I’m afraid this is not only an update as the title suggests, but also a confession. At the start of this year, I made three resolutions. So far I’ve kept to about one and a half. It’s not that I’ve lost sight of my goals – if anything I want them more than ever. However, time constraints are a big issue. I had no other choice but to put learning the three things (Spanish, Guitar, Keyboard) on hold for two weeks while I did my exams. Fortunately the strategy paid off in exam results, but it does mean my progress has been virtually non-existent for the two instruments. Spanish has fared a little better, but it is still no bastion of progress.
However, I have now drawn up a timetable for my (rough) daily schedule. I didn’t (and still don’t) like to do that, but I think it is a necessary evil to keep myself focused. Normally I prefer the ad hoc arrangement of working – work on what I want when it feels best to. Though it has served me well in the past I don’t think I can afford that particular luxury with the high goals I have set myself.
This is the first evening I’ve tried sticking to the schedule, which I’ve mostly achieved. I’ve done work on all three areas, gotten some web design done (which I can get paid for thankfully) and sorted a few other things. And it’s still only just now half ten! Normally I’d get to 1 o’clock and have nothing done. ‘Course I haven’t read Slashdot today, which helps tremendously.
In fact, I’m thinking of creating a couple of scripts to further curtail any temptations of procrastination. My thought is to have a script (say, work.sh) run at startup (and perhaps cron’d every 10 minutes if I felt particularly determined) that modifies my hosts file thusly:
slashdot.org 127.0.0.1
facebook.com 127.0.0.1
penny-arcade.com 127.0.0.1
phdcomics.com 127.0.0.1
etc etc
I would of course have a corresponding script that I could run on demand (oh… say, procrastinate_on.sh) that replaced the hosts file with a proper one. We’ll see if that becomes necessary in the next few days.
The only other things I need to mention in this update is that: 1) I’ve changed the blog’s tagline – like I’m sure y’all noticed; and 2) Dr Dave’s SK2 has eaten (at time of writing a relatively whopping 262 spams. Not bad amount of spam for a blog that I’ve not promoted at all. And just so you know, that’s not 262 comments nuked – that’s 262 *spam runs* of comments nuked. The comments number in the high hundreds to probably over a thousand**. Food (if you can call Spam food) for thought.
Update: I was wrong. Quite wrong. Well okay, very very very wrong. There have actually been (at time of update) 5 406 comments to this blog so far. How many of those are legit? 65. Sixty-fucking-five. That’s 1.2%, folks. What’s more, this blog is hosted on my home connection, which is possibly no longer a good idea. I’m going to purge the comment table of all spams since it is now about 9-10Mb in size, and possibly move the blog in entirety. Watch this space.
One day I’ll start a jihad crusade, uh, campaign against botnet’d computers. Fix them and you’ve solved a big chunk of spam problems.