I find that I am easily distracted.  Now maybe that is inherent in who I am, maybe it has come about because of my profession.  I started computers back when green screens were all the rage and remember encountering punched cards, algorithms, computer science and mainframes at about the same time.  Later I dealt with large-scale systems and then the micro revolution.

At the same time there is a lot of brain – speed thing in computing.  Computers do *not* work as fast as your brain and as a programmer you get used to single tasking for a while then ‘timing out’ as the computer does something.  During that time out frequently you will context switch to something else and believe me that all takes time!  Saving the stack, handling interrupts, managing the polling –> and that’s just for the hardware side, not the wetware side.  I find that PCs and distributed computing haven’t done anything to help at all – for instance I am using a wireless keyboard right now and the letter are appears with a perceptible delay as a I type.  It is really irritating and makes me distracted!

I’m also typing this while waiting for a virtual image to boot, so I can continue editing a vital work document – there, I just context switched and entered my password (which wasn’t in focus on my multi-OS desktop) – back again.  All of this training means that I find it real hard to focus on one job and take it though to completion.  Is this me, or is it my job which has degraded my ability to focus?

Just read about a trek desk – or treadmill desk where you work standing up and walking on a treadmill.  Sounds great if you can get one.  I think I might try and build one since my current desk takes up too much room in the home office and I need a refresh of the carpets and wall paint.  Still, one can dream on.

I walked past a muscled thug today in my home town.  He was smoking, chatting with mates, very young, and speaking on his phone.  As I passed he said “right-o son, see you some time then” on the phone and went back to talking to the others.  Now, this guy may be really nice and Actually a Good Bloke but it is all to easy to judge on outward appearances – and the whole shopping street seemed filled with aimless people whom I imagine find it hard to get work, subsist on government support, and generally live lives of quiet desperation.

I also saw some nail clippers on sale for £336.

That was in one of the more expensive streets in London filled with elegant people and lots of expensive cars.  More than anything else this sums up Britain for me; opulent splendor and extreme privilege alongside abject miserable lives.  Sure, everyone has basic health services and education yet ‘the system’ doesn’t seem to inspire a whole lot of initiative.  If anyone aspires to much it mostly seems to be winning the lottery or Making It Big on some celebrity show.  What about celebrating hard work, genuine thrift, kindness and just plain ordinariness?  There will always be super-rich but most people’s paths to happiness  likely won’t involve becoming them.

I’d love to be able to monitor everything: spending, power consumption, words read and so on – and then graph, understand and analyse it all.  I did this for a while in my job as I graphed every business trip made for a period of six years and included cost, places visited, value to my company and so on.  It was interesting (and impressed one boss) but never led me anywhere special.  Most likely I’m on the Asperger’s spectrum somewhere and love lots of data and analytics however sometime it’s all for a good purpose.

The most recent one is my Current Cost energy monitor.  While it has been helpful in some ways I need a greater level of detail and have found a way to use Pachube’s data feed to further analyse the costs to my home of electricity.  Some surprising things included the nature of the refrigerator – it keeps turning on and off 24 hours a day – and how much certain things were consuming around the house.  But, like my senior colleague at work who innovates in this area for a living, I want to break into that large bulk of ‘unknown’ costs.  I’m currently using 9 Individual Appliance Monitors around the house and even that only give part of the picture as things like the oven take direct feeds from the consumer distribution panel, so I can’t monitor their usage directly but only infer what it may be. You can see my usage on the graph at the right.