I have a new-found enthusiasm for automating my job away#

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 23:45:58 +0000

I have a new-found enthusiasm for automating my job away. Yes, this is more overspill from "Life Hacks" at NotCon.

When I was a student and had nothing better^Wmore interesting to do, I'd spend ages messing with my computer trying to get an optimal environment together. Without any clear idea of what I was optimizing for, this was destined to be an infinitely deep time sink - or at least, one I only recovered from when I got a Real Job and had to start making decisions that involved some balance between "is this the Right Thing" and "can I ever finish it?". So, since then I've been kind of wary - and perhaps even overcautious - about spending time on anything that doesn't solve a fairly immediate problem. The classic example is my use of Sawfish - it's the first window manager I've used for more than a few months that has (what I believe to be) a competent scripting/extension language, and also the first that I simply haven't bothered configuring - in the four or five years I've been using it I haven't written more than a couple of lines of rep.

(Previous WMs have included [v]twm, fvwm, ctwm, and brief forays into scwm - which had possibly-guile-related 64 bit issues at the time I was using an Alpha on the desktop - and gwm, but that wasn't real lisp anyway)

This Must End. Or at least, I'm going to start getting a lot less hardline about it than I've tended to be in the past. I'm not sure if task #1 should be the TODO list, or whether I'm falling into the usual "making a list of stuff to do as an excuse to avoid doing any of it" symptom. A text file and an editor has actually worked pretty well, but it turns out to be n text files (per-project lists, multiple machines, etc) plus I need some way to cope with RT tickets as well. From the documentation it doesn't look like RT is exactly extensible "out the wazoo" (technical term) unless possibly you're the server admin. An RT-RSS gateway is one possibility.