A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I need a reminder.  Between A.D.D. and it’s associated effluvia, I get and stay off track very easily.

I thought about having some kind of interruptive reminder application that would beep or popup or something.  But that doesn’t make sense.

Then I thought that it might make sense to have a sign reminding me, when I looked up (or “noticeably though not disruptively close to my focal point”) to at least be mindful of what i was doing.

Being me I let the idea germinate a bit and I realized there were a couple/few things I need big bold reminders of.

Sparing you the rest of my fragmented internal dialog, here’s the deal strongly and simply stated:

I went to RiteAid and bought 4 8.5″x11″ frames (at $3.99 each) and I printed 4 signs, which I’ve posted.  They’re in time order.  You’ll see what I mean.

1. Let It Go This is the past.  It’s also things about what I’m working on that are bloody irrelevant meaning “everything that’s happened until now.” When you’ve got something to do the only two things you have are the situation or thing which needs work and it’s next state of completion.  Dwelling on the past is neither relevant nor productive.  The motives for doing so are at BEST suspect, frequently serving to keep something in stasis through procrastination or worse.
2. What Now? Now.  Right Now.  What are you doing?  Why? (rolls in to what.)   Know where you are, what you’re doing and what you expect from that action.  IF YOU DO NOT then your current action bloody well ought to be “Figure Out What Now.”  It’s simple really.  This was the first sign I wanted to put up.
3. What Next? So What Now is done, you lean back in your chair.  There’s only one question.  What next?  It’s the next What Now and nothing more.  It’s good to plan these in advance.  Other people are better at describing (and implementing) that process than I am.
4. What Then? Where are you going? Why are you doing what you’re doing?  I almost phrased this as “To What End?” and who knows, I may yet.  If you don’t have something you’re working towards then you’re dithering away your life on minutia.  Stop it.  Someone wiser than I said “Make No Small Plans.”  This is that.  Do that.

These scale well.

Here’s my desktop from 45 minutes ago (click to embiggen):

UPDATE: Hmmpf. Apparently while TwitPic has a “put this pic on your own site” feature, they only put the thumbnail. Fair enough. Click it for the big version.

Blog needs a major overhaul.  I really like the bliki idea (blog/wiki) as it seems the only sensible way of automatically cross linking content such that it remains accessible.  This foolishness of blogging being forceably time linear is as stupid as using cassette tapes for music.

It’s time for me to get back into IT.  Trading isn’t working and, more importantly, I don’t really care about it.  At the end of the day, even if I’ve traded remarkably well the only thing that’s different in the world is the size of my trading account and some femto-modifications to the price of certain instruments as an affect of my involvement.  Money is a necessary motivation and I’ve enjoyed tremendously having lots of it in the past but I’ve never been deluded by it’s value into making it my primary motivation. (Actually, that’s not true. There is a time I chose money over enjoying my job, before I’d had any idea what it was like to have money.  I did make the best decision I could have back then.  Frankly it’s only now, 10+ years later that I’m coming to terms with the fact that I can’t reasonably have expected myself to have made any other choice at the time.)

I say “get back into IT” because while I’ve just started up the job search engines, I’m not married to programming.  It seems to me that this would be a really great time to shift gears a bit.

In a perfect world I’d work on small (time) scale assignments in a hired-gun capacity.  Historically I’ve been far too easy to bore in a noncompelling project.  I’d rather come in with a full head of steam and grind for 6-12 months and leave having done a damn good job.

The Agile/XP Coach job was an interesting experiment because it really shined a light on a great deal of untapped potential.  But it was ultimately doomed to failure as a large-scale teaching job.  Piecemeal and small scale classes, training, pairing and tool creation and setup were wonderful.  When it came time to actually fly half way around the world and do 3 weeks of training, I simply wasn’t ready for it and bowed out, which was unabashedly the right thing to do.

No matter where I land, I simply can’t go through a day without making something any more.  Hell, even in my horrible heroin like addiction to MMOs I spend most of my time “crafting.” But I do very well with small scale quick hit tools and programs.  Everything from protocol ‘breakout box’ taps for testing purposes to banged out html screen scrapers and even mini gui apps that help me get through the day.  I churn these things out all the damn time.  Unfortunately I’ve never been quite focused enough with job responsibilities to be a top tier perl or python scripter in a unixen environment, otherwise there’d be that facet open.

For now, my job search is on autopilot, dice, monster, hotjobs, a couple really great recruiters (yes, they’re out there.  There are a couple who didn’t get their job by failing the ethics exam to be used car salesmen.)

I want something a little different though.  Something that plays to my strengths, but seems to me to be a fairly odd niche.

On To!

Last year I spent a fair amount of energy importing my old posts from other blogs into here.  It totalled a little over 3000 posts spanning 6 years.

I still see incoming references to old uccu urls.  It wouldn’t have been SUCH a nightmare to accomidate that.

The way to do it would’ve been:

- Tag the old posts with the old post id and ‘uccu’

- Add a rewrite rule to the magic whatchamacallit file that would redirect all the /uccu/*html links to a cgi.

- Add a cgi that redirects to a WordPress searche for the post number from the intended url and ‘uccu’.

- Tada!

But I didn’t tag the uccu posts.  After seeing what happened when I tagged the old radio userland posts (massive proliferation of tags and an OldRadioBlog tag) I thought differently.

Well that was wrong.

Now I’ve got people who are getting cached google results coming in to this site and landing on the homepage, which is almost certainly the last thing they want.

Yeah.  Looks like it’s time to do some site work.