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Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


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Another smart-assed remark from Mike
Hack mode
22:25:00 on 2005-01-20

As I was writing this, Diaryland was recovering from the hard drive crash reported last night; I can't enter this entry because the site's database is busy regenerating diaries. Normally, this wouldn't be such a big deal, except for:

  • ...that whole "posting more often" thing.

    Sure, my writing schedule has slipped. I have several entries that are in the pipeline being processed currently, but it's the whole "who has time?" thing. They are in the works, and I still plan to make the 208 entries for the year mark.

  • ...I wrote an XML-RPC front-end to ping Ping-o-Matic from my server at home, and I sort of wanted to try it out with a new entry.

    It's something I've been meaning to write for a long time, but I kept thinking about writing all that code to do the processing and really didn't feel like getting into it. However, once I looked around for a library, I found Keith Devens' XML-RPC library for PHP. It's easy, it rocks! Worked just fine every time I tried it, and a lot of folks work it out more than I do. I really recommend it!

  • ...I was thinking I need to write code so I can start doing my personal writing/blogging/documenting life elsewhere.

    Diaryland is sort of the low-rent district of weblogs. Granted, I got on it in 1999, several years after I thought about starting my own online journal but never making progress on writing code (sort of like now, huh?). The trick is that it doesn't have good support for newsfeeds, remote tools, easy markup, comments, trackbacks and the like. Hell, even Livejournal has more flexibility.

    The draw was that I didn't like Blogger (what, you want my username and password so you can FTP files to the server? Um... no!), and it was free. Free was very important at the time, but now it's not an issue. Of course, I didn't pay anything, so in a generally republican-oriented world I don't have a right to complain that Diaryland is down (but I will anyway), but it's still quite annoying and I'm worried about my content (and rightfully so).

    (Let me amend that. I am thinking about losing a lot of my older content. That was a different chapter in my life. Does it apply now? I would probably restore it on a new site that I build, but for now, it's just not me. In a way, it feels disingenuous; in another, it is simply trimming down to be a reflection of my current self. It's an interesting philosophical conundrum, actually.)


All this points to the fact that I need to write code. Lots of code. The trick is that there is so much to write, and so little time. However, I think I have a bit of a model for doing this: build one tool a day.

I'm talking about stuff like the above; I've been meaning to write this for some time. Of course, if I put it among a huge list of things I need, it's not the highest priority, but I just sat down to write it. Now it's written. I don't have to write it again until I beautify it or integrate it with something else, and even then, the logic is the same. I just throw it together based on what I did before by building it into a library instead of a static script. Simple and sloppy wins the day again — the beauty over scripting and loosely-typed languages.

Writing this software is going to be the same way. Basic functionality takes care of a lot of it. I just have to build it. I often write little pieces, but then integrating the pieces seems insurmountable. So why not just do it incrementally?


The trick is that writing code is alone time for me. Something that a lot of non-programmer types don't understand is that when you are in that mental state where you're holding details and flow together the outside world shuts off. If something pulls me back into the outside world, like the phone or an interruption, then I lose not only the time I get pulled back into the real world, but also the length of time it takes to get back into that state, plus the length of time to rebuild all the detail in my mind; the detail begins to fall apart immediately, because it's almost like you're loading your mid-term memory with details, and attending to other tasks causes these details to begin being replaced.

Basically? I specialize my mind at the moment for writing code. You pull me out of that specialization, then it takes a while to go back to that.

This concept is so important and universally understood by developers, there is even a term for it in the hackerly jargon.

So, as I said, to people who don't do that, it means I'm antisocial. To me, I am trying to focus all my attention on the task at hand.

Of course, lately Marilynn has been upset with my going to the geek room at home to write code/administer the server/check my email/play a game/generally deflate these days. I know while she's on disability she doesn't get as much face time with people, but that doesn't change my need to be myself. I think sometimes she genuinely acts like we don't spend time together, but we always spend at least a couple hours every evening after work together, and often we're inseparable once I get home.

It's a delicate balance, but I want her to understand that sometimes I just need to be left to work on things, or waste my time or just empty my mind as I see fit. My creations make me feel more complete. They make me feel like the person I know I am.

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



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