Hence, many things that have been put off (like fixing the horribly broken blog and website) will happen. And everything will break for a while. Sorry about that. It’ll be better when everything is over and done with. I hope.

You see, until just now, I had Wordpress set so that only previously-approved authors got automatically accepted for comments. I figured, that was enough — if you’ve posted before, no problem. Otherwise, hold for moderation, and I’d just accept the real comments.

Then I found a few comment notifications in my spam filter. Someone had tried to post a couple of times, and got nothing. Finally, they gave up.

That sucks. Especially since it was someone who had something nice to say, and Murphy knows, there’s little enough of that in the world. And the web.

So. Comments: open.

cricketschirp

Well, that’s okay, then. :)

Again.

Let’s just say that if I was going to put XP on this machine again, I’d be using an axe to do it. There are limits beyond which no-one should be pushed.

So. How was it?

Fairly not-bad.

After an almost-painless install (modulo a few intermediate hurdles caused by a KVM switch), the machine is online. The default window manager is a surprisingly usable environment, with some sensible defaults.

The one thing that really bugs me is that Gnome Do utterly fails to be a substitute for Quicksilver. Or for LaunchBar. Although many applications claim to behave been called Quicksilver for linux, they all fall disappointingly short.

For most people, that’s a quibble. My main interaction with the box is going to be over SSH and SFTP in any case; its purpose is to be a firewalled local web server, to house my hideous creations, until they are fit to crawl out, blinking and moist, into the light of the real Web.

Or something.

So, yeah. Ubuntu. It beats reinstalling Windows.

Again.

[EDIT]

I should add that David Siegel, who wrote Gnome Do, is right, and the Gnome Do project never claimed to be “Quicksilver for Linux.” My grumpy reaction stems from the fact that I was specifically looking for a Quicksilver replacement, and did not find one.

As to why one would want Quicksilver on a linux box, rather than the command line, there’s a discussion on that topic in the comments to this post.

I tend to self-edit when there’s no Undo command. If you only put the good ideas down, then you’re improving the quality of your output, right?

Except, it doesn’t work that way. The only way you get to the good ideas is by having dozens of bad ones. And the good sketch always comes after you get the bad ones out. You’ll never get to the good one if you sit there, waiting for it.

It’s a kind of flow, and it means giving yourself permission to suck.

Sometimes, you don’t really internalize that permission, though. So, some tools help. That’s what was so freeing about capturing ideas on index cards; you can toss them out if they don’t have any value. There’s no missing page in a notebook.

But three by five is a pretty limiting sketch size.

I just got a Dot Grid Sketchbook from Behance, which is a lovely, lightly-gridded sketchbook… with perforated pages. It’s a nice pressure relief valve. I’ve been sketching much more, recently. I have permission to suck.

Interestingly, I haven’t actually tossed a single page so far. I doubt I will. It’s just that the safety of it makes me more likely to try.

On the blog end of things, well, that’s just the nature of the medium; most posts are throwaways. We’re thinking out loud, here, and that’s okay.

So, this is me giving myself permission to stop obsessing over topic, quality, and the rest, and just iterate. Maybe I’ll come up with something interesting. Or, probably, not. That’s ok.

…and that’s done. :)

Woot, I say.

Screenshot after the cut, for extra nerdy goodness.

Let’s pretend that that’s because I’ve been too efficient in my real work, okay?

(Translation: I get to escape New England in winter for a weekend. Woe is me. :))

I’ve got post-by-email from my Treo working, via Flickr, and the trip is going to involve a riverboat gambling night, so I hope some interesting pictures should show up here, or at my flickr page.

Now, I should probably start packing, huh?

I’m currently at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California. I have more than a little repetitive stress injury, and have been typing most of my notes on the wiki, so odds are if you’re looking for recent things, you are best off going there.

In any case, I plan only to update this blog when I have relevant content, so I won’t apologize for not posting; the object is a high signal to noise ratio.

In future days or weeks, keep your eye on this space for a complete rework and redesign of my Getting Things Done with Index Cards setup, some tinkering with Merlin Mann’s Hipster PDA, and other things… for one, I’m fascinated by iFabricate’s “open-source hardware” system, and hope that as my lofi hacks get more elaborate, I can leverage that for storytelling.

In any case, comments are open, and I’m enjoying a brief honeymoon period of no comment spam. :) We’ll see how that lasts.

Cheers!