Friday has been a lazy day of small advances. I was curious whether yesterday’s work would actually run on my Windows workstation, so I did some software installs and looked at upgrading my license of Camtasia Studio (a screen video annotation tool) for possible screencasts in the future. For example, I’m thinking of using Camtasia to record my face and my screen as I try to figure out my approach to music composition, outsider-style! (more…)

Thursday was a good day! I took the time today to connect with people, and everyone was in an upbeat mood. With the lessons of yesterday’s procrastination fresh in my mind, I found it a lot easier to start working on my utility project. I actually finished it! (more…)

Wednesday was a very difficult workday. Though yesterday I had kicked-off a major code goal with some excitement, today I felt the opposite of that. I find the process of looking-up how to do sundry development tasks pretty boring. To try to liven things up, I thought I would tackle a simpler project that would scan a directory for a browser bookmark files and convert them into a clean easy-to-ready listing using NodeJS. This would be a practical introduction to utilities programming, but I put it off and off and off because BOOORING. I eventually dragged myself into starting it, but not after a complete day of fighting-off other distractions. (more…)

Today I kicked-off another ten-year goal, Project 1405! This is the “make software for thinking” goal, and since I’ve never made software like this before, it’s going to be a long road. Good thing I gave myself 9 years to do it!. Details follow. (more…)

I’ve been doing the Groundhog Day Resolution Challenge for two weeks now! From past experience, the two-week mark of ANY project is a critical threshold because (1) the excitement from the novelty of a new challenge has worn off and (2) I start to get a feel for what works/doesn’t work about it. And indeed, I have been noticing that I’ve been feeling rather tired lately, perhaps because I’m starting to lose some enthusiasm for the daily push. I’ll talk about that a bit after discussing today’s GHDR push that started as a half-hearted goal to create a new folder on my hard drive and call it a day. (more…)