Productivity Booster

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:09:40 -0700

I came up with a great way to increase my productivity recently. You need a locally-running Apache server for this to work most effectively.

First you need to set up a redirect for 404 requests to localhost. On my system I determined that DocumentRoot is /srv/http, so I set this up in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:

<Directory "/srv/http">
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Next I edited /srv/http/.htaccess to redirect 404's to a main index page:

ErrorDocument 404 /index.html

Then I created /srv/http/index.html:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>GET BACK TO WORK, YOU HOBO</title>
        <style type="text/css">
            html {
                background: #f00;
            }
            h1 {
                color: #0f0;
                font-family: sans-serif;
                text-align: center;
                margin-top: 100px;
                font-size: 64pt;
            }
        </style>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>GET BACK TO WORK, YOU HOBO</h1>
    </body>
</html>

Almost done; the final step is to edit /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 reddit.com www.reddit.com slashdot.org news.ycombinator.com

Now I see this. Image hidden behind a link to spare the eyes of my readers.

If this doesn't work, you could try making the background color flash quickly between red and green, or add a background MIDI and some animated GIFs.

Work

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:32:39 -0700

When I was in college, one of the guys in one of my classes was an older fellow who'd been working in the Real World for a while, and he asked me one day what kind of job I wanted after I graduated. I remember saying "I have no idea. Pretty much anything. If Microsoft drove up to my house with a truck full of money, I'd go work for them."

Looking back now, I was wrong. There really are more important things than money. I couldn't do a job I didn't thoroughly enjoy. Not for long anyways. I don't make as much money doing what I'm doing right now as I could be making elsewhere, but I like it. I like the atmosphere of working in a research setting. I can't imagine working in a corporate setting.

I feel really bad for people who work jobs that they hate. When I got out of college I worked for six months doing tech support over the phone for a residential satellite dish company. If not for the fact that I needed money to survive, I wouldn't have. Near the end I was considering going to live under a bridge somewhere. If faced with the choice, I'd probably rather dig ditches for a living than do that again.

If hell existed, for me hell would consist of being eternally bored. I've had jobs that required no thought, just mindless repetition of tasks that were slightly too complicated to get a computer or machine to do. I can't imagine a worse fate. I can feel my brains start to leak out of my ears after an hour of a boring task.

When you have a job where you have to play with data, as I do at times, it can sometimes start turning into that kind of boredom. But then I start writing programs to do all the mindless repetition for me. Instead of spending lots of time solving little problems and doing little tasks, I solve bigger, harder, much more interesting problems that incidentally solve lots of little problems at the same time.

Computers are useful tools for everyone. But in one sense, a computer is often a waste in the hands of anyone but a programmer. The way most people use computers is like using a powerful microscope as a hammer to pound in a nail. Any time you find yourself copying and pasting a bunch of things over and over for an hour, there's something wrong. Any time a human being is forced to do a linear search through a long list of ANYTHING on a computer screen, someone along the line has failed. There are so many of these little problems in most people's lives that a programmer can solve for people.

briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Work)

Productivity Booster

Work