Creativity Drought

Over the last couple years I have spent a lot of spare time working on various creative projects including this blog, setting up and hosting my own website, drone videos, and the Kilobyte podcast. They each managed to challenge me in different ways, whether it was finding the right equipment for podcast recording, learning about setting up a Linux server, or understanding how to build and pilot a quadcopter. It was also difficult trying to find enough time in my schedule to work on each thing in a meaningful way. Somehow I managed to find the time and was quite happy with my first pass at all of it.

Going into this year I hoped to adopt a yearly theme as was discussed on Cortex #62: 2018 Yearly Themes. The basic idea is to find a theme for the year (or season) and use it as a guide for decisions throughout the year rather than setting a bunch of goals for the year you are likely to break. I spent several days thinking about the past year, what I had accomplished and the direction I wanted to head for the upcoming year. It was really important that I build on the previous year’s learning, but step it up in some way. Initially I was leaning towards creating content more consistently, but I think before that I need to make it easier for me to actually create and post the content.

I was getting close, but just as I started to narrow down on a theme something happened and I got distracted. It is hard to say for sure what happened, but my creative output went down to zero. Thankfully I have recognized it and have started down the road to correcting course. Here is my first step in creating more content again with hopefully more to come soon.

MacOS, Maven and Tilde Folders

I recently set up a new MacBook Pro for development and installed some developer tools like Java and Maven.  After checking out my source code from Subversion and building it using Maven a folder with the name tilde (~) appeared in the same directory as my source code.  I deleted the folder and a little while later I noticed it was back.  After some digging around I found that setting the path of my local maven repository in my settings.xml file so it started with a ~ for my home directory was the problem.  Every time I ran a build it was trying to put a new local repository in a tilde directory of the working directory.  After updating the path to use /Users/{username} it stopped creating the tilde folder.