procrastination diagram

I don't want to blog about stuff until I rewrite my blogging software to make my head hurt less. And yet I don't want to do that until I've got the stuff done.

This is something I saw a decade or so ago, mentioned in conversation with someone vaguely recently, and couldn't find when I went looking for it.

Fortunately, someone else linked to it when they linked to this.

Remember, only you can prevent traffic jams.

My stubborn insistence on writing my own software for things like maintaining this blog causes me to spend more time thinking about the problem and less time writing about other stuff.

There are large projects that occupy a lot of my spare time that I never mention here because linking to them isn't particularly useful yet.

I need to sit down and do something about a lot of my infrastructure; my mail reading pattern isn't standing up to the current demands of work, my personal mail infrastructure could use some work, I'm still depending on Debian Sarge in places where I really shouldn't be; I'm running three or four different pieces of IM software for three different systems and as such missing critical information, and of course, I don't write here as often as I'd like. (see above)

Remember the cuecat? It's not a great barcode scanner, but it does work. Most of the time.

Deep-Fried Coca-Cola. . . .

Home built USB logic analyzer. Like I'd have time to use one, much less build one.

Read your Own DHS Travel Dossier. For various reasons, I would be disappointed if they weren't keeping at least something of an eye on me. I wouldn't expect that to be true of everyone, though.

Make a Jacob's Ladder. I've always wanted to do this. Where do you get neon sign transformers, anyway?

Super Probe. This just looks handy.

If you have any domains registered with GoDaddy, you are wrong.

I'm beginning to think that I need to switch to Windows on my laptop for a while, if only to try and understand how the other half (which is to say, nearly everyone else) thinks. I say this, because whiz-bang "new" applications (about which, more later) are seeming to have increasingly incomprehensible (to me, anyway) UI methodologies.

I suspect at least part of it is that one of the applications I was trying (jarnal) is either flaky or just doesn't do what I think it does, and possibly doesn't work very well with my window manager.

I could get much of the effect from switching to Gnome (it has enough Windows/Motif-think in its UI to have the right consequences in my head) but it would be too easy to cheat. I'm also not sure how much good it would do me unless I gave up emacs for mail, zephyr, and coding, but there isn't a windows alternative for zephyr (I guess I could switch to owl to maintain the the complete alienity of it all), and the temptation to beat all of those into working on windows in emacs would be high.

I could also probably get much of the effect from switching to a MacOS machine, but it many of the same problems switching to gnome does, only those problems would be more annoying because I've gotten really used to Debian and switching Unix platforms is no longer something I'm used to doing. (Also, I may want to play more with OneNote.)

It's been several years (I think the last time was early 2003) since I both gave much thought to my computation environment and actually did something about it. (This involved switching to ion as a window manager and emacs term-mode as a terminal emulator in order to make some pointing-device related RSI go away; ion stuck, and seems particularly addictive from a UI perspective (I haven't seen my desktop background in years), term-mode had problems and seemed like overkill once my hands stopped hurting.

I wonder how happy MacOS X is on a T42, or if I could convince work that it needs a loaner MacBook Pro.

I deleted ~5000 spam comments earlier this evening. Then in a fit of activity, I wrote code to let me disable comments on specific entries. Then I disabled them on everything. I'm going to leave them off entirely until the spammers appear to have lost interest; then I'm going to have them automatically turn off after two weeks for new entries.

Sometime in there I might write a real entry.

I wish to announce that the rumors of my death have been only slightly exaggerated, and that this is the coolest thing ever.

That is all.