Weeding sorties

The value of incremental progress

I am not a champion gardener. If you’ve been following this blog, this will not come as a big shock to you.

And I believe I mentioned before how I live in a sub-tropical climate. Plant life has a tendency toward the over-exuberant. Unless it’s dropping dead from heat stroke or complications due to my lack of green-thumbness. Mostly, however, it is over-exuberant. There’s a vine thing, for example. . .well, let’s just say, it won’t surprise me if it creeps in the window and strangles me in my sleep one night.

Anyhow, it must follow as the night the day *(I knew I could get Shakespeare in here somewhere!), that Weeding 101 would become a required course.

The problem is it is also extremely hot down here. Extremely hot. Hotter than hell, eggs frying on the sidewalk, where’s a cooling shelter hot.

I am a person who likes to finish what she starts. Preferably within minutes.

Back when I was doing a lot more programming than I do now, working on large and complex projects with shifting requirements and ‘scope creep’ of epic proportions, I was most often hired by Tony Coretto, the CEO of PNT Marketing Services, Inc. Tony is a most excellent boss. In the midst of chaos and looming deadlines, he would talk with unfailing optimism about “incremental progress.”

I’m sorry to say that I never totally appreciated the value of that way of looking at things until it came to weeding the flower beds in a hot, humid July in Florida. It is not possible–unless you have greater masochistic tendencies than I do–to eliminate all weeds in one marathon session. A person can, however, make incremental progress.

Going out before the sun is high enough to beat down on the flower bed, you can work for a half hour or so in the shade. Taking out the weed whacker in the late evening, around 7, there might be a breeze coming off the water.

It will never all be done at once in one shining example of impeccable landscaping. The campaign is not one of shock and awe. It’s guerilla warfare with intermittent weeding sorties.

Incremental progress.

And you know what?

It turns out that’s the only way to finish any piece of writing. A little at a time.

So this Tuesday’s Tip is to make a sortie. Set a timer and write for five minutes. Ten minutes. One minute. Any increment at all leads to incremental progress.

* Hamlet, Act I, sc.3

Tooting your own horn

You don’t need money to toot your own horn. You just need a horn.
—from a Citibank ad, of all things

A playwright is always his or her own first producer.

That’s an inconvenient truth.

It also applies to almost any kind of artist.

I’m extremely sorry to have to tell you this, but the chances of somebody knocking on your door to offer you a recording contract when they hear you singing in the shower are slim.

Your private journal, however steeped in literary eloquence, isn’t going to bring you a publisher if no one ever sees it.

You’ve got to get over all that early training about only speaking when you’re spoken to and acting like a lady and being modest and so forth.

Put your stuff out there.

Marketing is key. And it’s not just for Fortune 500 companies any longer.

These days, we all have access to a relatively inexpensive marketing tool that levels the playing field. It is easy–and important–to have your own website.

A lot of web hosts provide powerful tools to get you up and running quickly. In order to put your own stamp on your design, however, I highly recommend that you achieve a basic understanding of HTML (main markup language for web pages). Even if you use any or all of the various WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editors that allow for drag-and-drop design and which have come a long way since the early days, understanding the underlying codes is invaluable when there’s a problem.

Being able to edit the HTML can save you hours of confusion and frustration.

And this Tuesday’s Tip is a pointer to a great online tutorial, W3Schools, and a reminder about a nifty little program that makes editing that code much easier: Notepad++.

W3Schools is a terrific reference to all the major web design languages. It has great interactive online tutorials and lots of examples for beginners and a searchable reference for more knowledgeable users. I use it all the time.

And once W3Schools has helped me figure out what the code should look like on my webpage, I go to Notepad++ to help me implement the solution.

It’s possible to edit HTML in the regular old Notepad that comes with Windows. Notepad++, however–free to download and use–provides a number of additional features that will make you wonder how you ever survived without them.

It lets you edit multiple documents in the same window. Great for cutting and pasting useful bits of code from one page to another.
It allows color coding of syntax. Comments in one color, keywords in another, etc. So much easier to read the code that way.
It allows collapsing and expanding of sections of code. Just make the whole table disappear (in the code), while you work on the rest of the page, for example.
It allows search and replace across multiple documents. If you change the directory structure of your website, you can globally replace all references to any particular path.

There are other features I haven’t yet explored, but those alone have saved me hours of time.

We’d all like to spend all our time on creative endeavors. But if we want those endeavors noticed, we might have to toot our own horns.

More stuff that’s going well

Thankful Thursdays – # 2

Thursdays are devoted to stuff that’s going well-because there’s a lot more of it than we usually think, and because there’s a theory that putting your attention on the good stuff attracts more of it to you.

Some–okay, most–of you have probably heard of The Secret, the 2006 bestseller purporting to let you in on the secret to getting anything you want. Some people leap wholeheartedly into that kind of thing, and some people start thinking ‘snake-oil salesman’ when they hear about it.

I tend to fall into the middle camp. I haven’t managed to manifest a million dollars yet, but some experiments have yielded interesting results. And one thing that certainly can’t hurt is to pay attention to the good things in your life. If it doesn’t bring more of them to you, it reminds you of the joy of the ones you have.

Ergo.

Thursdays in this blog are devoted to thankfulness.

This Thursday, I am thankful for tech support that works. Specifically, I want to send a shout out to MailChimp. MailChimp is the service I selected to handle my email list for my News Flashes as well as the blog posts. If you received this post via email, it’s thanks to MailChimp.

There were some good reasons I picked them in the beginning. Their base service is free, and the volume limit they offer for that very attractive price is high enough that you can give them a serious test before you have to pay anything. They give you a lot of control over the look of your emails, so you can do that “branding” thing pretty well.

And their support is awesome.

Aside from having extremely clear online instructions and documentation, they’ve got a LiveChat thingy* that actually works. Reps comes on really quickly. They generally grasp the problem right away and have solutions to offer. They are friendly and funny and fast. They never try to pass the buck. You don’t hear “Yeah, see, that’s probably a problem with your website host. We can’t troubleshoot that for you.” (At least, I haven’t yet. I suppose it’s possible that I might run into something that is genuinely outside the scope of their service, but so far, they’ve really tried to solve every problem I’ve had.)

In addition, and this is more of a benefit than you might think, the chat chimes when the rep responds. Unlike many other company’s live chat, you don’t have to sit there watching the window while the rep handles some untold number of other clients. You can do something else in the rare instances that you need to wait for a response, because the chat will chime and let you know the Chimp has chatted. (No offense to the MailChimp tech support staff who are more human than most.) I really love the chiming. It’s a serious selling point for me.

And if you’ve got a question and it’s outside chat hours, they respond to emails within hours.

Their instructions are clear and concise and they fix the problem.

And that chimp is slightly hilarious!

So, today, I am thankful for the menagerie–the MailChimp and the FatCow** are doing me proud.

* ‘ thingy’—a technical term for that which I cannot immediately think of the word
** my website host

Treasure Hunt

The holy grail of disk space

Way back when I bought this PC–which has provided remarkably trusty service over the years–it seemed like it had unlimited disk space. 140 Gb. How could anyone possibly use all that?

One lives and learns.

Programs get bigger. I want more of them. There is music to store. There are graphics and videos to edit. There is data to crunch. And there is odd and esoteric research to hang onto because, who knows, I may write a book or a play about that someday.

And the next thing I know, my PC has only about 5 Gb left and has slowed down to something that would insult the speed of a baby if you called it a crawl.

I do have external drives, but there is a lot of data I like to keep on the local drive. That’s the one Carbonite backs up under their basic plan, and while I love Carbonite, I am not quite ready to increase my backup budget just yet.

I am also not quite ready to install a new larger hard drive. We won’t discuss whether this is out of the same frugal–i.e., penny-pinching–impulse or out of long and dismal experience of what happens when you start taking your computer apart . (I will say that it will be a lot easier to get to it the way my office is set up in my new house than it was in the past–when there was a lot of crawling involved–and, once, a hacksaw–but that is definitely another story!)

So, I have reached a point where I have to evaluate what’s on this drive and make some decisions. Some files can be moved to an external drive, of course. Some files can be archived.

And, let’s face it, there are probably a lot of files that can simply be deleted.

To keep or not to keep.
That is the question

And that brings me to a couple of nifty little programs.

(Before I tell you about them, let me give you one other very important Tuesday Tech Tip. Don’t just take my word for it. Read other reviews before you use anything recommended to you in a blog. ALWAYS have a current back-up before you start deleting files. Use common sense. Proceed at your own risk. Remember–your results may vary. I’m telling you what I’ve done. I’m not guaranteeing it will work for you.)

About a week ago, I got a lot of disk space back using Easy Duplicate File Finder. It’s a free program for both PC and Mac users that will compare files in selected directories and provide a list of those it has identified as duplicates. You can view them, move them, rename them or delete them.

Almost 10 Gb had been swallowed up by dupes.

Today, however, another 5 Gb has disappeared. More drastic action is needed.

So, I just found: Directory List & Print. It’s freeware–although there is a paid version that has a few more features–and it’s really simple. It does exactly what the name suggests. What I like about it, is that unlike Windows Search, I can easily copy the directory listing to Excel or Word for storing, sorting, editing, printing –and, unlike redirecting the output of a DOS dir command to a file, I can choose which pieces of information to include in my list.

I can then go prospecting for disk space.

It should be easy to find the major candidates for deletion: the temp files and backup files that are outdated. I’ll be able to scan the list for other possibilities as well as use it for the plodding, methodical check-list-y approach I just know is coming.

Amazingly, I’ve already gotten rid of over 8,000 files one program has generated in unsubmitted crash reports. That’s half a gig recovered! (That may not sound like much, but I’m pretty sure this is going to be a tedious process of knocking off little minnows of files nibbling away at my disk space and not identifying any Great Blue Whales swallowing Jonah-sized sectors on the hard drive.)

Those crash reports were just sitting out there taking up space for no reason. I’m not sure I’d have noticed them if I hadn’t run this program and generated this list.

Every time I do something like this, I swear I’m going to be more diligent and disciplined with data storage as I go along. This is what is known as a pipe dream. Not having access to a personality transplant, I’m glad I’ve found these two programs.

I’ll let you know how the Great Disk Space Recovery Project is getting along.

Are we in a time warp?

Tuesday Tips

Here’s a tip for you on this lovely Tuesday morning: You probably want to avoid launching a blog in the middle of a business trip. Especially if you are using all of the wonderful but somewhat wacky free software that is available to make your life ~~a living hell~~ easier.

Now, to be fair, I launched this website last week. But I didn’t try to incorporate an email feed until—oh, somewhere around Wednesday. And guess what? Everything worked fine.

Except the part where it’s supposed to email blog posts on the day they post.

Because the email part of the blog is a day late and a dollar short. (Well, no dollars are changing hands—so that part’s not true. But it is a day late.)

That means that if you are reading this blog via email, you are wondering why I haven’t realized that it’s actually Wednesday and not Tuesday. The thing is, I know that it’s probably Wednesday where you are. Over here in blog land, however, it’s been Tuesday since Monday.

See, I wrote the Monday post on Sunday. And I scheduled it to go out on Monday. And, if you are reading this on my website or via RSS feed, all is well. But if you subscribed to get the posts by email, you are getting things the day after they post.

I don’t know why.

I’m using free software. Free software has a hidden cost. No help. Anywhere. All kinds of forums where well-meaning and sometimes surprisingly knowledgeable users try to help you, yes, with extraordinary generosity. But no actual tech support. And, for me, that rarely works. Because I am an odd mixture. I have a great deal of knowledge about a wide range of software applications—and pockets of ignorance that would swallow Montana. So, when I run into a problem, it’s usually something totally bizarre. If it were not, I’d have solved it.

So, please bear with me while I try to solve this problem (which might be easier if I were not in airports and hotels and play readings). In the meantime, if you’re getting this by email, the space-time continuum has not slipped its leash.

It really is Wednesday where you are.

Probably.

And. . .we’re off!

Welcome to my very first blog post!

It’s a little scary to launch a new endeavor–especially one so fraught with narcissism as blogging. You know those voices in your head? The ones that like to shout–or, more often, whisper insidiously–Just who do you think you are?

Well, they are working overtime today.

Who do you think you are to start blogging? To have a website? A bookstore? Who do you think would ever be interested in anything you have to say? What’s wrong with you?

But I’ve decided to tell the Tyrannosaurus Chatterboxicus to sit down and shut up.

I would like to point out to that garrulous TC that I am interested in what I have to say, and that’s enough. If nothing else, this should get me writing a bit every day. And if other people decide to come along, that will be great.

There may be interesting things here.

I’ll be talking about writing and creativity and what gets in the way. I’ll be talking about theatre and what I’ve learned as an actor, a director, a playwright. I’ll be talking about computers and website design and the bruises I’ll be getting from beating my head against the brick wall of trial-and-error programming.

I’ll be talking about visibility–oh, the shame of poking your head up and saying, “Here I am. Look at me.“–and having to combine all manner of esoteric business-like disciplines (marketing, pr, research, compliance, data design, accounting, etc.) with all manner of other esoteric creative-like disciplines (plot, theme, structure, imagination) into the more or less coherent whole of an Artist Entrepreneur.

Sometimes I’ll be talking about how hard all that is, and sometimes I’ll be pointing out some tricks and tools that have made it easier for me–and might work for you. And sometimes I’ll probably just be talking, and we’ll all wonder what the heck I’m talking about.

I’m learning this blogging software as I go along. Weird things will happen. The TC wants me to wait until I understand it perfectly, but you know and I know that just means it will never get off the ground.

Leap, and the net will appear. — John Burroughs

I’m leaping.

Bookmark this site if you want to see what happens next.

Elaine Smith Writes