The Australian federal government has recently released an app to assist in combatting the coronavirus pandemic, urging all Australians to download, install, and run it. I feel uncomfortable with the project on a number of different fronts, and wanted to put them into writing to understand them better.
First and foremost; I don’t trust our power- and privacy-grabbing federal government not to use this to infringe on our rights in some manner.
We often have grand ideas for projects and then easily get stuck at one of a few different stages. Often we have a huge list of features and balk at the size of the work involved with no idea of where to start. Or we start by building a single component with huge scale in mind and quickly get disheartened by the lack of progress towards the end goal. Or maybe even we built a tiny scale idea and then throw it away, not knowing how to turn it into what our visions demand.
Note: This is a long post focused on the approach I took to developing a new project. If you’re interested in more technical details, how to solve challenges this brought up, or insights into some of the processes I will be writing other posts under the “ns3000” tag.
For about four years now I’ve had in mind a project, an all-in-wonder file-storage solution that meets a whole bunch of criteria that I have.
Every day for the past seven days I have written a small fiction online. I think my previous record was nine days, but I may have missed some rotations then. Each one comes in at under 280 characters, the maximum length of a modern tweet. I thought I’d include a few examples here for posterity.
Old hotel bars are anchors in time. A few drinks to weaken your temporarl inhibitions and who knows what past or future patrons you’ll meet.
As more and more of my friends have started streaming their gaming brilliance on Twitch I’ve become steadily more interested in the platform as an opportunity to share my creative process with projects.
On Monday the 24th of February I decided to take the plunge and set myself. I hooked my Macbook Pro up to my Razer Kiyo webcam, my Razer Kraken headphones, and two external monitors that I had been using for my desktop.
Not long after I completed the Gopher Maze that I’ve written about previously, my friend @shmouflon and I embarked on another Gopher project; writing a Choose Your Own Adventure-style short story told through Gopher directory pages.
We completed the project later in the year during August and were content to have ridden that wave of creativity for a while. However we were struck by an idea: what if we could use other oft-forgotten or much-maligned technology to create something new from this?
For the past few years I’ve wanted to increase my creative output, especially in writing. However this year I decided to really try and set it in motion using SMART goals. Doing this, I managed to write at least one blog post and one post for ScorpInc every month for the entire year.
Goal Setting SMART goals are relatively simple, it’s an acronym that refers to the following useful attributes of a goal:
+SHIP d1fdd6fd-1d4c-4af1-9af1-558f7d7f6e9b DOCKED, BEGIN UNLOADING+
The message was processed by the wharf control system, it’s failover brethren, and received by the redundant systems although as there was no emergency requiring activation they did not act on it.
In the harmonius ballet that followed, the wharf control system orchestrated a hundred drones of varying types that began removing all the cargo from d1fdd6fd-1d4c-4af1-9af1-558f7d7f6e9b. Ship-to-shore cranes took care of sea containers full of goods and materials, robotic pumping stations connected, cycled, and then began pumping out all the precious liquid and granular contents that would be sent elsewhere for processing or manufacture.
I’ve been pretty quiet about the 28 hour days project, even though it has still been ongoing. I’ll be honest, I fell into a bit of a depressive state and didn’t have the energy to devote towards writing or productive work. I’m unsure about the providence of this episode; while it could be a side effect of changing my sleeping schedule, it’s also a well-known part of my schizoaffective disorder.
Getting further into my 28-hour days experiment and trying to focus a bit more on “getting stuff done”.
Night Time I woke up at 22:00, which is a pretty weird time to come around, because your partner is about to go to sleep and you’re just thinking about breakfast. After spending some time with Nikki and seeing her to bed I decided to wrap up the blog post for the last two days and then spend some time chilling.