I attended the Nokia Forum Qt training last April 28 to 30 at the Makati Shangri-La Manila Hotel. During the training, I had the good fortune of sitting next to Dr. Pablo Manalastas (“Doc Mana”).
I can’t quite remember now how we got into the topic, but in the course of our conversation I had mentioned that I was dabbling in Android programming nowadays. Doc Mana then proceeded to mention a problem he had with the Android development environment. He was trying to program on his netbook and it turns out it was a problem I had encountered before as well. One of the windows had resized itself to fit the screen space, resulting in the disappearance of one of the choices. I’ll mention the solution in a later blog post, but suffice to say I was able to show him how to make the window even larger despite the lack of screen space. That was when Doc Mana mentioned that I should be writing this in my blog.
That struck a chord in me. I haven’t been writing as much as I wanted to this year. In fact, I’ve been practically dormant on this blog. There has been a lot of things that I could and should be sharing in the past months but I’ve never gotten around to writing about. Things like Android and Qt and why I went back to CentOS. About the seminars I’ve attended, the boo-boos that have happened during particular seminars. Why they worked. Why they failed. I should be writing about those. So how do I jumpstart my blog writing?
One thing I could do is to make use of the pencils, fountain pens and notebooks that I have accumulated over the years. I should write those thoughts as soon as they come up, no matter how short they are. I’ll think about how to expand those thoughts later. Another is that I haven’t taken advantage of my Android phone. I have a good enough voice recorder on it that should allow me to record audio notes when needed. Definitely much faster than writing those notes on the device. The important thing is to not let those ideas fade into the ether!
I figured that if I’m going to write on a more regular basis, I should think like a writer. One of the things I learned from “The Writer’s Idea Book” by Jack Heffron is to train the brain to start writing at a specific time of my choice. I decided that the choice would be every evening at about 10pm. Just turn off the lights and the television and start writing until I feel sleepy. It’s nice because I get to unload my thoughts which tend to keep me awake for longer than I want to. On my netbook, I use the app called Q10 so that I have nothing but my writing to think about. My plan is to keep writing in the evenings on weekdays, do some edit work on Saturdays and put them up as scheduled posts on Sundays. Also, no use of the internet when writing. That means nothing to stop and look up when I’m creating a post. Everything I need to write about should already be in the notes I took using the voice recorder, phone and dead-tree notebook.
Hopefully the method would stick. I would love to find my groove again and start helping out other people once more through this blog.
