Happy 230th birthday to all Marines where ever they are serving

I first started reading rands in repose because a friend forwarded me a link to his N.A.D.D. article with a note saying that I would find it interesting.

Well, that was an understatement :)

Anywho, back to the reason behind the odd title. Rands has done it again – described something that I’ve been trying to not only describe in myself, but also manage: self-inflicted information overload. Or as Rands likes to call it: Repetitive Information Injury.

Man, what a great description. When I was working at my previous job my day was often interrupted with tech support calls and other customer interactions – so much so that towards the end the only coding I was doing was to fix problems. So when I did have some free time it didn’t seem like a problem browsing the web for 20 minutes or other similiar activities. But now my day is self-directed with occasional interrupts to help other people. I love working with people who are bright – the problems they bring to me are well defined and always interesting. After all, if it was easy they would have figured it out.

But that brings us back to the other 60% of my day … my task list.

Normally I get direction every couple weeks about what is a priority and what isn’t from my boss so I pretty much know what I need to work on next. The problem comes about when I’m transitioning from an interrupt-driven task back to working on one of my todo items. Many times I find myself staying with the browser session I started when I was researching the issue or I go and check email to see if any other issue came up. The tail end of an interrupt is a perfect time to work on new interrupt tasks – or so I think.

Now I’m beginning to think that it may not be the case – recently I found myself at the end of a long day with the realization that I had basically daisy-chained one interrupt task after another. It seems that I need to find some way to triage incoming requests and shunt the ones that can be delayed into a task item and then deal with them during the parts of the day when I am ready for a break. And, just now, after typing that sentance, I am realizing that I have had this conversation before with one of my bosses … hmm, round two starts with round one being given to my opponant :(

I’m going to have to think about this again but maybe not at 0200 hours.

To put the following in context with my own use: I’ve been using Ubuntu for quite a while now on secondary servers and I switched to using it on my primary development computers for more than a couple months now, so what Sam states was of no surprise to me – he just words it so damn well ;)

Found in Sam Ruby’s blog:

Ubuntu boots off of a CD. It comes with Graphics, Internet, and Office tools. Where I had once ran AIM with advertisements and could only connect to a single service, I now run GAIM with no ads, can connect to multiple services. And I even get spell check.

But I’m a developer. I want more. I want ruby. And subversion. And cvs. And build tools. Each is only an apt-get away. There even is a convenient GUI for this. Ray’s vision of the future, I have today. And whereas Windows Update kept the OS and selected Microsoft tools up to date, the Debian packaging manager keeps everything up to date and in synch. Without ever needing to reboot.

I think what Ubuntu has done is proof of the best part of the Open Source realm: enabling others to build using prior art.