Attention has become the new black, almost as if the old new fads of TQM, Theory of Constraints, SCRUM methodologies et al. have been broken down structurally into a single point of failure: Focus.

Wired online recently put out this article on "Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains", and the read is an interesting one and well worth it. Maggie Jackson looks closely at the neurobiological responses to attention deficit, and in a basic cause and effect type method suspects the digital age to be behind us being a lot of distracted over ADHD type people.

I tend to disagree..

To be fair, I've been thinking of writing this post all day, yet I've been distracted, distracted by work, eating, relaxing and various other things that I mark as a higher priority than my blogging.

You see, as much as we do live in an age where distractions happen often, and multitasking has become common place, I still find that I can focus for hours on end, without any dstraction, on a single task quite happily. In my mind the secret is about priority, the simple question of "Is this task the highest priority to me right now?".

My view on this is once things are prioritised they become easier to deal with, "Yes I want to do that, because it'll lead me to this" gives a lot more focus than, "yeah maybe for 30mins I'll do that and then play x-box"

I don't think we're in an age of attention deficit, I think we're in an age of lost priority.

It's not often that I do a full tech post, mostly because I find that philosophy and human behaviour tend to have a larger target audience. Having said this I've been hacking this thing for the last 8 hours, and I've finally got it right. So I'm publishing so that others can avoid my problems.

It turns out the latest version of the MacTeX LaTeX package comes without a critical set of files. You can however install the tex4ht source files here.

You also need to install your font files in the following directories:

/usr/share/texmf/fonts/
/usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/ht-fonts/

Run a updmap-sys and then run a texhash so as to update your ls-R files.

I'm finished, I've been staring at this problem all day, and feel like I've wasted a day doing so. I realise that I can now get to what I needed to do tomorrow (or the day after, depending on what the day brings).