Phillip Karlsson's random thoughts, musings, and mindless pabulum.
The first one is the eating stage, which can also be the sitting and futzing stage. This is when you know what you're trying to solve, but aren't exactly sure how you want to go about doing it. I tend to spend about a third of the time researching, a third of the time procrastinating unproductively, a third of the time maybe getting other random stuff done, and a third of the time working on my notoriously bad math skills. This part tends to get stretched out as I avoid starting to choose whatever solution I'm going to spend the time implementing. For me this is the eating stage, I like to munch on stuff as a way to waste time while I let my brain mull over possible solutions, and eventually (hopefully) come up with the one I decide to implement.
The second stage is the not-eating, or implementation phase. When you know how to solve the problem, and get into it, you completely lose track of time. Often you're not even seeing the screen, you're just translating whatever model you have in your head into code (hopefully avoiding typos and silly bugs while you're at it). When you're in the throes of this, you don't notice time, don't get hungry, and can't stand having someone interrupt you. You feel that if you lose the current structure that's in your head before it gets translated into code, you might lose it forever, and any interruption might be enough to knock it out of there.
Why do I bring this up? I'm the first stage, but only because i know I only have 1.5 hours before I need to go elsewhere (banjo lesson), and that's not enough to get into the zen-coding state. So I'm looking to waste time, and none of my usual blogs are updating, making procrastination very difficult. I was forced to catch up on bills instead.
It looks like they're trying a new version of their subscription system. It'll be interesting to see how this goes for them. They're one of the places we looked at when trying to figure out how we wanted the premium version of Goats to work.
I expect it will frighten off lots of people, but that's ok, it's only going to be the people who weren't paying anyway, and they're just a drain on the system. I also think that before, only certain areas of their site were subscription only, so if I was a "Tech & Business" reader, I had no incentive to pay, because those were almost always free. This way anyone interested in any section has to subscribe. I wish them luck, it'd be a shame to lose their journalistic voice, hopefully if it works well enough they can expand to more original investigative reporting again.