There is a lot of stuff around online about productivity; there was a recent xkcd about the typical cynical view of all this. While I have read some of this stuff, and can see that people with less traditional working schedules than a student’s may find things like GTD allow them to make better use of their time, but in general I tend to be rather cynical (wow! what a surprise!) about it all myself because it’s wonderfully easy to read about this stuff and feel better about yourself rather than actually do whatever it is you need to do. And it’s vital to recognise that these things might have a small motivational effect (setting yourself up properly to do something means you’re more likely to do it) but they’re not going to help motivate you in general. But as I intend to write properly about soonish, I do not have issues with motivation in a big way. My current issues are more focused than that and while a lack of success does feed back into my motivation to keep going and my tendency to procrastinate, it’s secondary to the issue itself.

So why do I spend a great deal of time setting up my organisational systems? My perfectionism is a factor, and as I have said there is some small motivational boost from having a list of things to tick off, as we are all familiar with. The two main reasons for me are because I don’t trust my memory, and because I want control, and this is rather directed and specific. The first reason is self-explanatory. Org-mode allows me to tie everything together electronically and does what I can’t trust my memory to do. I am slowly getting better at taking the decision not to trust my head and to leave it free to try and figure out how to study Philosophy again, and instead let the computer keep track of pretty much everything. While it might be more romantic to have nice notebooks or the ruled refill pad that screams conscientious-and-unpretentious (you should hear the conversations I have with myself on these things), it isn’t actually as good as storing things in a system one has built oneself that one understands, a system of plain text backed up and synced between computers (not “devices”, computers). I don’t need to remember what I’m supposed to be doing because Org-mode can tell me, and I don’t need to remember what’s going on because I read my e-mails/wrote things down and pumped them back into Org-mode — anywhere in my Org files, and they get brought together and organised automatically — and it tells me what I need to know. I over-exaggerate here. I still know what I’m doing and can tell you what’s important to me this week, and whether I’m on track, and I can give you an idea of what that e-mail said about that upcoming event. But I fall back to something that is complete and tailored to suit me and my life like a glove.

My second reason is about control, and it’s about control of my own time and life in the face of the distractions that hit at us from all sides in this world of the consumption of gratifying activities to fill the hours between sleeping. I am fortunate that I am already removed from cheap social gratification, choosing quality communication with friends over constant electronic connection via phones and social networking websites, so I avoid a certain amount of banal chatter, egoism, ranking of one’s life against others etc. Not being materialist I’m not surrounded with toys of various descriptions. But the Internet beckons, oh how it beckons. There are many fascinating websites out there and one can get a great deal out of browsing around the place, but the issue for me is more specific than just spending time reading because, unless one has something else to do, that’s fine. It’s very rare that I allow my browser to distract me from working on something in this way. Instead, I find myself possessed with a need to know or to make use of pieces of knowledge on specific areas of interest for me. Perhaps this will be best illustrated by examples relating to the present: Emacs, Org-mode and Gnus feature prominently. Page with some keybindings from Emacs, not all of which I know? Must spend time absorbing them. Page with a Gnus feature that I’m not aware of (happened today with tree mode)? Must evaluate and assimilate feature into workflow. Article on typography about how one should typeset footnotes? Must see if my LaTeX templates need updating right now. Article on a philosophical topic that I have a strong opinion on? Better read it now. And so on.

All of these things are valuable. I’m pursuing the things that interest me and learning more about how others see the same subjects and that’s great, but the issue is that when one goes off down the rabbit hole for a while one hands over control of what one things is important to one’s surroundings and less conscious inclinations. There is already too much in my life, and I can’t do everything. My Org-mode setup helps me with this in two ways. Firstly, it tells me what I’ve already decided is important to do today, and it tells me the projects I currently have in progress, and it reminds me that unless I want to make a decision to change my mind, this is what I’ve committed to and this is what the real Sean wants, not the temperamental Sean possessed by the excitement of the ability to join two lines and remove the indentation or whatever. Secondly, Org-mode keeps track of interesting things for me and allows me to bring them up. Not sure if I should be reading this but don’t feel comfortable just throwing it aside, and need to get it out of the way in order to focus in on the day’s tasks? No problem, hit a few keys and store it away in my Org files, tagged so that it can be brought up in a list with a few keystrokes.

The response to this, if you don’t like it, is to talk about how a certain flexibility and spontaneity is lost when one rigs oneself up to a schedule when one doesn’t strictly need to. Productivity in the sense of ticking things off on a list of tasks that are considered good doesn’t have to come first, and if you’re at a time in your life when you can be a little more free and perhaps achieve less then you should take advantage of this and float a little more. I don’t think any flexibility goes anywhere though, it’s merely made more thoughtful. If I decide that something else is genuinely more important, running things via my Org-based system forces me to evaluate my own inclinations of the moment critically against the other things I’ve said I’ll do. I can still decide to change things up in any way I like and Org is flexible enough to make this very easy to do. But I’m back in control, which is good; saying otherwise is probably just over-romanticising life in the modern world. And secondly, I am made very unhappy if I feel I am unproductive. With Org-mode I can see my productivity, am happier and thus more productive and indeed everything else goes better.

My goal right now is to take things to the extreme by rigging myself to Org-mode in all my dealings. For the next 30 days I’m forcing myself to make it almost an obsession, so that I can reap the full benefits. Then to regain some flexibility I will be able to slack off, but hopefully I’ve have figured out what level to go to in order to gain the above-described benefits.

I’ll end with a brief description of my system, since I keep referring to it and as I say I’ve put a good deal of time and effort and thought into it lately to grow it up to my needs and ways of working and the kind of things I do. I have a number of core Org files relating to various aspects of my life; the main ones are Academic.org for degree work and related, Oxford.org for all the other stuff I do during term time (so not got much going on at the moment), the almighty TechNotes.org which contains so many notes, links and plans for computer geek stuff and then my catch-all miscellaneous Sean.org which has errands, political notes, ideas for TV shows, films, music and books to look into and the like. Deep in my directory hierarchy there are things like ~/doc/work/philos/history/Hume.org which has all my notes and tasks on Hume. It’s hard to get the balance right between how much one needs to organise and separate one’s files (an interesting blog post on this is to be found here; this is amusing by the same author), but things are made easier because Org-mode is at its heart a piece of outlining software, and outlining models how you think, so a certain amount of organisation just happens automatically as long as you remember to use the keybinding that inserts headings as well as the keys that type text.

But the bigger reason why this doesn’t matter that much is the other component of the system which is Org’s agenda view. This thing is amazing, pulling together tasks from across your Org files, arranging them according to useful metrics such as tags, scheduled dates and deadlines, adding warnings for upcoming deadlines and the like, and then pulling in appointments from either Org-mode itself or an external calendar program, birthdays and wedding anniversaries from your address book and finally it even adds results from Google Weather if you have the right elisp. The key thing I’ve done recently, perhaps, has been realising the significance of the agenda and how building one’s system and customisations around that view rather than around the Org files themselves, which organise themselves as much as is necessary, is the key to success.

The word “agenda” doesn’t do this tool justice. I have four blocks to mine, and you can view something that looks a bit like it here. At the top I have a list of the tasks I’ve marked as in progress. This has two kinds of things in it: tasks that I am actually working on right now/today, and also so-called “stuck projects”, which come out in a different colour (not so on the above-linked export, unfortunately). Below that I have a list of tasks that are waiting on responses from other people. It’s important to look at these each day to see if people need reminding or can be relied upon to just get it done, and it wouldn’t be so good to have these show up as ordinary TODOs. Below that I have my appointments/calendar events, weather, scheduled tasks, daily “habits” or things I wish to accomplish regularly and repetitively, accompanied by coloured progress charts, and then at the very bottom I have a list of all undated TODO items.

Hidden from view are items marked as SOMEDAY. This is a task that doesn’t actually need to be done, unlike a TODO, but that it would be nice to be done — this is Org keeping track of interesting things for me. I bring these up in different categories with other agenda keybindings. And last of all there is my buffer of tasks to refile. These are links and notes I have shoved into Org-mode quickly and unceremoniously and without organisation, and once per day I move them into the appropriate .org files.

The key thing that I’m benefitting from right now is how Emacs allows me to integrate all these things together, so let’s see if I can give a brief description of that. At three set points in the day (after getting up, mid-afternoon and before bed) I empty my inbox. I read things that need to be read and I reply to people’s questions. I add things to my diary. And then for things that I can’t do right then I hit a key combination and add an entry to my various task lists within org-mode, with a hyperlink (of sorts; it’s plain text) back to the e-mail in question. I can then add a deadline so it’ll come up in my agenda view (which pulls in timetabled events from my diary), and that’s it, thanks to Gnus handling e-mail like usenet the e-mail will disappear until I use the hyperlink to get back to it. E-mail is literally an inbox not a todo list like it becomes for most of us which tends to be a pretty unhealthy policy, because you can’t attach dates to things and have them come up ready for the day. So this is how information gets in to the system; how do I get it out again? At the end of each day I refile all my captured tasks from e-mail into sensible places and check the dates on them (e.g. academic work gets transferred under my Maths and Philosophy headings and I make sure that the deadlines are what the work deadlines actually are). Then each morning I sit down with my notebook and agenda and copy down the tasks scheduled for the day and timetabled lectures and classes etc.. This process fixes most of the information I need for the day in my head but I’ve got the notebook if not (which is another place to scribble things in, ofc, which I clear out each day when I clear out my captured tasks from e-mail and the like). If I need some information for a task it’s probably hyperlinked in so I can just pop it all up (I can also hyperlink text files, Office documents, PDFs, web sites and pretty much anything else) and get going, without really having to think very much.

The benefits to all this are obvious. In theory I can’t lose any important information, which is important with a poor memory like mine and useful even if one’s memory is good. With ritualised slots of time for organisation I don’t end up with backlogs and I can knock through this stuff as quickly as organisational stuff can be knocked through. Because I force myself to empty my inbox, and also don’t want a cluttered task list, I end up just reading things there and then rather than letting them build up, keeping me abreast of what’s going on that I should know about; a useful psychological trigger. By writing things into my notebook I’m helping to keep myself on top of things without the need to carry any electronics around with me. And of course everything we’re talking about here is plain text so it’s all synced up almost intervention-free using my pre-existing setup for home directory versioning and syncing.

What’s next? As noted I’m not using the system perfectly and there are changes to be made but I’m getting better every day and often times it’s my frustration with my academic work that stops me from feeling like doing anything at all. Being more successful with Org-mode and Gnus makes me a little more successful at my work and vice-versa. Further, I don’t ever really put myself in a situation where I can’t do work because I’m not organised enough, because now it’s setup this stuff takes so little time. And giving myself as many chances as possible to work is important at the moment, since then hopefully I’ll fulfill at least a few of them. I should note how this extends to the rest of my room here in Oxford: I try to keep it pretty perfectly tidy too, as an oasis of calm to come back to. I’ve got myself an in tray (think I may have mentioned that before, either here or on my tumblelog) and that I treat like my stack of tasks to refile at the end of the day, though I don’t really get round to doing it every day. There’s no paper lying on my desk because it’s all either filed or waiting to be filed, and having a clear desk stops one from losing stuff and obviously makes the desk easier to use.

Technologically, I have a few things to check out but they’re not priorities. My workflow for interesting stuff that I’ve described recently is not yet really coming together so perhaps I need to rethink that. I am also considering dropping my beloved dwm in favour of StumpWM, for two main reasons. StumpWM uses Emacs paradigms, which is what I’m now used to, whereas dwm is by default more like vim. It would be more comfortable not to have to switch to a different way of thinking about windows and splits when I switch outside of Emacs, I reckon. Since it’s in LISP, which I intend to learn at some point to make Emacs perfect, it would also be good to be able to extend this to my window manager. Oh and finally it will allow me to get over my everything-in-Emacs obsession because being under stump feels sufficiently close… there are some things that I don’t really need to integrate but seem to want to, such as music playing.

So yeah: Emacs, Gnus, Org, Conkeror, StumpWM — closing fast on computing, organisation and — dare I say it — productivity nirvana.

At least, this is what I used to think, in one form or another. I’ve been thinking lately that the 140 character limit isn’t enough to be able to express interesting things, and expressing non-interesting things is just being unhelpful to your friends by using up their limited brainpower on things that aren’t, well, interesting, and I think that a good starting point for friendships, excluding times of emotional distress, might be to share interesting things rather than non-interesting things. But writing this is opening a questions about the words I’m using like bamboo shoots in my head and so I’m going to back away slowly from this particular point and leave it as assumed.

What I really want to talk about is whether or not Twitter is actually much good at expressing interesting things, and over the past few weeks I’ve been coming over to the opinion that it isn’t. I’ve got an example from this afternoon that got me writing this post. After five and a half hours of clearing my RSS reader’s backlog, and then transferring the feeds semi-manually (learning how to use Emacs regexps being the automation) into a new reader, I was headachey and feeling a bit burnt out so I went to my window and threw open both sides of it. My window here in Oxford is a small rectangular cushioned seat, set into the corner of the room, with three glass sides and one open to the room, and the two shorter sides (neither of which face the room – I’m hoping I’ve given sufficient information here to allow you to imagine the scene) can be opened. Breaking my usual habit of only opening the left window, as I say, I opened both and given the rain and wind this got everything blowing about and was a good way to refresh myself a little. But then I had this strange compulsion (reminds me, tangentially, of this) to go tweet about the fact that I felt really good to have the cool air wash over me after many hours of tedium and distress (because I was having to skip over lots of interesting-looking stuff). And then I thought, how can 140 possibly get that in? Someone reading that miles away as just another tweet in his or her stream is not going to get much of an idea of the scene, and unless it was a bit of an in-joke among my social circles that Sean likes to stand in the rain (and I’m pretty sure it’s not atm), it’s not really going to have any impact on them; there’s no way that I’m going to be able to transfer my experience to them via the 140 characters and thus I’m not only wasting my time by trying, but also I’m missing an opportunity to try to a better job of transferring that experience, if it’s worth transferring.

This last point is the key issue, because we all know that social networking is, so much of the time, all about time-wasting I don’t think that there was anything epiphanic about my experience at the window this afternoon, but suppose now that there was and I really did want to share it. By tweeting it, and not instead sitting down to write about it on something such as this blog or in a more limited form over on my tumblelog, I feel like I’m putting to bed any responsibility I might have had to myself or others to share it properly: Twitter is almost an excuse to be lazy about something that could actually be turned into a valuable expression of ourselves and our lives and the fact that we might want to share these with others in order to enrich our own lives and those of our friends. If we drop down to another level of cynicism and (anti)-buzzwords, it’s more consumerism, quick fixes and instant gratification that, ultimately, isn’t as good as doing things properly and taking our time.

In this post and in a recent one about my volte-face wrt the editor wars, I’m actually writing from a position of experience and knowledge. I’ve experienced the Vim way of doing things throughly and knew enough about Emacs to make an informed decision; in this case, I know enough about Twitter and about blogging to have come to the view that what I want to get out of being social on the Internet is better served by cutting most of the stuff from the former, pulling out the valuable and under-expressed things and then expanding them out into the latter. So I’m going to try to defeat the compulsion mentioned earlier to post things on Twitter in order to get them out of my head and use that as the way I stop worrying about them. If it’s interesting I’ll try to find the time to write about it, or if I haven’t got that time or inclination yet it really is something worth sharing, I’ll tumblelog it, and if not and yet I really want to type it out somewhere, I can always just slap it into my diary/journal, a huge text file which I add reams to each week. Because actually most things in my life are boring, and those things that aren’t boring are far more complicated than the English language will let me (attempt to) express in 140 characters.

Just a quick note about my Twitter account – I’m not going to get rid of it for two reasons. Firstly, purely as a protocol for chat it’s often very useful for certain individuals who don’t know how to use e-mail or instant messenging, so it’s useful to have around. Further, for a lot of friends, inter-personal communication has been replaced in this day and age by broadcasting snippets. They’re not going to write to me or ring me up or have a conversation over IRC or IM or something, so if I want to see the interesting stuff they’re doing I’m going to need Twitter to have some sort of glimpse. I really, really do not blame anyone for the Facebook broadcast culture being how they go about their social lives because it’s had me too at various points and of course there are arguments in its favour, and I’m not just going to isolate myself from people just because this is how they express themselves – but I’m trying to move away from it myself, to see what results.

While I’m here I should write about something else that’s been brewing for a little while. For most of my first year of university I was avoiding updating this blog about my first year/terms at university and so I ended up posting writings to my tumblelog instead. Ambiguity over the purpose of these two WordPress installations has been growing and I would like to make the distinction clearer. One should be able to decide what sort of Sean-stuff one wants and pick the appropriate blog, and finally in the past fortnight or so I’ve come to a conclusion on what I want each of them to be, supported and extended by the considerations advanced in this post. I’ve got a number of technical changes, which will involve moving some posts tumblelog -> blog, in the pipeline, but these will be time-consuming and they’re not happening any time soon. In the meantime, I want to establish as habits the following changes to where I put stuff, as these are more important than any restructuring and it would be nice to have things being used properly from day one when I eventually find the time to make those changes. An additional factor motivating all this is that del.icio.us is going, and I need a replacement (why did I trust my data to the cloud? why? grr).

The essential distinction between the two blogs can be described crudely as one of length, but I say that only because length is in the case of my writing a direct consequence of making a decision to meta-write, that is, to think about what I’m writing with the suggestion that it might be read, rather than just hammering keys. That doesn’t mean that this blog has to be perfect, but it is supposed to be my extended writing: selecting a title and then trying to lay out some thoughts and/or information in order to convey myself to someone else. But while posting on this blog will have a very narrow remit, I’ve got a lot of things that I want to put on my tumblelog. I’ve got the “expanded tweets” that I discussed above (This remind me of an issue that I haven’t looked at: the instantaneous nature of Twitter, and what value this might have, or otherwise – I’m not sure what I think on this atm so I’ll blog about it some other time.), and I’ve still got interesting little things found throughout the day – videos and pictures, and links of particular note that stand out from the usual stuff that I might slap into del.icio.us. Then I want to have two types of posts that group together links, in bullet-point form, that I’ve found interesting: one called something like “Today’s Bookmarks” which is things that I would otherwise post to del.icio.us, and another called “Today’s Articles” which is stuff that’s come to me through RSS that I found interesting. I dunno though; it might turn out to be better to combine these two into one daily set of links; I’ll think about this.

I’ll probably start this tomorrow, depending on how much time I get to read web stuff, for I have a busy day planned. In writing the latter half of this post I’m really seeing the value of my extensive notes on anything and everything that’s come to mind. I planned most of this on the 8th, and wrote a huge list of bullet points, and being able to dig it out to make sure I don’t miss stuff is useful because I was basically having the same thoughts as I had today without realising it, and it’s good to be more aware of how your thoughts flow.

I’ve a number of cheatsheets printed out. Haven’t got round to signing up to alt.religion.emacs quite yet though.

Let’s talk a bit about Emacs itself and what I’m finding so great about it already, with the partial switch I’ve made (to be explained). In Emacs, everything is text, and everything is linked together. You have one (set of) clipboard(s) to share between your organisation/scheduling software, e-mail client, shell and chat client, and all of these things are just large amounts of text with specialised key bindings, and it’s then easy to feed this text about. You might run a command in the shell, piping and globbing as usual, and then redirect the output into any of your buffers, where you’re writing an e-mail, composing a poem or goodness knows what else; you could just send it straight into a chat session with someone. It’s very easy to move things around, and plugin authors who have written extra things for Emacs have exploited this well. Org-mode is a phenomenal package that allows you to draft pieces of writing, take notes or make plans in an outline structure, and then it allows you to drop TODO items throughout these. Whenever you have something unfinished in a document, you can just make it into a TODO with some plain text and org mode picks it up. Hit a few keys and all your tasks get scooped up and arranged on a timeline-like display, that is, a schedule for the upcoming week: you barely have to think about storing your information and then org mode brings it together for you. With org mode capture mode, you can yank links from all over Emacs and make TODO items out of them, and this even has a protocol to link to outside applications. In my usual web browser if I want to look into a comment on a blog more carefully, say, I can select it, hit a key combination and then over in Emacs the comment will be waiting, with a link to the original webpage, and a TODO header just waiting for me to summarise what it is I need to do with the comment. Then it gets filed into my org files and filtered into the agenda view and task lists and all the other useful ways org gives you to extract information. And all of this works for everything in Emacs. You never have to put aside all your usual tricks when you’re reading e-mail or something, it’s all there.

Then we have the wondrous world of elisp. Almost everything you do in Emacs is in fact nothing more than the execution of lisp code. Typing letters just calls functions in lisp that insert characters into the buffer; splitting the window is again just a lisp function. And lisp is a magical language because you can change it up as you go. The lisp sitting in memory that’s running your editor is changable as you go. Type some lisp into any document, and hit a key binding to tell Emacs to evaulate it, and change the way things are going. Add a new e-mail client by telling Emacs to load a bunch of lisp into memory. Don’t like what happens with a particular lisp call that you make a lot, but don’t want to rewrite it from scratch? No problem, just write some lisp around the function with the simple concept of advising a function. Want some time-saving code to execute whenever the editor does something in particular, such as getting it to check your e-mail every time you load up you send a new message? No problem, just hook your code into the existing elisp. I don’t know what a list is in elisp, but I’ve been able to hook basic macros in all over the place. Truly, one can construct one’s perfect editor – and by proxy, one’s perfect e-mail client, chat client or PDF viewer. It’s hard to get this across here. But when you realise that you can make this thing do whatever you want, and that your entire life can be organised and recorded in something like org mode, Emacs gets very exciting very fast. You take a fresh look at the likes of rms and friends who set this stuff up. They’re absolute geniuses.

Vim doesn’t have anything like this. Vim’s scripting language is very hard to work with, and does not infect the editor in the way that lisp does Emacs, so all it really allows you to do is (slowly and painfully) add to vim, rather than moulding it to suit your needs.

All of these things excited me when I read about them and so I started looking at how I could take the vi editing philosophy and put it together with Emacs, and of course, you can. Vimpulse pulls together a few things that gives you vim modal editing with all of Emacs’ clever features too, and I’ve been happily using that for a couple of months. I edit text the way I always have and I feed it around the place using lisp, and I feel like I have the best of both worlds. All until things start breaking, and certain modes don’t work at all. People writing cool extensions for Emacs are writing them assuming that the Emacs editing keys are being used, and they’re assuming that you’re not flipping back and forth between insert and normal modes all the time, and it starts to show. You get weird lisp errors popping up and it always feels like the fact you’re trying to cheat the system is at least in part what’s causing it. And then I started to find Emacs bindings slipping in. I would fix errors with M-b, C-f and C-d rather than doing things the vim way – it just suddenly seemed like the right way to fix a certain problem. I started to think that it might be worth the switch to an admittedly inferior and less clean approach in order to get more out of Emacs the operating system (there I said it).

So I’ve been thinking about where I am right now. I’m a competent vim user – when I used to correct hastily-typed transcripts of JCR meetings, I could zip through with a combination of commands that other longterm vim-using friends of mine didn’t even recognise. I found myself getting very cross very quickly when forced into a non-vim environment, furiously hitting escape and messing up the online shopping I was doing or whatever. But then, on the other hand, I was always capable of adapting. Faced with the prospect of doing some work on someone else’s machine, without an easily accessible vim installation, it never takes long before I find myself using Home S-End DEL in place of ESC dd, C-S-> DEL in place of ESC de. I seem to pick up new bindings quickly, and there are many things I do in vim with little more speed than I would in another editor, suggesting that I’m not really that high up the ladder. So, I’ve been thinking, if I were to make a decision to switch to the Emacs bindings now, I could get faster than I now am with vim, and I’m not really throwing away much: I’ve been using vim for two years, I’m hardly seasoned by any real estimation. I’ve made dramatic changes before, throwing away built up effort and invested time in configuring a program to work well for me, and it’s tended to be good. After having an opporunity to evaluate both sides fully, the Emacs side of the editor war appeals more.

So onto the New Years’ Resolution. All my raving about the power of Emacs has not gone unnoticed, and my friend Jonathan has decided to give it a try, so we’re getting ourselves set up with a 30 day Emacs challenge for the New Year. For me, the challenge is removing my crutch that is Vim emulation, and starting the long process of getting fast with Emacs, really wiring it into me. Jonathan’s challenge is to get a text editor more fully integrated into his life, since he’s finally switching from Windows to GNU/Linux, and he’s starting with Emacs – but since he hasn’t had the evaluation time I have, we’ve agreed that Jonathan can simply ramp up his vim knowledge instead if the Emacs experiment goes badly. My challenge is substantially harder: this is something I have worked with day in day out for two years and now I am to use a completely different tool for the same tasks. It is going to hurt, a lot, for the first few weeks.

If he fails at this or I fail with Emacs, and end up slipping back into Vim, there are going to be forfeits – suggestions welcome. I personally have two further stages of the resolution to carry out later in the year once this part is accomplished: firstly, to learn to touch-type properly rather than the weird idiosyncratic style I have now, which is slow and bad for my hands, and thirdly to learn elisp and lay the power of Emacs bare before me. I’m making an investment of my time now to reap the rewards later. I’m going to have absolute mastery over my perfect editor, carefully constructed. It’ll take time, but it’ll be worth it.

So there we have it. I am not pleased with the quality of my expression in this piece, so I’ve got here a few inspiring and amusing pieces written by others on the subject, that got me thinking this way.

• Emacs v. vi is rooted in the love of Lisp | stevengharms.com
• Switching editors is just as hard as switching languages | Codeulate – the challenge I am to face
• org-mode In Your Pocket Is a GNU-Shaped Devil | dot unplanned – down the rabbit hole, this is my life since I discovered Emacs
• A Tough Pill to Swallow | GrumpyMeerkat

Camping gear set out in a temperate area

Then we have mods, and so many more hours of interesting things are opened up. Sure, so many mods are extremely unpolished (you should see the houses I built – very basic), but there are some classics that I’ve got a huge amount out of. The Private Mobile Base – huge floating stronghold that teleports to cities around the world; the Dragon Riding mod – just what it says; many many houses. I want to stay away from these with this character for now because I think they distracted me, in the past, from the core quests which I ended up neglecting, and ended up levelling my character inappropriately for. So I’m going to try to rise to the top of the various factions and develop my character that way. But there are two mods I want to use that I don’t think break anything, and make things more fun. Firstly, we have Acheron’s Camping Gear, which provides you with a movable camp site. This is cool from a roleplaying perspective – when I’m raiding a dungeon (ew WoW terminology has infected even me) I like the idea of setting up a little place to come back to in a nearby hollow. This makes the game more fun and doesn’t give you any advantage at all, considering that you can just dump loot on the ground instead if you want to. Then secondly there is the Ashlander Tent mod, which gives you a tent you can put up with rather a lot of stuff inside. Since you also get a teleportation necklace to jump back there it gives you a huge set of advantages as a starting player: you can get back to town without yet having developed the requisite spells or acquired enchanted items. But I’m not going to use it like this. I’m going to set it up in whichever town is my base of operations at that stage of the game, and use it as a base like that, and then I don’t think it has much potential to spoil things.

The Ashlander Tent in snow

A challenging thing about keeping Morrowind fun is getting round the game making things way too easy at certain points. I know a trick (e-mail me if you really want to hear about it) that means you can basically earn limitless cash for doing a certain set of things over and over again; this is how I bought my way into things like the Private Mobile Base (which, to balance its epicness, costs something like 1.1m gold to fully purchase and equip). But this trick removes any balancing costs in mods, and removes a lot of challenge. There are other things that you can pull off too to level yourself quickly. And there’s a point at which you can either win a fight incredibly quickly or lose it every time you try (until you get a bit better) if you’re a standard melee character, which takes a lot of the challenge and excitement out of completing quests. But I’ve played an awful lot of Morrowind, so I know most of these flaws and I can avoid them to get the most out of the game.

Another multiply dissapointing thing that has occured this holiday is repeated crashes from various causes of Warcraft III roleplaying games, run over a VPN with a few friends. Warcraft III, as many will know, is a strategy game at heart involving various traditional fantasy races battling it out. It’s an old game but is still incredibly popular despite there now being many more fantasy games out there without the limitations of the engine. This is primarily because of the huge number of custom Warcraft III maps/levels available, since the game’s included world editor is supremely flexible; these then get distributed through playing online. There is Defence of the Ancients or DotA, with a massive cult following, that is used in international tournaments. One struggles to find a game of DotA where you don’t find yourself being automatically kicked for not being on their list of safe players (these are people who won’t disconnect and ruin a game since there is no way for players to take the slots of those who leave). There are various other quick-fire games of some skill: in Sheep Tag, some players as sheep construct farms with narrow passages between them that the other players, the wolves, attempt to destroy in order to catch the sheep. If the sheep survive for a certain length of time (as long as they are not all captured, captured sheep can be released by teammates) then they win.

Then there are the roleplaying maps, my favourites. There are some fixed maps with clever methods for saving heroes so that games can be continued, featuring the usual simple quests and collectable equipment and skills. But it is the entirely flexible RP maps that I most enjoy. These have gone through several generations of names and improvements but the most commonly played at the moment seems to be Secrets of the Depths RP, or SotDRP, though they all work pretty much the same and in fact use much the same terrain or actual playing environment. In an RP game, the player uses various commands to create cities, towns, camps, armies, navies and heroic adventurers with no limits on resources. The game then has two clear aspects. The first, which is probably the one I prefer, is constructing bases and camps and other such niceties to set a backdrop for the story. By rotating, resizing and making invisible structures, intricate and attractive creations can be wrought. Then the actual roleplaying begins, which is effectively like DnD or Exalted with props and effects. The system allows you to name and speak as characters, and while it may seem like an odd way of telling a story it actually turns out to be a great deal of fun, especially when it is with people you couldn’t conveniently meet up with otherwise. The crashes, then, stem from the limitations of Warcraft III as a game. Because RP maps are such a massive hack, Warcraft III’s saving of multiplayer games (a feature absent from many other games which is a shame) doesn’t work fantastically well. And if someone disconnects, that is it: there is no way to get them back in. So the dissapointment stems from losing all the building done, which can take several hours. But I intend to push on with the recurring plot a friend and I have established.

Despite the hardened geeks of freenode staff heckling me as an Apple fanboy who was buying a locked down device for a ridiculous amount of money, my experience so far has been extremely positive. The iPhone may be missing a lot of features (its camera is of low quality compared to other phones and has no flash, it can’t forward text messages, it can’t send multimedia messages, it can’t bluetooth files around etc.) but what it does do it does so very well, and software features can be added later. In hardware terms it’s fantastic: a below-par camera doesn’t bother me as if I want to take photos properly I would use, er, an actual camera. So while there are things that I would change, things that can be changed in software updates I do hope Apple will roll out (which is likely given that now Google’s Android platform has arrived there is finally some smartphone competition to force Apple into improvements), I have in my pocket a fantastic little device. It is my web browser, SMSer, e-mail reader, music player, direction finder, IRC and SSH client, emergency torch (we had a power cut tonight so this was handy), Twitter client, notepad (although I still like having my trusty ‘collected notes’ commenplace book), clock/alarm/stopwatch/countdown, ping/whois utility, light distraction (simple games), eBook reader (not yet, I intend to look into this), RSS reader (this is one of the main reasons I got it, to try and keep up with blogs and things, and of course once you have the web a world of opportunity is opened. Having all this with me all the time is great.

I could blah for ages about all of the things I’ve just listed but I’ll try and keep to the more notable pros and cons. Firstly, what stands out? The touch-screen interface is very effective. Only very occasionally do I find the phone not doing what I want it to do and this is usually because I have my other hand touching the phone and pressing buttons without me realising. Everything flows together nicely and I am getting pretty fast with the on-screen keyboard. Even if it takes up half the screen during use, and is very easy to hit the wrong keys on, the auto-correct means I don’t go wrong very often, and it is learning things that I type frequently already, such as ‘fn’ for freenode which it would probably thechange to an actual two letter word for any other users. The IRC client that I have been using turns off auto-correct and the amount I rely on it very quickly becomes apparent: my messages to the SilentFlame channel last night were often extremely garbled. The lack of copy-and-paste abikity is a pain but software problems can be fixed, and with the ability to e-mail URLs and the like it’s not that bad. As shown in the picture attached to this paragraph, texting is done very well. Messages are sorted into a conversation view with whomever you have messaged. For me this is fantastic. Not only does it mean I no longer fail to understand replies to my messages sent after I have forgotten entirely what I wrote, but as a user of Gmail since 2004 I am obsessed with keeping archives of all messages so this makes me happy.

Since I’ve had the phone for over a week I have certainly experienced some less pleasant aspects, but as noted above these are mainly software related. The phone has crashed several times: hard reboots don’t always get all the downloaded applications working again, although they often do. Updating a particular app often fixes all the rest. In general the phone can be quite temperamental and slows down a lot at times for no visible reason. There are no background processes, meaning that I can’t stay connected to, say, Google Talk, and go and do something else as nothing can run unless it is actually on the screen. The built in e-mail client is rubbish (thankfully Google’s iPhone-adapted Gmail web-based app is brilliant (as shown next to this paragraph) so I can use that, but that is of course slower than a local program) as it doesn’t support threading at all so is utterly unusable for me as I have mailing lists clogging up my inbox (which is out of control right now, so sorry if an e-mail of yours still hasn’t been answered). Many people have complained about the e-mail client and it could definitely do with improving. The battery life of the phone is appalling when the web is used over WiFi or 3G as these both drain battery, but this is because battery technology just hasn’t caught up with transmission yet. In terms of off-phone issues, 3G coverage really isn’t fantastic so I am often reduced to dial-up Internet speeds. This is fine in my view for reading e-mail and RSS feeds, but it is a shame O2 don’t have better coverage. Being as the iPhone is Apple, I am forced into using iTunes to both activate, upgrade and backup the phone, and to download music onto it. iTunes is in my view a terrible piece of software that I personally find very hard to use, so I’m annoyed I have to use it, but I know a lot of people love it.

While the iPhone may be a great device, I’m obviously not keen at all on the locked down nature of it. As soon as people heard I was getting it, most of the school seemed to commence shouting me down as a consumerist and a capitalist, with my feeble defence of wanting it for a very specific purpose of web browsing not bearing much weight. Philosophically it is very unsound. It’s using a corporate operating system with Apple vetting all applications that can be installed on it. But while I would never choose this over a free alternative, these is not in this case an alternative. I run my computer on Ubuntu because it’s great both functionally and philosophically, but I have Windows installed because I have to in order to play games. I have the iPhone as it is the best choice if I want a phone that does all of the above. So I think I’m in a reasonable position, given the world I’m in.

Overall then, I think my £350 has been spent wisely as I have a great device that does what I expected and does it well, giving me something very useful to have around. Given that I spend my money on little else, I decided to go for it, and am pleased I did. I heartily recommend this to people who would make use of the web to the extent I do. If not, it’s not worth it, as it’s then just a fancy phone with a nice MP3 player.

I’ve also renamed my blog again, back to ‘Intellectual scribblings’ (it was once ‘XyrWeblog | Intellectual scribblings’ – gargh how horrible). This is not an expression of arrogance. It’s just a nice little phrase that I rather like and I think it at least reflects the aim of this blog, even if it doesn’t reflect the reality. This is a lot nicer than simply ‘Sean’s blog’ which doesn’t really hold any meaning at all. There are a few issues with this new theme that are worth pointing out: the artistic scribbled labels aren’t always visible and obvious (try posting a comment and you will see what I mean) and the text is a tad small. But I really like the notebook idea since I have taken to using a notebook regularly of late, and so I think I’ll stick with this for a while. Now let’s try actually writing some decent content – after I’ve fiddled with things like the link list and post categories and the like…

A few thanks are first in order. Thanks Google for running my blog for ages, thanks the WordPress team for the free software, and thanks Evan Eckard for the beautiful theme.