Alan Gutierrez

And ever. They drag. Last weekend, I promised myself that I wouldn’t worry assign myself tasks this weekend. It’s one thing to feel melancholic, it’s another thing to have your melancholy interfere with your work. No such interference, because there is no work for me this weekend.

Last night I had a nightmare. I was back in Michigan. That was all. I’d gone back to Michigan. It was a horrible, horrible mistake. I did not now how I’d made it. I had to get back to New Orleans. I had no means. I woke up in a panic. I woke up in New Orleans.

My MacBook is becoming dangerously slow. It is cutting into my productivity. With Eclipse and Firefox open, I am unable to really do anything. Programming requires taking notes as I go along. I keep my notes in Backpack. If switching from Eclipse to Firefox takes 30 or more seconds, I lose my train of thought. It is ridiculous.

Do you think that’s petty? A minor inconvenience? I don’t think so. If I were writing a book at a typewriter and something occurred to me, I could reach for a pad of paper and scribble a note, and move on.

Imagine though, I had to ask my dog to run to the other room and fetch my pen and paper. I sit and repeat the note in my head, so I don’t forget. Meanwhile, I track the progress indicator of canine claws on hardwood.

Nothing like that spinning beach ball, or hour glass, or watch, to mesmerize you while you repeat your tiny brainstorm like a mantra.

You switch the focus of a powerful machine to a menial task. Storage. You may have been running full bore on your writing, spreadsheet, programming, and now you’re sitting there repeating to yourself, tell Paul about the lunch, tell Paul about the lunch, tell Paul about the lunch.

Of course, by the time Firefox comes up, I’m thinking neither about work or lunch. Whatever fancy bauble is on the Google start page commands my attention.

Instead of walking up to you with your pen and paper, the dog has returned with a brass band, everyone you forgot to stay in touch with since high-school, and what he claims is a perpetual motion machine.

This is a real productivity killer.

A great many people and things that beg your attention, sprung upon you after a wait just long enough to muddle your train of thought.

Update: I ordered 2GB of memory for my MacBook from crucial.com. At $82.00 it seems like a bargain, down from the $205.00 that it once was. Let’s see how much faster the MacBook becomes.

Spent the afternoon and evening at Sound Cafe. Tweeting on occasion. Developing a filter for Twitter and RSS. Not in code. An emotional filter. Something along the lines of, looknig Finally, created a forum for Civic Intelligence Camp, that is merely a blog post. Need to simmer on how to organize, but considering how web savvy the key organizers are, might as well practice what I preach. I’m going to go by Bacchanal and see if they’re doing the chef in the courtyard thing so I have something worth Tweeting. Didn’t get all that I wanted done done, but the day is ending. I cannot keep it from ending. Tomorrow, I start fund raising. Need my rest.

Or so it seems. He is the man who cuts my hair. He had a salon called Salon ‘d Malta on Dumaine in the French Quarter, toward the Marigny Triangle. He liked country music, but the people around him did not. “Robin Malta, 43, was found dead in his house at 634 Port St. between Chartres and Royal streets when his sister went to check on him”, from the Times-Picayne.

Is overrated. You would think that I would be over it by now.

Maybe I can just collect the photographs from Flickr for this Urban Scavenger Hunt.

From Instanley Great by Steve Levy, a story about the phrase coined by Steve Jobs, “Real Artists Ship”. The project mentioned in this article is the Macintosh.

Jobs’s speeches were punctuated by slogans. Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP. It was an awesome encapsulation of the ground rules in the age of technological expression. The term “starving artist” was now an oxymoron. One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well. Was Engelbart an artist? A prima donna — he didn’t ship. What were the wizards of PARC? Haughty aristocrats — they didn’t ship. The final step of an artist — the single validating act — was geting his or her work into boxes, at which point the marketing guys take over. Once you get the computers into people’s homes, you have penetrated their minds. At that point all the clever design decisions you made, all the twists and turns of the interface, the subtle dance of mode and modeless, the menu bars and trash cans and mouse buttons and everything else inside and outside your creation, becomes part of people’s lives, transforms their working habits, permeates their approach to their labor, and ultimately, their lives.

But to do that, to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship. You had to ship. You had to ship.

Real artists ship.

This is the definition of prudence for the knowledge worker.