I enjoy picking up new programming languages, but unless I get to use it in at day job whatever I learn rarely sticks. I've been tooling with perl for, well, "awhile", and can't really consider myself competent there. I simply haven't put in the time yet to really know how that language works.

For all their usefulness and as much as I use my own, mobile phones and the companies that provide service for them truly suck. Currently I have a Motorola RAZR and it's the best phone I've had yet, for one reason; It syncs with my computer's address book. This really basic functionality has eluded my other phones. I was looking at the helio phones, and for all their cool features, they don't do sync well, and as they can't sync at least contacts I'm not interested. I can't imagine going back to a life where my contacts don't just sync themselves, I'm just not interested.

Yesterday I discovered the incredibly time-saving traer.physics library for processing. Until yesterday I'd been very slowing building my own sort of physics library to handle this sort of particle physics. Mine however was much less sophisticated, so I'll be using this from here on.

One of the lessons I keep forgetting to learn is to do a little searching before just starting to code. It's easy to get wrapped up in ideas and excitement and neglect to stop for a moment to say "wait, maybe somebody else has already done this." ...and more often than not somebody somewhere has already done a little bit of your work for you. It's just a matter of finding it.

I'm trying to figure out how I can spend less time in front of my computer, but get the same amount, or more, done. It's not really that I want to spend less time working, but just less time on the computer. I work at a computer, and because I'm a bit of a nerd, i play with computers too.

So I'm looking for ideas. Some things I've thought of so far include getting a printer but I'd rather not involve too many dead trees in this. I've already unsubscribed from a couple list-serves I can't keep up with, and switched a few others to digest mode. I need to consolidate my rss & podcast subscriptions. I'm looking at what daily tasks I do that I can automate to some degree. I need to re-examine the tools I use for programming - currently I use a bunch of tools that work together reasonably well. I need to look at if there are better tools out there.