Creativity
posted in General, Hurray for Geekdom |Yes, I’m avoiding work. You see, Hal died, and coincidentally, my linux server at home died. Both computers suffered, what one might call ‘catastrophic hard drive failure.’ Yes, that means that there’s no backup for the three sites I had on Hal. I found an old copy of arghwebworks on the laptop, but wishease.com and veeshans-fury.com are both … down.
With it coming into a serious gift-giving season, it’s really appropriate that I get wishease.com back up and running, if I’m serious about providing that service and theoretically making money from it.
There are two weblogs that I read for no other reason than they give me an excuse to read weblogs and pretend to be working. It’s not making me any money directly, but I can see reflecting on them making me a better … wage-earner. Or whatever. Anyway, one of these two is Paul Graham. His essay on Ideas helps me understand myself a little better. On the one hand, I know that I don’t learn something very well unless I’m using it to solve a problem. Writing a hello world program in javascript is pretty dull, but I can see learning the same techniques to a task that’s more interesting. Like parsing a stock market price and updating a web page in near-real-time.
According to Paul Graham, ideas come up like doodles.
Perhaps letting your mind wander is like doodling with ideas. You have certain mental gestures you’ve learned in your work, and when you’re not paying attention, you keep making these same gestures, but somewhat randomly. In effect, you call the same functions on random arguments. That’s what a metaphor is: a function applied to an argument of the wrong type.
You need to have some knowledge of techniques (mental gestures) before you can be inspired with an idea. I rather like that, because it meshes well with my need to, for instance, learn C so I can write a water-sensing program that turns on a waterpump. It’s also crucial to “fill the hopper” (my term, not his) with a lot of interesting arguments that your function can be applied to.
