Sanskratio

As of today, I am officially a "house-husband". Taina has gone back to her day job and I am taking care of our daughter, Telma, full time. For the next six months.

Our wages are pretty much the same and Taina has been taking care of Telma for well over a year now, so I felt I could just as well be a househusband for a while. We didn't want to put Telma to daycare just yet and I think it's great opportunity for me to know her a little better and experience all the wonderful stuff she learns every day. And to just enjoy her company. She's a terrific girl, you know.

It's six months off my day job, sure, but I hope that taking a break from one's job once in a while is a positive experience, too. It's not quite a sabbatical, since my current job as a care-taker is a full-time job too. But it's a break nevertheless and maybe a chance to reflect on the bigger picture of my career.

Financially we would be better off if we would both be working, but we're not in trouble or anything. Just a little less money to spend, but we manage.

I don't expect to be doing anything significant with my personal hobbies, which have been on hold for quite a while now, but you never know. Telma does take a nap or two every day, for an hour or so, so maybe I'll find the energy to do something other than making food etc.

...

Oh. Telma woke up. Gotta go.

Donald Norman: Google is not simple. I do agree.

I think it's a bad misconception to say that the less elements an interface has, the better it is. In fact, our cognitive abilities enable us to tune out extra visual information. Furthermore, when needed, user's focus can be guided through visual cues. This gives us the possibility to put a lot of information on one screen, thus we can minimize navigation, which is one of the most important usability principles, if not the most important. I am not saying it's easy to design an interface filled with a lot of information, but I am saying, that the resulting interface, if done with skill, will be more usable if it has more elements on one screen.

Google is a great search engine, but Google is bad interface to Google's services.

The archives of weblogs are sometimes a pretty depressing sight. They are too often swarming with spam. Take, for example, this entry by Adam Bosworth:

http://www.adambosworth.net/archives/000035.html

That's some 2844 comments on a weblog entry for you.

(Double that with no contact information whatsoever of the author on the site. If for no other reason, have your contact information available on your site so that the casual reader might inform you about such spam problems.)

Please, please, please. Make your blogging software automatically close commenting from your older entries.

Joe Gregorio's httplib2 provides an easy-to-use and solid http client library. It contains features, such as for example caching and compression, not readily available in other http libraries.

(Joe's goal is to get httplib2 added to Python standard library. A worthy goal, in my opinion.)

Anyone happen to know any great free audio shows? (You might call them podcasts or audiocasts or whatever.) I don't have that much free time, but we keep strolling around outside with Telma almost every day and I enjoy listening stuff on my mp3 player whenever she's sleeping or just doesn't seem to need attention.

I think I've heard most of the interesting (to me, that is) stuff on IT Conversations and I've just listened to the brilliant Ricky Gervais shows. I've also downloaded other shows, but I don't know exactly where to look for great audiocasts.

I don't care about the theme or the subject, it can be about whatever, as long as it's entertaining or educating and has some quality to it.

Any pointers?

If you have what they call a writer's block [1], you might be staring at a blank sheet in your word processor and not getting any words written down. And you start to feel anxious and depressed and everything for not getting any writing done. Then, what's ironic, is that if you just concentrated totally on the blank sheet —not thinking about anything, just concentrating on the sheet—, you'd probably get inspired soon enough. I know that one uses this image of a writer staring at a blank sheet as a sort of a metaphor mostly, but you could literally be in this situation and even if you didn't, you could literally follow the advice.

You see, the trouble is that when you're staring at the blank sheet, your mind is not clear. Quite the contrary, your mind is full of trouble and anxiety about you not getting anything done. Your mind is filled with negative thoughts about the situation.

If, instead, you just cleared your mind totally by concentrating (for example) on the blank sheet —in a meditative sense, if you know what I mean—, you'd do a lot better. After just, say, 20 minutes of good meditation, your mind would be ready for just about any possible battle. Writing would be easy, or at least easier.

Instead, after just a few minutes of staring and scribbling random words on the sheet, you probably just give up and start cleaning your apartment (or whatever it is that you do to avoid doing real work). After you've procrastinated for a while, you go back to the blank sheet and it's not a bit easier to start writing than the last time. It might even be worse.

So, the next time you're suffering from a "writer's block" and find yourself staring at a blank sheet, try to actually make use of the blank sheet and the power of a simple meditation.

(PS. I dislike the word "meditation" —maybe not for any good reason— but it's the best word for my purpose here. I would prefer an expression like not-thinking-about-anything-for-a-while, but that's not too illustrative either. The point is, if I've understood correctly, not to actively think about anything, but to concentrate on something meaningless, like your breathing, for example.)

[1] "Writer's block" is too fancy a name for the thing it is describing, anyhow.

I find it a bit, dunno, ironic [1], that the most unstable and unresponsive program that I use on Windows is, tadaa, Firefox. After waking up the machine, it takes ages for Firefox to become responsive. I can fire up several new instances of IE before Firefox becomes usable. Firefox is also the only application that occassionally eats up all the CPU time and is just generally pretty unstable. And this has been the case ever since I've been using it, so don't come telling me that "sure, you're using version X.X, but you should try X.X+1" because that's what I've been hearing for the last five years or so.

It's a one great achievement as a software project, Firefox, sure, but I wouldn't go around praising how great a browser or a program it is. I am sure I couldn't do a better job, but that's not a measure of anything.

[1] Ironic in the sense that Firefox is being hailed as the landmark of the greatness of open source software, while Windows, and particularly Internet Explorer, is claimed to be the most buggy and unstable piece of software family ever.