Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Another attempt

I’m trying it again. I’ve made a number of these attempts over the years with my longest attempt lasting just a couple of weeks. Now though I think the time is right for a final go. You’re probably wondering what the hell I’m talking about. My fellow programmers might have an idea.

I’m talking about making the transition to Vim as my preferred text editor for writing code.

For years now Sublime Text has been my only text editor. Its flexibility, plugins and stability make it such a great editor to use. It made my job easier since I first started using it and continues to do so. So why would I want to upset my workflow and change to something else? Curiosity. For a long time I’ve watched other developers wield Vim with such ease and fluency. I’m fluent with Sublime Text but there’s something about Vim that makes me think I could be more fluent.

I’ve tried to make the move permanent so many times over the last few years but it’s never successfully happened. The main problem with each attempt to use Vim has been the initial stumbling blocks that make an impact on your typical work day. Sublime Text has worked for me so well since I first started using it and switching to Vim will take a while but my patience always takes a battering and then I move back to Sublime Text.

This time it feels different though. After a couple of days using Vim I’m making headway with the basic actions of managing panes, buffers and basic text manipulation. I’m taking notes as I’m using it and I’m practing some of the shortcut keys that I discover each day. There’s still a few teething problems with the setup I have but I’m prepared to see it out for another month at least.

We’ll see how it goes.

There’s a new age of celebrity available now. They offer more in the way of entertainment and you can even find celebrities who aligned with your own interests. Who are these new celebrities?

For years I’ve seen the activities of celebrities reported in newspapers and magazines. Every week it seems there’s some fashion faux pas made, another check into rehab, or just opening their mouths to say something loud but clearly wrong. I see it as a depressing form of entertainment to follow and one that doesn’t give any actual value. With reality television programmes providing an steady stream of new celebrities to add, it seems like there’s no end in sight. Well actually there is.

We often class a celebrity as a well known famous person in the public media. Actors and actresses, sports people, singers and even business people are all classed as celebrities. It’s been this way for years now, but where else can find celebrities that offer more in the form of entertainment and value? The Internet of course. A platform consisting of millions of celebrities. Through blogs and publications, there are millions of celebrities out there for you to follow, and they’re just a click away.

A few of these celebrities I follow are Patrick Rhone, Nicholas Bate, Curtis McHale, Michael Wade, Kurt Harden and many others. You might recgonise some of the celebrities I follow, you might not. For me though they trump anything that any celebrity magazine can offer. Every day my RSS reader fills with their latest activities and drama. They publish on an open platform for the world to see and yet they are often ignored in favour of more conventional celebrities. If people choose to ignore these new celebrities then it’s their loss.

This is just the tip of the iceberg though, there are millions of celebrities out there in different circles just waititng to be discovered and followed. You just have to look in the right places. Start with blogs that fall into your interests, there’s always someone posting great content in any topic you can find. Search your favourite social network for interesting people in your field or look to mailing lists that offer a condensed form of entertainment straight to your inbox.

There are millions out there waiting to be discovered.

Many of you will notice that my daily posts have tailed off somewhat in the last few weeks. Despite recent attempts to scale back on the frequency of posts, I’m still not finding that sweet spot that lets me write and publish. I had it last year, but this year it seems to have vanished.

I’ve got a holiday starting next week for two weeks. It’s a clean break and a chance to kickstart the writing process again. I’m hoping to come back with a list of ideas, drafts in progress and hopefully by then I’ll have published a few more posts to get me back on track again.

Let’s see where it goes. See you on the other side.

Trade-offs

Nicholas Bate is on the ball again with advice on true productivity.

Trade-offs are hard, very hard because they are rarely perfectly resolved. To be comfortable with them we need to have time to have thought about them and time to communicate such thinking to those who are important in our lives.

— On Productivity and Life in the Gaps by Nicholas Bate

Yesterday I wrote about coasting along. Good for when you’re driving and taking in the good views, but when you’re coasting for everything you do, you’re just ticking the boxes. Today marks the first day of a reboot to purge this nasty habit.

If only everything was as easy to fix as a reboot. Got problems with your computer? Reboot and try again. It’s amazing how often this works. I’m not technical support person, but the amount of times I’ve given technical support to family and it was simply a matter of rebooting their PC is astounding. It’s not this easy for everything though.

Rebooting yourself takes a bit more thought, a bit more time. Let’s face it, we’re complicated entities. Our brains have the accrued knowledge and memories of a whole lifetime. We have habits, whether good or bad, engrained in us. How we approach problems and solve them is different for others. This rebooting lark then is going to take some time then. I’m not expecting a change overnight, but I am expecting to see good results as each day comes. I’m not trying to achieve everything on day one, just making sure that for each day, I’ve made a positive change to how I work and what I do.

This is the first day of the reboot. So where do I begin? Well, this morning I decided to ditch the MacBook and went out for a cycle. I haven’t done this as much as I would like to, as I like to use the Friday to catch up on a few things. Those things can wait though. This morning I just wanted to clear my head and start again. I put on my bike gear, grabbed the bike, walked my oldest son to school and then headed out.

The west of Scotland is having a period of sunny weather so it could not be a better time to head out. As it was the morning, the heat hadn’t reached it peak and the trails were great. Dry hardpacked roads mixed with some dry grassy paths further up. The descent back down was even better.

The bike ride was good. It gives me a chance to clear my head which is something I wasn’t doing often enough. Using the Friday morning for a bike ride, even if it’s just 90 minutes is a good use of time. Everyone knows that exercise is important but what’s also important is the chance to leave a few things behind. The feeds, the timelines, the inboxes, the emails, the messages, the tasks. They can wait. They’ll still be there when we get back. The difference now is that with a clear head I might be in a better frame of mind to take a few of these on. And that’s a good starting point I think for the rebooting process to begin.