I had heard of the technique before, as well as the Pragmatic Programmer book Pomodoro Technique Illustrated. Thanks to fellow geek Rachel Ober I was made aware of the free Pomodoro book, which I promply downloaded into the Books folder of my DropBox account making it seamlessly available on my work computer, laptop and iPhone without thinking.

I read through the first chapter to get a quick idea of how it’s done and gave it a try today. It went very well (I completed 8 pomodoros!) which I think is pretty good for my first stab. The experience didn’t come with out some revelations.

I had to curb my email checking

I had to shut off my email alerts. The little “ding” sound was just too distracting to hear every few minutes.  I could just close my email client but it’s Outlook and takes too much time to start up every time.

I had to curb my instant messaging

I had to shut off audio alerts for IM as well. Within 5 minutes of starting my first Pomodoro I got IMs from 5(!) people. It was really tempting to flip back to my IM client to see what people wanted but I managed to ignore them for another 20 minutes.

I could just shut off my IM client as well, but I do use it for work communication (as well as communicating with friends). I do have a work specific IM account, so I could always only allow co-workers to contact me through it.

I should make an effort to talk to people in person instead of IM. It does make me chuckle to think that I could potentially be interrupting somebody else’s Pomodoro though.

During my Pomodoros I set an away message mentioning that I was trying the Pomodoro Technique. In the future I might even link to the site.

I had to separate Pomodoro specific apps and sites from interruptive ones

For a brief period during the day I tried to keep my Pomodoro task and interruptive tasks on separate computers (my work desktop and my personal laptop) but security limitations of our wireless network made it impossible to only do work on my laptop.

Another approach to the above is to use Mac OS X’s Spaces feature to separate out the Pomodoro you’re working on from other interruptions. I used this today and it definitely helped keep me focused. I’m sure there’s a number of Windows equivalents.

Yet another little technique for separating out work from distractions is to use different browsers. In my case I was using Firefox for my Pomodoro work and Chrome for anything that would be interruptive but I didn’t want to close completely.

Questions

My experiment also left me with some questions, some which hopefully the rest of the free book will answer and others that I may find my own answers to over time:

• How do handle/categorize meetings? Track them? Ignore them? What if they’re more than 30 minutes long?
• How do you deal with dependencies? What happens when you can’t start your task until somebody completes something you’re relying on? Should you track this? I suspect that information could be useful.

After Effects

It’s funny how even throughout writing this blog post I was tempted by several interruptions but I found myself realizing they were all things that could wait a few minutes.

I used MacPorts to install Maven with the following:

sudo port install maven

I created a simple project using the following:

mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=org.spilth.rpgam -DartifactId=rpgam

And then tried to generate an Eclipse project file using:

cd rpgam
mvn eclipse:eclipse


The command failed with the following error in the output:

[WARNING] Unable to get resource ‘jline:jline:jar:0.9.1′ from repository central (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2): Specified destination directory cannot be created: /Users/brian/.m2/repository/jline/jline/0.9.1

It suggested I manually download and install jline. I was not down with this because, well, I thought Maven was supposed to take care of this stuff for me – I shouldn’t have to manually download and install stuff!

Upon looking in my ~/.m2/repository directory I noticed that some directories were owned by root and some by me. I’m not sure how or when this happened but I fixed it with the following:

sudo chown -R brian /Users/brian/.m2/

This fixed the problem and successfully created a .classpath and .project file for Eclipse.

I also started my own Maven cheat sheet.

Lastly, I learned that you an open a Finder window for the current directory from Terminal by using:

open .

Recently my friend Kim suggested we “do a project together” after talking about things like Make magazine and Arduino boards. We haven’t picked a project yet but we’ve started investing in learning about electronics in order to obtain the skills we need to build something.

I ended up ordering 3 books:

• Make: Electronics
• Programming Interactivity
• Getting Started with Arduino

Make: Electronics

In order to do the experiments in Chapter 1 of Make: Electronics I went to a store I haven’t voluntarily been to in years – Radio Shack. It was exciting to see all the various kinds of eletrical components and tools that I could potentially be playing with:

I ended up getting the majority of what I needed but the selection at the two Radio Shacks I went to were a little bit slim. I ordered what I was missing and much of the Chapter 2 items from the Radio Shack site instead. The Saturday night after X-mas I started trying out the experiments in the book. My Saturday nights are not normally this wild and crazy:

Today I re-created the above using the breadboard I got in my order. It’s definitely a lot easier than getting those little alligator clips to grab onto little wires:

I’m still learning and confused by a number of things, but hopefully more experimentation will bring things to light.

Programming Interactivity

I also started reading and skimming through Programming Interactivity which led me to the interactive multimedia language and environment called Processing. I soon realized that this language could possibly be used to implement another project I’ve been working on.

Continuous Integration is the practice of automatically compiling and testing code every time it changes. A Build Monitor presents the results of the compiling and testing, most simply with a Success or Failure message. These are often used as an information radiator, a way to casually inform people of the status of something. I’ve been wanting to build one to display the status of projects we’re running continuous integration builds with AntHill Pro at work. I’d like it to be generic enough to use with other CI tools like Hudson or CruiseControl.

I have a version I’ve been working on using Quartz Composer for the Mac:

But I realize it would be good to have a cross-platform solution that anybody could use. Thus I started putting together a version in Processing:

I finally also made the project publicly available by putting it up on GitHub: http://github.com/spilth/ci-build-monitor

Getting Started with Arduino

I flipped through this book a little bit but since I don’t have an Arduino yet, I can’t do too much with it. I want to make some progress with Make: Electronics before trying out any Arduino projects, if only to arm myself with knowledge so I don’t burn out the Arduino board.

My vacation started with a Saturday morning ride at Graham Hills Park. It was an early morning ride with my friend Kim that we managed to sneak in before some rain that day. We practiced a few areas but didn’t stick around too long so we wouldn’t get caught in the approaching rain. If it didn’t start raining I think we would’ve gone around a second time.

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent on the road to South Carolina. On Tuesday I stopped atWhite Clay Creek in Newark, Delaware to try and do some riding, but the trails were too muddy to really enjoy or respectfully ride on. I was looking forward to checking out the “skills trail” to try out a few technical obstacles but even the first one freaked me out, especially because I was by myself:

I arrived in Bluffton Wednesday afternoon and decided to kick off my week there with an evening road ride around the gated community my parents live in. It was also a nice chance to finally test out the helmet light I got a few weeks ago. The combination of the helmet light and a handlebar light worked very well, even in the foggy evening darkness.

Thursday morning I went for a ride with my dad at Pinckney Island, which I’m still not sure how to pronounce correctly. The ride was very pretty, but totally flat. I entertained myself by bunny hopping logs and practicing wheelies, enough so that I ended up breaking one of my pedals.

We stopped at Bluffton Bicycle Shop on the way back home to get me some new metal pedals and see if they knew about any local trails. This proved to be a fruitful stop because not only did I get fantastic new pedals but they also told me about a trail out on Hilton Head in Crossings Park. This place was just what I was looking for! Lots of thin, winding single-track and even a few hills and obstacles to tackle. I rode there are total of 5 times during my vacation.

Towards the end of the vacation my dad decided to give Crossings Park a try and did very well! He even humoured me by filming some footage of me in one of the more fun parts of the park.

My dad and I also checked out Tom Triplett Park in Pooler, GA but due to all the rain in the area it was full of puddles and hard to ride in. We lost the rail several times but I guess it was still a bit of an enjoyable.

One of the more surprising rides was the one my dad and I did at Folly Field Beach. I thought it would be really boring but it ended up being a lot of fun. There were plenty of things on the beach to bunny hop over and the sand helped give me an idea of how far I can hop (not very). There were also a few rocks and branches to traverse during the ride.

I’ve been using my Canon Vixia S HF10 to shoot all my mountain biking videos but I was getting really eager to pick up a helmet cam for some more exciting videos. I had debated buying the ContourHD 1080p Helmet Cam before my vacation but didn’t think it would arrive in time. After discovering the really fun trail at Crossings Park I decided to order one and have it shipped to my parents place. It works great and looks almost as good as the Vixia.

I ended up driving the entire 14 hours home in one day which left me a little wiped the following day. The weekend snow resulted in my two planned mountain bike rides up here being cancelled but it did give Kim and I the chance to go sledding at Rockwood Hall Park. I wanted to record some rides with my helmet cam but we ended up getting there late enough that it was to dark to record anything. It was also a lesson in proper sledding attire -

Graham Hills Park has been the best measurement of my mountain biking progress because it’s basically where I started riding and where I’ve done most of my rides. It’s also got one relentless climb that I’ve yet to do without resting, but the amount of resting has certainly gone down. There are also a number of technical sections that I used to shy away from and can now confidently ride through/across.

There’s still plenty of learn and accomplish but I’m quite happy with my progress so far.

This place is of course Mianus River Park. I’ve got to pause every time I say the name of the park, if only to collect my composure. Depending on the audience this is often followed by sentences such as:

• Mianus is actually really beautiful.
• There were a bunch of people in Mianus this weekend.
• It was actually too wet to ride in Mianus the other day.

And it’s quite true – it’s a beautiful place to ride and a lot of people (hikers, bikers, dog walkers) go there. And yes, it’s generally frowned upon to ride trails when they are muddy.

We stopped to practice a few technical parts of the trail but sadly I was not mentally prepared for them and didn’t attempt them, BUT I did have a bit of a realization about why. I find that I’m not so afraid of the hill or drop or whatever we’re attempting, but more concerned about what happens AFTER the rollover/drop. I’m afraid of what happens once I make it through the obstacle. Will I be going to fast? Will I lose control? Will I run into something else and not be ready for it?

I believe this feeling is from the fact that that’s exactly how I ended up breaking my ankle while trying to skateboard. I was pushing myself to go down a 6 foot ramp, which scared me, but ended up being alright at it. The problem was that I hurt myself after picking up too much speed from going down the ramp.

Now to move past that fear…

On Sunday I went to Cunningham Park in Queens, NY with a friend from one of my mountain biking meetup groups. It was my first time at Cunningham and I definitely would ride there a gain. No giant hills, really clear signs and lots of fun, winding single track. And it’s only about 35 minutes away.

We started off on the east side of the park and spent a good amount of time practicing on a “skinny”. Skinnies are long, narrow sections of track, often on logs or wooden boards. They can be a few inches to several feet over the ground. I managed to get across it a number of times and felt good about it, especially since a month ago I could barely get across a piece of flat wood on the ground.

I had my camera, so I once again video taped what we were doing.

Next we checked out a area of jumps and burms, but I don’t feel like I’m quite ready for jumps. It’s honestly not a primary interest of mine, but I wouldn’t mind learning how to do some jumping eventually.

After that we headed to the west side of the park where there was lots of cool, winding, jungle-like single track. On the way back out we tried the skinny a few more times and then made our way to the exit. Sushi at Mr. Wasabi in Queens topped off the evening. All in all a really good day of mountain biking.

I’m still mountain biking and still loving it. I’ve been trying to ride at least once a week. Evening rides are harder now, at least if I want to ride in the woods but I’m hoping to join a night ride later this week. I think I’ll need to pick up a better light though.

This past weekend I rode twice – once with the NYC MTB meetup group and once by myself. The Saturday ride with the group was excellent. We spent time practicing various technical bits at Sprain Ridge Park and a few of us even went for another ride afterwards. I brought my video camera and my new GorillaPod camera stand and took a bunch of footage of us.

The previous weekend I also rode with the NYC MTB group, that time in a long ride around Lewis Morris Park in Morristown, New Jersey. I really had to push myself that day, especially when I decided to go for a second loop with the group. I was definitely the slowest of the group but I managed to stay not too far behind. We did a bit of practicing on this ride as well, though not as much as this past weekend.

The weekend before that was a ride in Mianus River Park which was probably one of the best ride I’ve been on. That park is really beautiful and the guy leading the ride took us on a really nice route through Mianus. I’m glad I have it stored in my Garmin GPS.

Back in September I made the trek up to New Paltz, NY for mountain biking festival at Lake Minnewaska. I was initially disappointed because they had no single track but after seeing the following view my opinion changed completely.

And while I’m throwing all this video at your I should mention my friend Will’s new band
Gotham City Mashers. Here’s my favorite song of theirs so far:

You can see their entire recent gig at Don Hill’s:

The opener was The Anderson Council, who’s entire set I also taped:

After a lengthy project at work I finally put in for some vacation time and was determined to get myself up to FunSpot. It was a little over 5 hours away but after a recent drive to Florida and back that seemed like nothing. As long as I had some good music to listen to it wasn’t going to a long drive. I left around 10:30am and made good time with the help of iPhone’s Maps application. That is until I got about an hour away from Laconia.

That’s when my cell service suddenly disappeared. Given that it’s AT&T I was honestly surprised that it was with me for the majority of the trip. It’s at this point that I got a little lost but realized that I still had G-Map on my phone as well. I’ve complained about G-Map via Twitter before – my first time using it it sent me on the most roundabout route just to get back on the road I was originally on. The one upside it has versus Apple’s Maps application is that all the maps are stored on the phone so as long as you have GPS reception (which I get even when my cell service is dead) you are good to go. It did the same thing again where it wanted me to go down some side street, up another street, back up another street JUST to get back on the road I was already on, so I just ignored it this time and kept going straight. I eventually arrived at FunSpot and decided to check it out before looking for a hotel.

I went on a Tuesday so that place itself was pretty dead. At any point during my gaming there I didn’t see more than 10 people in the upstairs “museum” section of FunSpot. This meant it was pretty quiet and I wouldn’t look too foolish taking pictures of each game before I played it.

Before the trip I debated trying to play every game there at least once but with over 200 games it would’ve required at least 2 days straight playing video games (assuming about 5 minutes for each game, time for eating, bathroom trips) and while that might’ve been fun to document via video and such I don’t know that it would’ve been much fun. Instead I decided to just play the games that caught my eye. The ones that triggered memories just by looking at them. I got $10 worth of tokens and made my way through the arcade.

Marble Madness (Wikipedia | Killer List of Videogames | Marble Madness Homepage)

There was one game I definitely wanted to play before I left and I made it the first (and last) game I played at FunSpot. I remember playing this every time my family went to Fuddruckers (oh the naughty jokes we made about that name!) on Central Avenue in Yonkers when I was a kid. I’ve always been drawn to this game for some reason, so much so that I eventually created a Marble Madness modification for Unreal Tournament called Marble Mania with the helper of an UnrealScript programmer a few years ago. I think I just loved the idea of an abstract geometric world and at the time I thought the graphics were pretty damn cool. It’s funny how over the years better resolutions and color depths seem like the best things could get.

The machine was in pretty good condition though the left speaker was being flakey and would turn on and off on it’s own, resulting in the music sometimes just blasting away in my face. If you know the music for Marble Madness you know that it can make you a bit tense and anxious while you’re playing, moreso at loud volumes. I only managed to make it to level 4 while playing but did end up knocking all the lower scoring players off the high score list. Still, my 24,000 score was nowhere near the 110,000+ scores of the top 4 spots. By the next day I was debating trying to obtain my own Marble Madness arcade machine so I could practice like some Steve Wiebe wannabe. I still may do it one day…

Dragon’s Lair (Wikipedia | Killer List of Videogames

Speaking of state of the art graphics, how much better could things get than actual cartoon animation in a video game?! Dragon’s Lair was the first in a line of laserdisc-based video games that, at the time, seemed pretty amazing. In truth it was nothing more that Memory + Choose Your Own Adventure really – an animation was played and you had to either push the joystick in the correct direction or press the buttons at the right moment. Doing so took you further in the storyline. You could lose a lot of quarters trying to memorize all the moves needed to finish the game.

I think my first exposure of this type of game was Cliff Hanger which my brother and I saw as kids at Kiawa Island in South Carolina. They might’ve had a Dragon’s Lair as well – it was a posh resort where hot dogs cost like $5 so they could afford to have two state of the art laserdisc games.

Unfortunately the audio level on this game was very low making it difficult to hear where I was supposed to in a certain direction. I didn’t last very long at all and didn’t feel like dumping too many tokens into it.

Krull (Wikipedia | Killer List of Videogames)

As if the movie Krull was enough exciting adventure for one person, apparently a video game was also made of this riveting story of a guy with a neat dagger-disc and annoyingly upbeat perspective on life. I never actually heard of the game until I saw it at FunSpot but wanted to give it a try considering how crappy the movie is.

Unlike the movie you actually get to use the Glaive for most of the game. The first level consists of you collecting the 5 pieces of it strewn across a boulder infested mountain. Once you have the weapon you can use the right joystick to fire it off in different directions. It seemed like you could fire up to 5 of them at a time but I wasn’t paying close enough attention. The next level has you saving soldiers in a forest, the next saving soldiers in a cave and then a level where you are trying to break your way through a set of hexagonal barriers constantly changing colors. You had to hit it when it was black or you glaives would get stuck in it. I sucked at that part. I gave the game another try later in the night but didn’t fare any better.

Continue? 10… 9… 8…

I was thinking I could squeeze all the games I played into one post but it’s turning out to be longer and more work than I thought it would be so I think it’s better to break this up into multiple posts.

Next time: Patrolling the moon buggy-style, bears looking for gems in castles (what?!), strong aversions to aliens and racing way too fast in a tube (no, not the london underground)