botwerks

don’t get sucked into buying the augmented reality issue of esquire.  about the 3rd time you hear “boo-yaa” from robert downey jr.  you’re pretty tempted to throw the magazine through your monitor. cute and clever?  yes.  tedious as hell? definitely.

yesterday, i horked up something in my .emacs file which broke the manner in which my on-the-fly spell checker (flyspell) worked inside of emacs. if i’d been thinking i would have had the whole thing under the current version control system. but somehow, this portion of the home directory tree missed out on that.

setting aside that bit of silliness on my part, i noticed something. while i was grinding out real work and answering emails between the discovery of the breakage and repair, i discovered that my work flow had developed a dependency on having an automated “checker” come back and clean up after me.

now, i’ve had this realization in the world of MSFT Word and other packages with built-in spell checkers, but clean-up of typos was one of those things that i did in a batch manner, my fingers hadn’t actually adapted to the use of an integrated spell checking function like they had in my normal work tools. (read, emacs)

i’ve always had some level of pride in having relatively decent spelling skills. but the power of ctr-; and knowing what your tool would do, has had an interesting impact on my productivity. one that i’m not entirely convinced is for the best in the long term.

before i dropped vonage a month or so ago for the comcast triple play. i used to use this schell script bound to a quicksilver action to dial my phone. eliminating the need to deal with a pesky phone dial pad.

note, this grabs the phone number to dial from your system clipboard. (note the use of the pbpaste command. users of non-OS X platforms should adjust to something appropriate. i seem to recall the gnome had something similar.

in the interests of posterity.

vonage dial