Junebug on a String

Hey, y’all. :)

I had grand plans of showing you all the insane stuff from this weekend, but I’m flippin’ exhausted.  It’s a good exhausted.  An exhausted where you flop back on the couch and exhale and think to yourself now THAT just TOTALLY ROCKED and I need a nap.

So instead, I’m going to let you talk back to me today.  I’m getting ready to gear up for this week’s 10kH stuff, and I’d love your feedback while I’m mapping out where to go from here.

Just come on over here and tell me a little bit aboutchoo.

As a little incentive, if you do it, I’ll throw your name in the hat for a little giftie at the end of the month.

:)

p.s.  There are three or four files in the monster kit that appear to be giving PCs fits.  I’m on it.  Hold tight, non-Macfolks, and I should have it fixed and re-uploaded by the end of tomorrow.  I’ll send y’all an email when it’s no longer being a pain.   (And people wonder why I say technology makes my eyes bleed…!)

You probably remember, if you’ve been reading all this from the beginning, that this was the app I picked to keep track of the time I’m spending on each of the projects.  I tried a few web apps, but didn’t like having to stop what I was doing and walk aaaaalll the way to the other side of the room to change tasks.  (Yes, I’m aware it’s the height of Lazy.  Lemmealone.)  And the interfaces were a little clunky.  And I was having trouble finding a web app that would keep both running totals *and* countdown times, blahblahblah.

Daily Tracker was my solution to that, at the time.  As you can see up there, it has a TON of features on it, including a bunch of different ways to track things, both related to and unrelated to the project.  Best part: you can have multiple timers running simultaneously, and exit the app.  It shows a little badge button with the number of active timers, while you go off and check email or whatever.  Nice.

Downside is that a running total across days was hard to get, unless I didn’t let it advance days.  It kept a DAILY running total, which was nice, but not an OVERALL one.  It was just kinda clunky, trying to figure out a workaround to make it work for my project, in specific.  (I *have*, though, been using it for other things, and I can tell you this — if you need to track something daily, this is the way to go.  And the programmers are very patient with tons of newbie questions, in my experience.)

Today, though, while I was doing something completely unrelated, I found this:

It’s called mi_Xpert and get this — it’s a TEN THOUSAND HOURS-SPECIFIC COUNTDOWN TIMER.

Did I say that loud enough?  Seriously.  10kH ready.  Also based on Gladwell’s book.  You can do multiple goals/end results/expertise areas, and you can add back time by clicking that little + sign up in the corner.  And it slowly ticks off the hours, rotating that little odometer in the middle there, so you can watch the numbers get bigger.  (I’m easily amused.  Sue me.)  Downside is that it does NOT allow you to run it in the background, which means that if you get a call, you’d better know where you were so you can add your hours/times as a backlogged time, or you lose it.  And your battery life better be full, or the phone/touch better be plugged in.  And you can only add back time to the minute, which, really, isn’t that bad of a drawback.  I just like being overly precise.

Under the “Details” button, you can see your progress percentage and total logged time, and how much you still have to go.  (I was all proud of how many hours I’d had in just over a week, only to find that I have 99.67% of the 10kH left to go.  Holy cow.)  You can also apparently set alarms, but for what, I’m not sure.  Maybe to remind you to eat and sleep?  (Says the girl still up and geeking over things at two a.m…..)

I like that you can add unlimited goals to this one, but it seems like that might be a little…unwise.  I can see their point — they say in the about info ,”(…) track teh time you spend working toward each (goal) — from lifelong aspirations to mundane tasks.  What will emerge is a big picture of personal progress, quantifying your dedication toward a variety of commitments.”

Admirable, but for the course of my own project, I don’t really care how many hours I spend doing dishes, because it’s not something I necessarily want mastery of.  I mean, really…other than those two british ladies from “How Clean Is Your House?”, who wants to be an expert on doing dishes?

This one’s easy to use, and I love the tracking.  But then I found this:

ANOTHER app, specifically devoted to keeping track of ten thousand hours.  It’s called, original as it is, “10000″.

No, really.  It is.  (That’s just like giving up, programmers!)

This one is slick.  Slick looking, and the functionality is kinda nifty.  It does run in the background in the one unscientific test I did, and I love that it date/timestamps every session.  (Something I liked about Daily Tracker.)  You can add in your backlogged hours, and as you go along, the little stars light up for you.  (Hey, it’s cute, and I’m a girl.)

It seems easier to use, until you find that this app?  Only tracks ONE THING.  Which, honestly, is probably how it SHOULD be.  Diverting your attention between two projects is a tough dance, and probably requires the record-keeping just to keep them straight.   For those running just one 10kH project, though, this would be like the PERFECT simple app.  Tells you elapsed time and time remaining, and really, that’s all you need.  Nice there’s something that will do it for you, from a programmer who actually understands WHY you’re keeping track. :)

Other downside — you can only have one past record.  So if you mess up and forget to start the timer (as I am wont to do), you have to delete the existing past-time record and add in both the OLD number of hours and the new number you forgot to timer.  Which means you’re back to math.

Both of those previous apps are $.99 on the appstore, versus $9.99 for Daily Tracker.  I wish I’d found them first.

HOWEVER…  (and you knew this was coming, right?)…there’s MORE.

I stumbled on, through a series of links that I can’t even tell you now how I found, this little puppy:

OMG OMG OMG.  I almost have no words, due to the GLEEing coming out of my head right now.

Level Me Up! is another $.99 app that uses the 10kH Rule for gaining skill proficiency and mastery.  Much like the other two, it keeps track of your time, but it does it in a unique, fun way.  Using a kind of RPG-like levelling system, it lets you set particular goal activities, and as you add time to each goal, it “levels you up” when you hit arbitrary marks.  For the first 1k hours, you level up one level for every 10 hours spent; for the so-called “Epic Levels” of 1k – 10K, you level up every 90 hours.  Each level up gives you a new title and the progress bar re-sets, like an XP bar in a game.

Even cooler, it interacts with your Facebook account and will post your level ups, if you’re so inclined.  It’s not quite like blogging your progress, but it works in a pinch, and it makes me squee.  Loudly.

The downside is major, though — it only counts one-hour increments, especially for backlogged time, so if you have more than one but less than two hours, it’ll only register one hour, even if it’s one hour and fifty-nine-point-five minutes.  You can get around it by starting the timer when you’re not actively working on your goal, and stopping it at the overage number of minutes, but it feels a little unnecessary, when giving us the option for less than a full-hour increment would be much easier, and probably wouldn’t take that much time from the programmers.

Upside — it allows for users, so if you’re the only one in your household with an iPhone/Touch, but you AND your partner are both doing the project, you can keep separate profiles.  It DOES run in the background, so you can keep time and use your phone, if you need to.

Also, the help files/about files have some great information on both determining your task goals and defining your skills, which most people seem to ask the most questions regarding.  There’s some good advice here.

It does not have a running countdown from 10,000, too, which was a little odd.  The only thing it shows you on those bars is how far you have to go before hitting the next level.  It means that if you want a running total, you’ll need to do the dreaded time-math manually.

But honestly?  Even if I won’t use this for my main tracker (I’m going with the mi_Xpert, for a lot of reasons mentioned above), I will TOTALLY be adding my time to this, since the levelling up is just so flippin’ cute.  It also makes these first hours feel like a race or a competition of some sort, which is motivating due to the small, new level rewards.  (What can I say?  I’m a geek and I’m easy.)

***

So after all this geeking out today, I logged precisely bupkiss for hours of my own.  A few minutes here and there, but nothing major.  Some friends were in town and I really needed the break, and after a day of yarn and cheesecake and bloated beaverwalruses with Mary Ann and Cindy (both of whom I wanted to throw in the trunk and bring home and keep forever and ever), I’m feeling completely revved up and ready for the next bout of hour-ing.

Tomorrow, however, is a planned hooky day.  Wednesdays are reserved for Lime & Violet Live, and I’ve got some non-project-related knitting that needs to get done, or at least progress beyond the first repeat, or it won’t be done in time for a certain cohost’s wedding…and it *needs* to be done.  That, and the day job has a few things for me to do.  And there are two hundred waiting emails in the box.  An Admin Day(tm) is in order.

But I’m still in app/tool SqueeMode.  Tracking is SO much easier to do with an application that was *made* for this very process…it’s just squeeworthy.

Does this mean I’m a total geek?

Yeah, yeah.  I know.

Long couple of days, folkses.  I thought I was going to post this last night, in fact, but even after taking a relatively long (for me) nap in the afternoon, I was asleep in the chair by 9:30, and curled up in bed by 10, which is pretty early for me.  (I’m blaming pollen.  The little sporethings are whooping my butt.)

Aside from the monsters, which have now all been redrawn in a higher DPI (the ones I showed you the other day were just for little sketches and were at web resolution, which doesn’t print all that well.  Not so good for digital designs that will eventually need to be printed somehow.), I ended up making all this stuff up there.  Apparently, my monsters live in a garden.  With buttons.  I’m okay with that.  :)

I *will* say that I’m really glad to be moving back in the direction of just hand-drawing stuff this week.  I like that stuff better, to be honest.  It’s much more work than, say, scanning in a pair of jeans for texture or vintage book text to cut into shapes, but it just feels more uniquely *mine* when I do it all this way.

Digital design totals for  Sunday and Monday:  4:14:31.

Scent has been CRAZY.  I’m at building time, meaning every spare second is spent with the wacom and the notebooks, sketching out not only WHERE things are, but WHAT they are — the building faces, who owns them, what goes on there.  I’m at the phase where I’m establishing setting in a very real and meaningful way, so that there’s a stage on which the characters and events can play.  Most of it’s been in my head for a very long time now (I can tell you where the genesis of the idea began — December 6th, 2008, hotel room in NC before I lived here, talking with a friend.  I can even tell you what the conversation was, and what sparked the idea, and show you, on paper, how it grew over a matter of hours.  Within a few weeks, I had the domain and just had to wait for some other things to get done before diving in.), which is why it’s INCREDIBLY EXCITING to watch it taking shape.

It’s not just about scent, Oak River.  It’s about story.  And while every place and person and event will *have* a scent, there are a ton of other things going on here, too.  Collaborative story-writing, yarn and knitting patterns, Lydia Foote and her awesome teas (*snort*), cookbooks and books of collected stories, and an apothecary full of bath stuff by Teri.  All I’m producing is the town, the stories, and the scents — but collaboratively, this thing is much huge-r than the sum of its parts, and it’s gonna be awesome.

I wasn’t kidding when I called it a scratch-and-sniff online interactive graphic novel.  Just sayin’.

Most of the past two days has been drawing and filling in holes on the downtown walking tour, but it’s added up to a LOT of time.  I mean A Lot.  Like, yesterday and the day before: 11:48:52′s worth of time.  And that’s WITH the other digital stuff going on.  If I wasn’t being smacked with the pollenhammer, there would probably have been more. :)

Speaking of ORT — huge thanks to Iko for figuring out (at a glance…she’s amazing with teh code of doom) what was wrong with the main index.  It should be displaying for everyone now, not just the firefoxers.

The Public Library’s still in progress, but it was too cute not to show.  (And it’s based on the public library of the town I grew up in, which was an old Carnegie Library from the early 1900s.  I was so sad when they built the new one far away from my house, but they turned this building into the arts center for a number of years, so it was okay in the end.  Last time I was home, it was an architectural firm, I believe, now.  *sigh* Progress…)

(Insert clunky subject-change HERE, because I haven’t had enough coffee for segues)

It’s been a little while since I got all meta on y’all.  And I want to get just a little bit meta for a second about the 10kH Project.

In March, I had THE PLAGUE.

Okay, fine, it was a respiratory infection.  But it might as well have been THE PLAGUE from as much as I was whining about it.  (I’m a reeeeally good whiner when I’m sick.  I can annoy a normal person at twenty paces.)  To be fair, it really was a sucky bout of PLAGUE.  The doctor tried to tell me that it was bronchitis, and that bronchitis was “going around”, and just to rest and drink lots of fluids, even when I tried to explain that no, I was pretty sure this was a respiratory infection.  (As a kid, I’d get these things.  Allergies would set them off, and I’d get LRIs a couple times a year.  It was to the point where, when I went to college, I could call my hometown doctor and tell him it was happening again and he’d call in a prescription over the phone.  I get them ALL THE TIME.  I KNOW what they ARE.)  Doctor here, not being familiar with my body’s penchant for getting all lung-chunky, didn’t listen to me.  (And, ironically enough, when I finally called my hometown doctor for antibiotics, it cleared up in two days.  GO FIGURE.  Grr.  I really wish doctors would *listen to their patients*.  Rant for another day.)

ANYWAY…

The reason I mention it is because for most of the month of March, I couldn’t breathe.  I spent large portions of my day laying in a chair (because laying down flat would make me cough up my toes), unable to do anything more than read and occasionally write fever-addled notes.  DayQuil was my friend AND my nemesis, because it meant I could breathe, but then, I was AWAKE (deserving of the all-caps) and still had no air capacity to DO much of anything.

To say that this sucked is an understatement.  For me, who is never still for very long anyway, to be unable to do much?  INSANE.   I was the very definition of Crazypants.

All I could do, literally, was read.  And read, I did.  I read blogs and ebooks, copious books on the kindle, every magazine in the house, and the entire Wizard of Oz series.  Even the crappy non-Baum volumes.  I had to do SOMETHING, and there’s only so many movies on Hulu that are worth spending time on.  :)

It was in mid-March when I read the article in Smashing Magazine about designing something every day.  The call to action.  I read all the blogs of the people participating,  including the ones that did it for a week or two and quit.  And I filed it away somewhere under “DO THIS SOMEDAY”, because I thought it was the world’s most awesome idea.  Sure, there are a ton of those do-something-every-day projects out there.  All that meant was that I could totally get on someone else’s bus and follow the rules they set down.  Which, to my fever-addled brain, sounded just fine.

So when I dug out Outliers again after Angie’s talk at ReneePearsonTV, it didn’t click at first that the Ten Thousand Hours postulate would be relevant to the Smashing call for design every day.  They seemed pretty separate — Gladwell just researched the work of other folks and reported back that the experts said it takes X number of hours to gain mastery/world-expert status.  And I thought that ten thousand hours was a WHOLE LOTTA TIME.  But maybe…

The two gelled in my head somehow.  Do something every day toward the predetermined time goal.  Advance your skills in a particular area through focused work and study, and maybe watch how the hours change as you go.  How your *skills* advance, as the hours start racking up.  I picked an arbitrary date (April 15th), and started talking to y’all about it.

But I want to make something clear here:  The 10kH is mine. This is MY PROJECT.  Nothing else like it exists, in this form, anywhere else.  The research is based on all kinds of sources (Gladwell and Smashing, among them), and the actual execution of the project is MINE.  Steps are not laid out in Outliers (it’s not that kind of book), Smashing never called for an hours component, and while other people have read the book and mentioned the ten thousand hours theory of mastery, nobody else is doing exactly what I’m doing.

I invited y’all into my living room, so to speak, to either watch the progress or to play along doing whatever it is that you want to be known for, because it’s more fun with friends.  Doesn’t matter what the “it” is.  IT is always more fun with friends.  And if we’re all having the same pain of keeping up, it’s comforting. :)   But that doesn’t really change that it’s my living room you’re in.

Over the past couple days, I’ve seen some folks claim the 10kH, either directly or indirectly.  I’ve seen people get the purpose of it wrong (it is NOT about doing things you don’t want to do, or motivating you to do all the sucky parts of your chosen field.  There *are* no sucky parts of your passion, and if you’re doing this for anything other than your passion, you won’t make ten thousand hours, I’ll guarantee it. You’d be bored before a hundred.), people say that this is “something going around the internet” (Um, no, it’s not.  It’s mine.), or take the credit for their “good idea” in starting the project.

Aside from the fact that it’s just bad ethics to claim someone else’s project/work/ideas as your own, it’s also undeniably rude.  Following the metaphor before, it’s like having someone invite you into their living room and peeing on their curtains.  Knock it off, you’re being a jerk.

So what I’m saying, essentially, is don’t pee on my curtains.  Coming up with this, and executing it, is a lot of work.  Work that I’m sharing freely with y’all.  Work that will probably end up being my livelihood at some point, and I’m not keen on people claiming that work, this idea, this unique combination of disparate existing research, as their own.

Capice?

And that said, I’m grateful to all the participants who are playing along and having fun with it and learning something along the way.  It’s tough to make time for this kind of thing in already-busy lives, and I hope y’all are getting something out of it, too.

I’d bake cupcakes for everybody if you were closer. :)

It was time for a change ’round these parts.

With the change of residence, and the (soon enough) acquisition of chickens, life’s changed enough that the old blog just wasn’t cutting it anymore.  Much better to start anew. :)

The title, for any non-listeners who might be happening upon the new bloggybits, comes from an incident earlier this summer, where the son of the people with whom I was staying got it in his head that he needed to tie a string to a junebug’s leg, let it go, and fly it along like a pet on a leash.  While this was a perfectly logical idea at the time, the poor junebug was not nearly as impressed, and wriggled free from the thread pretty much instantaneously, leaving a bewildered ten-year-old (who, incidentally, wouldn’t touch the bug himself and had his mother and grandmother tie the string for him, which was a comedy of errors in and of itself) to look for….more junebugs.

When I questioned this particular action, his grandparents told me they used to do this all the time when they were growing up in southern Virginia, and blamed it on the lack of cable television.

(I still don’t have cable, by the way.  Nor have I been bored enough to tether bugs to myself with thread.  I think perhaps it’s my upbringing.)

Lots more, coming soon.  Thanks for dropping by.  The Weird Magnet(tm) in my forehead appears to be operating at peak efficiency, so the stories should keep on coming….