Athletes talk about “being in the zone” — a magical place where everything just flows. Here’s what one coaching website says about it:

The zone is an experience players get when everything they do seems effortless. They allow themselves to be an athlete and allow their subconscious mind to go on auto pilot. The athlete is not thinking, “what could go wrong, who’s in the crowd, or will I get pulled from the game?” Instead they are, “in the game.” When people are in the zone the game goes by quickly. They play so well that they may forget what happens. This is because the experience was almost unreal. The best athletes do this most often. They trust in their abilities and let things flow. If the athlete has to think too much about what they are doing, the athlete cannot naturally react and respond and the zone cannot be achieved.

The experience is not unique to athletes. Here’s what Joel Spolsky says about “knowledge workers” in the zone:

Here’s the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into “flow”, also known as being “in the zone”, where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.

The trouble is, getting into “the zone” is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. Sometimes, if you’re tired or have already done a lot of creative work that day, you just can’t get into the zone and you spend the rest of your work day fiddling around, reading the web, playing Tetris.

I know this all intimately in my own work. There are times — I’m in the middle of one right now, on a quiet Sunday night — when programming spills out of me like gangbusters, where one project leads to another to another, and where it actually begins to feel like I’m inside one of those crazy visualizations that are always used in the movies to try and characterize cyberspace (all sort of 3D graphics twirling and whirling around).

Conversely, there are times when “the zone” appears to be closed to entry, when mood or food or sleep or circumstance leads to a dullard-like worklife where nothing gets done and even simple tasks seem impossible to execute.

The end effect of this, for me, is that 95% of my work gets done in 5% of my working hours. If you ran an EKG of my productivity, you would see many hours of gathering the horses interspersed with manic periods of extreme productivity where all the real work gets done.

Some practical side-effects of this way of working are:

• The telephone is my enemy. When the telephone rings, it pops me “out of the zone” and may in fact irrevocably make the work day a bust.
• The same is true of spontaneous visitors, loud paper shredding trucks, hurricanes. And, alas, the need to eat and drink.
• All estimates of when jobs will be completed are, in essence, lies because it’s so hard to predict the amount of time “in the zone” that one will be able to muster. Mitch Kapor says, “[s]oftware, like construction projects, is typically late, sometimes very, very late. It typically takes longer and is much harder than any estimates.”
• Non-programmer friends and family not attuned to this craziness are apt to think one is either a n’er-do-well or an addict, depending on the moment.

Ironically, we don’t design our programmer workspaces to maximize time in the zone. We should be working in fortresses of solitude, isolated from all distraction, with chilled iced tea and small snacks at the ready. Instead we plop ourselves into distraction cauldrons. Our social lives benefit immeasurably (and that’s not an altogether bad thing). But focus suffers as a result.

I’m feeling the zone fading away as I type these final words. Time to exit the zone and go home…

We started experimenting with RSS at The Old Farmer’s Almanac back in December. Today we’ve released an expanded list of RSS feeds, including things like “Today in Weather History,” “Word of the Day” and others.

We’re continuing to experiment with RSS on the Almanac site; feedback is welcome.

I stumbled across HotelChatter.com in my fumbling around for a hotel in Boston during the DNC. As a travel logistics fan, the site is right up my alley: news, notes and opinions about hotels.

The site has an RSS feed, which the site owners recently flipped to show the full text of posts (thanks!).

By the way, as described here, Edward Hasbrouck has converted his own RSS feed to show the full text of posts too, on a trial basis.

In other travel news: the spirits seem to be calling me back to Thailand. First comes an invite from my friend Steve to come and stay with him in his new house in Bangkok.

Next, we happened upon an episode of Tony Bourdain’s excellent A Cook’s Tour television show that focused on food in Chiang Mai on the Food Network (it was great; Bourdain is the author of Kitchen Confidential, which we just finished listening to the audiobook version of).

And last night we caught an episode of Valerie Pringle Has Left The Building that was also shot in Chiang Mai. As chance would have it, we ran into Pringle and her crew in Bangkok in their way north to shoot this episode, an event that prompted me to lambast her for poor manners. Pringle’s time in the city was considerably more upscale than ours. We weren’t living close the ground, exactly. But our hotel cost us about $25/night and her room at the Four Seasons was, I dare say, somewhat more.

Pringle was far less objectionable on television than she was in person, by the way.

Here’s a Globe and Mail article, in today’s edition, on DNC convention blogging. Here’s a clip:

While many still view these digital diaries as repositories for lukewarm teen angst, blogs have, in the past two years, become the preferred information sluice for political pundits large and small. About 35 bloggers received official accreditation for the Democratic National Convention that concluded Thursday in Boston.

One of those lucky three dozen included Peter Rukavina, who lives in Charlottetown and had the honour of being the lone accredited Canadian blogger at the Democratic gathering. Having to self-finance the trip meant that Mr. Rukavina, a computer programmer, could afford to stay only for two of the four nights of the convention.

Still, Mr. Rukavina did his best to harness the power of bloggery. His site, reinvented.net, offered a very personal and personable perspective on the political process. “I’m not sure I’ve been able to get any real sense of what this convention is for,” he wrote in a posting on Tuesday, the second day of the proceedings. “This is not a national town-hall meeting; it’s more akin to a televised debutante ball.

“I’m afraid that politics here in America is so abstracted from reality that it is, in fact, impossible to understand on a level other than the superficial.”

Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor believes that Mr. Rukavina and others like him provide a perfect example of what bloggers can and should bring to the journalism conversation.

Here’s an accounting for what it cost me to cover the DNC. All costs are in Canadian dollars, taxes included.

• Travel
• Confederation Bridge Toll (twice!): $78
• Gasoline: $30
• Air Canada, Moncton to Boston: $531
• Subway and taxi in Boston: $20
• Lodging
• Country Inn and Suites, Moncton: $100
• Sheraton Braintree, Boston: $580
• Internet Access
• Sheraton Braintree: $18
• Logan Airport: $10
• Other
• Meals: $50

Total cost comes out to $1417, or roughly $29/hour for my time on the ground in Boston.

Balanced against this is the income from the trip:

• Generous grant from a donor: $500
• Fee for reprint of blog in National Post: $100

Total real cash income was $600, which makes the real cost of the trip $817.

If I were concerned with things like this, which I am not, you could also count the exposure in the media as a sort of income. For example, the 250 agate lines of weblog reprint in the National Post is worth $3820 if seen as an advertisement.

Several reporters asked me why I would do something like this. CBC Radio reporter Pat Martel asked me, Gordon Sinclair style, “was it worth the money you spent?”

Having had some time to think about this, my best answer to the “why” is “because I’m an inveterate collector of experiences.” In lieu of formal education, I’ve choosen instead to learn about the world by playing around in various parts of it. I didn’t go to Boston, really, out of civic duty, out of interest in the political process, or even because of a passion for weblogging. I went because I knew it would be interesting, because I would learn something, because it would be an experience unlike any other.

And it was.

Thanks to those that helped, financially and logistically, to those that provided commentary to my posts, and pointed me in the right direction. And thanks to Catherine and Oliver for putting up with my eccentricities.

The Deutsche Welle article is now online. In German. With photos.

I just received an early copy of the text of the article that resulted from my interview on Tuesday with DW. It’s in German, and I ran it through the Google translator to get a sense of what it said.

My favourite part is how the description of the location of the blogger area in the Fleet Center translated:

There is even a special range for the Blogger, directly under the roof Fleet Center, in swindles of exciting height.

I believe that hits the nail, inadvertently, on the head.

Then there’s my description of the need for WiFi and power as a sort of addiction:

Then the Blogger sits there, and if one sees to them into the eyes, then they look like addicted ones, which do not get straight their drug?

This isn’t intended to be a comment on the article itself, simply on the manner by which Google machine translates it. I’ll have to learn German to get a real sense.

I’ll post a link to the article when it goes online.

Reinvented is sponsoring the Senior Women’s Canadian Fastpitch Championship again this year (we were a sponsor in 2002 as well). It’s taking place here in Charlottetown from August 8th to 15th, 2004.

We’ve got eight free tournament passes up for grabs; a tournament pass entitles you to entry all games at both fields. If there are any ball fans in the readership, and you’d like one, just email me and I’ll pass them out first-come, first-served.

Judge O’Toole released his opinion in the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, et al. v. MBTA hearing I attended yesterday. Edward has a full report.

I took the picture below at 1:05 p.m. That’s my flight up there on the board. Elementary physics suggests it is impossible to board a flight and take off in 5 minutes, especially with the crowd in the waiting room, which included several babies and small children.

Nobody expects airlines to be perfect. But the least they can do is be honest: providing false information like “your flight is on time” when it is obvious that it will not be is just plain bad basic customer service.