If you know me personally, you certainly know that I have some trouble managing my time. The way my brain works makes my attentions turn to certain pursuits over others, sometimes without a conscious thought on my behalf.

With this type of ‘disability’ comes a lot of loose ends, as well as issues involving relationships with customers, family and friends. Though I’m actively attempting to change my habits, things never seem to stick.

The way my passion works is a burst of sudden energy toward one topic, and my attentions can seem infinite and without speed bumps. Without fail, once the passion fades, I’m left with an empty husk where productivity should be, and things get left to rot in the background of my ever-changing mind. Truthfully, my mind is a scary place to live, with thousands upon thousands of connections running from one topic to a seemingly disparate topic of an entirely separate persuasion.

That being said, truly there are projects out there which I have started (quite a few come to mind, *cough* ZTTC *cough*) and are truly just relics of the spaghetti that is my thought process.
[A quick word about the irony of this post.  I started writing this on Thursday, August 28th, and only made it to this point.]

So, I’d like to list a few of my projects here, with some brief descriptions so that I can get things in order, and make small strides forward in each of their processes.

1. DiggNitty - This was a project that never made it anywhere, as using the name of Digg in any new service is against the copyright holder’s rights.  DiggNitty was to be started as the “nitty gritty” version of Digg, with more adult-themed sections and stories.  I was told very amiably that I could not use the name “Digg” in my site, and I’ve come to terms with the idea that they are just trying to protect their rights.  Diggnitty.com expires today, and I am going to let my hold on the domain lapse.  If someone out there wants to try their hand with this, be my guest.
2. Nostrus - Nostrus was to be a blog and content management system for websites.  I started this project in 2005, but after seeing how much spam can build up on a homebrew system, and running into enough other issues, it was abandoned.  I just use WordPress now, and stop worrying about the underlying code of the site.  Nostr.us expires on September 16th, and I’m unsure whether I want to keep it around for a future project, or just release it back to the wild, saving a few dollars a year in the process.
3. The Third Realm - The Third Realm was to be the home of Jaycen Poole’s artwork and rants.  For a while, it ran the Nostrus software.  After switching a few different servers, it was sidetracked, and no new content was being produced.  Jaycen has expressed the desire for a new blog under a different domain name.  Most likely, I will set it up using WordPress, thereby making things a lot easier for everyone.
4. Radioactive Computers - I guess you could say that this is the granddaddy of all of my failed projects.  Radioactive Computers was a company that I started with a coworker in 2004.  We did desktop support for individual and business customers, as well as running a hosting business with a dedicated server.  We also began running a Half Life 2: Deathmatch server, and created a fully-functional stats system with an online profile and forums.  This effort created the Radioactive Clan (rAc) which is still active today.

   After operating for about 2 years, the losses we were taking with the dedicated server were starting to hit home.  Both of us had fulltime jobs and growing families to take care of, so things became stagnate, and the business was lost.  The forums on the original site are still available in a read-only format.

5. Benjam.us - This was simply to be a place to post pictures of my son, for our families to see.  A set of about 20 pictures were posted, and nothing ever came of it. I still plan on doing something with this domain, but it’s unclear what at this point.
6. Amjebin - This domain never had a clear project associated with it, but I still own it nonetheless.  At one point, it was a wiki for me to keep track of things I was working on, but it became way too cumbersome for its own good.
7. I’m A Big Fat Loser - Before I joined Weight Watchers, I was trying to figure out a great way to lose weight, and create some sort of fun project along with that goal.  Originally, I was going to try to make a wager with the world, and bet that I could lose 50 pounds in some crazy short amount of time, and thereby win some sort of reward.  Alright, that’s kind of a weird idea, right?

   Although I have lost 25 pounds with Weight Watchers, I’m still 33 pounds away from my realistic goal weight.  I think if I can grab some more time, I might do this blog again, and try to at least chronicle my normal weight loss and keep track of my points and exercise and weight loss-oriented thoughts.

8. Western Maryland Think Tank - The Western Maryland Think Tank was going to be an invite-only forum for contemplating the large ideas for life, as well as the small things affecting life in this area.  It existed for a small time, but eventually faded into dust.  I would love to get this started up again, as I’ve recently resumed contact with a few of my intellectual friends.
9. Cranial Constructs - This is a new recruit to my army of incomplete ideas.  Cranial Constructs was to be a repository of some of my best ideas, so that I could put the ideas out into the world.  The thought was that because I’ve been getting less and less time to complete things, if I put the ideas out there in an open source type fashion, someone can pick them up and get them done, paying great justice to the concepts, without need for copyright, trademark and patent disputes on my end.It became painfully obvious, while I was trying to put the concepts into words and simple artwork, that each idea needed much more love than I was able to give it at the time.  I’m not going to include these projects in this roundup, but maybe I’ll go over them at a later date.

This is pretty much all of the ones that I feel comfortable sharing at this point.  But just from memory, I can think of at least 6 or 7 others that have been partially done with great enthusiasm, only to meet the wrong side of a backup folder.

I think I might do a spotlight series of posts, focusing on a new idea in each, and including bits of already completed work in order to try to work through things a bit better.  But, as I’ve said earlier in the post, most of the time I can’t be arsed to complete much of anything.

Tags: Rants, Travel, Uncategorized, daily review by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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Posting has been very sparse lately, as I’ve been working on signing up for classes for the Fall semester at Allegany College of Maryland. While I only have classes on Tuesday and Thursday, I’m hoping to find a full or part time “normal” job in order to try to round out our income for the rest of the month. We’re still a good bit away from being able to stay completely afloat while avoiding credit disasters, but everything seems to be moving in a better direction.

Speaking of moves in the right direction, or at least the general direction of right, Mozilla Labs has released a video of the Ubiquity Firefox Extension. Ubiquity brings to Firefox and the web what Quicksilver and GNOME Do have brought to the desktop in terms of productivity and time-saving methods of computing.

Ubiquity makes sharing things on the web, and more generally, getting things done much easier. As shown in the video, let’s take an idea and run with it. Say I want to meet a friend at a restaurant in town, the easiest way to show him the location of said restaurant would be to email him a link to Google Maps. That takes things way out of the context we want to have, and ends up proving more work for not only me, the sender, but also for my friend, the receiver.

What Ubiquity allows us to do is take that change of context and throw it out the window. It provides an easy interface for you to include a Google Map right in your email, as well as many of the other open API sites that could be easily used to provide relevant information. This allows us to send a full-context email, in which the receiver gets a map, reviews, a shared calendar, basically anything the sender can think of right in the comfort of his email client, eliminating unnecessary legwork which would need to be done in order for all of that information to be at his hands on the standard web.

This is an amazing step in the right direction, allowing plain English into an application to accomplish tasks that only Mashup gurus were able to do in the past. If you are interested, view the video here:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Thanks to Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders for pointing this out.

Tags: GTD, Rants, Uncategorized by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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I hate jellyfish.

That is all.

P.S. I now hate jellyfish AND Sting…

Tags: Rants, Uncategorized by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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Well, Thursday was a bit of a disappointment for us both.

We started driving at around 10:15pm on Wednesday night and, other than stopping for gas, drove through until we arrived at our hotel around 10:30am.  They let us check in early, so we hauled all of our stuff up here and I basically just passed out, after not having slept for 27 hours.

I woke up around 3:30pm, and it was raining.  What a bummer, we were planning on going out to the beach on our first day, but it’s thundering pretty bad.  So, we decided to shower and get ready, and we headed over to our favorite restaurant of the area, The Crab Shack.

I got the BBQ Ribs, and Myriah got the Half-and-Half with shrimp and crab legs.  We shared each of our dishes, as they are always monstrous.  After dinner, we walked around a bit, looked at the alligator pond, saw a few cats, and went into the bird house to see the Macaw’s and other Parrots.

We got in the car, and headed back to the hotel, and I decided I wanted ice cream, so we stopped at the ATM, then headed over to the “Sugar Shack” for some hand-dipped icecream.  Myriah got a chocolate malt, and I got a cookie dough scoop on a waffle cone.

We drove back to the hotel, and decided that since it wasn’t raining, and it was warm enough, maybe we should at least go walk on the beach, so we headed over (Myriah had finished her malt, I was still carrying my ice cream).  When we got there, we could see a visible divide in the sky where the thunderheads were moving in over the ocean.  It was really neat, one side a light grey, the other almost black.

Myriah saw one lone seagull, so she asked for a bit of my cone, and threw it to him.  As the cone chunk left her hand, 50 more seagulls showed up, staring at Myriah.  So, we fed them a few more chunks, and it started to rain really hard.

We made it back to the hotel and into the freezing air conditioning.

If only today would be any different, but it looks like the Weather Channel has other ideas for us:

Tags: Uncategorized by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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Lately I’ve been thinking about the way we interact with computers.  The concept of the keyboard and mouse is such an abstract idea, that I can understand why it’s daunting to new users.  While neural interfaces may be a bit far into the future, I think we can find a happy medium between the abstract concepts in use today and the ultimate in the future of computing.

Multi-touch
I think that current multi-touch technology (see iPhone or Microsoft Surface) is definitely a step in the right direction.  Being able to manipulate objects onscreen using your most recognizable input devices (i.e. fingers) is the way to go for current technology.

One major problem I have with multi-touch interfaces is that they still use archaic concepts for manipulating objects.  Instead of creating a system from the ground up, it’s basically a retrofit for a concept that’s been around since the 1950s.

While I understand the concepts and why they work with people’s minds, they were created originally to provide a basis for knowledge workers to switch from physical pen-and-paper systems.  The concept of files, folders and the desktop all stem from this original set of concepts.

Think of the Children
Have you ever tried to teach a child how to use a modern operating system?  A child goes through life learning things in an organic manner that reflects the inner workings of the human mind.

How do you teach a child, who has interacted with the world in a direct manner with immediate results, to learn this whole new world view set in a virtual environment?  Obviously, I’ve been asking myself this question while thinking about how to introduce my 2 year old to computers in the future.  Maybe by the time he’s ready, we’ll all be using whiz-bang multi-touch interfaces, and the idea will be moot.

Now, that said, of course I’m going to teach him about “modern” GUI concepts, and sit him down in front of a Linux or Mac OS X environment (I couldn’t imagine the damage he’d be able to do with Windows), and show him the importance of these concepts, as well as the abilities of the command line.

What to do?
It’s important to teach our children to draw a line between virtual worlds and the real world, but why does there have to be such a steep learning curve?

Where the “modern” GUI and even the multi-touch interfaces fall flat is in their ability to relate to real-world objects and situations.

What we need in interface design is a completely new set of concepts and core interactions.  Microsoft Surface and the iPhone may be steps in the right direction, but as I stated before, they are still built with the idea that you have once used these concepts in a normal keyboard-and-mouse context.

Interaction with virtual objects should be handled just as they are with physical objects to start with.  Our brains are not confined to learning in strict folder-and-file systems.  Our brains are extremely complex and capable relationship-driven machines.

More relationships, fewer abstract concepts.
This is where I see post-modern computer interfaces going over the next 10 years.  I realise that this kind of approach would require some high system requirements, but technology is growing at an astounding rate, and will surely be able to deal with the requirements of such a system in the near future.

Computers should, in the future, be based on natural concepts, rather than abstract concepts that take time to learn.

Just as the modern computer is based on abstract concepts, today’s learning systems are also based on age-old “tricks” to get our children to learn things that are needed in life.  Learning systems should be more organic, teaching through association rather than repetition.

There is a great deal of research and reading materials that take on these concepts, but they are far from being adopted as a core structure of our learning systems.

This is something that’s really piqued my interest lately, and I would love to go into some field or venture that takes on some or all of these concepts.

Tags: Rants, Uncategorized by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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I’ve been doing more work using my aging iBook G4, and I’ve come to miss one main thing that I get from my desktop: screen real estate.

The iBook maxes out at a 1024×768 resolution, and though that might have been amazingly convenient when the iBook was first released, now in the age of high resolution desktops and multiple monitors, it’s really just a pesky limitation.

The display physically can’t display anything more than 1024×768, so it seems that I’m stuck with switching spaces or dealing with apple-tabbing through windows in order to get anything done.

I realised that the one app that’s really taking up the most space on my desktop is Firefox. I could use the zoom feature of this wonderful browser to view web sites at a lot smaller zoom level, therefore saving a bit of screen real estate. The only real problem is that I would have to change the zoom level every time I open a new site.

That’s where NoSquint comes in. NoSquint is a Firefox extension that allows you to save a default zoom level for all pages, and even allows a list of certain pages to be configured to load at a separate zoom level on a site-by-site basis.

Now I’m browsing at 75% zoom level, and I’m able to keep my Firefox window much smaller, which allows me to better switch between applications while I’m working.

Tags: GTD, Uncategorized by Benjamin M. Strozykowski
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