I’ve been doing some deep thinking and reflecting about why I never seem to get caught up on anything. My conclusion was that I spend too much time worrying about the how and not enough doing the actual work. Ultimately this is my own fault, but a large part of the problem rests squarely on the shoulders of technology. Having listened to Merlin Mann on the most recent MacBreak weekly and watched an archived TED video with JJ Abrams, I came to the conclusion that I have a problem. The reason that I can’t get anything of substance done is because I’m too focused on the details of how things works. It’s an issue when I’m supposed to be writing a paper, but instead I’m trying to learn how to use LaTeX so that it will look nice and handle the footnotes for me.

I want to be efficient, but the cost in terms of time and effort is absolutely killing me. Even beyond that, the effort that I put into using all these electronic systems to help organize my life means that I’m offloading the important information. I can remember where I put that PDF of the article about tablet computing in the classroom, but I can’t remember the author’s name. This isn’t a huge problem in terms of everyday activity, but in academia, we’re expected to remember all this stuff.

Maybe the iPad will be good for me, and many other people that are affected by computer overload. No multitasking might be a godsend.

I’m at a loss on how to fix this problem. Should I go back to a typewriter? Should I load a basic linux on my netbook and stick to that when I have important work to do? I need to find a way to be okay with being imperfect, and to focus on content and have the details get the hell out of my way.

My favorite mug for coffee

It’s just the right size (12 oz.), and the handle is a comfortable shape.

Sadly Starbucks seems to no longer be selling these. Anyone know where I can find a few more?

As a student and researcher, there are a few basic things I’m looking for in the Apple iPad

• A word processor
• Web browser
• PDF reader with markup

At the Jan 27th presentation, Apple announced that each of the iWork applications was ported over for the iPad (Pages, Keynote, Numbers), so that takes care of the first. It’s running Safari, so that takes care of the web broswer. That just leaves the third and most important application.

I think it’s fabulous that textbooks will finally be available in a usable device. Not only that, but the iPad is powerful enough to do interactive animations and video… so publishers can go far beyond the written word.

As almost anyone in academic can tell you: we read a lot of articles! Absolutely necessary is a decent PDF reader with the ability to do basic markup (highlighting, bookmarks, notes). Personally, I would be thrilled if Apple ported Preview over to the iPad. It’s PDF manipulating abilities are perfect for 99% of what I need to do. If Apple doesn’t make a preview-like application, then there’s a nice opportunity for a company like Mekentosj to port Papers to the iPad along with a PDF reader/editor.

I have Papers for the iPhone, but quite frankly… trying to read something inflexible like a PDF on a tiny screen is just a pain.

Back in 2003, I purchased and tried using an Acer C110 tablet for just such a task. Windows XP tablet edition was SLOW and I didn’t have the software I needed. The touch interface on the iPad, and long battery life will certainly make a big difference in the usability of the tablet. The one question: will anyone develop a usable stylus? I’ve tried a pogo and it was terrible. It had bad precision and was quite unresponsive with tapping. I’d rather not have to use a stylus, but it might be nice to have for drawing.

I was browsing through my Google Reader this evening when I ran across a Google Alert that came up for my name. Upon further investigation, the alert came from a site called docstoc that was hosting a PDF from the UConn Chapter of Phi Delta Kappa. I’m 100% sure that neither I (as acting webmaster), nor anyone else from the board gave permission for our documents to be hosted on a third-party site. (see here).

There is no information on the “user” who supposedly uploaded the document, nor do the category or many of the tags make any sense based on the context or content. Here’s what I think is going on:

docstoc offers a revenue sharing model for users using AdSense: they split the revenue 50/50. Based on the abundance of user accounts with no social-networking connections, obscene number of uploads, nonsense keywords, and lack of cohesiveness in the collections, I’m guessing multiple people have decided to game the system. I made a user account and checked… there’s no captcha on the upload form. My guess is that someone created a robot to scrape PDF documents and upload them into docstoc in the hopes they could make money without doing any work (they even offer an API to make uploading easy). And of course, docstoc has no incentive to stop this sort of activity because all of these illegal postings of content not only make them rate higher in search engines, they also get 50% of AdSense earnings. A little searching shows that I’m not the only one to notice problems with illegal content on docstoc.

I also did a couple quick searches and found dozens and dozens of PDFs ripped off the site I manage at UConn. I will most certainly be bringing this to the attention of the Office of the Attorney General.

Yes it’s trite, but it’s time once again to make resolutions for the coming year. Here are mine, and how I plan to accomplish them.

• Create more, consume less
  This is the year where I’m going to try and spend more time making things and less time passively consuming things. I dropped my cable in the fall and have been much better in avoiding television. I probably only watch 3-4 hours per week. Anything educational or intellectually stimulating is exempt from this resolution, such as reading or audio books.
• Cut down on drinking coffee
  I’m over-caffeinated on a regular basis, so I’m going to try and limit myself to 2 coffees a day. One first thing in the morning and one following lunch (I may have to make an exemption for Thursdays during my all-day treks to NYC). I’m going to try and substitute tea, leaning towards herbal, whenever I need a hot beverage.
• Get more sleep
  I spend too much time not sleeping and affects everything else in my life. I find that when I’m rested, all of life’s troubles are easier to deal with. This is going to require some experimentation to find out the amount that is ideal for me. This could be tricky in conjunction with cutting back on caffeine. I’m guessing it will be in the 7-7.5 hour range, which is far more than the 5-6 hours I normally get during the work week.
• Get and stay organized
  Here’s one that a constant resolution list member. I will continue to work on becoming organized. My iPhone has certainly helped in keeping me on track with appointments, and my next step is to get all my projects in better order. It’s a daily struggle dealing with all the different things in life, but knowing what I have to do each day and not worrying that I’ve missed something is an emotional place I’d like to get to this year.

Before I get to work on writing of a substantial means, I would really like to have a good system in place for handling things. All I really want is:

• A way to mark up the document into sections
• A way to easily cite references (ideally drag & drop)
• A way to format that document similar to how XHTML and CSS work together

So in my browsing, I’ve found out that LaTeX is exactly what I was looking for in terms of separating the document content from the design. Unfortunately LaTeX has all kinds of ugly codes that are used in-text for doing this, which makes it sort of hard to read, and difficult to share with other not familiar with LaTeX. Generating a file in BibTeX format (which integrates citations and automatic bibliography generation with LaTeX) is easy, Papers does it… and so do BibDesk and JabRef (both free!). After a couple of hours playing around with LaTeX using TeXShop (part of the MacTeX bundle, or try MiKTex if you’re on Windows) and the wonderful “The Not So Short Introduction to LaTEX 2e” I was able to generate most of the document content I need.

Being in education, we’re required to follow American Psychological Association format for most journals, and therefore I absolutely adore the apa template (although it’s still following 5th Ed. APA style). I just recently discovered LyX, which is the closest thing to what I’ve been searching for. It generates the LaTeX underneath, leaving only the editable content visible, and offering a nice GUI interface for marking up the document. Sadly I haven’t yet been able to get the apa template to generate references properly, everything comes out as a “?” Once I track this down I’ll be happy with working in LyX.

Thinking ahead to the dissertation, I doubt I will be able to convince anyone on my committee, or my advisor, to start using LyX in order to review my writing. That got me to thinking about other places where I had seen working citations and the ability to easily comment/edit… Wikipedia! I need to check and find out if anyone else has written a script to convert wiki markup to LaTeX. That would be the ideal situation for collaborative writing as wikimedia has versioning, citations, commenting, and collaboration all baked in. Even better if the wiki citations could pull from a BibTeX file or BibTeX-formatted page.

I have to believe that someone else has gone down this road!

I haven’t a laptop of my own, so I recently purchased a Dell Mini 10v. It runs pretty well in general, but recently I’ve been copying some files and it’s incredibly slow.

Just copying a bunch of small files (~1,600 files with a total size < 7mb) took almost 25 minutes. That seems INCREDIBLY slow, even for an atom processor. Then again, the processor shouldn’t be doing too much work. *shrug*

Tonight we were given half of a forward facing person and asked to complete the other half using mostly values. I couldn’t quite make myself draw an exact mirror image like we were supposed to… but I think they turned out pretty well. It was the first drawing class where I wasn’t disappointed with my work.

In this class we were given small mirrors and were supposed to focus on doing a self-portrait. I was not at all happy with how mine turned out. Oh well, guess I just need some more practice.

In class number 3 we worked on shading. Just picked out some weird objects from around the room. I ended up with a wine bottle, a small box, a tiny lantern with hurricane glass, and a pencil sharpener.