procrastination diagram

Writing is hard for me. It's even harder when I don't even have the attention span of a ferret on amphetamines to play with, which is to say, whenever I'm sitting in front of a computer. My email and my RSS reader are continually beckoning with little distractions, such that I will walk across the room towards my laptop with the intention of writing here, and before I know it, I'm reading the FBI guide to concealed weapons or looking at cars on ebay or something... and not writing.

Anyway, here are the things that I feel like telling y'all about:

It occurred to me the other day that it was possible that some people who read this were not aware of Bob the Angry Flower, and that this was, if not actually a problem, at least slightly unfortunate. It's a little uneven; even I find it difficult to find the latest strip funny, but strips like this one or this one more than make up for it. [The second one is also available as a poster which I don't know why I haven't purchased. Oh right, because my credit card is all the way over there on my desk].

These pictures from a motorcycle tour of the area around Chernobyl are amazing.

This documentation of how to make Russian-style Tea is sort of interesting, although I confess to preferring a more English-with-technology approach.

Meanwhile, Philips has figured out how to build small (3mm diameter) fluid lenses that can be adjusted electrically to arbitrary (5 cm-∞) focal lengths. I find this to be astonishingly cool technology even though it will usher in a further era of unobtrusive but high-quality cameras to invade our privacy.

And now we move into more hardcore geekery: ESR does an unsurprisingly good job of playing a technically naive user trying to access a network printer from a modern Linux box, and observing the apocalyptically bad user interface presented. This wouldn't be so horrible if said UI had been put together with a UNIX hacker in mind, but he was actually using an interface designed for the naive user, and he's right, it's just appalling. Now, his problem in his story is conflated by the fact that once you've found the functional "friendly" bit of the interface, its functionality is broken by a paranoid security decision (probably made by someone who wasn't thinking about the usability implications). It would have been OK if they had a friendly way of switching off the paranoia, but that's apparently too much to ask for.

A list of free software Revision Control Systems, which is interesting, and ends with the disclaimer:

I resent CVS because I use it every day and suffer its flaws and limitations. On the other hand, this shows you that CVS is still the standard that I actually use.

Which really does ring true.

Random links de jour:

I just have to say that I really hate people who go so far into rainbows and bunny rabbits in a technical specification.

Walter Cronkite's voice is comforting, to people above a certain age, amidst the world falling apart. He also has interesting things to talk about that are more topical than they may seem at first.

Science Fiction Citations is a page of citations of neologisms used in science fiction being collected for the Oxford English Dictionary.

Something Positive is another webcomic I read that maybe you should be reading as well. I admire Mr. Milholland's dark take on the universe, and he's more consistently funny than the often excellent Bob the Angry Flower. Today's (3/25/04) S*P filler strip is wonderful.

I was walking to work today, past an advertisement for some sort of hair and beauty management place (I've never paid much attention to what you call them, just that other people, especially the ones without Y chromosomes, have things done to them there.. often resulting in their hair looking different). Anyway, they had a bit of suggestive advertising that caused me to start wondering if there's any sane rationalization left for showing only male nipples in public. It was very cleverly laid out - a very thin female model with a towel wrapped around her "upper midsection" with a male model behind her placed such that my train of thought was something on the order of "picture of girl. nipple. HUH? oh." So it got my attention, but unfortunately for the advertiser my idea of hair care is regular degreasing with occasional mowing when it gets in my eyes.

Those of you who know me might be slightly surprised by the first clause of the previous paragraph; Karl walking? His car must have broken down. Actually, my weight recently spiked enough to scare me, and I've decided to become assiduous about walking to work, and also try to eat more slowly. It's a sad comment on my personality that it took me being personally disturbed by my health to start doing something about it, despite many people who cared about me telling me that I should do something for many years prior. To you, I apologize - and my thanks for putting up with me as much as you have.

Eating slower has also been an interesting experience. My general m.o. has been to spear a piece of food on my fork, or otherwise hold up what I'm about to eat, and look at it and try to think about it, and be at least fleetingly cognizant of every bite I take. It cut my normal lunch yesterday in half, and I didn't end up any more hungry than I usually do. (My flip description is that I meditate on how each bite feels about being eaten, but given my excellent track record in only eating things that are dead, I think the answer is "Not much".)

So anyway, I've been walking to work, an activity that I've rejected in the past as inefficient, and contrary to my impatient, "instant gratification isn't fast enough" nature. I've actually found that it gives me time to think of things that I'd otherwise think about behind my desk, staring into space. Furthermore, I've also observed that "real" bloggers seem to get a lot of mileage out of quitting smoking or the like. I don't think I'm going to quit eating, but I can at least cut down a little.