Yesterday I got a haircut for the first time in, er, over a year, I think. I just haven’t had the money, so my roommate did it for me. He did a pretty good job, and I gave him a tip (“avoid sweets”).
Now I feel like the brain is working again. During this very hot 100°F summer, it’s been smothered by a thick coat, and it’s finally allowed to breathe, to air out.
This hampers my writing and my drawing. Right now, I’ve got to get the writing caught up. I’ve been brain dead for the last month, terrible timing after a bout of carpal tunnel syndrome. I’ve got to get things back on track and redeem myself.
I did some writing in my Vimwiki yesterday, some text description for my current R-rated comic strip. It wasn’t a whole lot, but I got a late start, and it’s a lot more than I’ve been getting done.
One problem I wind up with is getting into a series of mini-ruts. I’ll start a writing binge, and I disappear, I don’t touch Twitter or the blog for a while — especially if the writing is not going so well. I start Twittering, and tweeting expands to fill my life. I blog, and suddenly I’m nothing but a blogger.
You can see, it’s all very uneven. It’s not efficient, and I don’t do a good job of balancing work with social contact.
This morning I had an idea for a Vim start button! Vim is my text editor, by the way. The start button is a simple mapping of my F6 key.
By default, my Vim opens slightly smaller than the monitor, for when I’m simply dealing with text files, editing HTML, etc. When I’m ready for a complete session, however, I press my F6 start button: Vim maximizes to the full size of the monitor screen, opens Twitter (and reduces the entry line to maximize the messages), splits the screen and opens up my wiki on the right, then opens up one box under the writing wiki for a new blog post.
Here’s the line in my _vimrc file. It’ll be gobbledy to most of you who don’t know Vim.
map <F6> :set lines=999 columns=999<cr> :FriendsTwitter<cr> :resize 3<cr> <C-W>k<cr> :vnew C:\vimwiki\index.wiki<cr> <C-W>L<cr> :rightbelow new<cr> :resize 10:<cr> :set modifiable<cr> :BlogNew<cr>
This can be changed when conditions change. If I find Twitter and my wiki to be distracting in the same screen, I can (for example) edit F6 for a productivity session, and create a complimentary SHIFT-F6 for social contact. I think the basic concept is sound. But I hope this arrangement holds, because I would like to encourage myself to blog every day, check Twitter every so often and, of course, get my work done, and without going through the ceremony involved in opening up those different functions by hand.
