December 2011
2 posts
November 2011
2 posts
vidir →
onethingwell:
vidir allows editing of the contents of a directory in a text editor.
A slightly eccentric way to remove or rename files, admittedly, but I quite like it.
This is super-useful. Back when I used Emacs, I’d use `dired-mode`’s ability to edit directories when I need to do some fancy renaming stuff, but now that I’m using Vim, this is a life-saver.
October 2011
4 posts
Quality vs Quantity
A thought experiment: Assume that we have some metric of human quality — whatever
you desire, be it IQ, kindness, creativity, or some more nebulous construction
of what you think makes people “good”. If there was some method which would kill
off half of humanity, but double this quantity value in all of the survivors,
would it be worth it? What if it were 30% dead and the...
5 tags
September 2011
3 posts
13 tags
10 tags
August 2011
6 posts
http://weightyexorcism.tumblr.com →
So it seems all of the cool kids have fitness-focused blogs…time to throw my hat in the ring!
4 tags
3 tags
10 tags
Making Desktop Webapps in Lion →
onethingwell:
Andy Ihnatko’s Automator workflow for turning websites into little apps.
This is completely awesome
July 2011
8 posts
A Short and Incomplete List of Shit Some Fuckers...
Jogging in the bike lane.
Riding an electric scooter in the bike lane.
Using “fail” or “win” as nouns.
Calling mundane shit epic.
Relating to 3 and 4, using the phrases “epic win” or “epic fail”.
Saying “X a.m. in the morning” or “Y p.m. at night”.
Thinking that merely making a reference that people recognize counts as...
Stuck in Meta: I’m finally diving into test-driven... →
stuckinmeta:
I’m finally diving into test-driven development (TDD), and two advantages come to mind:
Making tests pass is fun! It’s a game: checkmark, checkmark, checkmark. Short feedback cycles (aka. instant gratification) are critical in maintaining ‘programming morale’ and productivity.
Coded specs…
Very true. I like having tests mainly because they let me refactor without fear...
OTask →
onethingwell:
A todo.txt-like command line interface for OmniFocus.
Pretty sweet! That Mr. Terpstra knows his stuff.
Scripting Chrome and Kaizen
One technique or philosophy that I find very useful is the idea of
kaizen: Continous small improvements. I find that looking for small
inefficiencies in ones workflow and figuring out how to address them a great
pastime, as not only do you make your life that little bit easier, but you tend
to learn some neat things in the process.
The bit of friction that inspired this post is something that...
On Being Pigheaded, Part 1 of Many
So this Sunday I managed to rather painfully injure my lower back. I saw this coming — that area of my back has been horrible stiff and sore for weeks now, due to my refusal to take days off lifting — but I did nothing to avoid it. Why? Because the lifting session in which I injured myself also saw the setting of three new personal bests. Totally worth it.
No regrets.
June 2011
2 posts
Conspiracies and crazies
It’s kind of starting to weird me out how difficult it is to tell how much paranoia
is justified vis-à-vis the government and businesses these days. It occurred
to me when listening to the Latest in Paleo podcast that, while people
that refer to “Big Pharma” are probably insane, some of the things that they’re
complaining about do seem valid. I suppose that in some ways...
Striving for Statistical Significance
I think we can take it as axiomatic by now that one shouldn’t be basing their
sense of self-worth on what other people think of them — that sort of thing
leads to some pretty pathological behaviour. On the other hand though, if you
completely disregard what other people think, you run a pretty fair chance of
deluding yourself into thinking you’re better than you are (viz. the...
May 2011
2 posts
My Problem With "Distraction-Free" Setups
When you really care about what you’re doing, it’s a struggle to stop working on it. If you need to hide your menubar, turn off your internet, and quit all other running other applications, I submit that the problem is not “distraction”, but that that you don’t care enough.
Folding Fun With Vim and Markdown
Here’s a fun little bit of vimscript that I came up with (after a great deal of experimentation and delving into Vim’s documentation for it’s regular expressions (which kick the crap out of Emacs’, if I can say)) to give you syntax folding for your markdown documents. Just add this to ~/.vim/after/syntax/markdown.vim (creating that file if it doesn’t...
April 2011
4 posts
New Domain!
After moving my OccasionallyCogent domain over from GoDaddy to Hover a few days ago, I realized that the little Heroku webapp that I had the domain pointing to previous was fairly pointless, so I’ve changed my Tumblr to use that domain.
I’ve also got a secret plan in the works involving the domain (that I’ll hopefully be discussing in the near future), but this’ll do for...
fast music.
pipesmacfads:
Apparently THIS is what happens when Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds, Neil Gaiman, and Damian Kulash (of OK Go) write and record an 8-track album in 8 hours.
Sooooo goooooooddddd
Some New Processes
Or, “So I started reading Dr. Drang…”
One of the things I’m fairly obsessive about is refining my various workflows.
One of the best sources of fun new tips for doing so that I’ve found in a while
(or forever, really) is Dr. Drang’s blog (which I was directed to via
one of Merlin Mann’s recent podcasts).
Reading through the archives of the good doctor,...
EDC: Thanks for everything and carry on… →
everydaycarry:
To the loyal readers of the site, as well as new followers — I can only apologize for what I feel is the best course of action to take. You may have noticed a decrease in posts as a result of my other personal commitments to my academic and extracurricular responsibilities. In light of the recent…
Damn it internet, this is why you can’t have nice things. Makes me...
February 2011
4 posts
Rosenhan experiment →
bestofwikipedia:
The Rosenhan experiment was a famous experiment into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1973. It was published in the journal Science under the title “On being sane in insane places.” The study is considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis. (via pbmaxwell)
Wow, this is a little frightening…
add more powerful find tool to vim →
jinpu:
My key binding:
" Ack
nnoremap <leader>a :Ack
And then enjoy it!
Or, what I prefer to do,
set grepprg=ack\ -a\ -H\ --nocolor\ --nogroup
So you can just use the standard :grep instead of needing to use :Ack.
Sliding Towards the Edge
This is an interesting sensation. After more than a year spend feeling okay
about myself and the world in general, I find myself sliding inexorably
downwards once again1.
It is a rather odd experience to be feeling more-or-less okay and then to
notice these dark thoughts gestating in my mind, experiencing them at the same
time I observe them. It is the sort of thing that makes it very clear that...
Waiting...
One of the (many) things in this life that unduly aggravates me is having to
postpone doing something that I know I need to do. Once I’ve committed to
getting something accomplished, every delay incurred just drives me insane. One
particular manifestation of this is exercising: When I miss a workout it
bothers me way more than it probably should.
Case in point: Today, I was unable to lift...
December 2010
1 post
My EDC
I have a thing about always being equiped for any situation. To that end, my EDC1 is what some may consider a tad excessive, especially what I carry in my bag. However, everything I carry is something I’ve needed, my philosphy being “if you’ve needed something that you didn’t have with you more than twice, start carrying it”.
On my person:
Leatherman Skeletool CX...
September 2010
5 posts
On Running
I love running.
I really enjoy all sorts of exercise — that sensation of feeling pain, but a delicious pain, a pain that tells you you’re improving yourself. An ache that lets you know you’ve pushed yourself just a little bit further and made yourself just a little bit stronger.
But of all forms of exercise, running is one of the few I enjoy purely for joy of doing, not just...
2 tags
The ViM Experience
After an absence of about five years, I’ve finally come back to ViM, at least for a while. When I first started doing programming stuff in high school (after escaping the terror of Turbo Pascal on some weird Novell system), I used Vim, since that’s what my programming mentor/inspiration Wolever used. Not long after, however, I came across the writings of Steve Yegge, which convinced...
Relgion As A Tool
One of the things I think about a lot is the nature of religion: Why do we humans persist in believing things where proof is not only not required but actively considered irrelevant? More importantly, why do we allow such beliefs to continue to spread when we can see the untold deaths and human misery that these ideas have unleashed on us over the millennia? It was something that just...
A Return to ViM?
Well, after about five years using Emacs, I’ve decided to give ViM a try again. While Emacs, being the self-contained operating system that it is was excellent on Linux, I feel like OS X is more suited to a smaller, more orthagonal editor (and TextMate has some issues that are getting to be too much for me).
I’m planning on writing about what this switch is like soon…look for...
August 2010
2 posts
Two Weeks In...
So I’ve finished my first two weeks of interning at Google. Wow. Everything people say about what an awesome place Google is to work…not even close. Take the most wild hyperbole and multiple by twenty. It’s fantastic. Food, drink, access to gyms, rocking-climbing walls, massages — I can’t even begin to enumerate the number of awesome things that are provided.
...
July 2010
1 post
Stuck in Meta: Optimize for X →
The other day I posed a question via my Facebook status: … Within the many thoughtful responses, my friend Vivien linked me to some interesting research on the correlation between choice and happiness. I’m an extreme maximiser, so many of the statements hit home. Here are some thoughts: As…
June 2010
4 posts
Some Questions
Q and A
When I wake up…I do pushups and/or stretch then peruse my huge collection of RSS feeds.
I always wish…that someday people will start to make sense
My favourite shoes are…I don’t really have “favourite shoes”. The shoes I have now work, that’s all I ask.
The way I feel right now…is energized and invigorated
Music...
Processes, Not Processors
The other day, I was answering a set of questions for a blog entry, one of those weird blog meme things, when I came upon a seemingly simple question that ended up sparking a whole chain of thought. The question was merely “what are your favourite shoes?”. My immediate reaction was that while I may be quite content with the shoes I have, I don’t have “favourite”...
Triathlon-ing!
Triathlon! And Some Complaints
After wanting to do so for a while, I finally did my first triathlon last Sunday. It was a great deal of fun and I definitely want to do another as soon as I can. I did alright, I suppose on the swimming and running portions (finishing 60th and 54th (out of 234) respectively), but pretty terribly on the bike (190th, giving an overall position of 116 of 234).
...
Yet Another Textmate/Emacs Rant
Yes, Textmate Again
I’ve written several times now about Textmate and how I wish I could use it (in fact, I think my third post here was about that). Well, I’ve decided to once again do a little rant about Textmate, Emacs, and my inner conflicts. Onwards and downwards…
So, Why?
So, why am I putting myself through this? Good question, I’m trying to figure that out...