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stiff fingers and distraction
Wednesday, May 15 2013
[REDACTED] I was actually rather productive today, cranking through a bunch of issues related to those educational games I've been working on.
One of the things I did today was to write a function that scans through a table, looking at each column of data, and determining whether or not the data in that column is all the same. It then returns a list of all the columns where the data is the same. I needed this for the results displays produced by those educational games. Because they can produce a few more columns than can easily be displayed on a screen, it makes sense to break out the unvarying columns and show the data from them in a separate list. I haven't actually had a need to perform this particular data analysis before, but now that I've done it once I'll probably find a use for it in lots of future projects.
Though there may have actually been a light frost this morning, temperatures warmed throughout the day eventually rising into the low 60s. Unfortunately, though, the interior temperature of the house itself was a lagging indicator. For a period of time today I found it somewhat difficult to work because my fingers were a little too stiff to comfortably type. Further taxing my productivity, Sarah Poiron kept interrupting my chain of thought with instant Facebook messages. It seems Facebook provides a bit more information about my real-time status than I like others to know; evidently there's a green activity light that shows friends you are active at your computer. The implication, then, is that if you're not responding to messages in real time then you're actively ignoring the messages. At some point I couldn't take the distraction and intrusion any more so I did what I never normally do, I closed the Facebook browser window(s). I wish there were a single application that could simultaneously shut off all sources of real-time distraction: Skype, Facebook, and AIM, but not email, which I have set so that I must explicitly check it.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?130515 feedback
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