It is Monday morning. I will write at the beginning of the day because it is important for me to plan out the activities of the week, I have a sizeable amount of client work, which I consider to have more priority than my personal projects, so I will begin there.

  1. Mr. Tatsuya needs that the output of Method Draw matches Adobe Illustrator’s parsing of SVG. The best way to do this is to limit the amount of things Method Draw can output which Illustrator implements differently. Unfortunately, this might mean radial gradients will be impossible to implement. But this needs to be confirmed in practice, it may be possible to implement radial gradients under certain constraints.
  2. I have a new client from Atlanta. She has a “logo maker” website which is implemented with SVG Edit. She wants it replaced with Method Draw. The website has a PHP backend and is clumsily integrated with SVG-Edit, I will first replicate the clumsy integration with Method Draw, and once I understand how it works, I may propose (or even attempt) a less coupled implementation.
  3. I am in final talks of a sponsorship with Deta for Method Draw. This would be quick: a link in the GitHub repo, and a button in the editor.

All activities concern Method Draw. This way I know that if I am not working on it, I am procrastinating. If I am procrastinating, let it be at least in hatching the creative eggs I’ve laid before, and not on mindless browsing of my focus enemies: Hacker News, Reddit and Twitter.

I will now write my stream of thought, as a form of self therapy. Please feel free to skip.

I lay in bed and I feel my heartbeat. I focus a bit on on the breath, and part of my attention goes to the screen. It is impossible to meditate and to type at the same time. In the past I have attempted to close my eyes and type, but this does not help me focus, so it is best to have an impartial yet detached gaze at the screen, so that I do not fall into the temptation of editing.

What is the purpose of observing within? To know better the sensations that arise when you face some tasks. I observe the list that I wrote before, and I have no desire to begin, but it is not exactly an aversion either. Many times, it is a matter of simply putting your tools and materials in front of you in order to reduce the friction to begin work.

The browser must have only the necessary tabs, the phone must be in silence, only essential applications must be open. How many applications are running concurrently? 15. That is insane, I must become nimble before starting work, clean my table. A romantic notion came to me: if I was a carpenter, would I have a newspaper at hand to read while the paint dries? No, I think I would have a book. What would I be reading? I suppose, what I am reading now in my bathroom breaks: “A guide for the perplexed” by EF Schumacher, which begins by speaking of philosophical maps.

Schumacher makes a great point that any map presented is not the map of reality. There will be features that the human being encounters which are not pointed out on the map. Let us be more clear: suppose scientific consensus says certain type of healing is bogus. You experiment the healing first hand. What do you do to conciliate this fact? Do you adapt your experience to scientific consensus (it was placebo or a fluke), or do you come to the conclusion that the map is not showing you something because you came to it by walking the territory?

If you open Google Maps and move to a remote region, you may find a loss of density in roads and human construction, thus it appears “empty” to you, but if you turn on satellite view it is possible that you see forests, mountains and natural features which are patently important but not displayed in our maps except in the most rudimentary ways. You can use maps in satellite view in order to find the most shaded route to work on a sunny day, but this information is removed from the map view because this maps is not for you.

In the same way, the maps we are given to understand the world, through philosophical, scientific or religious concepts, necessarily make a simplification of reality.

Battery is almost drained, I sure sign that it is time to plug in at my desk and begin work.