November's very nearly over; I lost the blogging momentum over the last few days through being busy and tired, and was hoping to regain it (there's still a lot of loose ends), but I just haven't had the energy. It seems a shame to let NaBloPoMo just tail off like that, but... I'm exhausted. I could stay up late and bang out a few hundred more words and be exhausted again tomorrow morning, but you know what? Nobody pays me enough for this to make it worth being knackered all the time. I remember finally realising towards the end of my undergraduate degree (nearly 10 years ago now) that if I didn't hand an essay in there was actually nothing my tutors could do to me that was worse than long-term sleep deprivation; you'd think the lesson would have stuck, but maybe it's time for a bit of revision. With work, though, it's not so much a question of "bad things will happen if I don't do this" so much as the illusion that if only I could work a little harder, smarter, or later I'd eventually get everything finished. That's like hoping that just one more game is all it'll take for me to win at Tetris. YOU CAN'T WIN AT TETRIS: you can only put off losing for a bit longer. I can only put off sleep for a bit longer, too. Time for bed.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Tags: blogging about blogging, nablopomo, via ljapp
Current Location: United Kingdom, England, Oxfordshire

Oh, and yes, I did totally miss a day of NaBloPoMo on Thursday. I was at work all day, then volunteering at Oxfam till 8:15pm, came home, made dinner, went out to a work social thing at the pub round the corner, got home at about 11:45, spent about 10 minutes staring exhaustedly at the screen before realising that I literally didn't have any words or energy left and certainly couldn't post anything worth posting before midnight, and if I'd effectively already missed the arbitrary deadline then I might as well not miss out on sleep as well. I am definitely running out of steam. And now here I am missing out on even more sleep through trying to justify briefly prioritising sleep over arbitrary deadlines. For heaven's sake. Time for bed.

Tags: blogging about blogging, guilt, nablopomo

A post about the Perl course I went on a couple of days ago. May contain a couple of paragraphs of mild interest to non-programmers. Contains traces of badgers.

Annoyingly, I wrote that post much better on the train on the way home, but (as mentioned) the iPhone Wordpress app ate it. On the other hand, that version had a very long digression about how I got into writing Perl, which I suspect interests nobody except (possibly) me.

BTW, I notice with amusement that the course tutor has since spotted that I was tweeting about the course, though I'm not sure he knows it was me, if you see what I mean. Wouldn't be hard for him to find out now, though. :-)

Tags: badgers, blogging about blogging, nablopomo, perl, programming, twitter

Hey, I totally wasn't going to do the diary thing this month because I don't think that counts as Proper Blogging, but I had to get up ridiculously early this morning to get the 7:53 train to London for an excellent Perl course (with added badgers), got back to Oxford in time for another great Oxford Geek Night at the Jericho Tavern, drank some very tasty raspberry beer, and now am really far too tired to blog coherently about anything. Also, I wrote a Wordpress blog post (for one of the other blogs) on the iPhone on the train home, saved it as a local draft, decided I'd be better off uploading it and tried to save it as a full draft, at which point the Wordpress app threw up its hands, showed the spinning wheel of death for a bit, then crashed. Guess where my post ended up? No, I don't know either, but it's not on wordpress.com and it's not on the iPhone. :-( Also, one of our fence-panels got torn off one of our fence-posts, presumably in last night's tempestuous winds (which kept me awake when I was trying to get to sleep in preparation for getting up early); can be fixed, but it'll take more time, more faff, more money.

So, I have a massive list of things I haven't done, minor guilt about things I have done, and general worries about the two sets of things; but I'm feeling enthusiastic about Perl, happy to be in our house even though the fence is falling down, and incredibly positive about the prospect of going to sleep within the next 20 minutes. Good night. :-)

Tags: badgers, diaryism, guilt, nablopomo, perl

I find that, more and more, there are things I know I need to do, and even (in some cases) want to do, but I don't do them, and I have no idea why. I write them on my various to-do lists, on the mini-whiteboard in my office, on the back of my hand... and still I put them off. I transfer them from one day's 'to do today' list to the next's, and the next's, writing them out like a scribe trying to preserve ancient writings they don't even understand, knowing only that they are somehow sacred. But where the scribe might perhaps feel an air of sanctity, I feel only the sensation of guilt settling on my shoulders, around my neck: the holy albatross descending.

Of course, I don't do nothing in preference to the tasks on my list; I do smaller and smaller tasks. If the task I'm procrastinating from is a big one, I'll break it down into little things. If it's a little thing, I'll do the one-liners, the one-action tasks. If it's a one-liner, I'll check my email. If I've run out of email, I'll check something else, running round in an endless circle of refresh-refresh-refresh like a dog still confidently expecting its tail to get closer. Checking email isn't a task; it's like checking that there's still gin in the bottle by drinking some.

The next stage is writing about the procrastination on LiveJournal; from the initial "I can't seem to make myself do it", through the "Tell me off if you see me here", to the inevitable "still not done it". It's Hamlet's disease: words, words, words. Nothing shall come of nothing, and words (not actions) shall come of words; they grow legs, they grow wings. Writing about the procrastination turns into describing the sensations of guilt, describing the procrastinatory tactics, wallowing in the attempt to weave creative writing out of uncreative ennui. It's like trying to knit your way out of a blanket.

But words breed yet more words, they invite the helpful suggestions over the threshold: do 43 Folders, Inbox Zero, Morning Pages, the GI Diet, Tai Chi; set alarm clocks; embrace idleness; uninstall FreeCell; make lists; don't make lists; drink 8 glasses of water a day; don't step on the cracks. The tiny thread of deferral unravels until the entire jumper of forward motion is lying in a tangle of mixed metaphors on the ground. The inch in which we live becomes the minute in which we'll do it, and before we know it we're bounded in a nutshell with bad dreams to boot. You know the sort of dreams: the ones where you're trying to organise a conference but all the people who turn up aren't on the list and their names are in Russian and it's supposed to start at 9am and you're trying to explain why it's running a bit late and then you look at the clock and it's already 11am and you don't know how that happened and you're trying to email the other organiser but she's gone to Birmingham and when you do get in touch with her you find out that the reason she isn't there is that she's turned into an owl and it's already 3pm and ... Look, I know it's not just me. Not even the owl.

In the end, there's only one solution to getting things done, and it's an unpopular solution, an unsexy solution; it's the journey of a single step. You can't sell books about it, you can't even write an iPhone app for it, because the solution is to ACTUALLY DO THE THINGS.

Tags: gtd, nablopomo, procrastination, werke, why don't you

Okay, yesterday's poll was full of fail, because it does depend a lot on context. I'm normally the one who can't get more than two questions into a questionnaire without going "ARGH BUT IT DEPENDS" and throwing the whole box of "neither agree nor disagree"s across the room in disgust, so I apologise for giving everybody else the argh this time. I think I was working on the assumption that the hypothetical communications in question were a) personal, or at least something where you personally have an interest (in either sense) in getting a reply, and b) something that obviously invited a reply but didn't specify the time-limit; e.g. if you say "please let me know by the end of the day" then obviously you're kind of expecting a reply by the end of the day, and if you send something that doesn't normally need/expect/invite a reply, then, um, you're not expecting a reply. But I did completely fail to show working.

Not sure what to do now: 48 people have managed to respond despite the fail, so I don't want to make people fill it all in again; but the results are probably a lot more meaningless than I hoped. That'll teach me to try to design surveys when I'm tired and rushing to meet an arbitrary deadline. :-}

Tags: fail, nablopomo, polls, stupid

A poll, to get some information for a future post (hopefully). Feel free to point other people here (though obviously they'll have to have an LJ account); this isn't Serious Research, but it would be nice to get a decent number of replies.
( cut for length )

Tags: communications, nablopomo, polls

I only realised late last night that today would be Stir-up Sunday, so I hastily scouted around for a plausible pudding recipe; in the end I rejected the ones suggested on snake_soup and plumped for the one in my excellent vintage Homepride Book of Home Baking.

The Homepride Book of Home Baking is something I've seen around in the kitchen at home for so long that I was a bit confused to find that it's not something you find in every kitchen, like a sink or an oven. Of course, our current kitchen doesn't have an oven yet, but it does have the Homepride book, thanks to my sister's generosity and eBay skills (don't worry, she got herself a copy too). If you're looking for your own copy, it looks like this (published 1970, SBN 900869054 — don't be misled by later editions; they're utterly different). It goes through the basics of baking, the different methods ('rubbed-in method', 'all-in-one method') and representative recipes, and there's a troubleshooting bit at the end of each section. Each recipe is short and uncomplicated, four one-column recipes to a page, measurements given in metric and imperial ("It's the first metric book of flour cookery in Britain ... Before very long, all other cookery books will become obsolete," raves the introduction). Okay, the recipes are very 1970s, but they're also very tasty. If there has been little innovation in the field of steamed puddings and stodgy cakes in the last 40 years it's because they were just fine to start with.

So, time for pudding. Fortunately I had a pudding-basin (the plastic sort, saved from a previous shop-bought pudding, which had been used in the interim as a general tupperware and even had 'stew soup' faintly scratched into it), and even more fortunately, this morning the local Co-op had most of the requisite ingredients. The newsagent next door filled in the gap of self-raising flour, and I cycled to Tesco to try to find almonds. They didn't have any chopped or blanched almonds — a good thing, as it turned out, because it meant that I bought their much nicer organic almonds and blanched them myself. I don't think I'd ever done this before — I was resigned to using them with skins and all — but the Homepride Book's casual instruction to "Blanch almonds (see page 16)" reassured me that it'd be easy. Turns out all you do is put boiling water on them and leave them for a few minutes, after which time the almonds' skins have loosened and you can just squeeze them off. Who knew? Okay, okay, you probably all knew. Humour me.

There was a minor crisis when I discovered that the packet of suet which I'd briefly hefted and judged to be at least a third full turned out to have less than the necessary ¼lb, and the Co-op (close enough to home to encourage this sort of disorganised shopping) turned out not to stock any, but in the end I substituted finely-diced butter instead and crossed my fingers that Saint Delia would forgive me. After some wishful stirring, I ladled it into the bowl, put the boil in the big pan of water, and proceeded to steam the thing for six hours, which does not make for interesting blogging material so I'll just use it as an excuse for a bit more rambling.

There's a poem which I always think of when I think of Christmas puddings; I reproduce it here in its twee entirety:

Our Christmas pudding was made in November,
All they put in it, I quite well remember:
Currants and raisins, and sugar and spice,
Orange peel, lemon peel - everything nice
Mixed up together, and put in a pan.
"When you've stirred it," said Mother, "as much as you can,
We'll cover it over, that nothing may spoil it,
And then, in the copper, tomorrow we'll boil it."
That night, when we children were all fast asleep,
A real fairy godmother came crip-a-creep!
She wore a red cloak, and a tall steeple hat
(Though nobody saw her but Tinker, the cat!)
And out of her pocket a thimble she drew,
A button of silver, a silver horse-shoe,
And, whisp'ring a charm, in the pudding pan popped them,
Then flew up the chimney directly she dropped them;
And even old Tinker pretended he slept
(With Tinker a secret is sure to be kept!),
So nobody knew, until Christmas came round,
And there, in the pudding, these treasures we found.

—Charlotte Druitt Cole

I only know it because we had to learn it in the Elocution classes that I (briefly) attended at one primary school. I don't recall any training in diction (though the teacher's name was Mrs Dixon — my dad thought this was hilarious and then had to explain the joke, which is how I learned the word 'diction'), but I do recall having to learn a poem every week, first writing it out in our best handwriting and illustrating it, and then reciting it before the rest of the class.

The thing is, though, I don't actually have any memory of making Christmas puddings at home; I'm not sure we ever did, and we certainly never made them in November. We made Christmas cake (always made to this recipe), and stirring it was certainly an occasion; but as far as I can remember it was usually only a few days before Christmas. My mum would ice the cake, ruffling the royal icing into snow-like peaks with a knife, and then my sister and I would add every plastic cake-decoration we owned, until it looked like an explosion at Santa's grotto. My mum only once made her Christmas cake in advance; when we unwrapped it from its foil to ice it, we found that it had gone mouldy. She blamed the organic (and hence, supposedly, preservative-free) dried fruit. Thereafter we went back to making Christmas cake just before Christmas, or even just after — okay, then we called it 'New Year cake' instead, but it was the same cake. Nobody ever felt like eating cake after Christmas dinner anyway.

So, the moral I derive from this story is that you can't store your cake and eat it, and you can't eat your cake and pudding. Only kidding — there isn't really a moral! There are just a handful of key techniques, and a selection of good recipes, and some tasty ingredients, and occasional long periods of waiting, and things you do again year after year because they work, and all these things are just rattling around in a box of terrible analogies like the little plastic cake decorations in the biscuit-tin on the top shelf that I had to stand on a chair (or, if nobody was looking, on the kitchen unit) to get to.

Tags: baking, books, christmas, family, nablopomo, traces of nuts, traditions

I didn't blog yesterday, because I was busy with friends and beer and pizza and cats, and didn't get back till after midnight. Sorry (not very sorry). :-)

This jaffa-related post counts as today's. I was going to write something else as well, but didn't get time. More hours in the day would be good, if anybody has any spare...

Tags: blogging about blogging, nablopomo

I'm worn out already and it's only just over halfway through November! What I really want is to take a long break from blogging, but I am determined to post something every day this month. I think it's doing me good: I've probably finished more sentences this month than in the entire preceding year. (If you're finding this unnervingly out-of-character, just stop reading here and instead imagine me waving my hands around and descending into rambly self-deprecating mutterings, undermining everything I've said.)

So anyway, today's rather thin offering is partly this post here, and partly a new short-ish buycurious post. I do find those harder to do, in some ways, because they're more about the information than the opinions (I can have opinions on pretty much anything at the drop of a hat without necessarily knowing anything about the thing(s) in question — though it's a tendency I try to keep in check); so why am I doing it...? Basically, because I always seem to have a head full of information about shops and where to buy things, so I wondered if I could make that into something that might be faintly useful for other people. I had plans to do all sorts of things with the blog at one point — price-comparisons for specific objects, profiles of individual shops, overviews of areas of Oxford, an opportunity for people to email in "where can I find..." questions like the Guardian magazine does — but every time I had an idea like that I had the same form of Blogger's Block that I usually get with new blogs: "I have a great idea for a post about [whatever] but I have to sort of establish the blog and get some readers before I use up the really good ideas". This then leaves me struggling to find something boring-but-not-too-boring to say in order to pad it out a bit before I post the stuff I actually want to post, which is a frankly rubbish situation to be in and it's no wonder it puts me off posting. (NB I don't really think my "great ideas" are so great that they're worth being that precious about, and I'm sure a lot of the things I blog about are actually quite boring; this is really just trying to explain the mental block I normally get when it comes to actually posting things.)

There's a bit of a general problem here, though: blogs let you publish things easily, but they also come with some kind of expectation of regular or frequent (or at least not-just-one-off) publishing. It's as if every author got signed up for a 10-book contract automatically (though with no promise of payment for any of them!). Yes, people do set up single-purpose blogs, but what I really want (both to read and to post to) is a blog which works more like a magazine: that is, a combination of good one-off 'feature' articles and regular columns, written by lots of different people. Unlike most magazines, though, I'd like it to be unrestrained by the need to have a unifying style or theme, except, well, being interesting. Okay, so maybe I'd be disqualifying myself from this blogozine with even just that single criterion... but that's fine, I'd still be able to read it. :-)

[Will that do? — Ed.]

Tags: blogging about blogging, blogging about blogging about blogging, media, nablopomo