I read The Pleasure Trap earlier this year, and was amazed at what its authors have to say about the dangers of modern food. It’s very hard to avoid unhealthy food. I wanted to get to know the authors a bit better so I searched YouTube and found this excellent hour-long video about the Dietary Pleasure Trap. It’s worth a watch if you’d like to eat better, help someone you know to eat better, or just understand why so many people are overweight. The book goes into it much more deeply and in my opinion is well worth the time it takes to read.
I just watched Corey Haines’ lightning talk from this year’s acts_as_conference:
He makes a lot of really good points in a short amount of time. One of the things he says is that if we have to look at documentation for a technique, we’re unlikely to use that technique when we’re in a time crunch. I think this is a very good point. Another time when I might not use the documentation is when I’m just dabbling.
To learn things, he suggests doing arbitrary tasks repetitively to get them engrained into our minds.
I spent a number of hours doing arbitrary tasks with vim, and I’ve gotten pretty good at using vim IMHO. I wish I could say I was as good at jQuery, but I haven’t got it down as well despite doing real projects in it. I think perhaps it’s best that I pick an arbitrary task, or at least do a real, but small, task repetitively, or keep trying to improve it, until I start to really get the hang of it.
On a side note, Corey Haines’ has quit working a regular job and started traveling around and pair programming with people in exchange for room and board. He calls himself a Software Journeyman. It will be interesting to hear what he learns from the experience. I hope his journey takes him to Arizona at some point!