An Unexpected Procrastination Prevention Strategy
I can usually manage to stay away from time-sinkholes like Facebook and Twitter day to day, but when my self-control is put in the ring with technology news and scientific articles, I rarely make it past the first round. I love reading about what is essentially the future, and also discovering how things work, respectively. More of a problem is the fact that I can halfway justify time spent reading these things, on the claim that they make me a more well-rounded professional... but after a certain point, it becomes obvious that that is an excuse more than a rational reason.
Ok, so there's the problem. Now what?
Instead of using one of the dozen plugins for Firefox in the genre of Control Your Surfing Habits, or, Hand Your Self-control to the Computer, I discovered a way that works just as effectively for me. For most, it will not be novel, or even new, but its unexpected efficacy is what prompts the entry.
Generally upon reading one article, and still not feeling particularly ambitious about getting back to useful activities, I need only to glance around the present webpage and something likewise interesting will catch my eye, and thus goes my time.
The Unexpected Solution: By importing all my frequently-visited sites into a feed reader, I take back control. Instead of being bombarded by the self-referential advertising that these sites do (because basically everything other than the content on the websites are ads; they just happen to be ads selling a visit to a different page on the same site), I am free to read through the updates to the sites I deem worth following, but those sites only. If there are no new updates to those select sites' feeds, then I am sitting in front of an empty feed reader, with no attention-catching ads to other interesting things, and that is enough to prevent me from going off to find something to procrastinate on some more.
Sometimes putting one more step, in this case the jarring feeling of No New Items, in between an allowable activity and a blatant act of procrastination is all it takes to keep from sliding down the slippery slope.
I use the web-based Google Reader, and it is pretty fantastic. In the past, I've used Feed Demon, a desktop feed reader application.
Sometimes Titles are Just Too Pretentious
I remember the exact moment when I tried asiago cheese for the first time.
Now, hardly a day passes without me shaving its deliciousness over a salad, or onto Triscuits, or just cutting paper thin slices and savouring them plain.
It's hard to be pessimistic about a bad peach, considering how wonderful a really good peach tastes. Even if I have several merely ok ones in a row, I can't help but expect the next one to overload my taste buds with a flavour explosion.
Open Word Documents in Google Chrome
Why not make Google's Chrome browser able to handle files of type .doc? Let's say you want to open a Word document, but you haven't yet installed Microsoft Office on your computer. You have, however, downloaded the completely free Chrome browser, and so you just drag and drop your Word document into Chrome. Voila, Chrome realizes it's not a web page, detects the file type as a .doc, and sends you (along with your document's contents) straight to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, where your opened document awaits you.
Of course, there is the fact that everyone is staying away from drag'n'drop to browsers, for whatever reason -- but still, at the very least, Chrome could load the Google Docs page and give you a tutorial on how to get that file uploaded and opened into Docs, ready for editing online. The cool part? Microsoft Word would not be needed at any point of this process! Once you're done editing or reading the document, you could download it from Google Docs then email it on its way, just like any other document.
It seems like a good idea from Google's standpoint, anyway.
Crack the Whip
I really want to write a webapp in the vein of NowDoThis.com -- a instant task management "boss" -- but using the Todoist API instead. That way, a user could login with his unique Todoist key, and the to do items currently in Todoist would be imported. Then just like NowDoThis, the web app would command you to do one of them, starting with the most important one (judging importance by the task's priority and position) in Todoist. The app, tentatively called Crack the Whip, would let you select which node of your Todoist task tree you would like to read tasks from, so it would instruct you to do only your household chores, for instance. All of this with no sign-up entrance barrier; the only user input would be the user's Todoist web service token, and then (optionally) choosing which section of the to do list to read tasks from.
Crack the Whip would include an option that orders the dictated tasks by their priority in Todoist, or ignores the priority altogether and spits them out with random abandon. An optional button would allow users to click "not now, give me the next task" if they aren't able to do the suggested one, or the button could be omitted for those that have trouble with procrastinating over larger items on their to do. Other simple features, mostly just yes-or-no checkboxes, would be included.
It's too bad that I am now out of summer-time, otherwise I would work on Crack the Whip... and it would be fun and [debatably] useful. It technically should be called Kansas if I'm the one writing it, though my guess is that title would confuse a lot of people.
Todoist 'Clean Focus' Style
I recently finished designing a custom CSS style called Clean Focus for the todo-list manager Todoist. If you don't use a todo-list manager, or even if you do but yours seems slow or inefficient, I highly recommend Todoist. The numerous keyboard shortcuts make adding and altering tasks as instant as could be. It could even be an effective replacement of your calendar, though I probably wouldn't recommend it if you don't have enormous amounts of dates to work with, or if you are dead-set on the look of a calendar for your online planner.
The style I created is an amalgamation of a bunch of ideas that make Todoist's management features less intrusive or distracting. I tend to think that this style pushes everything out of the way so you can focus on the tasks at hand. You will need Stylish, or a Greasemonkey-enable browser, to use it.
Head to my page at UserStyles.org to install my Clean Focus Todoist Style!
In other news, in lieu of a CAPTCHA, I've disabled commenting on LifeSuit. Hope you aren't too heartbroken.
Drowned by a Stream of Letters
It is 3:10 a.m., but I did get the T*flock Quotestream email notifier up and running. Now, anytime anyone is listed as an author in a quote, they are sent a notification email telling them just that. This email is not sent, however, to the user that is submitting the quote, even if they're featured in the quote. This venture required more integration with the Drupal backend's database, but that part wasn't too hard. It was mostly just remembering the common little gotcha's that PHP always throws my way that slowed my arrive at the finished product... nevertheless, it is done, and probably buggy. In other news, I plan on coming up with a purplish theme of this website to host my travel journal when I'm wreaking havok on all the wonderful places far away from here. I love the minimalism of the current design, and will likely just tweak the colors, headers, and masthead image to something more Harlaxtonian, keeping most, if not all, of the HTML the same. Oh, the Power of CSS™.
Headphone Treaty Signed
The title would refer to the fact that I have been fighting with my headphones at work for... well, since I have been using them. In fact, I have been fighting with them since I got them, mostly because they were never actually mine. They were Katie's, and she abandoned them so terribly in the TFL because they didn't work. I found their secrets though; I learned that they had a personality that one had to work with to fully unleash their audio powers. One connection between wire and plastic controlled which channel decided to cut out, and the other connection determined whether or not you heard nothing, only the treble, or clear music.
To make a long story short, after weeks of fighting with my headphones, I dropped a considerable amount of cash to get me some new Sony ear canal earbuds. I am very pleased. They have excellent clarity, and the bass reproduction is very near those of Katie's -- it's likely more properly balanced than hers, anyway. I am addicted to Sufjan, and this is my paraphernalia.