Life & Research Notes

I had a lot of fun meeting up with three high school friends for dinner tonight. At one point in the evening we all came to the conclusion that, for the most part, we are all doing pretty much what the others would have expected… a doctoral student finishing his PhD and starting a business, a lawyer doing non-profit and pro-bono work, an up and coming green tech journalist, and a designer/engineer nerd working in a startup. None of us were at all sure of our plans back then, and we’ve all gone through our various challenges and adaptations. But for the most part each of our actual trajectories line up relatively close to our previously projected ones. It’s funny to realize this, and surprisingly comforting.

Evidently some new secret stuff is in the works. Looks hot, yet also makes me wistful thinking about all the great stuff I could be learning with those guys if I was still there. For more, see Luis’s post, and screenshots (1, 2, 3) and videos (1, 2) on PLWire.

The 15 minute redesign, in emacs, on live css. Not good practices for production work, but for my own site it’s ok. So for posterity here’s the old one, which was cramped and dark and gross:

And here is the new one, which is not perfect, but is lighter, wider, more legible, and importantly, doesn’t have any more crappy green:

It’s amazing how you can just so badly want to make a change, but it seems so involved and like such a huge project, and it just never happens. Months ago I had a full on freaking rails project for my new blog and portfolio. It had pink and yellow, and was absolute overkill. Now I realize how nice it is just to keep making incremental changes. There’s enough epic stuff to deal with already, and web design doesn’t always need to be one of them.

My information life feels horribly disorganized. At any given time I have many tabs open in my browser, maybe even a few windows, plus tabbed terminals and text editors, and then basic stuff like chat and music.

It’s essentially a visual representation of unsettled mental threads. Somehow I manage to navigate it, but I find it is a constant expansion and branching, with periodic maintenance periods when I try to quell my information anxiety by closing things that I don’t actually need.

I’m continually impressed how clean some people keep their digital workspace, with perfectly aligned vim windows and pristine virtual desktops each assigned to different tasks. I think I was like this at one point as well, much more fastidious about what needed to be out and what should be hidden. But the past few years I’ve gotten used to the visual noise, and maybe I’ve become a little lazy, so instead of keeping things neat I rely on quick switching between applications, just a few command tabs to cycle through, or a few keystrokes with quicksilver. So now I have lots hanging out, and it feels messy, and sometimes I get uncomfortable.

Only occasionally do I think to do this:

For a moment it isn’t actually so bad, and there isn’t too much, and I feel ok. But tragically it’s so temporary, more a sleight of hand than a reality, and selecting one of these windows I’m swooshed back shoulder deep in my own mess. Ugh.

Generally I am a big proponent of preemptive transparency and honesty. It may not always be an immediately advantageous strategy, but in the long run it’s an approach that connects me to others who feel and act the same way, and those connections lead to lasting, rich exchanges. It’s my strategy for friendship, and I intend for it to be my professional strategy too.

That said, it’s not necessarily easy to implement in practice. One thing about having a blog like this is that people know things about me without me specifically telling them anything. How much of my personal life stories and thoughts do I really want to mix in with my work? And conversely, how much of my work can/should I justifiably talk about here? My previous situation at the lab had few boundaries between work and personal life, so it was fine to have everything mix into one soup. But now I’m finding it harder to reconcile the two worlds, and the pool of immediately interesting material seems to have shrunk.

No doubt I’ll leave public everything I’ve posted the past year and a half, and I do intend to keep writing. I just need to redefine the goals of this journal. This is new territory here, figuring out how to thread digital identity into the ongoing changes of real life.