Parker Writesand stuff

I’ll keep this brief because these are getting repetitive and boring. I think that the fact that I am forcing myself to write them is helpful for convincing myself to Get Things Done. But when it comes to the end of the day, I’m sleepy and dont remember all the little nuggets of my productive and unproductive moments.

I did _not_ get my butt out of bed this morning. I wasn’t up and out until 12:30 or something. I went to run one of the ~5 errands that I had planned to run, and didn’t even really get it done. Fail.

I went to class at 2, which lasted until 4. I hadn’t had anything to eat except some cereal in my room. When I don’t eat, i’m hungry and cant concentrate. Then I eat a lot and then I’m sleepy. Overall, no eating means less getting things done. Bad.

I spent all afternoon/night basically sending emails and talking on the phone. I made very little tangible progress, but I was doing things most of the time, so it can’t have been all bad. I organized a few meetings and coordinated some stuff. Meh.

Overall: bad start today. But a good push through the afternoon/night.

I got a really really absurdly late start today. This is something I really need to work on. I have a lot of trouble getting up when I don’t have to.

I went to the library, which was good. I did some wikipedia surfing and watched a couple of TED talks, which was also good. Then I clocked in some hours on some web development. goodgood. I sent a few emails, but I ought to have sent more. I still sometimes have a lot of trouble diving in and cooking up brief emails.

After the library closed ~8, I was largely unproductive. Until my friends Cole and Eleni got in around midnight. Me and Cole recorded episode one of a new video blog. More on that soon.

Overall: Got a good amount of stuff done today.

I am disappointed with my level of activity last quarter. I made the grade, but overall I did less independent learning and less activism, and I created fewer things.

I want to get this quarter started off right. So this week, I am going to pay particularly close attention to what I do with my time.

And I’m going to blog about it.

I’m sitting in my dorm at Dartmouth. My east coast journey has come to an end. Overall, it was a huge success, and even exceeded my expectations. I met up with a lot of cool free culture people and overall just spent lots of time in the company of good friends.

Thank you to:

• *Spencer for letting me crash at Harvard
• *The Berkman Center for Hosting the awesome Gender and Tech mini-conference
• *Sam for letting me crash at Boston College
• *The Free Software Foundation for hosting LibrePlanet
• *Mako and Mika for hosting nightly get-togethers at The Acetarium during LibrePlanet, and for letting me crash Sunday night
• *HelloSilo people, including Seth, Tim, Rachel, Alex, and others, as well as Asheesh for hanging out with me and for being thought-provoking and hilarious.
• *Barry, for letting me crash and showing me a good time in NYC.
• *Free Culture @ NYU, especially Parker and Wesley, for letting me crash your meeting and hang out.
• *Elizabeth Stark for letting me crash your class at Yale.
• *Yale Information Society Project for letting me crash your fellows meeting.
• *The Purple Crayon at Yale for letting me play with you and for putting up with my horrible horrible improvised song
• *Adi Mark and Swati, and all the other awesome people that I met and hung out with at Yale. You guys are intelligent and funny and awesome.

I’m sure there are others that I’ve missed. Let me know and I’ll add you. The success of this trip has been a product of many many deliciously excellent parts which would not have been possible without the generosity and hospitality of so many friends.

(photo credit: thomashawk on flickr)

Over the next 1.5 weeks, i’m going to be backpacking around the east coast. I’ll be going to a couple conferences, meeting with some friends, checking out a couple museums, and walking a lot of city streets.

I have a google doc with my itinerary (mostly short notes now, will flesh out more later). If I’ll be in the same place as you and you want to meet up, give me a call or shoot me an email.

I’m going to be microblogging my adventures, as well as (macro?)blogging most days. I microblog on identica, and my identica feed gets cross-posted to my twitter account.

So follow along, won’t you?

Some time last week, I found myself forced to use an obnoxious scanner that emailed individual scans to me as PDFs. I had to re-enter my email address on the impossible touch-screen keyboard for each page, and when I was done I had 7 emails in my inbox.

I needed to re-assemble these 1-page PDFs into a 7-page one. A quick google search led me to this page. But I’ll spare you the unnecessary list of non-solutions (as well as the hentai Site Traffic Strip-O-Meter). The real gem on that page is this linux command:

gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf

simply “cd” into the dir with all the pdfs that you want to string together, replace in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf with the names of your pdf images, and voila! out.pdf is your new SuperPDF. The Eurasia of PDFs.

(This is the first time that I’ve posted a nerdy linuxey howto. This may or may not become a trend. But don’t get scared–the main focus of this blog will continue to be my crappy creations and stupid ideas.)