I stumbled across a post tonight about the tyranny of email. It’s overall point is about how to best manage your time and getting things done. I’ve read several blog posts of this type, but this is the first one that’s really hit home. It’s probably the point that gets made about needing three hours to actually get anything done:

I maintain that programming cannot be done in less than three-hour windows. It takes three hours to spin up to speed, gather your concentration, shift into “right brain mode”, and really focus on a problem. Effective programmers organize their day to have at least one three-hour window, and hopefully two or three. (This is why good programmers often work late at night. They don’t get interrupted as much…)

I find this to be completely true. I do my best work at night when I can completely zone out and focus on what needs to get done. I’m also very guilty of always having my email open so I can be that guy that responds to all emails in under five minutes. Definitely not a good idea for productivity. This is the same reason that I take vacation and spend it working on things at work that I haven’t been able to get done because I just haven’t had the time to sit down and focus on them - things like implementing Sharepoint, programming utilities, researching the latest technologies - all get pushed to the side by little interruptions throughout the day.

What also gets mentioned is the concept of working on something hard vs. something fun and how one usually tends to prefer to work on something fun. This line in particular stands out in my head:

I think happiness comes from liking yourself, and fun things are things which make you like yourself.

In any case, a pretty good read.

Of the Top 11 Geek Phobias, I’m almost positive I have at least two of them:

1. Codexplodaphobia - Fear that the one line of code you changed will completely screw up the program or entire application.
2. Wipadiskaphobia - The fear of erasing your holiday photos from the camera before you copied them to PC.

Almost definitely Wipadiskaphobia!

Due to the planets being out of alignment, I didn’t make it into work this morning until 8:45.

I was all gung-ho and ready to go and I hopped into my car, hit the garage door opener, and looked up to see a black Dodge Neon parked right in front of the garage. I cursed out loud as one of the tenants tends to do this from time to time.

I honked my horn for about a minute - nothing. I knocked on the back door - nothing. I rang the door bell around front for the first floor - nothing. I rang the rest of the doorbells and got two answers (out of three apartments), neither of which knew anything. I called the landlord who gave me the number of the dude on the first floor. I called him - nothing. Then I saw through the window that the cell phone was sitting on the kitchen table next to a bowl full of cut limes…hmmm. Some more knocking, some more ringing, some more honking - nothing. I then noticed that the bedroom window on the first floor was open, so I hollered in there - nothing. I hollered in there for another five minutes - I heard the sheets move. Another two minutes and I got an answer - he didn’t know whose car it was.

I then proceeded to call the towing company. They couldn’t tow it until the police ticketed it. So I called the police. Just as I got on the line with the police, this guy saunters around the corner and reaches in his pocket for the keys. I hang up on the police and proceed to inform him that he nearly got towed and that I was very upset (I used some different language, of course). He didn’t even acknowledge my presence. Just got in his car and drove away.

45 minutes after getting in my car, I was on my way to work. Until I got onto the road.

I was heading down the sidestreets just about to hit Inner Lakeshore when I noticed several guys running around trying to corner another guy. It was almost like a game of chess, in more ways than one, where the opponent had one pawn left that just keeps skipping around the board. I don’t know what was going on, but all the chasers looked like they were on their way to work - backpacks, trenchcoats, and cell phones out, presumably calling the police. Finally the pawn went running down the street with this girl chasing after him holding her arm out as if she had mace. I don’t know what happened to the pawn, but one of the chasers got in his car (that was holding traffic up) and proceeded to leave. As I drove by the girl, she was crying and holding her face and talking about how it burned. Guess she maced herself by mistake…oops.

I finally made it to work without further incident, but I felt for sure fate was trying to tell me to stay home today.

Nice! The Sysinternals guys have an RSS feed for tool updates. I was just thinking today when I realized my Process Explorer was quite out of date how I could keep up with updates since they seem to be constantly updating their software. Procexp is definitely my favorite and it’s replaced my Windows task manager. One of my favorite features is the ability to mouse-over the CPU usage history and see what process was utilizing the most CPU at a given point in time. That and the ability to determine what process has any given filehandle open makes procexp an invaluable tool!

via Jonathan

Well now I know what my next car mod will be. I was listening to Chris Pirillo’s non-podcast (noncast?) when I heard Scoble mention J.P. Stewarts Car PC. A quick google later, and I had found what he was talking about - J.P.’s Car PC Weblog.

I’ve always wanted to drop a server in my trunk and use it as an mp3 server, but my acquisition of the mp3 playing Alpine alleviated the need for that. J.P.’s solution looks awesome, though - GPS, Streets and Trips, and a wireless access bubble around the car. If only I had a garage to do that in this winter…

It seems like somebody else has experienced many of the same frustrations with cmd.exe that I have, and found the same limited alternatives as I have. I’ve played with Monad, the Windows Command Shell that’s going to be in Longhorn, and didn’t find it much friendlier. Granted, it’s still in “preview”, so it can’t be judged yet.

Being a command-line freak, though, I would appreciate a more robust shell. Give me a Z Shell any day over cmd.exe!

I’ve finally added an RSS Feed to my site! It may not have a lot of features, but it does validate and it even has full text. Now all you aggregator folk out there can pull in the content of my site without ever going to my homepage.

Maybe now I’ll get some readers who may be mildly interested in the occasional musing of an infosec guy in Chi-town.

As I mentioned, I coded this page myself, but have recently been considering going to some sort of blog software. Simple things like an RSS feed and an archives calendar have taken me way too long to implement. Between work and life, adding features to my blog that only gets read by family and few friends doesn’t rank too high. An RSS feed is a necessity, however, if I do want to obtain some more readership. We’ll see…

In light of Fall starting to whip into Chi-town, I’ve updated the Random Pic with a bright yellow sunflower.

Enjoy!

Now this is a useful service! Google SMS

Goodbye 411…

Microsoft did a horrible thing for online standards when it allowed Internet Explorer (IE) to accept javascript code that wasn’t fully compliant. Sure, things are easier for developers…at first, until somebody wants to use a different browser.

For example, I ran into some code today that set the value of a text input in a form:

date_input.value=’10/07/2004’

That’s pretty easy and intuitive, but it only works in IE. Want to get it to work elsewhere? Here’s the updated code:

document.getElementsByName(‘date_input’)[0].value=’10/07/2004’

whoa Notice two things:

1. getElementsByName is plural, getElementByName does not work.
2. Because you must use the plural, an array is returned and you have to reference the first value in the array by using [0]

Other than the plurality confusion, I would much rather sacrifice easy-to-write code for cross-browser compatibility!