Canllaith.org

I enjoy reading Stepcase Lifehack, although I tend to skim it lightly. Many of the posts can seem a little trite and obvious at times.

Some are so obvious I wonder how, when I feel them shock me like electricity and trigger my mind’s resonant frequency, I never thought to apply this concept to my life before. Others on the surface can seem fairly ordinary, but have me thinking along tangents to the original premise for days.

8 Good Reasons to be a Lousy Musician

A lifehack I’ve always felt the strength of but had forgotten a little recently is developing creative space. As children many of us had the ability to get so lost in our art that we would reach an almost zen state. I found it all too easy to pick up a pen or pencil and be so absorbed in my task that I’d come to myself with a shock hours later realizing it was too dark to see my page and that I’d had no sense of the time passing at all.

I never lost the ability to reach that state of concentration, but as an adult a trap I often fall into is to focus on the performance rather than the art. There’s a certain pleasure to be taken in being good at something, but there are times it’s more enriching to seek the creative space rather than a polished end result. The art itself is just the means to reaching this place. When I focus too hard on the quality of the execution, this transforms the creative pursuit into just another activity to make time for. When I let go of caring whether it’s good and instead focus on whether it’s affirming, I take an almost spiritual calm and centeredness away with me when I come back to the mundane world.

As a writer and photographer, it’s a given that I make room for creative space in my life. Even if I hadn’t found avenues of employment for some of my more artistic passions, I’d still consider it a priority to set aside time to pursue them. Music, drawing, and writing give me ways to stop the world for a few hours every now and then and find some kind of serenity.

If serenity sounds appealing, I can wholeheartedly recommend giving creative space a chance. It’s easy to be so busy that you forget to make time to centre yourself. Some of us have almost forgotten how to.For those who have, reaching that state might take a lot more than just sitting down with a sketchbook. Even if you don’t find yourself reaching a zen-like calm every time you pick up your paintbrush, the abiding joy taken in creation is almost a defining characteristic of humanity and I at least can’t imagine ever feeling my life has too much of it.

Sometimes I wonder - if I spent the time I usually spend browsing http://www.43folders.com/ and http://www.lifehack.org/ getting work done, would I have less need for productivity tips? ;)

I read a pretty neat article today from http://www.43folders.com/2004/11/18/hack-your-way-out-of-writers-block about how to get past writer’s block. A lot of the comments to the article are really excellent as well.

One of the tips in particular that really resonated with me was:

“Write crap - Accept that your first draft will suck, and just go with it. Finish something.”

That’s something I’ve struggled with for a long time, and for me at least it really is the key to being a productive writer. It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of wanting what I have to say to be absolutely perfectly formed in my head before I commit it to paper. I end up staring into space endlessly polishing sentences and lining up paragraphs, marching in lines all in my head, before I’ve even touched pen to paper.

It’s a productivity killer because the longer I polish something that doesn’t exist yet, the longer it’s going to take me to actually get started. When I started actually meeting deadlines at least most of the time was when I learned to do what I called ‘Just write’. I would go away from my computer and away from the internet with a pen and some paper and just go and get any old thing down. I could check my facts later, research content I wasn’t sure of when I got back to my laptop. The most important thing was to separate writing from researching, and just write some crap down.

I found it was a lot easier to get into a zone where I just wrote and it flowed if I used pen and paper and got away from the computer. In the interests of not having a million notebooks around the house and never being sure which one has which article in it I’m after, I’m trying very hard to digitise this process. To save me from myself I’m in the process of doing up an apple e-mate. No network connectivity, long battery life, sunlight readable screen and an absolutely fabulous keyboard. I’m hoping it will help me learn how to spark that creative process sitting at a keyboard, while still providing me with the distraction free environment that paper does.

These are by far the two most effective tools in my arsenal against writer’s block. Just write some crap, and turn off the darn internet.

Now ironically, I should stop procrastinating from working through the writer’s block on my latest assignment and go and just write some crap.

In three days I fly to Melbourne to attend linux.conf.au. It’s the first one I’ve been to in a few years and I’m really quite excited about it.

There are LinuxChix, Gaming and Systems Administration miniconfs that I’m very keen to attend, as well as talks on security and networking. Of course I’ll have to attend Aaron Seigo’s talk on creating user interfaces with plasma, and catch up on various KDE gossip with him over a drink or nine.

I’m taking a decent camera & lens with me and my long-suffering KDE laptop so with any luck there should be a lot of blogging about the conference. There’s going to be internet access in the conference accommodation which should help - during the conference talks I’ve discovered I rarely have the time or concentration to actually write anything useful, and really rely on being able to go back to my room with some notes to write things up properly there.

I’m looking forward to being back in Australia for a week - the temperature looks to be getting as high as 35 degrees Celsius. I’m packing t-shirts, shorts and sandals - don’t let me down Australia!

If any other KDEers are going to be at LCA don’t hesitate to drop me a line if you want to catch up.

KDE 4

Originally uploaded by canllaith

I’ve been crazy busy with so many writing projects the last few days. I’ve got a review of the Eee to complete and some articles on KDE4, as well as (hopefully) some more Eee content. Almost all paying work, so hooray for that.

I thought I’d take a moment out to flick a screenshot of the current state of KDE4. It’s very attractive although there are still a lot of rough edges visible. Now I’ve finally managed to master the cmake build process I might even manage to write some docs. Possibly even finish the half draft of the first KDE4 focused ‘This Month in SVN’ I have lurking around. Sleep is not all that necessary, right?

I do have a panel, but for some reason it’s vampirish and did not show up in the photograph. I’m going to blame Aaron for that.

Yet another ‘wow, I can’t believe how awesome Linux is getting’ post.

I went over to a friend’s place tonight to give her a hand configuring her Kubuntu laptop. In the time we’ve known each other she’s reinstalled Kubuntu a few times now, mostly to upgrade to new versions cleanly as she uses a lot of manual configuration that doesn’t survive a dist-upgrade well.

We’ve noticed it getting just a little bit easier with every new version, but tonight on installing ndiswrapper something she said reminded me that a long time ago, I’d written an article about ndiswrapper in the Bad Old Days of doing just about everything by hand. I poked around on the webserver I used to host my things on and it seems it’s still there.

We had a bit of fun browsing through my baby steps in Linux - I’m embarrassed to admit I used to think those little w3m ‘Compliant HTML!’ buttons were cool, and that I used to write HTML tables by hand because at that stage I couldn’t figure out CSS. Moving right along now.

The thing that really struck us going through all these old how to’s though is how markedly they show the improvement in ease of use over the last few years. All of the tutorials describe editing configuration files by hand, compiling kernels and other software by source and even writing custom init scripts for hardware.

Now, installing Kubuntu on my friend’s laptop is the work of a pleasant hour while sitting on the couch chatting. The only thing that isn’t picked up automatically is the Synaptics touchpad and the BCM4318 wireless card. One quick edit to the Xorg.conf and a little bit of fiddling with ndiswrapper (which goes much quicker when I don’t accidentally set the wireless switch to off! Go Jes!) and away we go - and this is on problematic SIS chipsets, about the least Linux compatible laptop I’ve ever seen. On Intel hardware, it pretty much JustWorks.

The attitudes have changed a lot too lately. Now it’s just terrible if I can’t get beryl’s 3d effects working right or my plug-and-play dual head configuration occasionally has a glitch. I almost feel guilty complaining about it when I look back on having to spend 3 days compiling just to get online.

I think I’m getting a bit spoilt :)

She’s Such a Geek really jumped out at me with its bright yellow cover. I remembered having read about it on boingboing, and on the linuxchix mailing list. I bought it and started reading it over hot chocolate on my lunch break. It’s a collection of essays written by women in science and technology, essentially about their geekiness and what it’s like to be that geek and be a woman. They’re in turn bold, strong, honest, familiar, inspiring, and at times bitter. It isn’t easy being a woman geek and I found myself empathising often.

I can recommend She’s Such a Geek to any one who either wants to better understand some of the difficulties woman geeks encounter, or those who, like me, understand only too well already. This isn’t an earth shattering book - it isn’t going to radically change how you feel about women in science and technology, or being a woman in science and technology. It is a celebration and an affirmation. We’re here, it says, and we understand - we’re like you, and we don’t feel we should have to apologise for it either.