Don’t break the chain!

Here’s a quick post:

Charles and I are bad at time management (although I think I have an idea of who’s worse), and we want to get better. Charles stumbled across this link: http://lifehacker.com/5886128/how-seinfelds-productivity-secret-fixed-my-procrastination-problem describing a novel method of getting-things-done: Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t Break the Chain” calendar strategy. It’s hard to explain so I’ll have to ask you to go read about it on the lifehacker page: http://lifehacker.com/5886128/how-seinfelds-productivity-secret-fixed-my-procrastination-problem (Yes, that’s the same link twice. Get off my back.)

The twist: Charles and I have a **joint** calendar, so that we have to make sure that we both get our shit done every day or we’re both screwed! And we would be disappointments to the other one. It’s like a competition to see who can get more done!

We’ll see how it goes. One of my weekly required goals is to make a blog post every Saturday (hence this post!). My other goals are mainly about classes, thesis, and guitar. So, pretty good overall.

Unrelated to all that, I quit facebook again last night, this time with Charles’ help of password locking.

OK, see y’all later!

Time to Switch

On my laptop, I am currently dual-booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04.  I find the transition between operating systems to be tedious (save, then hibernate or restart), and Ubuntu always ran too slowly in VMWare to be a viable alternative.  However, after using a smooth-running pre-made Fedora VMWare image for a class, I’m now considering just booting Linux in Windows.

Ubuntu was the first Linux distro that I used, and I still run it on my computers.  This may now change given my experience with the (not-so) new Unity interface in versions 11.x+.  The lack of customization (which is a main factor of why people use Linux) is driving my switch.  A particularly annoying example: in order to stop the menu bar from autohiding, a fairly simple task, one must install a “flaky” configuration package.  Unity provides no options by default!  It is as if Canonical performed absolutely no user-testing before pushing out Unity.

In contrast with Tom’s decision to remove Unity, as I am writing this post, Linux Mint is being installed for a test run.

Science and Ubuntu

PUBLIC SAFETY ANNOUNCEMENT: THE FOLLOWING IS A TECHNICAL POST THAT I COULDN’T FIGURE OUT WHERE ELSE TO PUT.

For various reasons (mostly dealing with my senior thesis), I decided to wipe my old Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid, 32-bit) install in favor of a shiny new 11.04 (Natty, 64-bit).

Anyway, this post is mostly useful for me, but could also be useful for you too if you wanted to do my senior thesis instead of me!

Getting the dual-boot (with shared storage partition – crucial!!) working:

http://lifehacker.com/5403100/dual+boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-in-perfect-harmony

(more…)

diffraction

And it’s as if a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. Fuck yeah.

We’ll see if this continues to be a positive development, but I already feel good about the shape of things to come.