Not completely gone yet

There I go again, just when I start writing regularly again, I neglect my blog and completely forget about it. Ah well.

Learning ObjC on hold for a few days

Well this is frustrating. I’ve been too tied up with work (both teaching and trying to figure out how to finish up my work proposal for this Friday) to continue with my studying in the past week. To boot (although I’m not complaining about it), I’ve got a few things to do with BCIT which is also due by end of week.

Sigh. I guess I could wait until the weekend, but then Father’s Day is coming up and I would like to spend Sunday with my dad. This is truly painful. Originally my goal was to complete the ObjC book by the end of the month, but I’m running out of time.

To add to my aggravation today, I found out that Radiant Communications tried to process a year’s worth of hosting charges for my website on my credit card. Good thing my card expired, and I have a new expiry date (hah! FOILED!). I don’t have a problem with the whole idea of convenience, but in this case I think this is Radiant’s sheisty way of locking me in before I even have a chance to say anything. I really resent that. They could have at least had the COURTESY to give me a couple weeks of warning so that I can decide whether to renew. You know, the domain registrars I deal with give me a MONTH to renew ahead of time. And domain names are cheap! On top of this annoyance, I tried to call Radiant, and after an eternity of being on hold with stupid music, I was redirected to fricken voice mail. OMG. I’ve decided I don’t want to do business with people that don’t give a shit about proper, fair customer service.

Cool emerging technologies

I love this stuff! Check out this article on “7 Technologies Shaping the Future of Social Media“.

User-generated mashups by Mozilla labs – Ubiquity. This is brilliant.

And now, I gotta stop distracting myself and focus on learning Objective-C. Sigh…so much to learn, not enough time.

GTD has really improved my life. No, it’s not paid advertising.

In continuation with my latest theme about information overload:

I used to feel really bogged down with way too many things on the go, it felt like I was constantly bombarded with a million new tasks, people to talk to, things to buy, and far too many things to read. I started to put things directly on my calendar in an attempt to force myself to do things at a certain time. But three things frequently happened: (1) I always underestimated the amount of time I needed, (2) often I was in the wrong place — sometimes still in transit, sometimes without a computer, and (3) seeing the task on my calendar was sufficiently depressing and demotivating that I never ended up doing the task I wanted.

Then, I would reschedule the task. And then the nasty cycle would begin again. Someone at work recommended I read David Allen’s book called “Getting Things Done”. I can’t say I had the patience to read through the entire book line by line, but I got the gist of it and started to reorder my mountain of tasks, bit by bit. I ended up with something like 150 tasks, and within a few weeks got it down to around 25. These days, I average between 20 to 25 tasks on my list, but it is far more manageable, and I don’t get nearly as stressed out about it anymore.

I thought it was interesting how this student applied GTD to his school work: http://macsamurai.blogspot.com/2009/05/going-from-failing-to-straight-with.html

I want to avoid having to work in a vacuum

Here’s an interesting article about the “benefits of distraction”: http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/.

It is very long though, I found I didn’t have the patience to read more than a paragraph on a page before I started scanning the rest. Hah…wasn’t I talking about information overload earlier? Still, it made some good points. I’m pretty conflicted about the issue — are all our distractions these days (twitter, blogs, rss feeds, emails, etc) truly destroying our synaptic pathways (I’m joking, but not quite), or are they simply keeping us from being more productive in our lives without the major side effects?

The whole multitasking thing probably is a myth, but then again I have faith in my brain’s ability to adapt at least a little. If you watch kids IM multiple people and play video games at the same time, I am not only amazed at how they can simultaneously juggle these activities, but how they don’t seem to suffer a great loss of concentration in any one ‘channel’. That said, I’m really curious to see how they fare in the workplace when they get older.

Perhaps the price you pay for the ability to multitask is the increasing inability to focus for long periods of time on a SINGLE task when it’s actually needed. Have you ever spent time talking to a teenager, one on one? And noticed that they can’t seem to look at you in the eyes for more than a split second before they start looking around? And not be able to follow what you’re saying? You might tell me that it’s because what I’m saying to them is typical adult stuff and they’re just not interested in the discussion (I usually try to talk about topics that are more relevant to them), but something tells me that’s not the only reason. And another thing — ask a kid these days if they like reading books. Some actually do, for those who are snickering as they read this. But they can’t seem to finish what they’re reading, and they certainly seem to be avoiding the longer titles. In fact, most of them seem to gravitate towards graphic novels. God I hate that term, ‘graphic novels’. It’s a bloody comic book, ok?