An Experiment in Scotch

I’m find­ing that I lack the abil­ity to con­cen­trate for long peri­ods of time. I think con­cen­tra­tion is a habit, one you can fall out of and work­ing at Bill­Ma­trix for 7 years on top of my already bad habit of being dis­tracted by shiny, jan­gly things has put a seri­ous hurt on my abil­ity to do one thing for a long period of time, espe­cially if it is some­thing I’m uncom­fort­able with.

Today has not been nearly as pro­duc­tive as yes­ter­day. I started on a web site to cat­a­log Texas his­tor­i­cal mark­ers today which has been a pet project on the back burner for a long time. I got a small frame­work for it but I imme­di­ately real­ized that I am a hor­rid graphic artist/web designer. I have been strug­gling most of the after­noon with CSS. My strug­gles are an equal amount of hav­ing zero expe­ri­ence with CSS and the afore­men­tioned lack of con­cen­tra­tion. I spent lit­tle to no time get­ting more famil­iar with Pylons instead find­ing myself con­stantly bogged down by the lay­out of the web­site. I’m pretty sure I’ll even­tu­ally get it to where it’s not ass-ugly but it’s cer­tainly never going to be pretty.

I remem­ber being in col­lege many moons ago and dif­fi­cult things (like cal­cu­lus) always caused me to go to the golf course. That’s a habit I have to break if I’m ever going to get bet­ter at these things I don’t know. I can’t afford to take 3 weeks to learn Pylons. When­ever I’m writ­ing code, if I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do, I can work for extended peri­ods of time. But when it’s all a con­stant strug­gle, I’m eas­ily dis­tracted by what­ever hap­pens to be dis­tract­ing at the time.

My goal tomor­row is to for­get about how ugly the lay­out is right now and work hard on the plumb­ing of the site. By mak­ing good progress there, I can always chicken out and pay some­one else to do the design.