This weekend I found Flashbake, a code versioning turned creative writing tool used by the likes of Cory Doctorow. While Cory is a little out there in some facets of his belief structure (Audible copy protection, Kindle copy protections, copy protections, sensing a theme?), I did enjoy his book Little Brother and after hearing his podcast adaptation and reading about his writing habits I have become interested in writing better.
Here is the thing I am finally figuring out. I have been a productivity maven for the past few years. I trained my first co-worker in Getting Things Done on Friday, and it really got me thinking about what I do with my time. I should in theory have more free time. More time because I am more efficient and effective
Here is the thing: I have been soaking up my free time with mindless pursuits like who will get kicked off of the Biggest Loser and will the CSI: gang catch the baddy (The answers: The person most deserving to get kicked off, usually, and yes, unless it is a “plot twist” episode). I have been wasting a lot of free cycles.
That is not saying that an occasional evening vegetating in front of the tube is a bad thing. Sometimes my brain needs to be shifted into neutral and I need to roll down the hill of my evening, but this has become a habit. A habit I want to break by doing more creative work in the time that I have found (read: made) since becoming so productive.
Back to this weekend’s nerdery, Flashbake takes ambient information, RSS feeds of music, weather data, latest twitter posts, and adds them to the notes of the code versioning system, allowing an author to go back an better understand what were the they were thinking (twitter), listening to, and what the surroundings were, when they had their creative flow going.
Fantastic idea!
Maybe if I can find when I am creative I can get that to happen more often.
Terrible execution.
Flashbake is not a simple drag-and-drop application, no my friend, it is a hardcore command line bonanza. I knew that going in, but I didn’t think I would learn as much as I did. Learning is a good thing, don’t get me wrong, but I would love and pay highly for an application that captured all of the information that I wanted when I write, without learning the finer points of vi, cron and git.
Yeah, those last three words, that is where I spent most of my Sunday, along with nano, sudoers and a few other esoteric places around a good UNIX system.
What did I learn?
- Code versioning is not the easiest thing to setup.
- People who love vi (or emacs or nano or pico or -insert name of editor here-) are efficient, maybe effective and a little crazy.
- UNIX is totally the nerd operating system, nerd not used as a pejorative, but as a compliment. UNIX can be so OCD inducing, I am glad that I don’t live on that OS everyday.
- Flashbake is a great idea, but difficult to execute, at least for me. I would be better served to find some appleScript or wordpress plugin that would meet the same functionality.
- Creativity does not come from installing software. Software may make it easier to be creative, but software does not make you creative.