Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Getting around to using an anti-procrastination app

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“[David] Nicholls, while writing his follow-up to One Day, used a particularly brutal app, Write or Die. Ponder too long over your next word and an ominous red glow descends over the page. Then your text disappears in haphazard fashion: This is what a sntnc lks lk ftr prcrstntng fr 20 scnds.

Nicholls likened it to “writing with a gun to my head”. Unsurprisingly he didn’t produce his best work and decided that two years and 32,000 words of work were to be discarded.”

The much-delayed war on procrastination – Tom Heyden, BBC News Online (11 October 2014)

I know what you’re thinking. He only wrote 32,000 words? In two years? That’s 16,000 a year. It’s 44 words per day. No wonder he wanted an anti-prevarication app.

No wonder it failed too: I can pump out 20 pages of script or 10,000 words of text per day for up to about 6 days in a row. But while they can be surprisingly good – in that when I go back over a manuscript I can’t always tell you what was considered and what was written that quickly – the truth is that it is all considered and it must all be. It takes time to write, time in which you are not writing.

So having an app that threatens you even more than I do just can’t work. However, the full BBC News piece has a lot more to say about beating prevarication and why this is an issue for us more now than ever.

You join me live…

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It’s 00:14 on Saturday night, leaning over into Sunday. I had a terrific evening seeing My Big Fat Cowpat Wedding in the very darkest corner of Kidderminster – Kidderminster isn’t dark but we got there and the venue was another hour further on into the countryside.

But now I’m home and on the good side, the smell of roasting chicken coming from the kitchen is rather grand. I’m roasting one ready to make up into lunches and suchforth tomorrow. Wish I’d remembered earlier or really just been around my home long enough to do it earlier. Still, it’s a nice smell and it’s nearly enough to keep me awake while I wait for the oven timer to go off.

There is a bad side.

I’m listening to the sound of seven leaks, seven rhythmic drop drops of water in our hallway. They’re close enough to one another that I suspect there’s just a single leak that is sending water running out all over the place. But the plumber I rang isn’t close enough to do anything about it tonight. The certainty that I woke him up coupled to the triple certainty that anything with the word emergency in it costs triple means I’m officially happy waiting for the morning. I’m not really.

You can tell from the way I’m writing to you. I’m using the fact that I’m too worried about the water to sleep yet too tired to stay awake. I’m using it to give me time to talk to you, time to roast a chicken.

If nothing else, I’m using my time.

Celebrity fame and productivity

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I’ve got one of these. But if I were also a famous celebrity, this is what would happen. You’d hear about me a lot on the news and each time I would’ve got a new book out. Or my shocking scurrilous sordid squid sex secret has been revealed. (Delete depending on what celebrity news outlet you read.)

My personal life aside – we’re all adults here, I don’t judge you, you don’t judge me or at least don’t judge me until you’ve tried it – I think that there is something interesting and something that gets forgotten. These people you see relaxing on the BBC Breakfast couch talking about yet another book, yet another success, they have two things going on that they don’t really talk about and that they are not really asked about either.

First, they need that publicity. I don’t mean that they crave it within their souls or that their lifeforce depends upon adulation, I mean that without you hearing about their book, the book doesn’t sell. They want to eat, sure, but they probably also want to keep on writing books and they need us, they need some floodlights put on their faces.

But the second thing is ridiculous. We listen to journalists asking people about their new book and yet we don’t really, consciously think: “They’ve written a new book”. Obviously they have but we tend to think more that it’s “They’ve got a new book out”. That’s subtly different and I think it misleads us.

To get on the telly talking about a book, you have to write the book.

We see celebrities relaxing, talking happily at events and in interviews, but they solely got there because they did the work. It’s back-breaking work but they have broken their backs and done it.

And tomorrow they’re off doing it again.

I’m not fussed about fame and celebrity, I am very fussed about getting enough sales that I can keep writing books. Do the work. Be productive. And you will produce things.

I have no idea whether that will get you on the telly but I know that you don’t get on if you haven’t done the work.

If you get fired, don’t do this

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Just don’t. I have no way to know if this is as genuine as it seems – though it’s a pointless thing to fake – and one always likes to think that there are faults on both sides.

But that doesn’t matter.

When you’re fired or you are made redundant, let it go. Because it’s gone.

And we might all bitch to our friends about how unfair it is – spoiler alert: your friends are never fooled – and okay, maybe, if you must.

But read this to see what happens when you bitch about your employer and in particular when you employer runs a website and you bitch about them on their own site.

Prepare to wince as you read the full feature.

TextExpander Touch updated, improved

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It is still harder to type on iOS devices with the TextExpander keyboard but a new 3.1 release plus iOS 8.0.2 has improved things. You want this because the very best use of the new iOS keyboarded feature is TextExpander and it is tantalisingly close to great.

The iOS 8.0.2 update has fixed the bug that meant you had to keep switching the keyboard on and off in Settings to get it to work. That’s a big thing, it would be the biggest thing except there is also now auto-correction.

A bit.

I don’t understand how it can have a bit of autocorrection. It’s as if developers don’t have access to the iOS autocorrection feature and so have to implement one themselves. That seems an enormous waste of effort and doubly so since it isn’t working. Whereas the TextExpander keyboard previously gave me no corrections at all, this one does some. Not many and not the same ones that the regular Apple keyboard does.

This wouldn’t matter a huge amount except that it is harder to type on the TextExpander keyboard than it is on the regular one. So the keyboard that is meant to speed you up with TextExpander snippets does speed you up – and slows you down too.

These new keyboards for iOS are solely for when you are typing on the glass of your device: they can’t use Bluetooth external keyboards. So I’m trying to write this on the glass of my iPad Air and I’m doing fine – except that I had to give up doing it on the TextExpander keyboard.

But at least I had a go where previously I couldn’t last a sentence.

One other improvement. TextExpander touch had one very good sound – the kind of bleep it gives when it expands some text – and one very irritating sound with the clicking keyboard. Before this update, you got both sounds or you got none. I couldn’t bear the clicking keys so I had nothing.

I so want this to work.

TextExpander touch 3.1 is available now in the App Store

Weekend read: Vanity Fair on Microsoft

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This is the kind of reporting that gets me back interested in computers: the endless grey boxes and blue screens of death drove my head away into drama and fiction and I’m good with that. But it really is a fascinating world for how it’s an incredibly fast-paced summary of all business issues. Problems come and they topple firms. Today’s right decision is tomorrow’s end of the company.

Quick aside? I once went to some talk or other where the speaker held up Dell as as an example of how to do business brilliantly. That’s a presenter who hasn’t updated his slides in a very long while and who isn’t actually interested in his own topic. Dell was a superb success but it shot itself in the foot and unless his next slide had praised their aim, I knew he didn’t know his stuff.

Back to the point. Vanity Fair has run a rather good piece about Microsoft and specifically about the pretty tumultuous changes it has faced and as yet has failed to conquer. There’s a really nice line in it:

In the old world, corporations owned and ran Windows P.C.’s and Window servers in their own facilities, with the necessary software installed on them. Everyone used Windows, so everything was developed for Windows. It was a virtuous circle for Microsoft. Now the processing power is in the cloud, and very sophisticated applications, from e-mail to tools you need to run a business, can be run by logging onto a Web site, not from pre-installed software. In addition, the way we work (and play) has shifted from P.C.’s to mobile devices—where Android and Apple’s iOS each outsell Windows by more than 10 to 1. Why develop software to run on Windows if no one is using Windows? Why use Windows if nothing you want can run on it? The virtuous circle has turned vicious.

The Empire Reboots – Bethany McLean, Vanity Fair (November 2014)

Do read the full piece. It’s a three-biscuit article and terribly interesting.

The One Where They Probably Don’t Even Remember

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Flashback twenty years. Friends has just begun on US television and it is an immediate hit. Now, it would progress from hit to smash to phenomenon (there are very specific rules about which is which) but right then, it was merely a hit. Do you know what else was coming around twenty years ago? Windows 95.

Now, I am a little confused here. Twenty years ago is 1994. Not 95. And I think Windows 95 did just squeak in before the end of 1995 but if so, it really was a squeak. I was the UK launch and I remember it being hosted by Jonathan Ross who made jokes about how the hall had been booked for this event months before.

Anyway.

I also remember being on the press conference call when the name Windows 95 was announced. Up to then, the operating system had been known as Chicago. (I think. Is that tight? Suddenly blank on that bit.) I can remember thinking oh, is that it? That’s rubbish. And then later on getting to use Windows 95 and thinking oh, is that it? That’s rubbish.

Windows 95 had one killer feature and I won’t even pretend to deny that it didn’t. I may dislike Windows 95 but it was better than Windows 3.1. But if you’re going to rip off the Mac’s easy-to-use system, I think it says a gigantic amount about how badly you did it that you need to make instructional videos on how to use your copy. That’s what this becomes, it becomes a guide to what in the hell have you just bought. But the first twenty minutes or so are different.

The first twenty minutes or so are actors Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston being required to not-really play their Friends characters – they very pointedly refer to each by their real names so don’t you go suing Microsoft, whoever owns Friends – and to make some pretty wretched dialogue sound audible. These are two talented people but they’re doing this for money and while you can’t fault struggling actors for that – Friends lasted years but you don’t know that at the beginning – it’d be nice not to see it so plainly.

Mind you, if they had hidden it better, if the script had been better, if this ‘cyber-sitcom’ were funny, maybe we wouldn’t have quite so much fun watching it now.

You won’t make it all the way through. But grab some tea, plonk yourself down and be agog at the Windows 95 Cyber Sitcom starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry. “Look, Matty, I’m computing!”

It should be “If Siri Were a Waitress”, not Was

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I love Siri and the ability now to just say “Hey, Siri” and have it listen is tremendous. When I’m driving or it’s on the nightstand, whenever my iPhone is on mains power really, then it is so handy and convenient. So handy that when my iPhone isn’t on mains, it now seems a right chore having to press the button and wait.

But.

It’s as if Siri has off days. There are times when it just ain’t on the same page as me. Sometimes I can be astounded at what it gets right and then bemused at what it gets wrong. It’s infuriating. On balance I’d say I have a love/like relationship with Siri.

Doesn’t stop me enjoy this, though:

But this is better:

And for another wrong but good take on the was/were issue, there’s this:

Area Man Patiently Waiting For Humiliating Email To Cycle Off First Page

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Because you’ve done this too:

EAU CLAIRE, WI—Hoping for additional emails to quickly arrive and take up space in his inbox, local man Steve Mazza told reporters Wednesday that he is patiently waiting for a humiliating message to cycle off the first page of his email program. “It looks like I’ve got a few more days until there’s enough new stuff to bump this thing to the second page,” said Mazza…

Area Man Patiently Waiting For Humiliating Email To Cycle Off First Page – The Onion (8 October 2014)

Read the full piece on The Onion.

So, what, is homework any good or not?

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This is mostly a critique of a report but the quotes from the report are interesting. Just apparently not new.

Let’s start by reviewing what we know from earlier investigations.[1] First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school. In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement. If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.

Homework: An unnecessary evil? … Surprising findings from new research – Valerie Strauss and Alfie Kohn, Washington Post (26 November 2012)

So that’s not new in two ways: it’s a 2012 article commenting on how a then-recent study wasn’t great. But it cites or at least refers to a whole chain of prior reports that all say homework is a shrug, doesn’t help you one way or the other.

I can’t help but map that homework idea to the amount of cramming I do overnight before meetings. I’ll take a couple of evenings off and see what happens.

The things I do for you.