thoughts.on.code

Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it.
- William Durant [quotes4all.net]

I have an addiction. It is a seemingly innocuous one, but really it is quite insideous. I am addicted to the instant gratification of the Web. ATOM/RSS feeds, PodCasts, News Stories. I love them all. I could not get enough.

But, when something around you (or in my case the amount of information coming at you) becomes too intoxicating, you have a choice: either realize that it is a problem and step away, or allow yourself to be consumed. In my case, it has been a constant struggle to keep focused while on a computer, and since that is the source of my financial stability, it is a problem that needs to be controlled.

Yesterday I read a great post by Steve Pavlina called 30 Days to Success about trying things out for 30 days and at the end of that “30 day trial period” you can make a choice whether to continue on with the change, or revert back, or try something else. The idea is that you are not forced into a “holy cow I can’t do this for the rest of my life” position, so it is not so daunting. And, after 30 days you have the start of a habit. Its much easier to continue than before.

So, yesterday I started to remove those items from my web inputs (MyYahoo, Google Frontpage, Bloglines, Mailing lists) that were not of importance to me. My rule is pretty simple: If I need it I will find out about it. Either freinds will tell my about this “cool new thing” or I will find it on my own when I need a solution.

• I kept were the blogs of friends and colleagues. I went from over 100 feeds to 18, 5 of which are comics (haven’t given those up… yet), 1 is a feed I really enjoy and does not inundate me with posts, and the rest are local people.
• I have also gotten rid of all of the news feeds and extraneous crap that I used to pay attention to… things like engadget and gizmodo. They show neat things, but overall do not positively affect my life.
• Every peice of mail in my inbox that had an unsubscribe link on it has been unsubscribed. I will keep doing this until I do not get any more.
• I went through my contacts list and removed anyone I have not talked to in the last year. Cut the list in half.

Here is an “after” shot of my My Yahoo page. I used to have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get to the bottom. Not anymore

I am still using Google’s customized homepage, which I actually just started using about two weeks ago. Here is how that page looks:

One of the pleasures of having a commute (30 minutes) every morning and afternoon, is that instead of listening to the news which has an amazing knack for depressing me, I am instead able to enrich myself by listening to audiobooks through my Audible account.

I am currently listening to The Secrets of the Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer.

On the ride in this morning there was one thing that really resonated with me. Dr. Dyer said that one of the steps to removing ones ego is to “stop always being right”. This is something that I know I have difficulty with. I have a tendency to always have an answer, and occasionally (not all the time, but too often nonetheless), I will defend this poorly-if-at-all thought out answer of mine for no really good reason. I just want to be right. I know that I do not have all the answers, and occasionally am borderline stupid, so why would I think that everything spewing from my mouth should be correct?

So, in the spirit of Blaine’s post on positivity, if you see me being stupid um, me defending a position for no reason, or if I am being negative in any way, stop me. Tell me to think about what I am doing. I appreciate it in advance!

Last night I read Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fullfillment by George Leonard.

This is a really good book, and has left me thinking about what I want out of this life. It starts out by describing the four types of people out there: The Dabbler, The Obsessive, The Hacker, and the Master. I fall into those first three types, depending on what “skill” we are talking about, though I would say that I am a combination of The Dabbler and The Hacker most of the time. The Dabbler can be characterized as a person who is really gung-ho on a “new thing” for a certain amount of time, and then when they reach a plateau they lose interest. The Hacker by the fact that they are happy to stay at the Plateau and “hack around” at that level. I easily lose interest in things that are not “fun” for me, while the things that are “fun”, but are hard I usually stay at the same level forever. For instance, I love playing the guitar, but am not good at it, and have never had instruction. I know a few riffs and a couple songs that I invariably fall into whenever I pick one up. My wife just rolls her eyes whenever I do this because she knows exactly what notes are going to come out. This is Hacking at its best.

The path to Mastery, however, is different:

We fail to realize that mastery is not about perfection. It’s about a process, a journey. The master is the one who stays on the path day after day, year after year. The master is the one who is willing to try, and fail, and try again, for as long as he or she lives.

These few sentences sum up the entire book. When I read this, my mind immediately went to a picture of a stream trickling down a hill, right next to a large waterfall. Imagine which water would taste better: the foamy water straight from the waterfall, or the water that comes from the stream, trickling downhill, picking up nutrients and minerals as it progressed. My bet is with the stream water.

We are a society of quick-fix steroetypes and ideals. This book reminded me of what being a journeyman is supposed to be like. It has been a long time since I have practiced anything, but I am inspired by this book to get into the habit of daily practice, of becoming a master.

Peter Thomas has an interesting graphic of a Tomcat/Acegi/SpringMVC/Spring/Hibernate call stack in this post. Very interesting to see the massive amount of infrastructure that you do not need to write. BUT, you do need ot understand what it is doing for you, which can at times be a daunting task. Note though that this call stack is made up entirely of FOS code. Overall, this picture makes me appreciate all that our software development community has been able to achieve in the name of progress.