Down at Turnberry
Walking round the peripheral of the Trump Turnberry course while Ethan plays his county match. Such a beautiful part of the world.
A bug or a lack of understanding?
This morning I finally resovled an issue with a Rails application of mine.
After a couple of weeks, of getting an hour every other night to resovle this, I finally understood what the problem was and how it could be fixed. A bug? Not necessarily, it was more of a lack of understanding on my part. The issue is fixed now and I can now crack on with other elements of the application.
Deer on the 11th tee
There I was waiting on the final match tonight when I noticed a nice bit of light through the trees from the 11th tee. It wasn’t until I got home and I realised I captured a deer almost in the middle of the shot.
A study shows that full absenteeism from social media is good for you.
Digital Minimalism and Deep Work author Cal Newport, highlights a new paper shows that taking a prolonged and full break is good for you.
The researchers further found that they could obtain smaller, but still significant improvements in depression and anxiety by having users simply reduce the time they spend on Twitter and TikTok. The biggest effects, however, came from full abstention.
— Taking a Break from Social Media Makes you Happier and Less Anxious
This is something that I need to do more often. The endless scrolling is a terrible habit of mine. When this happens, I sometimes start to sense that feeling of negativeness creeping in as I am scrolling. At this point I just put my phone down and find something else to do. Maybe I should just delete the Twitter app from my phone?
I’m on board with Kurt on this one. Money spent on books and music is never wasted. Although I do admit that it’s been a while since I actually purchased music outside of a streaming service.
Good advice from Kurt Harden on how to salvage the day when your plans end up changing.
Hey, 37signals is back!
Nice reminder by Shawn Blanc that the quality of question matters.
Signed up for the free plan on MDN Plus this morning. I’m not convinced that I need either of the paid plans yet, but I might change my mind after a few weeks of using it.
How I am using different tools and themes to seperate my work from my home.
It’s always good to use good tools for the job. In my case, I’m back to using a Macbook Pro and macOS as my development machine and operating system. It’s also great that I am working with Ruby and Rails once again.
The downside to using the tools is that they are the same tools I use to write web applications in my spare time. I enjoy hacking on ideas for web applications and using them for my own use, but I’ve noticed that the lines have started to blur when I use other tools.
Take for instance, source code management. I’m now using the same source code management tool for both work and my own projects. With source code management being a big part of my workday, I don’t enjoy using it the same way now for my own projects.
If I’m to continue enjoying hacking on my code after then, I want it to be an enjoyable experience. While I have no complaints about my job, it’s not a part of the day I want reminded of when it’s the evening or the weekend. I’ve been exploring different options for source code management over the last couple of weeks. I have decided to try out Gitlab for this over the next few months. It’s free, has similar processes to my current source code management tool, and integrates well with the hosting company I use for my web apps.
I’m also looking into other ways of using different tools or using the same tools differently. iTerm and Visual Studio Code are two tools that I use both at work and at home but finding alternatives to these is tricky when I use these tools really well. So instead of changing these tools to something else, I’m just changing how these tools look.
For iTerm, I have different looking terminals for work and home. It’s not much of a change, but the look definitely changes the dynamic of being at work and being at home.
I’ve also done the same with Visual Studio Code. I’m not going to look for a new text editor when I already use this quite proficiently. Instead, I am using the toggle extension in Visual Studio Code to change the theme and font settings for when I am at work and when I am home. A simple keyboard shortcut is now all it takes for me to change my interface from work to home.
Setting these boundaries between these contexts is essential as it creates a space for both. While I use many of the same tools, I do like to feel that I am in the correct mindset at the right time. That means using the appropriate tools for each and being able to distinguish between each. If the same tool has to be used for both, then a simple change of how that tool looks is all it takes for me to determine which context I am in.