intrepid girl reporter
Archive for the ‘Ramblings’ Category.
Faithful readers! All, like, four of you. You’ll be excited to learn that I’ve started yet-another-weblog. I’ve been intending to start this one for a while, but having a couple of days off has finally given me the time to get it done-enough to start using. It’s over here:
Parchment Moon is a weblog about books, writing, language, and other literary things. Mostly books, tho’. Anyhow. There you go.
The lack of updates is due to the fact that I’m buried neck-deep in work. Long story short, we’ve had to postpone some software/design upgrades for my project twice now, but…you know, we’re learning. Mostly I’m learning a lot about what it’s like to be a project manager (sort of) for a small but intense little project.
All that aside, I did make something yummy for dinner tonight that I would like to eventually recreate. Here’s the recipe:
Chunky Sausage Pasta
Ingredients
Procedure
Heat a good sized sauce pan to medium or medium hot. Drop in sausage chunks and let brown well on one side, then stir/shake. Keep doing this until sausage is cooked through. Some sausage bits will stick to the bottom, and if you’ve got the temperature at the right level, they’ll get nice and brown. Don’t worry, they’ll unstick later.
When the meat is cooked through, toss in the peppers and onions and stir well. Cook these for a little while until starting to soften. Add minced garlic and black pepper and stir, continuing to cook until the veggies are cooked but still a little crisp. Pour in the full jar of sauce, stir well, and turn heat to low. Let this simmer for a while, stirring occassionally.
Boil a large pot of salted water. Cook pasta. Tortiglioni is a nice big fat chunky pasta that goes well with the chunky sauce. Drain (don’t rinse).
Pasta goes in bowls, sauce goes over it, and top with grated parmasean and some more fresh black pepper. This is a little spicy and would go nicely with a fairly bold red wine.
Feeds two with leftovers for lunch.
So, it turns out that my Photoblog software doesn’t want to let me log in. Not only that, but it doesn’t want to email me my current or a new password. Long story short — I’m screwed. There’s no way for me to actually log in and use that part of the site anymore.
As it turns out, however, that’s OK. The reason I was even looking at it is because I’m replacing it. Posting individual photos was simply turning out to be a pain in the butt, so I just stopped doing it. I’m going to be using Lussumo Filebrowser instead. This is an extraordinarily slick little piece of php coding (no database) that basically builds a gallery of images (or whatever other file types you have), including, if you so choose, thumbnail previews. It’s…just neat. And tiny! Those Lussumo guys seriously seem to know what they’re doing.
Anyhow…the existing photo site is going away and will be replaced in the nearish future. I think I’ll start going through and organizing my photos right now, in fact…
I’m no longer going to physiotherapy. At $45/visit with only a fraction of that covered by our insurance, it’s just not feasible. Alas. Massage therapy is even worse (I went once, I will not be going back) as it’s $70/hr. Given how little effect physio and massage therapy were having, it’s really just not worth the money. Out of this whole several week ordeal, I’ve learned the following things:
Anyhow, that’s the end of physio yet again. I’m continuing on with the gym, of course, since a) it’s fun, b) it gets me away from the computer for a while, c) it’s good for me, and d) it’s not expensive. Hoorah.
Later I’m going to the dentist. On the way, I’m gonna buy a (muchly belated) present for my dad’s birthday and a pair of sneakers. And maybe a book. Such fun. (It’s really nice outside.)
For my entire life I’ve wished that there were more useful hours in a day, whether it be by doing away with sleep (my strategy during highschool and university) or by days suddenly becoming 36 hours long (my current strategy). Neither, as yet, have worked.
The issue is this: there is always more that I want to do than I have time. I suspect that the vast majority of us are in the same boat. On a slightly related topic, there also seem to be things that take up a disproportionate amount of time, attention, energy, or personal sanity than they’re worth.
I’ve been trying to address both of these issues lately, in two ways: First, I have started to reduce the sheer quantity of things I do (ostensibly in favour of quality); Second, I have started to simply drop things that cause me more stress than they’re worth.
An example of the first is that I have reduced the amount of time I spend playing video games in favour of spending more time reading, writing, and working on work-related things. This is good. I’m not saying that gaming is bad, because it’s not — gaming is a perfectly valid hobby of which I am a long-time fan. It’s certainly a far sight better than rotting your brain watching reality television, for example. For me right now, however, gaming has just dropped off the bottom of the priority list. This will likely change when Spore is released, but for now gaming is largely out.
The second is best exemplified by the number of forums and mailing lists I’ve been dropping. For a long time, I’ve spent a lot of time reading and posting on a variety of web forums and mailing lists, most of which are either game-related or peripherally work-related. A while ago I realized that some of these, for various reasons, were wasting too much of my time and energy without really returning any sort of real value. So, I’ve been dropping them like hot rocks, dumping, unsubscribing, or debookmarkifying them en masse. The sporadic nugget of useful information to emerge simply wasn’t worth the overall cost.
The end-goal of all of this stuff-reduction is to regain my ability to focus. Once upon a time I used to be able to sit reading a book, utterly rapt to the point where people had to actually yell at me in order to get my attention. This is not the case any more. I have what appears to be a (mild and) acquired form of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. Not actual ADD because I’m fairly certain that I can control the situation if I try, but ADD for all effective intents and purposes.
Some of the symptoms are:
These aren’t all the symptoms, but they pretty much cover the major issues that annoy me the most.
I blame a number of things, of course, but primarily I lay the blame squarely at the feet of these infernal machines: modern desktop computers.
Back in the day a typewriter was a typewriter, a radio was a radio, a television was a television, a telephone was a telephone. No longer. Now I find myself sitting in front of a machine that can effectively emulate all of these machines and more, all at once, all on the same screen. My TV picture is sitting to the top left of my typewriter, the radio interface (the playlist of which I control) is a mere button press away, I have four different personal communication clients open, monitoring (and taking part in) dozens of different, ongoing conversations. I have news feeds coming in at a rate even the big news agencies could not imagine a decade ago. And that’s just this one screen, during the course of a regular work day.
I have completely lost my ability to focus because there are simply too many things constantly clamouring for my attention.
It needs to stop, and I have started to take some steps towards more deliberately managing my own attention. I, like all people, can only really effectively focus on one thing at a time. Anything else, even a single simple interruption by email, IRC, the radio, or what have you, splits that focus. I’m starting to believe that it’s harmful — not only to personal productivity, but also to a person’s sanity. There is no possible way that everyone I know who is my age actually suffers from real Attention Deficit Disorder, but it sure seems like it some times.
Me, I just can’t keep it up, so I’m beginning to be very deliberate in what I pay attention to through the course of a day. So far, it has been an interesting exercise.
That said, I have 1000 words of writing to do.