Hack the Day

Rereading a text I wrote last year reminded me something I wanted to articulate for quite a while. The power of meditation; but actually meditation is a word with too many and messy meanings. What I’m talking about is that powerful “take a break” moment that precedes most great breakthroughs.

In my freshman year of college(Computer Science) I was just discovering the Internet and the vast information one could get from it. Those were the days of MsDOS, Windows 95 and Windows 98, and my geek hobby back then was to subscribe to e-zines of the underground computer virus geeks. I never learned to build a computer virus(it’s bad, evil and it turns you into a criminal) but, being young and restless, I enjoyed reading how one could conceive such software that resembled most to real life-forms - the smallest and code efficient possible, which could replicate, mutate and propagate around. Nothing much stuck with me from that wild age except for a broader understanding of computers, operating systems and assembly language and, completely unrelated, the tale of one of those virus developers.

The guy was stuck at some point trying to understand how to work around the limitations(security) of Windows 98; he had tried all ideas that came to mind, and was starting to get desperate and frustrated. Yet, at one moment, he decided to just lay back. Closed the monitor, closed his eyes. Tried to think of nothing. Quarter of hour later he was coding furiously and excited. His (memory quote) computer coding Zen had struck again.

Without naming it, I’ve been using this method since highschool; now, in my computer programmer existence, I use it more than ever. Whenever I’m facing a bug I can’t understand, whenever something eludes me no matter how hard I try or how much documentation I read, I will stop.

I breathe, I take a walk around the office, get some water from the watercooler. Chat with friends. When coming back to my computer, 10 minutes later, I close my eyes and try to think of nothing. Call it Zen meditation if you prefer; call it  yourKitKat moment.

I prefer to call it Seiza - the seated 1 minute meditation before martial arts training. Letting my mind free of all thoughts is just what we perceive on the outside; on the inside, our subconscious keeps working, freed from the outside stimuli and conscious noise.

More often than once, stepping back is all it takes to solve even the biggest problem.

[photo courtesy of Flickr]

On the 1st of January I had a skiing accident resulting in the injury my right arm - actually my right shoulder. After about two weeks of waiting for the pain to go away, I got the guts and visited a doctor who didn’t think twice before putting my entire right arm into a tight bandage and forbidding me to use my right arm for the upcoming 10 days.

Easier said then done - after all, I’m a work-from-home software developer, right-handed on top of that. Medical leave being out of the question, how am I supposed to get my job done by typing with only my left hand?

Luckily, I managed to work something out, and here’s a couple of the tricks I did for it, just in case they might help other imprudent skiers out there:

1. System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Keyboard -> Sticky Keys - this is the single greatest mobility impaired aid on the Mac: all special keys become sticky and appear on the screen as you type them, thus allowing you to single-handedly type complex, 2, 3 or more “simultaneous” keys combinations. Option+Backspace, Fn+Backspace, Cmd+Option+Escape and many more contorted keys combinations become now available to anyone
2. Quicksilver - I never really understood the full impact Quicksilver has on my productivity until now - launching an application without a mouse becomes really a life saver when you can only type with your left hand…
3. Textmate - luckily for me, I’m a Ruby(on Rails) programmer using Textmate on a daily basis. Although no longer being able to use the complex keyboard shortcuts that trigger all kinds of snippet generations, I was still able to remain productive using its built-in code completion and the tab-triggered snippets.
4. Terminal - a ROR programmer can’t get any kind of work done without the command line - be it just to change the working dir to the project’s one, or to start a server or.. many more. But typing in Terminal becomes an annoying pain when you need to run the same commands on and on. So I edited the .bash_profile and added a couple of alias for the most common commands I use on a daily basis. The .bash_profile is to be created(if not already existent) in the User’s home directory (just run cd ~ in Terminal and you’re there); here’s a couple of the aliases I defined for my daily use:
   
alias pr='cd ~/Work/MyProject/'
alias prr='cd ~/Work/Projects/MySecondProject/'
alias matem='mate .'
alias ss='./script/server'


There are more to say about tricks that made my programmer life better these last days, but I’ll take a little break for now; hopefully I’ll get back some day with more cool Tricks for the Mobility Impaired Programmers

(image by The Pack)

You know how I’ve only blogged one or two posts for the last couple of months? I blame it on Timothy Ferris! Yeah, that’s right, he’s the only responsible for my slacking off blogging lately. So if you’re discontent with Hack The Day’s summer/autumn vacation, stop sending me hate mail - Timothy Ferris is the one to blame.

Who is Tim? You haven’t heard of him? What kind of world do you live in? He’s the one who took over the blogging world and the publishing world alike, by writing a best seller book about business and lifestyle - The 4-Hour Workweek(I’ll call it 4HWW from now on). The book which inspired me to make a series of life changes, all successful so far. Letting go of blogging for a while is just only one of the many.

But I’ll take it slowly:
I heard about the book from the author’s blog, where I read some articles detailing the main ideas of it: outsource as much as you can, de-clutter as much as you can; never buy what you can borrow, never waste time when someone else can do it for you.

This was the first task I let others do on my behalf : on my personal (Romanian language) blog, I wrote a post asking my readers to help me to:
Get a free pdf version of the 4HWW book and get a free ebook version of Harry Potter 7 (ok, this one is unrelated to the article, but still a good example). Less than 6 hours afterwards, a reader sent me the Harry Potter book; another 18 hours and I got the 4HWW book as well. So.. the experiment was already becoming successful: don’t waste time looking for stuff: first ask for it. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m eternally grateful to my reader friend who sent the books. Something that would have taken me many hours with an uncertain outcome took him, I’m sure, less than a couple of minutes. He has my thanks, and I gained hours of productivity.

Also inspired by Tim was my second successful example of blog outsourcing: I was looking to buy a pair of Crocs shoes, and since I couldn’t seem to find them anywhere in town I again resorted to my reader’s help. In less than a day I received several tips, locations, best prices, as well as offers to have them bought and brought from Italy. What had taken me several days of unsuccessful research was solved by my readers for me. I am, again, more than grateful to them for their help, and to Tim for giving me the idea of outsourcing everything out of my area of expertise.

This was only the beginning, and many more followed: from asking readers tips about the ski resort I should spend my winter holidays, to asking friends and family for help in fields they are better skilled than me, to start using expert websites instead of Google to find the best information in the fields I’m interested in.

But outsourcing deals, tips, research and projects is not what 4HWW is about. After having read the book(I’m still looking for a paper-based version to buy, but couldn’t find any so far, and Amazon shipping is still too expensive in my country), I decided to go on and experiment with the second main idea of the book - de-cluttering your life. But since this article has already gotten too long, and the following risks to take a bit of time to write, I’ll just stop here for now, promising to continue next week. In the meantime, please take a while thinking what time-wasting chores you could ask others(more skilled than you) to do.

A man goes to the doctor saying “Doc, I have a problem: I can’t make any decision. I’m always in doubt. Or… hmm.. am I?”

I’m a smart guy. Really. I graduated from top European universities, with impressive academic results, etc. The problem with smart guys is that they have too many choices. Knowing you performed pretty well in the college classes makes you confident you’ll do the same in real life. After all, there were so many courses I was clueless about, but aced them after just a couple of days of study, that any random field can become familiar after a thorough 2-3 days study.

But like any teenager growing up, once I graduated from college I was met with a handful of choices: start a career in software development, follow a PhD in one of the many Computer Science-related fields, or even start my own business. The problem with smart guys is that they get too confident. Any field seems accessible. Yes, unfortunately almost any field IS accessible. So the problem is… which path should YOU take? Most life choices are therefore reduced to decision problems: should I take this path or that other one? Read the rest of this entry »

Given the major heat wave in Europe these weeks, an extra list of doctor-approved things to do(or not) in hot days is a welcome addition to my previous “heat survival tips“. I hope it’ll help at least a bit to cool you guys off.

• Avoid prolonged exposure to sun between 11 AM - 6 PM.
• Shut the sun-exposed windows and cover them with both curtains and window blinds. Keep them shut for as long as the outside temperature is higher than the inside. Let the cool air flow in the early morning or late night, while the outside temperature is lower.
• Reduce to minimum running electrical apparel - it tends to overheat and, what’s worse, to heat the surrounding air even more. Same goes for the light-bulbs - replace the incandescent ones with fluorescent ones as they greatly reduce the generated heat.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hack the Day is probably the only blog never to have talked about the iPhone. I decided to change this now that the iPhone has launched. Everyone is claiming that it will make their lives more complete and more productive, two justified reasons to pay the price.

But is the iPhone the ultimate productivity tool, as some have been hoping? I take a look into how this device will impact your working style (disclaimer - I wasn’t lucky enough to be born in the iPhone country, so all information below is based on blog reviews and Apple’s documents) and what applications to use for your organizing and productivity purposes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Old habits die hard, and as much as the continuous progress wants us to change we still fight these artificial urges. We are builders, makers, do-it-yourselfers; or, at least, the heirs of some. My grandfather used to do by himself all kinds of stuff around house - masonry, carpentry, agriculture and much more - he had built his own bed, sofas, fireplace; even his own motorcycle, from the spare parts of two different models bought in the junkyard.

Me, I’m not a builder, but I do love getting things done once in a while, especially when I get to save a few bucks. Call me cheap, but I really don’t see the point on spending 30 bucks for a laptop sleeve I can make on my own for less than 1$. For less than 10 cents even.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here comes summer, holidays and trips to foreign countries…

I lived in Paris and its suburbs since 2003 to 2006. No big surprise that I fell in love with it - I sincerely believe that it’s the most beautiful city in the world(though Prague, visited 2 years ago, isn’t bad either). Now, after having left France’s capital for more than a year, I’m returning there this week in a short 5-days trip with my girlfriend.

But please, shed no tear - it’s the perfect moment to write down what I missed most about this beautiful city, and start a blog tag game, named Your favorite city’s 5 best spots. While this is not necessarily a post on productivity or life improvement, it is about discovering the not-so-obvious beauties of your favorite city . So please feel free to join in!

The rules are classic - if you’re tagged you must join in, if you’re not but would want to, do it anyways, but also drop a comment below so we can keep the record: write the blog post about the best 5 places/things to do in your favorite city, link back to the blog who tagged you and, at your turn, tag three other blogs.

Me, being a stinkin’ cheater, I’m going to break the rules and share with you a 15 things to do in Paris, as in 3 times as much:

• 5 main tourist sights in Paris
• 5 romantic getaways in Paris
• 5 not-to-miss eating spots in Paris

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the last of a 3 article series on dealing with the stress of an upcoming event. We talk about an exam, but most tips apply to tests, interviews, business meetings.
Go read, if you haven’t already, Part 1 - The evening before
and Part 2 - The morning before

Stress handling during the exam

Pointers:

If blocked out, breathe
Don’t panic
take a break, think of something else
break the writer’s block - write down anything
reread the subjects
underline the key points
sketch out ideas of solutions

Read the rest of this entry »

This is part 2 of a 3 article series on dealing with the stress of an upcoming event. We talk about an exam, but most tips apply to tests, interviews, business meetings.
Go read, if you haven’t already, Part 1 - The evening before
and, once you’re done with this one, continue with Part 3 - Handling the stress during

I guess you had a nice pleasant sleep after all the relaxation from the evening before. Or, yet again, maybe you didn’t. You woke up at 6 AM although your exam, interview or presentation only starts at 10 AM. You might have had nightmares that you went unprepared and woke up sweating in fear. Read the rest of this entry »