.

Once you have decided on a blogging engine, you need to decide on what it is going to look like. Generally speaking, choosing the default theme is a bad idea. Many people use the same thing and it makes you look like you were unwilling to put the effort in to find something nicer.

Although I designed and built the theme for this site (and am available to hire), with a bit or HTML and CSS knowledge this could be done still. If that isn't such a strong point for you however, you'll be looking to find a theme.

For Wordpress, there are many. Millions probably. Finding these is quite easy with a quick googling around, although good hints to look for when finding your theme are:

  • Free themes are usually well used and of poor quality
  • If your theme has a tag line, then put something there

    • Paid themes are good, but generally, the easy to find ones are also well used.

    Appropriate free themes are out there, if you look hard enough.

By the last point, I am trying to say that there is no need to pay for a theme. There are loads about which are free and suit your blog.

Making sure the theme suits is rather important. Although my theme will most probably go with any content, a blog about African American culture will not mix with a pink theme based around Hello Kitty. Use some logic, choose the right one from the start.

Which reminds me of another point. Don't keep changing the design. It annoys users, mostly because it confuses them. Each time you change your design, they are once again lost. At the start I had quite a few problems with the design. I was more than willing to keep adjusting it until I found something that was more appropriate for me. What I am using now is it.

It does of course need some adjustments. I need to add categories, tags and a popular post list - something which I will be covering later. But even then, the main design won't be changing. There is no need to keep changing, so providing that you pick the right one the first time, you won't have to keep changing it each week.

Content Deviation

When I write a post, at the start I usually have pretty good idea on how it is going to end up. The problem is is that this often doesn't happen such a way. I'm quite good at disregarding what I had originally aimed for in the favor of something different.

In a way, this is a good example on why to title your post later, rather than before you start writing, and maybe, when you are writing some points, to make sure that you do your introduction and conclusion after too.

It's much like writing an essay. If I were to now go off and start talking about how pretty my monitor was, there would be no structure and the post would have no meaning.

The same goes for repeating yourself.

The same goes for repeating yourself, unless it is for effect.

Ending

This post is aimed at one person in particular, and they'll be linked to it later on. But I felt like it was a better idea to post about it now, than repeat myself later.

I hope that I have written something useful here, something that can be put into practice and for sure, something that I can look back on as a guide to making my blog better.

September 24 @ 06:42 PM | 0 Comments
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