Slacker Nation: Part 2; or Origins

How does one become a slacker? Are slackers born or made? These might not be questions great thinkers ponder (I wonder if Aristotle was a slacker), but they are interesting nonetheless.

While I haven't done a comprehensive study on this, I know how I became a slacker. It happened in third grade. My teacher, Mrs. Butler, was teaching us double-digit subtraction; take the one ten and make ten ones, etc. I was always great at math, so this stuff was a breeze (31 minus 17? EASY! Give me something hard to do). She gave us a math test, and it had one section with five questions that looked something like this:

1) 43 minus 24


____

I wasn't sure what that line meant, so I did the math in my head and put my answer on the line. Easy stuff. Well, she marked all of my answers incorrect. Apparently, I didn't read the instructions, which said to show your work. With those incorrect answers, my score was low enough to warrant being put in the remedial group. I was pissed (well, as pissed as a third grader can get). I wanted nothing more than to be with those kids I knew I was smarter than, working on those "enrichment" worksheets with the tough problems (345 minus 167! Also, multiplication!). And yet, I was stuck with the remedial group, having stuff I already knew explained to me.

So I tuned out. Not consciously, of course. As an eight-year old, I still wanted to appease my parents in everything. I continued to pull down good grades (not that elementary school is tough) and be a good kid. But I never really had to try hard again (until sophomore year of high shcool), and because I "knew" that trying hard wouldn't really get me anything, I didn't. I spent class time doodling (8th grade social studies), talking (honors English), sleeping (AP Chemistry), or not present (honors American History).

Yet I graduated with a 3.85 GPA. All I was subconsciously learning was to work the bare minimum to get by. (Fortunately, college was able to coax a lot out of me. Learning that I wasn't the smartest man alive helped me focus on work I didn't like.) Are all slackers created by nuture? Or does nature take a part? I don't know.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of Slacker Nation.

For Part 1 of Slacker Nation, click here.

Whoa... I bought a house?

Yeah, it's still sinking in that I actually bought a house. While we haven't done anything yet except push paper around, things feel like they're moving wicked fast.

Anyway, I've been caught up with house stuff and selling things on eBay. Also, Annie's grandmother is in the hospital, so we've been visiting her every night this 
week. 

This weekend I'll be busy again. House stuff plus apartment stuff. Maybe I'll get to the website.

Big News

I bought a house!

Well, I put an offer down that was accepted. It's going to be close to two months before we "close" and therefore own the house (or rather, the bank owns it and lets us pay them for 30 years). Suffice it to say, I'm excited!

Also, because of Easter and the home buying stuff, I didn't have time to work on part 2 of my Slacker Nation series. I'll attempt to hammer that out this week.

Slacker Nation: Part 1; or, The Definition

When I was young, adults made a big deal about slackers. They would conjure up images of a guy with longish hair (only long because he doesn't care about cutting it) with baggy, dirty pants (why wash clothes? They'll just get dirty again) who does every task to the minimum (so he can get back to "slacking"). I was told that becoming this man, this slacker, was the worst possible outcome of my life. I was young and impressionable, so I believed this.

Flash forward to high school. I took mostly honors and AP classes, but many of them were not hard. My honors history class was one of these. The teacher was smart and good, but he believed in homework. I don't, so I didn't do it. I got A's on all the tests, essays, and projects, but zeroes on all the homework, resulting in a B in the class. I tried to do the homework one time. I looked at the front page of the packet. On top was a big map of North and South America. The first question was "Mark on the map the location of the Panama Canal." This was a junior year honors history class. I threw out the packet. Did this behavior make me a slacker? I could've gotten an A easily if I had done the homework. But to me doing this homework was a complete and utter waste of my time. I'd rather read history books (which I did, often). I was troubled by this for a time, but never troubled enough to change my ways.

And now, present day. If you've read some of the past posts here, you'll see that sometimes I'm just unmotivated to do things. However, I'll go to town on certain things, like the cell-phone negotiation and the EBay stuff. Why do I have no problem working on these things, yet getting myself to write the basis for my website is hard as hell? A few years ago, I found an interesting article online called the Slacker Manifesto (pdf). The author brings up a few interesting points, but this is the most important one: slackers work hard only on what interests them (as opposed to Type-A people who can work their ass off on anything). This theory direction contradicts the message sent by my parents when I was young. I can be a slacker and still be a productive member of society. Sweet.

Stand by for Part 2 of this series, yet to be subtitled, where I discuss something else about slackers.

Too tired to be lazy

Annie goes to sleep before I do, but for maximum cuteness, I get in bed with her until she falls asleep (or until I fall asleep and start snoring, whereupon Annie wakes me up and kicks me out). Last night she took a while to fall asleep, so I actually fell asleep several times before she did. When I finally got out of bed, I was a slug. I wanted to not get up, but I had to feed the cat, turn off the TV and lights, etc. So reluctantly I got up.

I could not get myself to do anything constructive, not even playing video games. So that sucked. I managed to check my ebay auctions and fantasy scores, but that's about it.

Do the Dragon

I decided to relax last night. After two days of two-hour-plus of working on EBay items, I decided that I'm entitled to some FFVIA. Too bad I stayed up until something like 12:30AM playing it. It's just so addictive!

I'm off to my semi-annual performance review in a bit. Wish me luck, me! ("Good luck, me!")

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's Ebay

I spent about 2 hours last night taking more photos of my magic cards and resizing them, but I finally got three auctions up. Check them out here:

Taiga, revised
Birds of Paradise, revised and frouth edition
Everything else, revised, fourth edition, the dark, ice age, fallen empires, and antiquities

I had a Fork I was going to sell, but John, who's been so helpful to me regarding card value and what to do with these auctions, wants it. So I'm selling it to him. Sorry guys.

I really want to play some Castlevania:Symphony of the Night tonight, but I have to do this whole process with my two GBAs and my original XBox. Good thing I finally got past the bottleneck in FFVI I was at.

Single Tasking

"Single Tasking" is an idea I produced for myself one morning last week.

When I get to work in the morning, I typically check the New York Post online for new Yankees articles. I also check a few webcomics. Sometimes those sites will link to other sites I want to check out. I'll fire up Visual Studio and Query Analyzer, bounce between them and Opera, then open Firefox for my FF-specific stuff. As a result, I do a lot of things, but I'm not terribly efficient at them. Even when I say "Enough!" and close FF and Opera, I still have multiple work things going on at once.

So I decided to say "Here's the feature/bug/whatever I'm working on, work on it til it's finished." I have to fight myself hard to not think about other things or check email or whatever, but I'll get it done. Then I have to repeat the process. It's totally against my nature to do this for some things (like writing an SQL controller class for my .NET app); I've always found decent productivity while having a TV on tuned to a movie that just came on that I've seen before (more on this later). However, that approach doesn't work when working on code.

After producing this idea, I realized that I'm totally not the first to discover it. ThatVoodooYouDo covered an idea I've been trying to incorporate into my single tasking. Steve Pavlina (that crazy dude) covers an idea called "Timeboxing" (sort of the inspiration for this blog) which sorta ties in with this.

Nevertheless, I've found my highest level of productivity on code during single tasking. How about you?

Day whatever: New approach

Firstly, my activity since last update:

Nothing except last night, when I spent about two hours organizing and photographing my Magic Cards for impending EBay auction. Very tedious, but I stand to make anywhere from $40 to $120 from it, and those cards were just sitting in the closet, so it's free cash really.

Secondly, my protocol:

Obviously, I missed posting most of last week. I began to found posting here somewhat tedious, especially with the format I was using. It's not like all this needs to be machine readable (yet!). Maybe I'll write a webapp on my website (when I finally write it) to handle all that crap for me. But for now I'm going to just post what I do and not worry about "success" or "failure" or all that crap.

Fair enough?

Day 23: I'm Back in the Game

For about 1.5 hours last night, I worked on my site while watching Futurama and Family Guy. While I don't work at peak productivity while watching TV (obviously), I had already seen the three episodes, and so they didn't distract me as much. I worked mostly in CSS for the layout. I got a basic column layout setup with some decent colors. This was so important for me because now my test pages don't look like ass. Booya.

Date: 3/21/07
Status: Success
Project: Website
Time: 90 minutes with TV, so likely 30-45 minutes actual

Handling DBNull in .NET

The following is an email I sent to my development department. I found the basis for this code somewhere else on the interweb, but I can't find the link. I do not claim this as my own invention, especially since the functionality is built into .NET.

If you're like me, you've come across the issue of being unable to cast System.DBNull to any datatype. To get around this, I would check for DBNull, then conditionally do the cast: ' assuming "row" is a datarow with data from the SQL Server Dim office_code As Integer If Not row("office_code") Is System.DBNull.Value Then office_code = CInt(row("office_code")) End If This gets quite verbose, especially if you have many columns. Instead, using the "Of" keyword, we can create a generic-typed function that works just like TryCast works but works for reference and value types and handles DBNull: Private Function SafelyConvertFromDBNull(Of thisType)(ByVal item As Object) As thisType If item Is System.DBNull.Value Then item = Nothing End If Return CType(item, thisType) End Function Which is called like so: Dim office_code As Integer = SafelyConvertFromDBNull(Of Integer)(row("office_code")) Dim partner_name As String = SafelyConvertFromDBNull(Of String)(row("partner_name")) Dim start_date As Date = SafelyConvertFromDBNull(Of Date)(row("start_date")) Dim monthly_revenue As Decimal = SafelyConvertFromDBNull(Of Decimal)(row("monthly_revenue")) This function saved me many lines of code, so I thought I'd share it with you all.

Cincinnati, the City of Kings

This past weekend I was in Cincinnati at a wedding, so I gave myself a pass there. Monday and Tuesday though... wark! Monday I was still too tired from the trip, and Tuesday I was over at Eric's until 11:30 or so.

Also, I'm adding a "reason" field to all failed days. Should make the data more meaningful.

Date: 3/19/07 (Day 21)
Status: Failed
Reason: tired

Date: 3/20/07 (Day 22)
Status: Failed
Reason: social

Teacher, May I Be Excused?

I had a little run in with my car yesterday... at the mall at 8:30PM, it didn't start. AAA shows up 1.5 hours later, but the car doesn't need a jump (I figured that, something else was broken), and the driver can't fit his flatbed into the garage. 1.5 hours after that, a tow truck arrives. The driver, Artie, asks me to start it so he can hear what it sounds like. Of course, it starts right up. It looks like either the solenoid is corroded and needs to be replaced, or some other wire is loose or corroded.

End result: I left the house at 7:30PM, didn't return until 12:30AM. I am excused from being productive.

Day 20: Booya

With a little help from Eric, I got a serious good start on my Rails website. I pretty much forgot everything I knew about Rails, so Eric had to basically hold my hand through some excruciatingly basic stuff. However, now I have a basic working app! Wahoo! Eric's kickstart should be enough to get me going.

Go on over and give him some love; he's at the Mill Industries link over on the left.

Date: 3/13/07
Status: Success
Project: Website
Time: ~120 minutes

Day 19: A Conundrum

Last night I did several errands with Annie. We went to Petco, Stop & Shop, and CVS, three stores in pretty much exactly opposite directions from each other (spare me your geometric diatribes!). It took us about two hours, maybe two point five. So does this count as meeting my goal?

I'm going to take a step back. My original purpose for the goals was to get me to do web development (and some other projects I might not otherwise do) on my own time. I think I've somewhat fallen from that, given that my last three or four successful days were not web dev.

So where do errands fit? I don't know. I'm still in trial mode here, so I'm not going to refine my parameters for success yet. Maybe around day 30 or 45.

Date: 3/12/07
Status: Failure

It's Been A Long Time, Getting From There to Here

So I missed a few posts. No excuse for Wednesday or Thursday. I spent this weekend in New Jersey with my family, so I excused myself for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

So on Thursday I called my cell phone company back. The rep managed to give me a $20 credit towards a phone purchase, which finally tipped the deal. The rep told me I couldn't order the phone over the phone, but he would call the local stores to see if they had one. They did, so I went to the store that night to buy the phone. Booya!

Then on Friday I called back to get all the features activated. Now, all of a sudden, the rep is having trouble giving me the $3/month texting for free. So I escalate. The supervisor says he's never heard of this 'code' (they call all their plans codes, because they just put a code in their application). He says he'll file a ticket for his engineering team (think me, but working at a cell-phone company) and call me back on Tuesday (tomorrow). He also mentions a "buyer's remorse" program, which says that I can go back on everything within 14 days of purchase. If they can't give me the $3/month plan for nothing, then I'm out.

Date: 3/7/07 (Day 17)
Status: Failure

Date: 3/8/07 (Day 18)
Status: Success
Project: Cell-phone negotiations
Time: ~45 minutes

Dates: 3/9/07-3/11/07
Status: In NJ

Day 16: Boxing a Glacier

I dueled with the my cell phone company's retention department again yesterday for close to an hour. We're finally starting to get some progress. They won't budge on the price of the phone, and they've been offering me "unadvertised" data and text message plans. While these deals are attractive to me because they're cheaper, they remove certain features. For example, they offered a cheaper text message plan that did not include picture messages. Now, my Sidekick II can't send picture messages, so I've never felt their absence. However, I don't like being restricted. Also, it's clear from the conversations I've had that the rep is just looking through a list of plans and telling me about them.

The dynamic changed last night when the rep put my on hold. He came back and was prepared to offer me the $3/month text messaging plan for free. This offer was in response to my saying "If you could just knock $5/month off the total cost, I'd sign on the dotted line." Now we're actually starting to negotiate.

Date: 3/6/07
Status: Success
Project: Cell phone negotiation
Time: about 1 hour

Batch Update

Whoa, I got pretty behind in posting here. Here's the rundown:

Date: 3/2/07 (Day 12)
Status: Failed

Date: 3/3/07 (Day 13)
Status: Failed

Date 3/4/07 (Day 14)
Status: Success
Project: Haggling with T-Mobile
Time: ~45 minutes

Date: 3/5/07 (Day 15)
Status: Failure

I want to keep up logging my work, even if I fail a lot, because this is basically a beta test of my goals. We'll see how realistic they are.

Day 11: Tired

I did not meet my goal yesterday. I got home from work and was just exhausted. This may have not been a particularly wise decision, as tonight I'm going out with a friend for his birthday and likely will not be able to get anything done. We'll see.

I've got all my plans for my website in a Basecamp, and I set a milestone for myself. By this Tuesday, I need to have ten items done for my website, specifically for the user-account-system (UAS) and/or the blog. I'm currently at zero items.

Date: 3/1/07
Status: Failed.

Day 10: Booya

Last night I kicked ass. I called T-Mobile when I got home and spoke with a rep for about 15 minutes about my options. My plan is to collect competitors' offers, then come back to T-Mo with the offers and try to get them to flinch. Wish me luck.

Then I spent about 45 minutes working on my dev environment. I know this is taking way longer than it should, but I want to get it right. I have sqlite3 installed and working properly now (with a meaningful "create.sql" script); I just need to verify that RoR can connect to it and I'm ready to roll.

I credit my massive success to lack of distraction; rather than play FFVI on the subway home, I read my book. Once at home, I left the TV off (though I did blast FFVI music on my laptop). Without distractions, I rocked.

Date: 2/28/07
Status: Success
Project 1: Cell Phone dance
Time: 15 minutes
Project 2: Website
Time: 45 minutes