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By mike, 3 January 2010 5:36 am

So I’m a good day or so into the ‘cleanse’ and it’s going well so far. It’s actually a little scary how much more time I have in the day, just from cutting out twitter, facebook, and other “distraction” websites. Used to be, if I had downtime I’d just fire up Chrome and idly surf back and forth between sites. Lately, however, I fire up Chrome, realize there’s really nowhere else to go, close my laptop, and go do something productive. Or fire up Lightroom and work on some photos.

In a way, it’s kind of sad how easily I can develop productivity bad habits just from sheer repetition. I spend so much of my workday filling up the downtime with “distraction” websites that I continue the behavior at home. And if I ever wanna get to the levels that I do, I have to use my time more constructively. Cutting out these distractions helps a lot.

Not to mention the human connection. Without twitter and text, I’m actually calling people again. I’ve made more calls in the last three days than I had all December. It’s kinda cool, actually. I’d gotten to the point where I never called anyone. It was always just text. I kinda like going the opposite route.

As it turns out, there are some that think the whole “cleanse” thing is kinda stupid. I guess I can see that. Generally, cleanses are associated with releasing toxins and poisons from the body.  This is just communication.  May as well give up talking for a week.

If I was talking so much that it was getting in the way of other things, I just might.

In the end, though, I don’t really mind. People will think what they will. Ultimately, if I think it’s helping, thats all that really matters.

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By mike, 1 January 2010 7:06 pm

The other day, John Mayer (yes, that John Mayer) put forth a challenge for people to go on a “Digital Cleanse.” In short, it’s an online enema, the goal of which to ‘defragment’ our brains from all the inundation of little bits of chatter we’re filling it with constantly.

I decided to take him up on it, but not before modifying it a little. My brain can indeed stand to be defragmented, but it needs a little more work than that. Lately I’d found myself being even shorter of attention when working than normal. I would try to get through processing a batch of photos and barely five minutes would go by before I’d alt-tab out and check my email, or Facebook, or Twitter, or any other number of time-wasters that usually catch my eye.

There was no need for these distractions. I wasn’t going there with purpose. I was just doing it because I was bored. I was right in the middle of doing something, and the second my attention wandered, I’d fire up my browser and fritter away ten minutes for every five minutes I had spent working. I didn’t just need a defrag, I needed a low-level defrag.

These are the basic guidelines to Mayer’s “Digital Cleanse”

• no texting
• no tweeting
• no emailing from phone
• no social networking
• no entertainment/gossip sites

While this tends to capture the spirit of the cleanse, some of these things don’t really apply to me, and it misses a few of my own specific time sinks. Here, then, is my modified list of rules that I hope to adhere to for the next week:

• no texts, except to reply with “ok” — there’s no point in returning a text with a phone call just to say “okay.”
• no tweets, except when publicizing a new blog post — my tweet announcements are where most of my traffic comes from, sad as that is
• no email from phone
• no social networking and no online forums, except photography-related ones — I need to curb the browsing that wastes my time and increase the browsing that feeds the mind
• no blog surfing, except photography-related ones — I don’t really browse entertainment or gossip sites, but I read the hell out of Gizmodo, Engadget, io9, and Lifehacker. All four will be put on hold for the next week. I’ll read only photoblogs and photography resources.

Already it feels like an almost gargantuan task, but that only further cements how important it is that I do this and succeed. I never make phone calls anymore. I can’t work on something for more than a few minutes without my mind wandering. Given a choice between reading a book and idly surfing, I choose the latter. These are all very bad habits I need to break.

Hopefully, by the end of the cleanse I won’t just dive right back into the same old bad habits. Hopefully I’ll learn a little temperance and be a little more conscientious about how I spend my time.

And if not, hey — I can always run another defrag.

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By mike, 16 November 2009 4:38 pm

After some fiddling and tinkering, I finally managed to get a simple lightbox installed to let you view the images full-size. Currently it can only be launched via the text link right beside the timestamp, but I should hopefully figure out how to launch it from the image itself soon enough.

Currently the feature is available only on the main page and the View Post page. There is a minor bug in the lightbox where it will create a slideshow list of all the images linked on the main page. Not a huge issue, except that if I link to an image from inside a post, that image winds up in the queue. For example, if you were to click it from this main page you’d wind up with a world map, courtesy of one of my New York Skyline post below. Not a big deal, just a heads up.

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By mike, 1 September 2009 6:45 pm

Looks like my triumphant return to regular updates is on hold a wee bit longer. After weeks of waiting until I was all settled in at my new apartment, my computer arrived from San Francisco yesterday — more worse for wear than I would’ve liked.

Somehow, the United States Postal Service managed to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate my computer case. So much so that the steel frame is permanently dented in many locations. The power supply was somehow knocked loose, my dvd drive was shoved in about half an inch, and it’s scratched and dented all over. Thank god I had the foresight to remove the hard drive and carry it by hand. Still, my computer is in no shape to be running right now.

Luckily, it was insured before being sent out. I filed the claim last night, but word on the playground is that s.o.p. is to drag their feet for at least a week before eventually getting around to looking at the claim. I’ve been reading a lot of horror stories online that don’t fill me with much confidence. There was one story of a guy who insured five laptops for $3,000 total. The USPS lost the laptops, and two months after the claim was filed, they finally paid out for the five missing computers. A whopping $78.

In any case, I’ll try to keep updating every now and then by way of my tiny Dell Mini 9 netbook and straight-from-camera shots from my Lumix. But until I eventually get to replace the old girl, most of my major photo work is gonna be on hold.

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By mike, 4 August 2009 11:05 pm

Or should that be camera silence?

As I’m currently in the middle of a move to New York and my desktop computer is all packed away, my updates will be fairly few and far-between over the next couple of weeks. I’ll try to get some photos up by way of my Dell Mini 9, but as I only have eleven days left in San Francisco and a million things to do in those eleven days, I can’t make any promises.