Entries in Life

Lily rides! This is the LilyCar, otherwise known as a skateboard.

Nothing to see here. Just testing the security settings of my photo sharing.

This weekend, I upgraded my livejournal installation and installed the FotoBilder software that Danga produces. Compared to some of the other software I’ve used, it is very nice. It even has several Ajaxy touches that make using it even more pleasent. There is even a desktop Windows client for uploading pictures. Also, I moved the LiveJournal installation to a server with gobs of disk space. Now I just need to figure out an easy way to pay for the colocation. If you have an OpenWeblog account, go to http://pics.openweblog.com/ to try out the software. Or you can just look at these pictures that we took at a Mardi Gras parade a while back.

Last week, I said I was going to start using a planner and a budget. I thought I’d give an update on how well it has gone… Partly to let you, my faithful readers, have something to read, but mostly to keep myself using these tools. First, the budget. I know a lot of people do just fine without budgets. Some of those people have fewer expenses than me (my childless friends, for example). Some make more money than I do. Perhaps the rest only deal in cash. In any case, and I have had many long discussions about finances. We had “budgeted” our money several times. We were very comfortable with the numbers. And it never worked. My current thinking is that I need a tool to help me see where the money is a few weeks into the future at a time. This way, I don’t feel flush and forget that I have bills to pay. (I’m very forgetful that way.) So, a week ago, I used GnuCash to set up a budget with scheduled payments for known expenses. I set it up put entries in the ledger a month ahead of time so I know a month in advance how much money I have when. Then, I set up funds. Some expenses (like dentist’s visits or car repairs) are sizable, but I should still save a little each month for them. So, I set up sub-accounts in my main checking account. Each paycheck, GnuCash automatically moves a bit of my paycheck into each of these sub-accounts. In reality, the money is still in the checking account, but when I look at my ledger for the checking account in GnuCash, it is hidden from me, so I don’t spend it. This is kind of like cashing your paycheck and putting different amounts of money in various envelopes. When the money in the envelope is gone, you can’t spend any more on that item. So far, this has worked out pretty well. Still it has only been a week. I’ll let you know in a month how well it has gone. The other bit of organisation I added was planner-el. I even read a bit of the manual! The biggest change so far (besides using a planner in the first place to create and schedule tasks as well as measure how long I spend on them) has been using another Emacs package that works with planner-el: RememberMode. In the past, whenever I read something in my email, I would mark it as important and, every time I opened my email, there it would be, staring at me (my email reader only shows me unread messages and those marked as important). The only time I did anything with these was when I was feeling bored and wanted to get rid of some of the visual garbage. That is to say, I didn’t do much with it very often. In fact, most of the time, I would mark a message, ignore it for a while, and then unmark it without doing anything. In an effort to clear my own mind, I went back through those messages, read through them and, using RememberMode and planner-el, created planner pages with links to the messages. This cleaned up a lot of mental detritus and helped me to organise those things into tasks. Another nifty way I’ve used RememberMode is to keep track of items I want to buy. The other day on IRC, there was a discussion about slimline DVD writers … something I’m looking to buy shortly. I used RememberMode to mark the webpage and make a note of it on my shopping list. Now, most people will read through this description and shake their head. “Why don’t you just use little scraps of paper?” Well, my handwriting is terrible and, not only that, I write slowly. I type slowly, too, but I live in Emacs and all this functionality is just a few keystrokes away no matter what I’m doing. I spend most of my day looking at this screen and I can’t see a good reason not to use it. Still, planner-el (along with RemindMode) works just like any Franklin Covey or GTD planner. It can adapt to whatever method you want to use and make things easier. Oh, and I lied. While I have used it to set up tasks for myself each day, I haven’t really spent that much time scheduling those tasks or keeping track of how much time I spend on them. But after reading enough planner books in the past and then coming across the same advise in a “staying focused at work” post (that I read while not focusing on work), I decided to give it a try. So, tonight I’ve set up some tasks for myself to get done tomorrow and I’ve scheduled them out. I’ll let you know how it goes.

When I first became interested in planner-el, John Wiegley was still the author. Then Sacha Chua took over and her boundless energy and love for hacks that help people took us a long way. Now, it looks like the baton has passed to John Sullivan. Still, Sacha makes the best evangelist for planner-el (and emacs in general) because of her infectious joy of hackery and the fact that she publishes her online journal using planner-el. I spent this weekend organising myself money-wise. I’d rather not think about money, but it seems when I don’t think about it, I spend way too much worrying over it. So, fresh from the euphoria of a budget unsullied by day-to-day implementation and with some means to put it into place, I decided tonight to give planner-el another look. Emacs greets me each day with planner-el’s layout (left over from the last time I thought about organising myself). So, I bounced over to PlannerLove.com to see what they suggested. After a bit of unorganised bouncing around, I ended up on Sacha’s thoughts about having it all. This sort of stuff is the most interesting kind of writing I’ve found in online journals and weblogs. People writing about what they want, how they can achieve it, the alternatives they’ll discard. I almost never write like this unless it is past tense. Instead of planning out what I’m going to do and carefully calculating a route, I tend to just dive in. It works well enough much of the time. But there are times that I really need to plan more. (Ever try to remodel a kitchen by just “diving in”? Not a smart move.) In a sense, this is how I ended up with a smart, beautiful wife, four wonderfully intelligent kids, a house that needs a ton of work and a job at a startup. None of that was planned. It was all just “living in the moment.” How can you argue with success? But this afternoon, I visited a retired friend who just had knee surgery. I apologised for not visiting sooner (it’s been a couple of months since I said I would), but he dismissed it. “You’ve got a lot of irons in the fire.” Which is true. So now, instead of letting my house of cards fall apart, its time to manage it a bit more. Till now, I’ve done a decent-enough job. I’ve learned to let some purely recreational hacking fall by the wayside while I concentrate more on stuff that matters to more people than just me. Now I need a tool to help me prioritize the things I want to get done. I’ve seen how just prioritising and setting deadlines helps a me get more done at work and I want to apply that to my personal life. Still, I fear I’m inherently lazy and scatterbrained. Using any tool takes discipline, something I don’t have a large reserve of. But I do have a clue for how to fill my reservoir. Sleep helps. Good night. (sleepy update: Genehack seems to have almost the same planner-el/emacs setup I do. Except he’s chosen to run his EmacsOS on a Mac for some reason.)

At BusyTonight, trying to see how much bandwidth we can consume crawling sites. Bandwidth tends to be pricy, so we haven’t had much chance to really test our wings till now. We got a colo’d server with a 10mb unmetered pipe. Problem was, it had RedHat installed and our software is written to be installed as Debian packages on Ubuntu. So, how do you manage convert the operating system of a server you don’t have physical access to? Well, Debian makes it (relatively) easy. The debootstrap tool that Ubuntu inherited from Debian make it possible to set up a spare partition (swap, if need be) as a boot disk into which you can temporarily install Ubuntu. Once you have that up, you can tweak Grub, reboot with your fingers crossed, and — provided everything works smoothly the first time — you’ve got a Ubuntu system running. Of course, nothing works smoothly the first time. Luckily, I had kvm access for a few hours. So, I used it to struggle with the kernel. Too late, I realized I needed a custom kernel. Since I didn’t have to figure out which bits were missing from the Ubuntu kernel or what bits were included that shouldn’t have been, I just used the stock RedHat kernel to run the Ubuntu OS. It works enough to test out some ideas we have. And, if we need to do this in the future, I’ve a good idea of where to start.