The Occasional Masthead

Why, in the name Shub-internet does the Australian Business Register barf if you’re not using IE? At least I kept an instance of IE5.2 lying around for times like this.

Grr. I love tax law in this country. Sable Rose has had some hassles over the last few years getting renumerated because we’ve not really got an ABN, or some other indication that we’re exempt from GST. Ok, so there are pages at the ATO dealing witn non-profit organisations, which seem to indicate that we need an ABN to be exempt, but then the ABR says we’re not allowed to have one. Great. Oh, and after grovelling over the forms for half an hour, it crashed out on the Mac. Good one.

The following is just me brain dumping while I try to clear my in tray.

Via Teal Sunglasses, “There is absolutely no excuse, in other words, for continuing to use software that is the computer equivalent of unprotected sex…”

Some spectactuarly groovy 15th century tarot cards, showing some startling insights into the activities of ordinary craftsmen (and women).

Via Antipixel, quoting Tim Bray “The Internet and the Web aren’t things and they’re not places, they’re a mesh of agreements that allow us to talk to each other and to be less stupid.”

The ever-wonderful Mirabilis points off to some fun with the rather gorgeous Bembo typeface, and also why Michaelangelo’s David has a tiny twanger.

Meanwhile, Cronaca talks about the Bodleian’s plan to store some materials in a salt mine, and mentions something we Don’t Talk About Downunder

Finally, two axes (pun intended) of the technological cross that I’m currently nailed to: Axis 1.2RC2 breaks .Net 1.1 for String arrays, and Borland’s JBuilder 2005 has got that broken behaviour deeply embedded

There’s a lot of talk around the blogs at the moment about various ways of Getting Stuff Done. Places like 43 Folders have got lots of references and resources. I guess in a way that’s what is occupying my mind at the moment. I’ve got a lot of Stuff to Get Done. There’s a list as tall as the Matterhorn for work, a few things for QLHF, and the various semi-structured lists that I’ve been collating. (As an aside, I’ve been collating that in TextWrangler rather than SubEthaEdit. The Bare Bones magic is working it’s mojo on me, and I can feel it rapidly rising up to being my favourite tool for hammering on text.)

So right at the moment I’m basically moving things from one list to another, throwing things off lists, putting things on lists, throwing things out of the “do this now folder” because I no longer have any interest in doing them. An example was this article at O’Reilly about various egg timers. Good article. Great tools. But not the problem I need to overcome. I only realised that tonight.

One of the credos of the Getting Things Done movement is that one of the keys to more effective time use is to reduce the impact of distractions. But that won’t work for me. I like distractions. I multitask most of the time (not boasting, I just do), but what I usually do is have some of the things I’m doing as “distractions”. Hmm. Not explaining myself very well am I. Ok, let’s try this. Good ergonomic practice is to get up and stretch and walk around every so often, and to go stare out the window or something to give your eyes a chance to focus at different distances. So, the “distractions” are the equivalent for my head. I know now (one of the benefits of getting older, I guess) that if I reach the stage where I’m just churning on the spot on a problem, I need to go away and do something else, play with distractions. And I now now that if all I can deal with is the distractions, it’s basically an indication that I’m too tired or burnt out to deal with anything else.

So: all these lists? For me, not a tool for Getting Stuff Done (well, there is one list like that…), just lists of Stuff I Might Do.

There is one thing that I’ve picked up from 43 Folders though that I quite like. For a while I used to have a Palm with an enormous list of to-do items nagging me, most of which never got done. What I do instead now is have two documents. One is for personal stuff, called “This Week”, which is just a rolling list of things to do, or booked to happen, over the next 7 days. Only a few things each day, if any. And there’s no guilt if things move from one day to the next. I then have a similar list for work, but it’s broken up into “Today”, “This Week”, “Real Soon”, “As Soon As Feasible”.

The entries in both these lists (which are simple text documents) are just tickler reminders. Almost no detail, although I’ve found the “This Week” list is starting to be somewhere I jot down random URLs I come across, as it lives on a little USB thumb drive that moves from machine to machine with me.

Anyway, it seems to be working for me. Your mileage may vary.

There seems to be a trend here: more writing is appearing on line discussing the problems with stress and overwork, in this case particularly in IT. Erik Meade sums it up nicely by talking about knowing when to stop, but even better is the articles he links to. These include the relationship between deadlines and heart-attacks, a wonderful article by Ed Yourdon explaining why death marches are bad business, and sundry other ways in which the stress associated with the IT industry is unhealthy

Which makes me go off to look at this, an interactive George Bush….

Hmm. One way to tell that (a) everyone in Australia restarted work today and (b) most of them use email from work: my inbox is bulging again.

As Isobel said, “select all, delete”.

Well no, but it’s a nice idea.

I upgraded to OS X 10.3.7 a week or so ago, then for one reason or another barely used the Mac. When I did return to using it, I was left with a nagging suspicion that 10.3.7 had caused a slowdown in certain areas.

Engaging my outboard memory I found that a few other folk had similar problems. The experiences reported by Uche Ogbuji were interesting, and led down some useful paths of exploration. Panther Cache Cleaner from Northern Softworks was worth looking at, although it suffers badly from creeping featurism, and for my purposes has little benefit beyond a simple point-and-click to force certain caches to be cleaned out. I began by cleaning caches and repairing permissions and doing an fsck over the disk, all of which showed minor glitches.

The real fix was to remove the specified DNS server from my network preferences. At some point I’d specified the server to resolve some specific problem, and forgotten about it. At some later point, that server stopped serving. Then something changed in 10.3.7, I suspect in the order in which OS X attempted to resolve addresses, or in the time it spent waiting for a response from the DNS. I removed the specified server, and voila, everything is back to it’s normal snappy self.

I found an article (ironically via Slashdot, given the content) a few days ago about information overload, which has probably been blogged to death. On the other hand, it was relevant to me. Most of the material it covers — stress caused by distraction, information overload, and so forth — is not news to me, but discovering that “multitasking” is being seriously studied was:

In fact, multitasking — a computing term that involves doing, or trying to do, more than one thing at once — has cemented itself into our daily lives and is intensely studied. Research has shown it to be consistently counterproductive, often foolish, unhealthy in the long run, and in the case of gabbing on the cell phone while driving, relatively dangerous. Yet it is also expected, encouraged and basically essential.

My own experience, and anecdotally talking with others, is that I can handle about three things at once, tops. Anything more than that, and my head explodes. And if I try to do it for more than a few hours, my head explodes. My own experience shows, unambiguously, that trying to do several things at once almose invariably takes longer or results in a worse outcome than if they’d been done sequentially.

Nice to have an article that I can point bosses to next time…

So I’ve been watching the X-Files. Somebody has lent me the first three seasons, which I’m much enjoying ploughing through. Our sojourn in the TV-less wastelands meant that I only ever saw about the last three seasons, and not all of that.

So I’ve just finished Season 3, episode whatever, “War of the Coprophages” (which was screamingly funny). And there, the truth was revealed: Fox Mulder, banging away at a PC… that appeared to be running Mac OS 7.5 and he was definitely typing a document in a version of ClarisWorks or AppleWorks (whichever name it went by at that time).

Obsessive, I know, but hey, that’s my profession.