Understanding Nothing

It used to be that when I returned from a week away, I’d have thousands of emails to work my way through – even after deleting spam. I’d also have a few web sites to visit to catch up on news.

These days it’s reversed. I was pretty much done with my mail in an hour or so, but it took me all morning to catch up on my weblog reading.

There’s two main reasons why this seems to have happened.

Firstly, I had virtually no work related mail to read. There’s only 4 of us working for Kasei, and we were all at the same conference.

Secondly, I don’t read anywhere near as many mailing lists as I used to. I used to keep up with technical topics via mailing lists. This took a lot of time, even on lists where I delete entire threads without reading them, based on the subject line.

These days, I tend to get the same information (or at least the highlights) from the weblogs I read. I still have to skip over information I’m not so interested in – but not anywhere near as much of it. And I also get a lot of pointers to stuff that would never have appeared on tightly-focussed mailing lists.

I can’t help but fear, however, that unless I refine this approach some more, this time next year I’d take a full day to catch up (even in skim mode). I’m adding 2 or 3 people to my blogroll every week on average, and only dropping people at the rate of 1 every couple of weeks.

When I read them “in real time”, via my regularly refreshed “last updated” blogroll, it’s not too hard to keep on top off. But when you don’t read for a week, almost everyone has updated, and it’s not easy to handle.

I have no idea what the solution is.

I should mention that, for the first time in my life, I managed to go into the Ladies bathroom to relieve myself. You see, of all the words I looked up and learned before I set foot here, I forgot “Man” and “Woman”. I now know that Damen is not German for “men”.

What Casey neglects to mention in this post is that, when relating the story to us, he explained it as “I went to the wrong bathroom, because I needed to lick a German”.

He later claimed that he actually said “because I didn’t know a lick of German”, but he also tried to claim that “know a lick of” was a very Irish (or Ooirish?) phrase, so I’m not sure I believe him.

Whenever I teach a Dreamweaver or JavaScript class, few of the students can type. I usually spend a minute or two trying to convince them that being able to type will not only save them time and improve their accuracy, but will totally alter their relationship with the computer, giving them control and confidence that they currently lack. I don’t know how a two-finger typist could even consider programming.

Yet I know that relatively few will invest a small amount of time and money to get the big payoff. The willingness of human beings to act contrary to their own best interests never ceases to amaze me.

We were recently discussing the same thing with regards to programmers and editors. A programmer spends a huge amount of their working day interacting with an editor of some description. Most of the programmers I know use vi. But most vi users I’ve encountered learn more than the basic keystrokes and commands needed to get their work done – often using 2, 3, or even 10 times as many keystrokes as needed (I’m always shocked how many vi users will ‘right arrow’ their way to the end of a line, and then hit ‘a’ and ” to start typing a new line, and who are then amazed when I tell them that not only will ‘A’ start appending to the end of the current line, but that ‘o’ is even easier than ‘A’.

Of course, my own ‘vi’ knowledge is a little rusty too. I learnt most of what I know 10 year ago, when it really was ‘vi’, not new-fangled clones like ‘vim’. I’ve gladly switched to ‘vim’ a long time ago, mostly for multi-level undo, and syntax highlighting, but I’d never really gotten around to learning all the new fancy things you can do.

Now I’m trying to learn one new command a day. I’m not totally convinced by folding yet, and it’ll take me a while to get used to visual selections, but ‘gq’ is nice, and I’ve got great plans to integrate ctags with our configuration management system.

I wonder how many employers though would be prepared to send their employees on an ‘Advanced vi’ course. Somehow I don’t think there’d be very many…

(I got 84wpm on the test – but mostly because it doesn’t allow backspacing. My typing style involves lots of mistakes which are corrected very quickly!)