Eugene, Oregon
Dylan is a freelance software engineer, world traveler, and aspiring vagabond. . .[more]
About Me
Dylan is a freelance software engineer, world traveler, and aspiring vagabond. . .[more]
Current Location
03/28/2011 - 13:16
Eugene, Oregon, USA
When I had planned my trip to Asia, I had assumed that I would be moving back to San Francisco after a year. While preparing to leave, I had to get rid of most of my belongings—pretty much all of which went to the Salvation Army, or on to the street corner in front of my place. However, I figured I would be returning, so I wanted to keep a few "essentials" for restarting in SF. I left boxes and boxes full of things that I thought I would want for a new apartment. Luckily I had friends who were nice enough to hold on to my stuff for me, so I would have things to get started when I returned.
It's clear now that I will not be moving back to San Francisco any time soon, and that all that "stuff" still needs to be dealt with. A couple of weeks ago I rented a minivan and drove down to the Bay Area to collect everything I'd left behind. It turned out to be a LOT of stuff actually. Some of the items I kept make sense, like my pots and pans, computer monitor, etc., but I look at some things and wonder "what the hell was I keeping that for?" What I once thought of as the "essentials", turn out to not be essential at all after living for a year and a half with just enough stuff to fit into my backpacks. It feels overwhelming to have so many "things", and it's not really a pleasant feeling. For the first few nights after I had unloaded all my boxes into the garage here, I would wake up in a panic thinking "what am I going to do with this," or "how will I sell that?"
At this point I feel much better having less "stuff", and I don't want to be weighed down by personal possessions any more. I felt much more freedom when I had just the things I could carry. It's a comfort to think that I can pack up everything I own at any moment and be on a plane to anyplace I wish. Now I feel like I've got a huge anchor around my neck in the form of a big pile of boxes, snowboards, guitars and various other items in the garage. So now I begin the task of processing all things I've been holding on to and getting them out of my life. Of course it's not going to be easy—many of the things I held onto, I kept for sentimental reasons, but that's something I'll just have to deal with.
03/21/2011 - 21:55
Eugene, Oregon, USA
Before I left on my trip, and while working on building this site, I realized that I had a tough time with getting organized, and getting things done. So, I went on Amazon and started searching for self help books on productivity, time management, etc. That led me to a book called Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
GTD is a "work-life management system" where you get all of the "stuff" out of your head and into lists of "actionable" tasks. Basically, you do a brain-dump of everything you need to do, or think about, no matter how big or small, and organize it into a trackable system. Get everything written down into lists of projects, which can be further broken down into lists of actual doable steps that can be reviewed often. After doing the initial dump of "stuff", it's amazing to see how many thoughts and ideas have just been hanging out in memory, and nagging at me—each adding a bit of stress, or anxiety to my life. Dumping all this stuff onto lists is an amazing feeling—a sort of mind cleanse.
I decided that keeping piles of paper lists would probably not work out too well for me, and may have been one of the reasons I didn't get into GTD the first time I tried it. So, I decided to go with a software based system for keeping track of my projects and next actions lists. There are a few of them out there, but I settled on OmniFocus
, and it's been a great tool so far, though I've only been using it for a short time. It's pretty well geared towards the GTD process.
Another technique I've been using to help with my goal of being more productive is called the Pomodoro Technique. This is sort of where the "rubber meets the pavement." While the GTD techniques help you clear your head and get things into lists of "next actions", the Pomodoro Technique is what I'm using to focus on the "doing". This is a very simple, but so far very effective way to keep focused on what you want to be doing. Basically you set a 25 minute timer (with audible second clicks) and work on one thing for that time, then take a 5 minute break. It can't get much simpler. The thing that keeps me focused the most is hearing the timer clicking. At first it was a bit distracting, but now I look forward to each Pomodoro.
So far, so good. I'm looking forward to being more productive....
03/08/2011 - 17:24
Eugene, Oregon, USA
As I look out the window right now at the grey skies, and drizzle, It's clear that it's still winter here in Eugene. As you'd expect in the Pacific Northwest, there's been a lot of rain, and it even snowed a couple of times while I've been here. That means I've been spending a lot of time indoors, and I've had a lot of time on my hands, so I've been trying to keep busy. And that means studying. No, I'm not back in school "officially", but I've decided to sort of put myself through my own school by working on projects.
Drupal
As I mentioned in my last post, I'm planning to give this site a makeover, and I've decided to make the jump from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. For those who don't know, Drupal is an open source content management system and framework for building database driven websites, and is what I used to build this site. Even though I've cursed it quite a bit in the past—I think because of its pretty steep learning curve—it's grown on me now, and I would like to delve deeper into the world of Drupal. And now with Drupal 7, and the Foundation Drupal 7
Since I don't want to be developing the site "live" I decided I needed to get a solid development environment set up on my mac, So recently I've installed MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP), and set it up for a Drupal 7 multisite environment. So once I get the site built locally, it should (hopefully) be a simple matter of installing Drupal 7 on my host server and just moving the site over. We shall see....
In addition to learning Drupal 7, I've decided to build an iPhone app as well. I'll reveal more about that later when I've gotten further along on the project. So far I'm only at the "Hello World" stage—I just put my "Hello World" app on my iPod yesterday (also serves as a free flashlight app!). Of course this is a great excuse to purchase an iPhone, since I'll be needing to test the GPS features I plan to incorporate into the app. The fact that I need an iPhone is a great excuse to make a trip up to Canada to purchase an unlocked iPhone (since I have no intention of using the iPhone as a phone, and getting locked into some ridiculous contract with AT&T or Verizon).
So that is where I'm at this point. I plan on making a trip down to San Francisco and Sacramento next week, and am really looking forward to hanging out with friends I haven't seen in far too long.
