Crouching tiger, coding monkey

There was an article on 43folders the other day that talked about the value of constraints on creativity. The idea was that the best stuff comes from situations where you really have to stretch the intellect due to having to fit whatever you’re doing into a metaphorical box.

Kind of like when in the movies the hero must fix the spaceship with only a plasma torch, the glove from a space suit, a length of rope, and a package of bologna.

Right now my most interesting self-imposed creative constraint is the utterly useless Web 2.0 poster child, Twitter. For those not familiar with it, Twitter is what someone clever coined a “microblogging” site. That means you get to make post like any other blog only you get a grand total of 140 characters to work with.

That’s right, that brilliant piece of 156 character literature isn’t going to fit.

Now the vast majority of Twitter is basically what you might expect it to be.

“Going to work”

“Eating lunch”

“Going home from work now”

“Oh crap, I’m in a bind now, if only I had a package of bologna.”

That kind of day to day stuff, to me, is mundane for a reason. It’s completely and utterly boring. I barely want to live through it much less announce it to the world. What I like about Twitter is trying squeeze something funny into a super small package. It forces you not only question ever word but every character.

For example:

But the brilliant part of the software is the character countdown number in the upper right hand corner. It just dares you to use all 140 characters:

If you happen to also be into this crazy thing you can find me at twitter.com/glammi. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go update it about wanting to find a bologna sandwich.

I have the feeds for a number of the Revision3 shows set up in iTunes but I particularly like the quick hitter episodes that last around a minute. You see, if you keep the show under two minutes then it falls into the GTD “Do it now” workflow path. Thus, watching internet TV becomes a productive activity.

Yep, I’m a genius sometimes.

Other times I complete idiot because this Tekzilla Daily clip shows some sweet ninja gmail moves that I had no idea existed. (Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work on gmail hosted domains, only regular gmail.com ones.)

So I get this email from my friend Sean:

“You going to put up a status update on the nose and/or the wife’s leg/ankle/whatever it was that got blown out during her fall? Simply having a baby doesn’t relieve you of your blogging responsibilities, especially with the whole “closure” thing.”

And a good point he makes. I forget sometimes that this blog doesn’t just update itself or that it can read what’s bouncing around in my brain. While at first glance a mind reading blog might be considered a bad thing it would have to better than a brain eating zombie blog.

It’s all just a matter of perspective really.

And praying that WordPress doesn’t spawn any zombie processes.

To answer his question though, here’s the new nose which is actually still the old nose just put back in the same place where it used to be:

(iSight + Photo Booth + a green painted bedroom == a great way to distract 3 year old big sister so that newborn and mom can take a nap.)

I don’t really have a picture to prove it but my wife is all healed up as well. She also has a whole new respect for basketball players on TV when they go down with ankle injuries. That being said, she really wouldn’t have liked it the other day at our lunchtime basketball game when Tim rolled his ankle after throwing down a dunk. On the upside he didn’t let his bad ankle stop him from watching the Xavier near disaster with me yesterday. In fact, I will believe to my dying day that when he introduced me to Grape Crush that the rally began.

So there we go, status updated and loop closed. But just on the offhand chance that WordPress has gone all zombie on me it’s time to throw him off the trail:

lammi-mbp:~ lammig$ touch ~/brains.txt

Sometimes things just make me laugh. Keep in mind that I laughed at a Burger King commercial last night so my bar is set pretty low.

Hello world.

Sorry for the big old gap between posts. On March 2nd my son decided to go and be born so I’ve been out. Then after I was out I came back only I needed then more time to recover from being out. It’s a vicious cycle I know, but the good news is that life is returning to normal. Bad news is that the new normal involves being up from midnight to 3am.

The new guy is only three and a half years younger than his older sister but it was interesting to see the technology improvements that the hospital had put in place since she was born.

Listen, having the second kid was way less stressful than having the first. Plus, once my wife was all hopped up on goofballs there really wasn’t much to do for several hours other than sit around and wait. So, when you couple the complete lack of, “Oh sweet god I’m going to be dad, I don’t know how to be a dad, I have to teach her how to ride a bike, how do you teach a kid to ride a bike, etc” anxiety with general boredom I ended up with time on my hands to scope out the technology improvements.

The most obvious improvement was the availability of “free” wi-fi that I’m sure was being billed to my insurance company on a per-bit basis. That made me happy that I brought the notebook along, although it figured it would be a slow news day. The other big one was that they let you use cell phones in the rooms now. Apparently all the equipment that would explode when in the presence of a cell signal has been mothballed. Or perhaps there never was any exploding equipment. It could have all been a ruse by the $12 a day hospital in-room phone lobbyists.

Also, since there was no one I needed call, and I had already read the entire internet, I managed to watch more closely the computer that they were keeping all the chart information on. It was both modern and throwback at the same time. It was modern in that it was networked to all the other workstations on the floor and summary information was being rotated on plasma TV’s hanging in the hallway by the nurses’ station. It was throwback because it was most definitely running on some version of Unix with a Motif-based GUI.

That’s right, no fancy Web 2.0 UI here. In fact, watching the doctors and nurses use it I would best describe it as “Needing a lot of clicks.”

(And that’s putting it nicely.)

I’m usually all for the elegant user interfaces, but at the same time, the thing worked flawlessly and that’s really what you want from medical software. DOCTYPEs and Javascript and IE7 and Firefox and Cocoa and that stuff is all well and good but so long as the system allows the doctors to do all the right doctor-y stuff who cares. I’m sure the next time they’ll have upgraded to holographic doctors and levitating beds but I suspect that old Motif UI will still be there. Unless of course a holographic doctor can’t type or use a mouse. At that point I’m stuck for ideas. Good idea for a patent though, “System by which holographic doctors can interact with legacy Unix user input/output devices.” Hmm, now that I think of it, with a little polish I’ll bet I could get some venture capital for that. Um, yeah, I gotta go and, well, do some stuff.