So far, I’ve done a terrible job of getting anything done. The peer review tracker I’m supposedly building is often quite far from being on the forefront of my mind. I’ve attributed this largely to the fact that it was meant to be for my employer, and we’ve since parted ways. I think there’s another aspect at play here though, and that’s the fact that I don’t have an adequate place to study the books I want to study or code the things I want to code.

I live in a one bedroom apartment with my girlfriend Cyndi, cat Leo, and two birds (Tink and Houdini, though I always have to think about the latter’s name as I tend to call him something else entirely). I used to have this apartment all to myself, so I saw no major flaw with having my computer desk in the living room. Now, the flaw is obvious: privacy, or rather the lack thereof. Even if I wanted to move the desk into the bedroom, I don’t think I could because of factors like space, the awkward nature of the corners of the room, and the fact that my desktop is largely Cyndi’s now and I don’t want her to have to isolate herself in the bedroom to use it.

Cyndi is actually really good about giving me space if I want to try to work on something, but most people would probably tell you that your living room isn’t the best place to read technical books or develop software, since there are just too many distractions. Thus, I needed to look elsewhere for places to work.

The first place that jumped to mind was Starbucks/coffee shops in general. I figure it wouldn’t be too hard to find a place that wasn’t overly loud, but other factors led me to discard the idea. Mainly, I don’t like the idea of taking up space for paying customers, as I assume the staff wouldn’t be too happy about that. Also, I don’t like being forced to pay every time I want to code. Don’t get me wrong, I like coffee, I just don’t like the idea of paying $10 for a few cups so I can feel justified to work for several hours.

Next, I considered working at a campus library. I’m not enrolled there, so I didn’t think I’d be allowed to use the university’s libraries. When I was in college, my friends and I used to spend a lot of time in the library studying/hanging out, so I knew it would definitely be a good idea. I sent an email to each of the campus libraries and asked if the general public was allowed to study there, and they said that was absolutely fine, though their wireless system was only available to students. This environment seemed like it would be my best option, so that’s what I decided to do.

I’m still working out the schedule I want to follow, but it looks like I’m going to start working at the library 3-5 days a week for a few hours a day. Hopefully this will keep me structured and make me more productive.

The lack of wireless is also a motivator for a new project which I’m going to give precedence over the peer review tracker. Since I won’t have access to the internet, I wanted to start downloading things like the PHP documentation, the Java API and tutorial, and the MSDN Library. These are all readily available, but I’ve become addicted to StackOverflow as well, and I’d really like to keep an offline copy of that as well. The site is licensed under the Creative Commons and the developers release an data dump once a month of all the sites content. This sounds awesome, but unfortunately for me it’s all in XML format, which means it’s not as easily searched as something like MSDN or the StackOverflow website itself. My new project, therefore, is to create a desktop application that will load the XML contents into MySQL and provide an interface to all the sites questions and answers, along with a reasonable search feature. I just have no idea what to call it. Any ideas would be appreciated.

So, a new productivity plan and a brand new project. I think next week will be the start of something really fulfilling.