Post-Vaca Overload

Just returned this morning from a nice little summer break, filled with some absolutely fruitless striper/bluefish fishing along with some kayaking, hiking, etc. As an aside, if anyone knows what the stripers are hitting down at Popham beach, feel free to drop me a line – I tried mackerel, deceiver, sand eel, and random bait fish patterns – zippo. Got shut out both days, as did a few friends. But good excuse to hang by the water in any case, so good times.

But the problem with being out for 3 days is the few hundred emails that pile up, and given my increasing addiction to blogs, a few hundred of those as well. Then there’s the regular news and announcements – which are fortunately slow given the summer doldrums – but all in all, makes for a lot of catch up.

That in turn means that for the first day I get back – at a minimum – I suffer from what Neal Stephenson describes here, “continuous partial attention.” Unfortunately, Stephenson’s preferred mechanism for addressing this concern – i.e. to radically limit incoming information streams, be they email, business proposals or the like – simply isn’t an option.

As a result, I’m always on the prowl for software that can make me more productive. No luck yet getting Dashboard to run on my test box – haven’t sorted through all the masked dependencies in Gentoo as yet – but that’s the sort of thing that might help. Not a total solution of course – as I still have to sort though information – but anything that’ll help me sort it, I’m for.

In the meantime, if I’m a bit slow with the email – have faith, I’ll get to you ASAP 😉