August 2004 - Posts

Are weblogs causing a loss of productivity?
01 August 04 01:18 PM | alexcampbell | 3 comment(s)

I've found it convenient to be able to separate work, play, and rest with some physical partitioning; going into a different room helps to get in the mindset of accomplishing something rather than sitting in bed with your laptop reading blogs all day. Given a loft, people will often place semi-permanent partitions to separate space by function. That said, a one person house probably doesn't need or want more than three rooms [not counting the kitchen, which could be a separate argument].

-- Karl Ramm, July 31, 2004

I found this insightful comment on one of Philip Greenspun's articles (http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/house-design/).

The glib remark, “get in the mindset of accomplishing something rather than sitting in bed with your laptop reading blogs all day“, made me realise how much I could be achieving if I gave up on all the software development blogs I read.  What are the other things could I be doing?

  • Working on the first public release of my system monitoring software, temporarily named Cassandra.  I stole the name from a now defunct company (used to be http://www.arsdigita.com).  It will have some very cool features when it is released - probably around the same time as Whidbey.  More on this later.
  • Getting past the data modelling stage of my open source Web Collaboration and Publishing system.  Much more on this later.
  • Making substantial progress on my Blackjack application (C# with a Windows and Web front end)
  • Writing weblog posts soliciting feedback on the above two projects.
  • Doing some more substantial development in Whidbey (meh, ok, .Net 2.0) - although for some reason I'm having trouble really getting excited about it and engaging with it
  • Living out aspects of my old life - before I sold out and became a commercial computer programmer - such as going to the theatre, reading literature
  • Cleaning up my house, shopping, cooking

I hadn't thought about it since I first started reading them, but the http://weblogs.asp.net and http://blogs.msdn.com feeds have a pretty unimpressive signal to noise ratio.  I would be better off working on my own projects or reading books that interest me. 

And then there's the obvious silliness of writing a weblog post about the futility of weblog posts.

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