It’s been 18 months since I last reformated the hard drive of my laptop (main work machine) and reinstalled Windows. Oh, it’s going to be painful.

I’ve just started the process tonight, but I did a lot of prep work, like figuring out what programs were going to be brought over to the new installation, what settings I had set in various applications, etc.

There are a lot of resources out there for people who don’t do this every day. I found these links particularly helpful:

• PC World: How to Reinstall Windows Without Losing Your Data
• LifeHacker: Geek-to-Live: How to Format Your Hard Drive and Install Windows XP From Scratch
• Ultimate Flattening Pre-Checklist

I can already tell it’s going to be a long night, since the hardware is not visible yet, i.e., no sound card seen, no network adapters. Sigh. I hate doing this, but it has to be done every so often to clean out the gunk.

As you may recall from previous posts, I’m a graduate student, PhD, to be exact. This means that I’m pretty much self-employed, underpaid, stressed out about my lack of progress, and full of procrastination. Why? Because it’s actually pretty hard (dammit ;)) to do research, especially when you’re a “do-er”. I consider myself a “do-er”. Give me a job where there’s a ton of paperwork to be munched through, spreadsheets calculated, reports, written, even things coded, and I’m fine. Happy as a lark. Phone ringing? No problem. Voice mails, emails, in-person interruptions, fires to be put out? Hah, I chew on you for breakfast.

Research, on the other hand, is hard. I love what I’m doing, but it’s just a damn big thing that you can feel completely overwhelmed and not know what to start. I’ve been trying to get better by forcing myself to do something, anything, research related for several hours a day. Or impose fictitious deadlines for things, but that only works on reasonable sized chunks of stuff. The very nature of PhD research is that it’s so all-compassing, that you can’t even carve off a decent chunk to attach a deadline to.

Anyway, I’ve been working on a research proposal - theoretically a 10 or so page document explaining what problem I’m looking at and how I’m going to attack it. Get Lassie’s pawprint on that, and I’m off the races - just need to finish the actual research and Bob’s my uncle, or whatever. But the document hurts to write. I have a nice vague fuzzy notion of what I’m doing, a few key phrases floating about, an image to insert, and even a format to follow. But it’s one of those things that you just hate to write. Imagine having to come up with the mission and vision statement for your company. (I’ve done that too, and it’s just as painful).

I don’t have an actual deadline for this document - it will be done when it’s done. However, I do have a meeting with my supervisor tomorrow, and it’s the last time I’ll see him for a while, so I wanted to spend today working on the document. We discussed it two weeks ago, and it needed some work. But some of the work was on the icky bits, like the introduction, motivation, etc. So here, I am, nothing on my calendar today except this document revision, and I know that this is the only thing I really want to work on today. But I don’t really want to work on it at all.

So, out come all the tricks I can think of to keep myself on track for today. I’ve got an unschedule, a la “Now Habit” crowd, which I’ve been colouring in with pencil crayons. Green is good - time I’ve spent on the document. Yellow is breaks like lunch, dinner. Pink is me screwing around on the internet. I save black for when I completely fall off the wagon and end up really screwing around, not just lightly exploring the web.

I let myself do things like: work for 45 minutes, take 15 minutes off. Or, work for 45 minutes, take half an hour off. Read my book in between. Numerous coffee breaks. Check my mail or RSS feeds quickly, etc. I realize that multiple breaks of 15 or 30 minutes seems to defeat the purposes, but my goal was to keep starting over and over again, and even if I only got a paragraph or two hammered out in a session, well, that was more than I had done before.

What’s the conclusion? It actually worked. It’s not perfect, but I did manage to clock 6.5 hours of green work time and I have a document, that although a draft, and missing a related work section, is suitable for discussing with my supervisor. I feel exhausted, but somewhat happy. I do feel slightly regretful, because I did spend over 4 hours on breaks/procrastination/rewards. However, I’ve had days that started off badly, like today, where I sat down at my desk in the morning and immediately lost 1.5 hours. Unlike those bad days, today, I was able to kick myself in the ass and write for a bit. Then lose time, then write a bit, etc. etc.

So, what am I trying to say here? After all, I was only about 65% productive today, if you look at the total hours. However, I knew it would be a bad day, and this concept of continually starting, and continually rewarding myself, did get me through it. It’s a technique that I’m going to have to remember in the future, because I just *know* that there are going to be more of these days coming up

I’ve just finished reading Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information (amazon link). I picked it up because I’ve seen good things mentioned about it online, and I was wondering, “Who is this guru of excellent design, and what does he have to say?”

I originally wet my appetite with commentary from sites like these:

• Review from the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science
• Graphics and Web Design Based on Edward Tufte’s Principles

The links above were intriguing, so I checked out the book. I must say that it is an interesting read, but it’s much more of a coffee table book than a serious reference manual. I’m actually glad that I didn’t buy it myself, because I would only ever read it once. In it, Tufte spends a lot of time showing good and bad, and ugly, graphics, and dissecting what makes them good and bad, and ugly. If you were to read the second link above, you would get a lot of what the meaty part of the text is - the rest is commentary about specific examples.

I did enjoy reading the book, but as I said, it’s more of a coffee table book. In other words, it was a pleasure to read, and the graphs, both good and bad, are very interesting. However, I can’t say that I learned that much. Okay, it’s not good to lie in your graphs. Fine, I think I can figure that out. Tufte’s examples of graphs in modern media that stretch the truth (be it on purpose or because the authors of those graphs don’t realize what they’re doing wrong) is fascinating.

I was disappointed in the book as a reference manual because some of the advice that Tufte gives is impractical. For example:

• Don’t use graphs when a table suffices. He likes graphs when there is a lot of information, but not necessarily for smaller, say n=30, data points. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, I’m only dealing with a few things. I still like a nice little graph. Actually, more importantly, my supervisors like a little graph.
• Don’t waste ink on stupid stuff. (I’m paraphrasing here). For example, the axes of a graph are not necessarily important - try erasing parts of the axis that are not important, i.e., the axes line that is less than your smallest value, and greater than your largest value.

• This ends up producing a graph that looks like you’ve got a bad printer, i.e., you’re missing parts of your lines. (He also suggests that sometimes you can make do with a slightly offset line in places to emphasize things - I hate offset lines - looks like a cheap printer.)

That said, Tufte shows some amazing examples of wicked graphs. The most interesting ones are not purely quantitative in nature. For example, there’s a neat drawing of the life cycle of some kind of bug. Fascinating, but I wouldn’t have called it a “graph” per se. My most favourite one is a drawing showing the path that Napolean took on his way to Moscow, where a large tan line shows the size of his army, marching towards the right of the page. The graph also shows the return trip, and you can see how many soldiers have been lost, as the line gets smaller and smaller. The bottom axis of the graph is actually the temperature, showing that as it got colder, more and more soldiers died. I find this graph fascinating, especially because the dimensions involved include: time, direction, size of army, and temperature. In addition, it’s all placed on what looks like a map, showing major rivers, etc. etc. I would actually recommend taking the book out of the library, for this particular example alone.

One of my favourite older posts is called Ubiquitous Capture Tool at Your Fingertips - Tweaking for my Taste; in it, I describe how to use SlickRun to add bits of text to a scratch.txt file. There were some comments on that post about how to do this, while putting a blank line between each line of text.

I thought the solution was to use SlickRun’s @MULTI@ command; but that doesn’t actually work. Because one of the commands that you would be combining with the @MULTI@ takes a parameter, everything falls apart. So, busy girl that I am, I spent some time this morning trying to figure out how to beat SlickRun into submission.

The result - a new “.” command for putting text into the scratch.txt file. This command is basically the same as my old one, described in the older post, but it has an extra bit of goodness to push a blank line into the file afterwards.

Result

You end up with a text file that looks more like this:

07 Dec 06 9:52 - This is a line, which will be followed by a blank.

07 Dec 06 9:52 - Now, when I put this line in, I should see a blank above.

MagicWord

MagicWord: . <== or whatever name you like Filename: cmd
StartupPath: directory holding your scratch.txt file
Parameters: /c echo %date:~4% %time:~0,5% - $i$ >>scratch.txt & echo. >> scratch.txt

In the previous post, I explain what each most of the parameter line does. Here, I’ve just added a second command using the & command (from DOS). It was a guess on my part - you can use this command at the command line in DOS to string commands together. I just tried it here on a lark. But it works. Anyway, the & separates the two commands, the first being the original . command, putting the current date/time plus whatever you typed into the text file. The second command just echoes a blank line (yeah, “echo.” means blank line) into the scratch file. Don’t forget to use two angle brackets >>, which mean append, not one angle bracket >, which means overwrite.

Categories: GTD, scripts/batch, slickrun

There have been a couple of requests for the original expense template that came with EverNote. The easiest way to satisify these is just to export the template as an individual xml file, and post it for all to see. So, if you’ve somehow lost the original expense template, and want it back, download this xml file.

Enjoy.