• On Life and Love

    Monotony : Creativity

    I’ve learned that I have a minimal (or maximal?) ratio of monotony to creativity to maintain in order to not go absolutely stir-crazy. It’s about 4:1. For every 4 hours I churn on something that’s difficult to make interesting (office work, house cleaning, troubleshooting a tedious problem), I need about an hour of creativity. And not an hour of editing a creative work, but creating: sketching out a site design; penciling out ideas for an app, story, or novel; throwing down code/tests for a new or in-progress project; writing out a scene in my novel; knitting/crocheting; blogging; etc. But 4:1 is pretty much my bare minimum for getting through the…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    I’m still flying high from a wonderful 3 hours of dance last night. I had a whole lot of energy, even at the end, and managed to do all right at keeping up. I blame the belly dance show last weekend. There are a fair number of posts this week. I’ve been oot and aboot. Roleplaying Tips: Delegating – I really like the idea of splitting up some of the administrative work in running a game, especially in a game with 5+ people that will be running for a long time. I've seen in a 4-year one-on-one game how difficult it is to keep track of what's happened and who…

  • On Life and Love

    Quasi-daily linkage

    Another vote for "Fragmented" – An awesome article quotation from Elf. I agree with this, and struggle with finding a healthy balance for myself. I enjoy having a smartphone, but still consider it a luxury item (i.e., not necessary to my existence or even my happiness). I even debate getting rid of it and going back to a plain ol' phone (shh! don't tell Greg). I feel like a netbook and a normal cell phone would be enough connectivity for me. If I'm going to break contract on my AT&T/iPhone agreement over Apple's stupidity, maybe I should be looking at doing just that — get a nice, small (!!) cheap…

  • On Life and Love

    Quasi-daily linkage

    10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit – Nice and easy list to follow. I fixed a silly problem on my site this morning courtesy of the reminder. Clients From Hell : The client calls around 9 PM on a Saturday… – “[very angry] I am reading your email in disbelief. You are the webmaster – how can there be an aspect of our website that you have no control over?” Why You Can’t Work at Work | Jason Fried | Big Think – This is a great video on office workspaces. As an aside, Jason Fried's voice and style of talking remind me a whole lot of Dane Cook.…

  • On Life and Love

    Quasi-daily linkage

    My God—it’s full of unicorns! – Meta Stack Overflow – This is hilarious. I'm going to have to play around with this in WP. Dynamic Dummy Image Generator – DummyImage.com – C/o my darling, this is a pretty cool way to generate placeholder images. Alex Payne — On the iPad – This is the best damn commentary on the iPad that I've seen yet. A Toronto Data Guy, I want privacy because I break the law – This is a good essay on privacy and how that related to purposefully and accidentally breaking the law. I like that he doesn't once go into copyright violation (which isn't law breaking, although…