Thoughts

I’m going to try to see what it’s like to just collect my random thoughts and snippets here throughout the day, and then maybe edit them at the end of the day.

It turns out that when you sneeze with a mouth full of oatmeal, it’s almost indistinguishable from real snot.

I’ve spent a large part of today playing with installing the Solarized color theme for vim and emacs on my work computer.

I like the way it looks, but I’m wary of using or installing a lot of non-default things these days. I wonder how much time I spend tweaking things when if I just accepted the defaults I could get on with work.

On the other hand, maybe this is a form of play for me, and maybe it at least keeps me in a kind of readiness for doing real things later.

I’m wondering if I would get more done if I would keep all these other text based applications (for things like web browsing, chat, etc) out of Emacs and just use graphical apps and then use Vim for my text editor.

That way it would maybe be easier to know when I’m wasting time.

Maybe I could use the rescue time website / application to track my time. Of course Emacs probably has a way to do that if my apps are running in Emacs buffers.

I spent a bit of time taking things out of Emacs. But then I added the Solarized color theme to gnome-terminal, and decided that I liked the way it looked to have Emacs running in the terminal enough to try adding stuff in Emacs again.

I’m thinking about trying to send this as a Posterous post, but I need to refresh my memory on how to do Markdown for it, otherwise sending a plain text email, will cause all the text to run together (I think).

I don’t really know what I’ve gained from my efforts today. I’ve done a fair amount of work to explore using the Solarized color them under Ubuntu and so far I like it. I’ve got it installed for Emacs and Vim as well as the Gnome-Terminal app.

I really would like to figure out a real way to be productive when I’m not interested in the things I’m trying do (or supposed to be doing).

I think having a lot of apps running directly in Emacs seems dangerous because it makes it hard to tell when I’m actually working or not.

On the other hand having everything in separate apps, makes things feel clunky and somehow boring to me. I want to live in a text based computing world. I just don’t know how to get anything done while using it.

One thing I notice though is that wasting time viewing text based apps running in Emacs does not lead to the brain dead feeling that surfing the internet excessively in a normal browser gives me. I think that’s a positive, at least it seems like it leaves me in a state where I could work if I decided to.