As those who follow me on twitter will know, I’ve been doing without my PC for a few days now. Not because I want to, but because my motherboard decided to short out on me. Even though this is not a nice experience, there are some positive sides to it. Granted, I’m not sure I’d see any positives if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve been able to re-purpose my file server to serve as a temporary desktop without too much trouble.

But as I do have my re-purposed file server keeping me connected to the essentials I’ve decided to do a little blog post about the surprising positives I’ve noticed in being cut off from my regular PC. Not that I’d recommend anyone get their mboard shorted out just to experience these…

Item One

I no longer have all the links I’d normally take for granted in my bookmarks, toolbar, and history. This may sound like a weird positive, but I find it is. It’s made me realise just how much of a creature of habit I really am. There are sited I visit regularly, sites I know the address off, which I simply can’t be bothered to go to when I have to actually type that address. Not bothering with those sites has left me the time to do a lot more reading than I had been doing for a while.

Item Two

Another positive thing for me is that lacking my PC has forced me to make some decisions. I’d been thinking about a Magnatune streaming membership for quite a while, but I only got around to actually getting one because I’ve been cut off from all the music that’s stored on my desktop. As a result I’ve listened to, and enjoyed, more new music in the last few days than in the previous month or so.

Item Three

Related to the missing links, but a little different, I’ve found that aside from my browsing habits my routine has also changed a little. Most the changes aren’t massive, I’ve made sure my backup desktop is now running pretty much the same software my PC normally uses, but it has made me reconsider other things – like that large number of RSS feeds I’m subscribed to, even though I mostly click “Mark All Read” because I haven’t the time to read them. I’ve already mentally scheduled a thorough RSS cleanup for when the PC is up and running again.

Looking Back

So what do I feel looking back after a few days? Well I’ll still be glad tomorrow when I can pick up my new board and get my regular PC up and running again. But even so these intervening days haven’t been as bad as I’d first thought they might be. And the replacement I’ve ordered – replacing mboard, proc & memory – is also an upgrade that should put off the need to buy a new PC entirely at least a while longer.

And of course when I do get the (upgraded) PC back up and running I can carry some of the changes to my routine made during the last few days back there. That way the crash may actually have a positive effect in the long term.

It’s been too long since my last update to this blog. I don’t know why, but every time I decide to blog more, I keep it up for a little bit and then drop off again. And my last burst of activity was, of course, no different then the others in the end. And recently there’s been Twitter, which has replaced blogging, at least in some cases. But Twitter is, in a way, also the reason I’m blogging now. Because I’ve been having fun with code again lately, and it’s thanks to Twitter.

I was somewhat intrigued at first by mentions of the Twitter API. And then I started noticing (I must have seen them before, but I’d never actually noticed) some of the various ways people display Twitter statuses on other websites. And while there were some pretty good ones, I ran into the usual problem: none of them did exactly what I wanted them to do, the way I wanted them to do it.

Granted I could have lived with some of them, but I decided it would be more fun to write my own. Which is why I’ve been blowing the dust and rust off my PHP skills recently, working on my first ever wordpress plugin. It’s not done yet, and it’s only seen limited testing, but I’m hoping to take the code public as of version 0.5. Now I just have to figure out what features I want to have in 0.5.

The main problem seems to be one of balance – which I’ve always thought is probably the main trick of life anyway. In this case the balance is between allowing the user to customise the way they want the plugin to appear, and having something that runs without the user having to (virtually) write their own plugin.