When I was a kid , I harboured fantasies about driving the Paris-Dakar road rally . People who have seen me swerve through traffic will not think this is completely out of line. And when I lived in Paris I came so close as to almost sneak in as a navigator for a realdriver though it just didn’t happen.
Still, even here on the Western edge of civilization and an ocean and continent away, I haven’t given up hope.
I have to admit that the multitude of emails I get from work, friends, pro bono and charity work were getting to the point of near unmanageability for me. It was causing a lot of stress. Rather embarrassingly, two important mails slid by me the other week because I had been depending way too much on Apple Mail’s ability to have everything in one Inbox and just search it via Spotlight and flagging, marking as unread and auto filtering rules to try and manage things.
I’m like to think I’m pretty good with goal setting every year. It’s the followup I suck with. Generally, I try and look at the month end tracking on what I want to accomplish in a year and fall off somewhere around September as my life gets crazy.
I just need to get nagged a little more. That’s where HassleMe (dead link) comes in.
It chimes in at irregular intervals you’ve set to bug you about the things you’ve asked it to bother you about. It’s like emailing yourself a nagging at a fuzzy time in the future.
I have this great friend who I’ve lost a bit of contact with recently who had this great theory about karmas. That basically, there were three of them: apartment, job and friend karma. You could have 2 of them but virtually never three. I always found it charming but kind of wondered about its applicability to my own situation.
I was chatting with a friend as we watched the sunset off the Boathouse near my apartment and were discussing the idea of the “three” theory and what it was that kept you in a place or made you think someplace or sometime was better than any other in your life. After discussing Viktor Frankl and killing off a bottle of wine, I think we came up with a pretty good list :
Wow. I’m going to say this again, because it is so rare for me to use this word in relation to programming at all: Wow.
In fact, the last time I used it was in regard to my first view of XCode whose ability to remove the grunt work from creating interfaces and allow you to concentrate on coding instead is amazing (sadly though, I’m not a big fan of ObjectiveC and you really need to code in ObjC to get XCode’s full power… though apparently someone has come up with Ruby bindings for Cocoa which I am also going to check out since Ruby seems to save so much pain.
On the plane to DC I had a chance to catch up on some manifesto type readings from Change This which basically re-packages interesting essays from A-listers into pretty PDFs and puts them on the site. Short, compelling and thought provoking they are perfect reading for bumpy plane rides over hostile territory when you’ve only had 3 hours sleep. You can always pull something interesting out of each issue (one every 2 weeks) and often its pretty good, very applicable stuff. Certainly noteworhty..