I’m writing this blog post to relate the following:<\/p>\n
I’m planning a reading tour through the American Revolution, probably starting with Ideological Origins of the American Revolution<\/em>, by Bernard Bailyn. It\u00a0stood out most to me after perusing multiple<\/a> pages<\/a>\u00a0for<\/a> good<\/a>\u00a0starting<\/a> points.<\/p>\n Truthfully, I’m writing this blog post to relate why<\/em> I’m planning a reading tour through the American Revolution. It\u00a0was instigated by my sudden desire to get a grasp of the basics of the Revolution and the people and ideas around it.\u00a0That<\/em> came out of peeking\u00a0into an IRC channel full of my American friends. Which happened because I opened my chat terminal session. Because I’d just logged on to my server.<\/p>\n I logged onto the server to change my status page<\/a> from working.gif<\/a> to dancing.gif<\/a>. I was doing that because I had just visited my own blog and seen the status-page post on it. I visited to… write a brief post, about doctype vs DOCTYPE in html5 documents. I was writing that post to relate some\u00a0amusing and interesting facts that came out of researching it. [1<\/a>]<\/p>\n I found those facts after an instance of “DOCTYPE” in Bootstrap’s examples<\/a> set me off reading about why people prefer the different casings and whether they matter at all.<\/p>\n That’s all<\/em> because I sat down half an hour ago, thinking, “I should make a quick stab at building my list-webapp page, or at least think about it.” I’ve since been like a ping pong ball zooming back and forth between making and consuming, flung by inspiration and curiosity.<\/p>\n This is a normal pattern for me. I’m a bit curious if it’s normal for everyone, but I’ll stash that curiosity for now, because I’m onto something here. I fortunately know where my thoughts would usually lead: I’ve found a book, so I’ll try to find a copy to acquire. I know I’ll either never read it or take aeons to do so, so once I’ve got an ebook, I start looking for audio. If I haven’t wandered off.<\/p>\n I’d flounder at finding audio for a bit and end up researching text to speech options. My\u00a0probability of not being distracted into a wholly new line of thought by now is nil, but\u00a0if I\u00a0miraculously stay on-task I’ll\u00a0start trying to get the ebook\u00a0onto my phone, which mysteriously\u00a0does\u00a0better text to speech (for free) than my shiny\u00a0desktop computer.\u00a0Then I’d give up and resolve to return to it tomorrow.<\/p>\n But first, I would start to write a blog post about it.<\/p>\n The blog post would devolve into some vague call for a text-to-speech service, or a list-manager (to keep from getting so lost and distracted), or some unspecified knowledge tool that would help shorten a\u00a0cycle and increase the ratio of signal to noise\u00a0in my life. I’m not going to risk looking back through my old blog posts for prior art — I would spiral out of control! Rest assured, those posts exist.<\/p>\n And that’s where we’ll return for now. Thinking deeply about this will take some time, but for now, I feel like distraction of this sort\u00a0is a natural result of the mixture of curiosity and highly available information. Maybe it can be useful.<\/p>\n As usual, I still think that tools can help.<\/p>\n Something to help keep track of a\u00a0branching tree of ideas and mental states one encounters while researching \/ focused on other tasks would be useful.\u00a0A\u00a0list management tool feels like it’s worth trying for this. My vision is a little bit\u00a0like workflowy crossed with trello: not a single permanent list, nor a tool for moving items between many lists — more about easing management of the variety of lists we already make) would be amazing for this situation. I could make a “dec 28th research thoughts” list and throw things into them to scan for later, along with my “dec blog post ideas” list. Deleting either of those or swiftly clearing cruft from them and merging their content back into other collections should be easy.<\/p>\n Things to shorten the loop between thought and action, i.e.\u00a0“I want to be writing code for my website” to “I am in<\/em> the write\/test cycle, working in my website” would make me do more work, more often. Faster ways to open text editors already exist.\u00a0It definitely hurts me that my primary “simple web dev” environment is also my primary IRC environment — I may change that.<\/p>\n Shortening the loop between discovery and consumption would lessen the opportunities to wander off down intriguing candle-lit corridors and be a step on the path to superpowers. Quickening\u00a0“I want to read a book” to “I am listening to a good sounding voice reading that book at a good speed.” would likely result in monocle-level riches, and probably also in me being a gosh-darn\u00a0genius.<\/p>\n Tools to prevent distracting actions might also be worth considering, like search\/social\/new-context blockers, to keep me in-context when I want to focus. I’ve seriously considered cancelling my home internet connection, and I feel that the argument for it gets stronger by the day.<\/p>\n So, ra ra ra, I’ll go make the tools or whatever. When it’s not 4:00 AM, and when I’m actually able to get past the attractive nuisance of the distractions available to curious minds on the internet.<\/p>\n Which is indistinguishable from a euphemism for never.<\/p>\n <\/a>1. I’ll get to<\/a> these<\/a> sometime<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m writing this blog post to relate the following: I’m planning a reading tour through the American Revolution, probably starting with Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by Bernard Bailyn. It\u00a0stood out most to me after perusing multiple pages\u00a0for good\u00a0starting points. Truthfully, I’m writing this blog post to relate why I’m planning a reading tour […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=854"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":875,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/854\/revisions\/875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Overwrought Introspection Section<\/h2>\n
Tools Considered Helpful<\/h2>\n
The Cycle Continues<\/h2>\n
Footnotes<\/h2>\n