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There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker, Educator and Author (via forbes)
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Late Night Links – Sunday March 20th, 2016

It’s the first day of spring today! That’s not really relevant though, so let’s just get on with some late night links and not dwell on it.

And that’s it! Not only are we done for today, we’re also finally all caught up after my hiatus a while back. Until next week, then, Internet. Same time, same place.

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Late Night Links – Sunday March 13th, 2016

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Being Smarter by Not Thinking

There’s a popular
myth that says we only use 10% of our brains
.

It’s simply not true. Studies (including the source of all scientific truth: an episode of
MythBusters) have proven that all areas of the brain have a function, and while
the percentage that we’re ā€œusingā€ at any given time varies by task it can
certainly exceed 10%.

image

One thing that seems very obvious to me without needing to
cite a study about it, however, is that I certainly have unused brain capacity,
and it can do amazing things when you leave it to its own devices.

As an example of what I’m talking about, I refer you to a
link I posted on this very blog some time ago: Why
Great Ideas Always Come in the Shower (and How to Harness Them)
.

In the brief commentary I added, I mentioned that never in
my life have I had a good idea in a meeting. Great ideas come to me while I’m
doing other things. Specifically, other things that do not take much in the way
of thought and offer little in the way of distraction: things where my brain
gets left to it’s own devices and has an opportunity to wander – showering,
certainly, but also commuting, trying to get to sleep at the very end of the
day (infuriatingly), and when I’m at the gym.

Talking of the latter one, I haven’t been to the gym for
quite some time.

When we lived in our apartment there was a gym in the
building, and that was great. I could easily fit in a solid 45 minutes there at
lunch. Any spare 30 minute window in my schedule could be turned into 20
minutes on the stationary bike.

I want to go back, but now that we’ve bought the house there
is obviously not an on-site gym. There’s a gym at the office (20 minutes away)
and a Goodlife Fitness close by (10 minutes away) where I’d get a discounted
rate, but small though it is even that travel time is putting me off. I will
most likely join Goodlife, since I rarely go to the office these days and
installing a home gym just isn’t in the budget right now, but I’ve been missing
the ability to easily take 30 minutes and get some exercise, and I’m sad that
none of the solutions will offer me that. In the absence of a perfect solution,
I haven’t done anything at all… until yesterday.

Since the weather here in Calgary is distinctly spring-like
these days, I went for a walk before I started my work day. I didn’t go far – a
little less than 2km, according to the Google Fit data from my phone and watch
– just down the road a bit and then back along the pathways that run through
our neighbourhood.

I liked it so much I did it again at lunch time, and then
for a third time this morning.

The physical benefits of this, though I’m sure not huge by any
means, are probably much needed at this point. Really though what I like about
it so much are the mental benefits. I’ve never been much of a morning person
and I would never consider going to the gym before work, but rolling out of bed
and attempting to be productive more or less immediately is not a recipe for
success either. Feeling like my day has already started by the time I sit down
to get some work done definitely gives me a mental boost that I’ve been able to
capitalize on. More significantly though, there’s a lot to be said for the kind
of problem solving that can only come from not thinking about something too
much and letting my subconscious guide me in ways that I’d never have come up
with if I were sitting at my desk consciously trying to focus on something.

It’s amazing what you can do when you’re not trying to do
anything.

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Late Night Links – Sunday March 6th, 2016

After a fairly substantial break, Late Night Links is back! There’s quite the backlog and I don’t think we’ll get through it all today, but nevertheless let’s dive in, shall we?

Traditionally this is the point in our story at which I sayĀ ā€œwe’re done.ā€ We’re not done, but I think that’s plenty for today. Join me next week (same time, same place) and we’ll pick it up where we left off!

Blog

Quote

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, in the opposite direction
— Me, reflecting on some meetings I’ve had recently

Sometimes you need to take a step back and learn to walk before you try and run.

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New Code Projects: Backblaze B2 Version Cleaner & VBA SharePoint List Library

It’s been a while since I’ve posted code of any description, but I’ve been working on a couple of things recently that I’m going to make publicly available on my GitLab page (and my mirror repository at code.jnf.me)

Backblaze B2 Version Cleaner

I wrote last week about transitioning my cloud backup to Backblaze’s B2 service, and I also mentioned a feature of it that’s nice but also slightly problematic to me: it keeps an unlimited version history of all files.

That’s good, because it gives me the ability to go back in time should I ever need to, but over time the size of this version history will add up – and I’m paying for that storage.

So, I’ve written a script that will remove old versions once a newer version of the same file has reached a certain (configurable)Ā ā€œsafe age.ā€

For my purposes I use 30 days, so a month after I’ve overwritten or deleted a file the old version is discarded. If I haven’t seen fit to roll back the clock before then my chance is gone.

Get the code here!

VBA SharePoint List Library

This one I created for work. Getting data from a SharePoint list into Excel is easy, but I needed to write Excel data to a list. I assumed there’d be a VBA function that did this for me, but as it turns out I was mistaken – so I wrote one!

At the time of writing this is inĀ ā€œproof of conceptā€ stage. It works, but it’s too limited for primetime (it can only create new list items, not update existing ones, and each new item can only have a single field).

Out of necessity I’ll be developing this one pretty quickly though, so check back regularly! Once it’s more complete I’ll be opening it up to community contributions.

I have no plans to add functions that read from SharePoint to this library, but once I have the basic framework down that wouldn’t be too hard to add if you’re so inclined. Just make sure you contribute back!

Get the code here!

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Late Night Links – Sunday January 24th, 2016