Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Make It a Habit

I am fascinated by little things. My wife and I enjoy travel by car and whenever we are on the road more than an hour, one of us will start in wondering why we do things the way we do. Habits interest me. Not the traditional uniform of the Nun—that's a different interest. I am interested in how we learn to do things, why we keep doing them, and of course in how difficult it is to stop doing them, once you have started.

It's been said if you do something two-dozen times, it can become a habit. Others say it has to do with a number of times over number of days equation. If you have a can of Mountain Dew per day, every day, you may develop a habit, a behavior gives you the continued regular consumption of Mountain Dew without your having to remind yourself to do it all of the time. In fact, you will do it without any attention at all. This is especially true if you can somehow ritualize something. Have that Mountain Dew every morning when you first come in and turn on the lights.

So a month down the road, you come in to work, turn on the lights, sit down to start tearing through your day and you will reach almost automatically for that can of Mountain Dew. And at some point, if you reach out and it's not there, it can seriously mess up the rhythm of your day.

For some reason, it is universally recognized that it is much easier to begin a Bad Habit, like smoking, overeating or surfing the Internet, than it is to begin a Good Habit, like exercising or spell checking a document when you think you're done. And it's awful, trying to break a habit of any kind, once it's engrained in your daily ritual.

And so we keep doing things long after they are actually good for us. This is what I did, today. This is what I did yesterday. This is what I did last week. A friend once mentioned she was doing X "because of all of that inflation" with an appropriate Yucky Face expression. But this was in 1998, during a time when inflation wasn't a problem. But it was easier for her to continue the behaviors she had learned in the 1980s than to learn and adopt new behaviors as things changed.

I read. I mean, I read a lot. I got interested in reading about money about a week after I learned that I didn't know anything about money. But I always get two or three sources. So at any given time, I have two or three computer magazines coming to my house. I have two or three guitar magazines, now. It's rare that I get a single Web technology book on a subject. I have quite a collection of HTML books, CSS books, MySQL books, PHP books, JavaScript books, Design books and so on. I have only JQuery book, so far.

I need to make a change to a Web page. I fire up Dreamweaver. Why? Because that's how I edit Web pages. It's what I have used since about 2001 when I gave up HomeSite. And every couple of years I have upgraded, because, well, that's becoming a habit now, too. But should I upgrade to the next version? Should I be doing pages in Dreamweaver at all, now?

It's interesting, sometimes, to challenge yourself like this. Why do we do the things we do? Are there other, better alternatives? Beyond "comfort" is there some benefit to doing things the way we have "always" done them? I was impressed by Dreamweaver, when I finally stepped away from HomeSite. What am I missing out on, now, by continuing to use Dreamweaver to build pages? And how will it take me to break my Dreamweaver habit, now that it is so engrained?

Starting in September, I have taken to climbing the stairs of The Link, here at work, at least once per day. When I have been gone a day, I make it up. I have now done this quite a few times. Have I made it a habit? No, not yet. I know it's good for me and all of that, but I still have to force myself.

Habits are funny things.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

I Have Seen The Future

It may take a few years but I have been to the mountain top and see no reason to change my oft-stated viewpoint that The Future Is Going To Be A Great Place To Live.

In 1993, I worked on my first Web page from the front-page portal of my GEnie RoundTable. It was awkward, but familiar. I had worked with SGML some in the middle 1980s and many of the tags were familiar. But the state of the browser art, in those long ago, pre-Netscape days, was pretty dismal. Everyone who saw the Web saw it in sixteen colors of text characters. Only. No images. No fonts. Just text on the screen, text from all over the world.

In 1995 I got a call from Microsoft. They wanted to know if I was interested in working on their new online network, hosting their aviation forum. I hung up the phone and drove to OfficeMax to buy my first Windows PC, a Compaq, and await my FedEx delivery of the new Windows 95 software.

In 1996, the mother ship called us all home and I traveled to Seattle for a convention of hundreds of forum managers. There, as in most conventions of this sort, the real action took place in the hallways and at the after- parties. I heard then that one day we would see machine-made Web pages that were "just as good" as anything we were building then. This today would be seen as damning with faint praise. But it was enough to send a shiver down my spine. What would I do for a living, on the day after that day?

In the intervening decade and a half, we have made progress toward the machine-made page, if that's how you wish to see it. But I still think we will see agencies building one-off sites for small businesses and individuals doing their own pages for years to come. I don't know that I will retire from teaching HTML when I retire, but I suspect the odds are pretty good that I'll still be retiring from some form of building Web pages.

The latest threat, if you are so inclined, comes from Drupal. Drupal is an open sourced Content Management System. Think of Lego® blocks and you won't be far wrong. Drupal calls them Nodes, and you build little systems, one block at a time, using other nodes already out there or constructing your own. Using this technique, you can quickly model the behavior of, say, an online appointment calendar, or a little weather gizmo that gets the temperature and forecast for a given ZIP-code.

We've started a pilot program using Drupal. It's good. It's been up and running for less than a year, but we can already cruise through an entire Dreamweaver-built site and convert it easily into a more Drupal-friendly format. Point-point, click-click and you can edit your pages without sending Large Checks to Adobe or to Microsoft or to anyone, really. It's a very compelling case, especially for colleges and departments with tiny budgets, which is to say, all of us, now.

Drupal is out there, being tended-to by hundreds of developers the world over. Currently in Version 6 release, we are aiming for Drupal 7 deployment. Those developers are still going to be busy, and there will probably be a Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 some day. We can decide that we are interested in upgrading or we can decide that we like what we have, when the time comes. We need only respond to the needs of the campus Web developer community, not the needs of Adobe shareholders.

There are lots of advantages Drupal affords us over the current Dreamweaver model. Not least of which is that you can edit Web pages from anywhere you can send G-Mail from, with just a Web browser and an internet connection. We can include features as they become ready, not according to some arbitrary release schedule. One day we may schedule content changes and content expirations.

But, someone will still have to provide that content. Drupal isn't a Web page editor, it's a Content Management System, and someone will still need to provide the content that needs managing. And as beautiful and elegant as it appears today, like an exotic Italian sports car, it's going to break. And on that day, they are going to need someone who knows a little HTML….

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Motivation, Again

Remember that bit about bookstores? There are lots of books on motivation, and some are going to be better than others. I'm not going to try to top that here in 750 words. But let's spend another moment with this before we leave it entirely.

Some things we need to do. Some we want to do. Some things will improve our lives, our careers, our homes or our families. Others are just ordinary duties that come up on some regular basis.

Some tools I have used, to keep me on track and get the work done, include treating myself for reaching some milestone, secluding myself from distractions, focusing on the future, when the goal will presumably be reached, and the nuclear option: walking away from it all for a time.

None of these work all the time, but they all work some of the time. I make no promises, but I'm reminded of the Hunter Thompson quote, "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

It's a rare task that can't be broken down into manageable chunks. You don't sit down to write a novel. You write a word, and that becomes a sentence. You re-read that sentence, editing until you are happy, and you write another. Eventually it becomes a paragraph, a chapter and then a book. Most work is like that.

Sometimes I'm able to get a work done if I allow myself a little pleasure after passing some milestone. I will get myself a soda, when I finish making these phone calls. I will see what everyone is laughing about down the hall, when I finish this outline. I will sneak a peek at Amazon.com or Facebook after I get this Web page validated.

That kind of thing can work for a lot of people, but it depends upon having enough discipline to forgo that reward until the work gets done. Now we're in Chicken-Or-Egg country. If you have the discipline to delay gratification, you probably have the discipline to get the work done anyway.

I can get a lot done in the middle of a room, with conversations and music going on all around me. In fact, some of my best work has been done in busy coffeehouses with a constant distracting din as people drifted in and out, clinked cups with spoons, laughed about that guy in the office and whatever else. But, sometimes, you need to be able to shut everything out and just focus on the task at hand.

Maybe half the time these days, I close my office door. And now and then I'll even turn off the lights, so all I can see is my monitor. With class in session, people use my office hallway as a conduit from Where They Were to Where They Need To Be. And it's a hallway with not a stitch of fabric, so every sound from their start to their finish, the width of the building, echoes around and, I swear, amplifies as it makes its way to my door. When a class empties out, there may be twenty conversations, forty feet shuffling, doors creaking and slamming and so on. So where in summer my door was mostly open, these days, it's mostly closed.

I have a small selection of jazz guitar (no lyrics, no vocals) that I play on iTunes while I'm working on something. Often, though, I'll listen to a selection of podcasts. Some about Web design, others about technology, news and even comedy. Each requires various levels of attention. I don't want to replace the distraction of the mobile crowd with an interview with a comedian I like, so I'm careful with what I select to listen to and when. Still, I can't control things like the Band practicing outside my window. It can be hard to write JavaScript with the drumline ten yards away working on Boom-chacka-lacka boom-boom-Boom!

Sometimes, just imagining how great it's going to feel to be done with something is enough to keep you working toward that end. Man, I'm going to put my feet up and enjoy a cold one, tonight!

Sometimes you just burn out. That's what vacation days are for. I find that a day or two off often helps clear my head and get me back in the groove, again.

What works for you?

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Motivation

There are fewer good bookstores in this country, but if you can find one, the odds are good they will about a yard of self-help books, many dealing with motivation.

Motivation is interesting. Sometimes, it's like a spark. It can cause events to escalate and cascade and before you know it, nations are at war or economies are in crisis or people are in love.

Most of the job of an athletic coach is motivation. And that's illustrative, I think—I hope. There's some reinforcement of fundamentals, some critique of style or performance, sure. But mostly, the job involves convincing people to perform at a high level.

Fans of any sport go nuts when you reduce their passion to its essence. "It's a just a couple of guys, swatting a ball back and forth" sets tennis fans' teeth on edge. I get cranky when people tell me auto racing is "just a bunch of guys driving fast and turning left".

But, here we go. A coach's job is to tell athletes, who are very good at whatever it is they do, to go out there and do that thing, very well, for a tremendous pile of money, fame and other benefits, which you might be forgiven for thinking would be enough motivation, right there. And yet, coaches are some of the highest paid people on the team. So there must be more to it than that.

I know I should get "X" done, done quickly, and done well, and even that I should crow about it a little when it's finished. But for some reason, even though it may mean something from I-Get-To-Keep-My-Job all of the way up to I-Get-A-Raise, and all I have to do is just to do my job and do it well, there are any number of un-done "X" -jobs on my spindle. Everyone is like that, to one degree or another (I hope). Please, god, it isn't just me.

What is it that keeps us from doing things? Things we know we need to do, and often at our benefit?

Sometimes, it's just daily clutter and distraction. I need to clear out fourteen other ToDo items, before I can start work on the Really Big Task. I'm going to need a lot of room on my desk, so I'd better finish this little page, and do something about that receipt, and put away a few of these pens and other office supplies.

Sometimes it's a feeling of unpreparedness. I can't possibly do this now, without the proper training and tools and staffing and so on. So I need to schedule training, and get a hold of a good book, and maybe try one of those webinar things, but I can't afford a book right now and there are so many hoops to jump through, to get the office to buy one. And even then, it won't be like I really know this stuff, I'll just be the guy who read the book!

What I treasure are those moments when you end up "in the zone" and work seems to take over about 95% of your brain. You look up and it's 1:10pm. You start in, and the next time you look up, it's 4:52pm. It's like you've been working with a tailwind all day. It's the closest thing a fat man like myself can probably come to a Runner's High.

But I've been at work on a Web page or a report I really enjoy, doing a part of it I really enjoy doing, and left at five thinking tomorrow would be a breeze… and been disappointed in the morning. The spark is gone. It's the difference between hearing a comic tell a joke and hearing someone who saw that comic tell you about the joke. Comics telling jokes are very often funny. Telling about a joke never is.

Motivation is strange. Here's a team of world-class athletes, each one only here because they demonstrated they were better than a thousand others at their task. And yet they need a guy to point out to them that they are not operating at a hundred percent?

What hope do any of the rest of us have?

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Ten Thousand Hours

There's been a lot of talk lately about how mastering, well, anything, takes ten thousand hours. It comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success. I'm wondering how true that may be in our case?

I got my pilot's license in less than fifty hours. I had demonstrated by that point the proper skills and to a sufficient level to be deemed safe enough to fly unwitting people off to faraway adventures, with a high probability of getting us all back home, again. Fifty hours. But I can tell you that I was a much, much better pilot at 200hrs.

I was easily better than four times the flier, with four times the hours. I am sure that if I was able to continue racking up time, by the time I got to ten thousand hours, I'd be pretty damned good. It's not linear—I wouldn't be fifty times better, but I would bet that I would notice the difference, if nobody else did.

I've mentioned before that when I play guitar, I can hear the seventeen year old me laughing at the fifty year old me. But I figured out the seventeen year old me practiced and played about five hours per day, nearly every day, for a period of about two years, and about two hours per day nearly every day for about a year before that. So that's about twenty-five hundred hours of guitar playing, or a quarter of the way there. No wonder I was good. Had I stuck with it through the 1980s and 1990s, you might have heard of me by now.

But I wonder if this is transferable to the Web? How can anyone become an expert at building Web pages, if you need ten thousand hours? Is there really anything to learn from the umpty-millionth <p> tag you put on a page?

There are only a limited number of tags we use every day. There are only a few tags that we use maybe once a month or three or four times per year (I don't think I have ever used the <dd> tag, for instance, and I've been doing this since 1993). Once you have mastered HTML to some degree, you probably move on to Cascading Style Sheets.

There, you have several dozen property-value pairs to learn for several dozen selectors (basically the most-often used HTML tags). That is all quite a hill to climb. But here's where it falls apart, for me.

Ten thousand hours of eight-hour days is twelve hundred and fifty days. Given a typical working year of 2000hrs (8x5x50), that's five years of heads-down markup and design, with no sick days, no all-day meetings and no staring absently at the tree outside the window—and especially with no accounting for shopping on eBay, searching Facebook for old sweeties or looking up things in Wikipedia.

And here's my problem. In any random five years there are huge changes in the Web, the way we work, the tools we use and so on. How much of that transfers over? How much of the work I did in HTML v3.2 counted, when HTML 4.01 became the choice? How much of what I did in HomeSite was I really able to carry over into Dreamweaver? And how much of what I learned of Dreamweaver MX 2000 am I still using, today?

At some point, I stopped laying out pages in tables. At some point, I quit using <font> tags. Somewhere along the line, I learned to include title attributes on links, and alt text in images.

Realistically, the way I work today, this week or this month is how I have worked for only a couple of hundred hours. Some parts of it stretch back to the 1990s, sure, but not many, and fewer with every passing year. HTML becomes XHTML and probably soon will become HTML5. CSS is moving into CSS3, now. Browsers are still rolling out about a once a year, but there are only three or four that matter so it's a new one only every so many months. JavaScript improves and so do the libraries that techniques like JQuery depend upon.

It's all still in a great deal of flux.

So, according to Outliers, will any of us ever be any good?