A Buddhist allegory overheard in a podcast recently:

One day, a man decided to take a walk in the jungle. This happened to be extremely foolish because the jungle was dangerous and there were rumors of a man-eating tiger in the area.

But he wasn't quite thinking and decided it might be a nice day for a stroll. Sure enough, as he was getting deeper into the wood, a tiger jumped out of the underbrush and ran towards him. He took off running, but knew he wouldn't be able to outrun a full-grown, hungry tiger. Instead of just resigning to his fate, he ran as fast as he could and looked for a way out.

As he ran around a small tree, the crashing of the tiger's feet right behind him, he saw a well. He jumped into the well just as the tiger swiped at his back. As he was falling, he saw that the well had no water. A drought dried up almost everything and this well was no different. Just before hitting bottom, he grabbed a tree root that was growing through the side of the well to break his fall.

The man made so much noise during his escape that it woke the snake that was sleeping in the bottom of the well. The snake rose up and showed it's hood, striking at the man as he hung onto the root. The man was just high enough not to get bitten by the snake and just low enough that the tiger couldn't reach him with it's paws. He sighed as he realized he was trapped.

As the man hung there, two small mice crawled out of a hole near the top of the root, one white and one black. They both started to gnaw on the base of the root, making the base of the root thinner and thinner. The man tried to shoo them away, but the tiger prevented him from getting close enough to scare the mice.

As the tiger paced above, he kept rubbing up against the small tree by the well, shaking it little by little. In the tree was a bee's nest and it started to sway back and forth in the branches. The bees started swarming around the top of the well and the nest started to drip honey right down the center of the well. The man leaned out and was just barely able to catch the honey with his tongue.

It was delicious.

So I've started a new blog devoted the data privacy and protection named, oddly enough, Data Privacy and Protection. This is an extension of my book idea and I figured I'd transition it a little to a blog first and slowly get the content worked out there. I will also be keeping the blog up to date on the latest developments and vulnerabilities concerning privacy and security. If you want to know more about backups, encryption, data theft prevention and fun things like that, go ahead and sign up for the feed.

Sadly, I really do find this fascinating and fun, so if you have any article ideas for the new blog, let me know and I'll research and post an answer out there.

I've had the idea for a while of having some time where I wouldn't consume any content. No TV, no internet, no newspapers, no books, no radio ... you get the idea. If I wanted to keep myself occupied, I would have to come up with my own distractions and force myself to be a content producer.

The basic idea is, if you watch a TV show or read a book, you're a content consumer. You are consuming the content that someone else created and not adding any content of your own. Most of the content that we consume, we don't even use and so it's basically just escapism. Not that that is totally bad, but too much of it can be. Whenever I do this for long periods of time I always feel like I haven't accomplished anything.

If instead you film small movies or write a book, then you're a content producer and I would contend that you're a producer even if you don't ultimately publish these things or make them available for others to consume. The act of producing itself is important because you have practiced your art and will be able to make things of higher quality later. So with producing, just the act of producing is valuable, which is not necessarily true of consuming.

Put Into Practice

To try this out, I decided that the perfect time to do this was while on vacation. We were going to a secluded state park to stay in one of it's one room cabins and took along no books, no videos, no internet connection so that nothing would distract us. It ended up that the cabin did actually have a TV in it with DirectTV, but I quickly unplugged it and forgot about it. This was a weekend for creating only.

I brought along an AlphaSmart 3000, so that I didn't need my laptop and all the distractions it brings, and my ukulele. Amy brought her drawing pad and pencils along with some reference photos that she wanted to work off of. We were ready for unbridled production.

The first thing I noticed was, it was hard. The first night I actually said to Amy, "Do something interesting. Entertain me." I think that it's sometimes hard to get a handle on something until it's not there anymore. Once I didn't have ways of distracting myself, I just started to lose it. It did help me see that as a problem though.

When I couldn't take being bored anymore, I knew I was going to have to do something to occupy my mind. I broke out the AlphaSmart and wrote a blog post about the weekend. Then I wrote another one and I remembered how fun it can be to write again. I eventually ended up writing five blog posts and a chapter in a book that's been on the back burner for a while. Amy was able to do something similar with her drawing.

I think sometimes when you get into the mode of turning off your mind and just turning your attention over to someone else, you can get stuck in not thinking for yourself. It was interesting to me how I not only created more, but was able to see how my mind works to try and keep me distracted and not on task. The act of creating more automatically made me more introspective and think more critically about how I live my life and how my actions don't always live up to my intentions.

I'm sure most full time writers would read that and think 'Duh' because I've heard that advice so much in writing books I've read. This was the first time I really saw it in action though and I've finally understood it. The weekend really helped me find the value in not distracting myself so much with other people's content and focus more on creating some of my own.

So I bought an AlphaSmart 3000 off of eBay. But my decision to actually get one is confusing me a little. Why exactly do I feel so certain that I want to buy such an odd piece of tech, when I have a laptop so easily available and am even looking at getting a G1 phone with a bluetooth keyboard that would work just as well?

I borrowed my friend's AlphaSmart 3000 during my vacation to do simple writing. I didn't want to take my laptop since I wasn't sure about the power situation but, more importantly, I didn't want the distractions. I find many other things more attractive than writing, like browsing, coding or solitaire, but usually far less satisfying. If I got rid of those "other things", I knew I would be able to concentrate more on what mattered to me; the writing.

This played out amazingly well during the vacation as I got a lot of writing done. I also found it's instant on / instant off ability very conductive to capturing what I was thinking. It was able to grab it, turn it on and be writing within seconds. Then when I was done, I just turn it off and set it aside.

Also, it's minimalism is a huge strength. It's basically a keyboard, a very durable and nice feeling keyboard, with a little LCD screen on it and some memory. It can only be used for writing, and that is greatly appealing to me. I write best by typing and have never been one to write with pen and paper. With an AlphaSmart, I finally feel like I've found my electronic "pen and paper" substitute.

Since its 3 AA batteries can last over 300 hours and it's case is very rugged with no moving parts except it's heavy plastic keys, it's a great take along when you're going some place that you wouldn't want your nice little computer to go. This could easily fit in a carry-on bag and it's not to big to be used in an airplane seat. It's also easily taken apart and clean so I wouldn't mind taking it to the beach or the great outdoors for fear of it getting dirty.

What it's really good for though is writing what Anne Lamott in Bird By Bird calls "shitty first drafts". You aren't going to be doing much editing on this thing with a small four line LCD screen and you can't see a lot of what you've already typed, but you sure can pound out the words. That simple fact has got me writing again and that's something that a lot of other devices just haven't been able to do.

I'm typically not a fan of specialized devices. I like to have devices that do more than one thing at a time like, say, a phone with a browser, camera, MP3 player, GPS and whatever apps I write for it. But the AlphaSmart does one thing and it does it well. Now we'll see how well I use it.

I got to play with an AlphaSmart 3000 recently and am actually going to be buying one of my own. One problem I was warned about was that it didn't quite work under Linux. Since the AlphaSmart just acts like a USB keyboard to the computer when transferring files I figured there was just some crazy little things that needed to be done to get it to work.

Well, I was right. There is a crazy little thing you need to do.

Here are the steps to get the one I was working with to work under Linux:

1. Turn on the AlphaSmart
2. Plug it into the computer's USB port
3. Turn on the Num Lock key on the computer's keyboard. You must do this before hitting any keys on the AlphaSmart
4. Try typing on the AlphaSmart keyboard to make sure it's transferring

After that works, you can use the AlphaSmart to transfer your files like you normally would.