Star Wars Battlefront just keeps getting more and more awesome. Can't wait for November.

This brings back nightmares of timesheets being used to measure performance. It's a poor way of measuring any employees performance regardless of what they do.

What do you use to measure employee performance? For many years I worked in places where time was what I was paid for and so work time was what was measured.

This became a problem when I’d see other people spending the day on Facebook and still getting paid. They produced nothing, but production wasn’t measured, time in seat was. So by that standard, those employees were doing what was required.

— Measure the Right Things
by Curtis McHale

If you know me and you read my blog on a regular basis you’ll know that I’m an advocate for paying for the software you use. It’s simple, support the software that supports you. Lately though I felt that I was paying for software that I rarely got any use from. As I checked my recent outgoings I noticed that there were a number of software services I was using where I couldn’t justify the monthly fee for using them.

For the last three months I’ve been using OnePageCRM for managing leads and deals. It’s a nice and simple CRM for small businesses and it does a fine job of managing leads and contacts but I was using it just once a week. It cost me £8 per month to use but when you multiply this by four or five similar services, I was looking at £40 in software that wasn't necessary.

OnePageCRM didn’t fit the bill but I still needed something that will let me manage my contacts and deals but on a free plan. Then when the time comes for more functionality and there’s room in the budget, I’ll be able to scale up to a paid plan.

In the past I gave Highrise a short spin, but at the time I couldn’t justify the $29 for the Solo plan. It was simply too much money for what I needed but I didn’t give the free plan a look.

After a quick import of contacts from OnePageCRM I’m now up and running on Highrise’s free plan. Okay, I’m not paying for it now but in time I’m hoping that with a busier schedule and more clients, I’ll be able to spring for the solo plan and it will continue to help keep my business ticking over.

Paying for the software you use is good to do, but when you your own needs are for a service that gives functionality on an ‘as and when’ basis then free plans are an ideal way to make sure that you get the functionality you need while also ensuring that you can upgrade to a paid plan in the future.

All I can say is thank goodness for books.

The seek, sense and share workflow of personal knowledge management.

I’ve been holding onto a few ideas for software products. There’s two in particular that I would like to start building but actually starting them is the problem. I keep looking at these ideas in from the point of a finished product. What I end up visualising is a finished and polished product that has seen at least a year of development. When I do this it ends up putting me off even writing that first line of code and what I’m simply left with is an idea.

The book Rework puts it nicely:

Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. And everyone’s got one of those.

— Rework

Ideas are nice, but so is coffee, donuts and other forms of instant gratification. They’re within easy reach and quickly consumed. Ideas require time, in fact they can take a considerable length of time and that's the part that puts me off.

Despite the many advances in software development frameworks, there’s only so much of an application that can be generated automatically, the real work lies in the taking the idea and making it into something that’s more than an idea. It doesn’t need to be a finished product, it can be a well executed feature of the product that provides some value. Once that’s built, it’s time to move onto delivering the next set of value and so on. It's about breaking the idea down into manageable features that can be shipped on a regular schedule.

Right, I’ve put it off long enough. Time for a coffee and a few hours in front of my text editor. Let’s see where we can take these ideas.

Forget the Foo Fighters, I'd pay to see this lot sing.

This brought back a few memories.

Despite their unique preferences and stylistic tendencies, all of the module authors I spoke with agree that there’s a difference between being a good Dungeon Master and writing a great adventure. A Dungeon Master should be concerned with creating a seamless and engaging narrative for their players. An adventure writer, on the other hand, needs to produce modules that will motivate those DMs, capturing their imaginations while leaving them room to embellish, adjust, and alter as desired.

— Total Party Kill - The Architects of Dungeons & Dragons by Wills Plummer

I had a short spell (groan) as a DM but I didn't have a full grasp of the rules at the time. Enjoyed my time as a player though.

... more talking. That's just one of NB's three rules for managing less email.

Jenny Mason shares a her notebook preferences and their uses.

My pocket notebooks are filled with all sorts of useful information that I need on hand for the present. Nothing work related goes in here, this is purely a notebook for me. I have weekly personal to do lists with all things that I want to accomplish that week. I have order information scrawled on random pages, blog post ideas, trip ideas, travel itineraries and lists of things I need. I have lists of books I want to read, notes of things I want to research or look into and on a rare occasion there are doodles.

— How I Use My Notebooks by Jenny Mason

via The Cramped

I've got something of a fascination with writing. It's not that I want to become a writer, although the idea is rather tempting, I'm just curious about the process that writers go through from an idea or concept through to the final published article or book.

The fascination with writing started in secondary school. For an assignment we had to submit a short story on anything we wanted. I wrote about my first experience with a death in the family that happened just a few years before I started secondary school. After submitting the story I didn't think anything else of it until the day we got our assignments back. There were a few red pen marks where I had bad grammar or spelling mistakes but other than that I received a "very good" on my assignment. After class the teacher asked me to stay back for a minute. He congratulated me on the honesty of my story and the re-telling of the moment in my life.

A couple of years later and during the build up to my exams we had to submit a short story. At the time I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy books, so I decided to try and pull the two genres together into a single story. Unfortunately it sounded too much like a series of books that was already out, but I decided to run with it any and see what I could do. I received a favourable grade for my story but I was marked down for my short story being unoriginal.

It was few years from then until I started a mind mapping blog called MindMapSwitch. It was my first attempt at writing and while the blog was a moderate success, it did get me more hooked on writing. It was during this time that I bought Stephen King's On Writing book as well as a few ebooks on writing.

Today, I'm still writing as often as I can, but the idea of being a writer is something that seems so far away. A number of people I follow on Twitter have made the jump to being full-time writers or are on their way. They're publishing as often as they can and they are clearly happy with the change to being a full-time writer.

Despite writing on my blog now for over two years, I still don't identify myself as a writer. I do write yes but it's more on a hobby basis. I write for myself when I can and that's it. I have ideas for books that I would one day like to write but the prospect of even putting out a short book on a particular topic seems so out of my reach. For now I'm fine with having an interest in writing. As long as I'm on the fringe of writing, it will be something I'll always appreciate.

A very nice reminder of why I choose to host my own blog rather than opting for a service like Medium.

... by Tools and Toys. Something for everyone in the list.

I was watching Ethan this morning as he was playing with a friend on the Playstation. A session of Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare was in full play and the boys we're chatting about new video games, golf, going back to school as well as planning their next zombie assault. It got me thinking how different things are for kids today when it comes to media and whether that change is causing kids to mentally age faster.

The biggest difference I see is the prescence of media now. Everywhere we go, we have instant access to the latest news and headlines, trending topics and sometimes things that are just too horrifying to believe have happened.

I remember being the same age as Ethan and growing up in Canada. We had a record player, tape deck and a television. That was the extent of our media devices in the house. Most days my parents would get their fill of news from newspapers that they bought on a daily basis, but I never read those. I don't remember ever watching the news on television but I always watched cartoons like Spiderman and shows like Knightrider and the ice hockey was always on at night. I just don't remember the news at all.

Compare this with Ethan who has his own iPhone and a Playstation. He gets his fill of news from the BBC Newsround website which is news for younger kids. It's good because it explains what's happening in the world without complicating the story. They report most of the events that are in the news and explain why it's happening. We tend not to watch the news on television unless it's something serious but that's thankfully not happened for a while. If we are watching and Ethan sees it, we explain as best we can why it's happening.

As for exposing him to other media, we certainly draw the line on movies and games. Me and Jen use our own judgement when it comes to these but games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto are out until he's older. The same goes for movies. There's ratings on them for a reason.

Most of us have probably played some kind of war based game as kids but when we did we drew on our knowledge from television and movies that we had seen. When we were kids and running about shooting each other we used our experiences from movies to feed our imagination. That has changed and the advancement of technology means that movies and games now have a better sense of realism. Whether it ages your kids mentally though is difficult to measure but I always like to err on the side of caution.

Controlling and curating the media that our kids consume doesn't mean they won't grow up fast, after all I'm sure he's getting an education in the school playground. It just means we're slowing down the rate at which they grow mentally and that's not a bad thing. There's plenty of time to experience what the world has to offer but as a kid you get more from using your own imagination. And I rather see that for as long as I can before they experience the reality of the world.

No sooner do I get settled with Monoid when I hear of another coding font. This time it's the code-generated Iosevka.

From time to time friends ask me what they should use if they want to start blogging, and for a while I was considering adding Medium to my list of suggestions, especially for non-technical writers. But I can’t support this kind of anti-web architecture.

— Dear Medium: Please stop hurting the web by Avdi Grimm

I want to like Medium but it's fast becoming just another walled garden.

Execupundit has you covered.

It can be difficult to predict the popularity of topics. Supervision may become a mainstay subject since new supervisors are always in the pipeline and even the senior ones need refreshers. I've had people in class who last attended a workshop on supervision around 30 years ago. Many, of course, were never formally trained. One day they were told, "Congratulations! You're a supervisor."

That's why it is not rare to hear a senior supervisor exclaim, "I wish I'd had this class when I started in this job."

— Booster Shot
by Execupundit

Got me a new coding font.

About a year ago I made the jump to Vim. Having finally mastered enough of the keystrokes to muster through a single coding session, I made it my default text editor for programming. In the last couple of months though I've been using Atom for most of my programming. The reason for the move? Just for a change. Atom does have a number of niceties that encouraged the switch.

Good Looking

Vim is simple and productive but let's be honest, it's not exactly an eye-opener as development tools go. Sure you can cut and splice code like a keyboard armed ninja, but its look begins to get a little dull when you're using the same development environment for most days of the week.

Atom, like Sublime Text is it's own application and doesn't run within your terminal. The plus side to this is that it isn't restricted in the way the user-interface can give feedback to me through elements like auto-complete suggestions and notifications.

Atom is easier on the eye and maybe that's a cop-out reason for making a change in your development tools, but my eyes start to strain staring at a two-pane terminal session for most of the day. Maybe it's an age thing, but coding with Atom is much easier on the eyes than writing code within my terminal app.

Keyboard Friendly

Atom, just like every other development tool on the planet has a list of keyboard shortcuts that eliminate the need for a mouse. Not only that but there are some keyboard shortcuts from Vim that I can take with me to Atom. Also, like Sublime Text it includes a command palette to allow you to lookup and select the right command for the job.

Atom is keyboard friendly but more importantly for me, it's familiar in that most of the keyboard shortcuts I use are either from Vim or similar to shortcuts that I previously used in Sublime Text.

Switching to Atom wasn't prompted by it being a more productive editor, its growing community of packages or the fact that it's made by Github. The reason for the switch was just for a change. Sure I'm just as productive with Atom as I was with Vim or Sublime Text but sometimes you just need a change of tools to keep things interesting. A simple change like this can stir things up for the next few months or even years. At least until they perfect a text editor in the browser.