Unquiet Desperation

Windows partition
Ate beloved Mac Install
Time Machine rescues

Microsoft HPC – O’Reilly ONLamp Blog

Windows HPC Server 2008 is about high performance computing on the Windows platform. Or highly productive performance computing how we call it on our main product website www.microsoft.com/hpc.

Will this be better than the LPC we’ve been dealing with for years?

Promise?

photo credit: myrtti

I missed Windows for a while this weekend.

I was looking for a game to take my mind off of selling the house and moving to L.A. I wanted to relax and play a game, and I was craving a game like Galactic Civilizations. A sci-fi empire builder with exploration, colonization, and a little warfare.

No. Such. Luck.

Understand…I don’t play computer games like I used to. That’s not only because I own a Mac, it’s also because I just don’t have the time to play. Up until now, I’ve never had a reason to miss gaming on Windows.

Heavy Sigh. Looks like I’ll have to fire up my Parallels VM and install GalCiv II. Pity. Wish there was a Mac version.

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A week ago, I asked for people to submit some topics that they’d like to hear me write about. Some of my comrades in the Cleveland Programming Wasteland chimed in, wanting to know how I wound up working for Mahalo.

In a word, podcasting.

No, really.

Desperation, Quiet to Unquiet

When the podcasting community started to form in late 2004/early 2005, I was working for a small development firm in Medina. While I enjoyed the work, I wanted to do something more creative in my off time, and because of that, I got into podcasting. My first contact was with Evo Terra, who at that time was the co-host of The Dragonpage. He mentioned his idea for serialized audiobooks delivered via RSS, and dubbed them Podiobooks. At the time, Podiobooks.com was a simple site with five books on the front page.
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Part 1: Clearing the Workspace

It’s Sunday evening, around 6pm. I walk upstairs to put the laundry away and pull out a few things to get ready for the week. I switch on the light in my bedroom and there, across the room, is my desk, and on this desk, this very laptop. It sits there, the screen dark, but I can see that it is on. I can feel the heaviness growing…a feeling like I’ve just been ambushed, but I cannot leave. it’s like some sort of Stockholm Syndrome…it holds me hostage, but I do so love the attention…

I set the laundry basket down and sit down at my desk. I pause. There’s nothing that I really need to be doing, but I could check my email. I mean..it’s sitting there in the auto-hiding dock. All I have to do is move the mouse and…there…ah…I can see that I have fifty-nine new emails. Well, shit…what the hell? It’s Sunday…what could possibly be happening? Are they from work? Should I be checking my work email, just to be ready for tomorrow?

”Don’t do it,” an inner voice says. “That way lies madness.”

I ignore the inner voice because I’m feeling skeptical of inner voices at the moment. What harm could it do? I open the email and start to read…

…and before I know it it’s 11pm. I’ve been answering non-urgent email, surfing, twittering and doing everything but what I came upstairs to do: get ready for the week.

Sound familiar? If you’re anything like me, you really do enjoy the connection you have to your friends on the Internet. But…let’s face it…the moment you sit down at your desk it’s like being sprayed in the face with a firehose, or worse, it’s like you’re taken over by a sense of false urgency. Answering email, reading feeds…like you’re trying madly to catch up.

I hate that feeling, and that feeling was my first target when trying to reform my computer-using habits. I started with my desktop. Even before you connect, this is your greeting, your first interface. It’s a bit like waking up in the morning.

How do you like to start your day? I mean…when you wake up, do you like to get up, get some coffee in the relative silence, focus a little and think about what you’d like to do that day? Or do you prefer opening your eyes and having ten people at the foot of your bed shouting for your attention while the clock radio blares music and ads at the same time?

My first step was to reconsider how to use my desktop. I wanted sessions at my laptop to be more calm, more focused.

0) It’s tool. You’re the master. Don’t let it convince you otherwise.

I make this point zero because it forms the basis of everything that comes after in this series of essays. Yes, yes…this is just common sense, but most of us have a fairly personal relationship with our computers. It’s an extension of us, not just a little box we type on.

But really…let’s face it…it’s just a little box we type on.

It’s not your friend. It’s a tool, a means to an end, and nothing more. Want to write a novel? You could do it by hand. No, really, you could; and if you’re anything like me, you’d want to personalize that as well…pretty journal, new pen, slew of writing guides, etc. Still…all of that is window dressing. The action of writing is about pen on paper, not about the books you have or the pen or the special journal. Using your computer is not about the pretty wallpaper or the slick Yahoo Widgets. It’s a means to an end, an action machine. A tool. Use it like one. Make it personal if you like, but never confuse it with your Self.

1) Turn off all auto-startup programs

Email. Twitter. Skype. AIM. iChat. IRC. How many do you have starting up the moment you log into your computer? I used to have all of those, and the moment I logged in, I’d watch the email count increase with a sense of dread, the twitterific box would pop up, and Skype messages would start immediately. It’s enough to make you want to run and hide. Why? I thought I was being efficient. By having all of those things start up, I knew I’d be ready and waiting for whatever people needed from me.

The truth is that I shouldn’t have been worrying as much about responding to the others…I should have been focusing on what I needed to accomplish first, and then processed other things a little bit at a time.

Your desktop is a little piece of silent, sacred space. When you start up your computer, it should be with a sense of peace, not the sense of waiting for an ambush. It should be peaceful, zen-like, and allow you to focus before getting to work. To my way of thinking, having email, Skype, AIM, and Twitterific all open at startup is a bit like walking into your office or cube only to find several people shouting at you at once, all vying for your attention. Why would you do that to yourself?

Yes…I know it’s nice to hear from friends, and without our chat and twitter, we can sometimes feel a bit alone. But that’s rather the point. Example: if I sit down to write, should I:

1. Write

or

1. Write
   1. Write a line
   2. Read the Twitter that just popped up
   3. Twitter that I’m writing
   4. Change my Skype Shout-out that I’m writing
   5. Check the email that just came in
   6. Answer a twitter question about what I’m writing
   7. Re-read the line I just wrote…
   8. etc.

Obviously, the answer is the former, not the latter. And, if you’re anything like me, you feel yourself getting tense just reading the second list. Sadly, I’ve done the latter before. I’m not proud.

The key here is making your desktop almost like a separate space. Some of you who have played online games will know what I mean by this: when you sit down at your desktop, you should have a sense of place. It’s almost like you enter a clean room, decorated how you like it, but without distractions. It gives you time to wake up and compose yourself before you step out into the world.

2) Tidy Your Desktop

I’m stealing this one directly from Merlin Mann. On an episode of MacBreak, he showed how Path Finder can be used to hide all the icons on your desktop, including the Trash bin. Additionally, if you want to work with a completely blank space, you can use MenuShade, and then use Hazel to autotidy your desktop files.

Merlin likes to work with a completely blank, black desktop, but I’m a big fan of digital art, so using Backdrop and MenuShade did not work out so well for me. Backdrop kept popping up when I didn’t need it, and MenuShade left a black (or pale, due to transparency settings) at the top of my desktop. Both are great programs for what they do, but I didn’t need them. It was enough for me to have Path Finder hide everything (you Windows folks can do this with a right-click on the desktop).

Hazel tidies my downloaded files and other bits and pieces. For instance, any PDF I download automatically gets moved to my ToRead folder. Any zipped files that are not opened in three days get deleted. It’s a great tool, and well worth the price.

3) Clean and Autohide The Dock

Like many, I’m a huge Quicksilver fan. Because Quicksilver makes things so easy to launch, I have no need to extra bits in my dock. I almost never use it. Because of that, I’ve removed all of my apps.

Well…almost all. The Dockables remain. Dockables are tiny apps that allow you to trigger certain actions from your dock, like shutdown, eject, sleep, log out, etc. In truth…I could probably get rid of those as well and just trigger them from Quicksilver as well.

I should mention that while Windows cannot run Quicksilver, I found that using SlickRun can accomplish much the same thing. By setting up triggers in SlickRun, you can run just about anything with a simple key combination. I highly recommend it.

After all that, I autohide my dock. It not needed for much, so why have it take up real estate?

4) When you’re not sitting in front of it, TURN IT OFF

No, really. Shut it down. Close the lid, turn off the monitor. When I leave my computer on and open, I’m that much more likely to move the mouse and “check on things” (read: get sucked in) whenever I walk in front of it. When it is off, I tend to not want to start it up unless I have something I need to do. It’s a small hurdle (my laptop starts much faster since I stopped allowing things to autostart), but it’s enough to keep my ass out of the chair unless it needs to be there. This leads to me actually block out time to work instead of digitally grazing all day long. I can focus on other things, away from the umbilical of the network connection.

These were the first steps I took, and so far, they’ve truly helped my peace of mind when I’m working. However…this was just the start. The next task was to deal with the dreaded, the evil…the Email.

Wednesday:Dealing with Email