Category: post

Besides the very sexy action office pr0n the sell, they also have great tips too. Take this great article, called Making Reference Items Helpful, for example. A lot is made out of reference materials and filing in GTD land but not a lot is written about it. It starts out with a bang too “What is the relevance? For what purpose would I refer back to it at some point? If you can’t answer this question, throw the damn thing out!”.
If you are a Mac user, and you have not checked Quicksilver out, you have no idea about the productivity your are missing. More than just a launcher, Quicksilver is an entirely fresh and fast way to interface with your computer. Merlin at 43 Folders is on top of things of course with this excellent guide for Getting started (or reacquainted) with Quicksilver. It includes links to guides, video tutorials and some good places to start down the path of this incredibly deep and rich program.
Speaking of Merlin, if you have not been catching his new vidcast series, The Merlin Show, you are missing out on some great content. There have been some fantastic interviews with independent types about how they get stuff done, deal with distractions and otherwise go about living this life. Not too late to catch up.
What ToDo is a newish GTD program for the Mac. I downloaded it and played with it for a while and I must say I am pretty impressed. It is simple, clean and, most importantly for someone like myself who is outline-centric, hierarchical. While it can’t compete for my love against Backpack (it’s that whole “cold, dead, hands” thing), if I were to use a desktop GTD program, this would probably be it.

Unless you have been living under a productivity rock somewhere, you have surely heard of Highrise – The new contact management solution from the rock stars at 37 Signals. Here are some of my first impressions:

• 37 Signals has once again taken a simple approach by boiling the concept of contact management down to some basic elements. They give you just what you need and nothing you don’t. What does one really need to track communication with a contact? Attach notes? Done. Add some related tasks? Done. Attach other related communications like e-mails? Done. Associate the contact with other related contacts? Yep. Share your contacts with others? That is there too… All of it done with the straight forward simplicity, attention to design elegance and ease of use we have come to expect from 37 Signals.
• The task manager is brilliant and flexible. It allows one to associate tasks with categories (or contexts, if you will). You can assign either “fuzzy” due dates (Today, Tomorrow, This Week, etc.) or specific due dates and times to those tasks. You can even assign tasks to others in your organization.

• If I have any dig against Highrise (and this is more specifically about 37 Signals strategy) it is this – why the mostly walled garden between your ious apps? For instance, I currently use Backpack for my personal stuff and Basecamp for work related projects and now I would like to use Highrise for my consulting business clients. This means that I will have to have three apps open with no real integration between them. What I would love to see is a way to attach projects in Basecamp to contacts or companies in Highrise. What I would love even more is the task functionality in Highrise to be integrated into Backpack.

In all, Highrise is a fantastic application – especially for small business or solo business users who just want a simple and effective way to track communications with their partners and clients.

I have come up with a plan I am going to try to overcome my current writers block. Instead of feeling like I have to come up with a lot to say about a particular thing, I am going to post what I am calling a “Quick Take” on it. This will leave me the option of coming back and saying more about a cool shiny new thing later without the pressure of feeling like I must. Therefore, look for a few of these over the coming days.

The folks who brought you Stikkit have a new web app coming. This one is a personal assistant of some sort for e-mail called iwantsandy. Details are a little schetchy for now (not yet released) but it peaks my interest.
Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton want you to know that Web Typography Sucks and what you can do to change that. Yes, that’s right… You. Download the slides with notes and find out how. (via Kottke)
Lifehack.org has this enticing proposition, clone yourself by hiring a part time personal assistant. They posit that, if you use a little outside of the box thinking, it is not as expensive as one might think.

Been feeling really stuck lately. So many events have occurred recently on so many opposite ends of the spectrum. It seems for every good event in my life I have one that is so disheartening that it really takes away my ability to feel motivated to do anything at all.
I returned yesterday from a really great trip to Washington DC. My father lives there and Princess Bethany and I have many friends that live out that way to. Despite the inclement weather (icy and sleet ridden due to a nor’easter that blew through – more on that later) we managed to see a lot of the sights and spend the quality time we wanted to with friends and relatives. A really great time had.
Of course, as said previously, lately it seems that life can’t let me have a good time without giving me something horrible to balance it. It turns out that the nor’easter mentioned earlier caused major airline cancelations on Thursday and Friday while we were in DC. In turn, stranding over 100,000 people. many of them at Philadelphia International Airport, where it just so happened we were due to connect through to Minneapolis/Saint Paul (where we live) on Sunday. Are you asking how that bad weather on Thursday caused any issues for me on Sunday? Well, here is how…
When the nor’easter that hit the east cost on Thurs/Fri caused all the airlines to cancel flights, the solution that U.S. Airways came up with to get those people, now stranded for days, to their destinations was to cancel a slew of regular flights on Saturday and Sunday (i.e. mine) to cover those rebookings. Smart, huh? Here is the deal… The airport industry runs their fleets with as few flights as possible these days in order to ensure that every flight is full. In fact, more often than not, they overbook as it is cheaper to bump people than to risk a less than full flight. Therefore, when weather issues cause cancelations, there is no “breathing room” and it causes a domino effect. People like myself flying on Sunday arrived in Philly to find our flights had been cancelled. As a matter of fact, the real kicker is that they were canceled long before we boarded in Washington DC and they did not even bother to tell anyone. We were just stranded in Philly with no way to get home other than to wait on standby for the next flight. In this case the first one was the following morning! Oh, and we were not the only ones. There were over 40 people waiting on standby for a flight to Minneapolis alone. And this was the airline’s plan amazingly enough.
Now one may think… “Wow, it must cost them so much money to put people up in hotels and give them free tickets for the trouble”
This is where you would be wrong. You see, all of this was still considered “Weather Related” and airlines do not have to compensate you in any way whatsoever when it is the fault of weather. Not to mention the fact that I was flying on free tickets from being bumped last year from a flight complicated matters as they were not even obligated to find me a flight on another airline…
We spent Sunday night in the airport, waiting for the 8:00 AM flight. Then, along with the 40 or so others, the 9:45 AM, the 1:30 PM, the final flight at 8:00 PM. All of them were full. No one was leaving from the standby group. We were stuck.
The airline gave me a voucher so that myself and my sons could go sleep in a hotel Monday night so we could return early on Tuesday and go at it again…
We eventually did make it home but, damn, what an experience…
The point of all of this is that life has been taking big chucks out of me lately. Out of my time. Out of my desire. Out of my soul. The burglary, the travel, the workload. It has all gotten the best of me.
I will get out of this mood and get to posting again. I mean, there is a lot of cool stuff going on. Hopefully, in the coming days I will find the heart to say something about it.

Take a look a these sexy action list planning pads from Behance.
MoCo Loco has a quick peek at the Moleskine City Notebook for New York City and mostly likes what it sees. We used the Barcelona model while we were there and found it very useful – especially the maps and being ale to write down addresses for places we wanted to go.
You just have to check out Timbuk2’s new line of Moleskine Notebook Covers as well. Very nice. I have been a fan of their bags for a very long time (10 years). If that is not enough, they have a whole line of office pr0n.
Since my laptop was stolen, and I need to keep as much out “in the cloud” as I can until I purchase a replacement, I have been using Google Reader for my RSS addiction. You know what? This is a very nice web based feed reader. I may actually find myself sticking with it. It has been very nice to have my feeds available to me any place I can access a browser.

The Good News…
Bethany and I have arrived safely back home and had a wonderful honeymoon in Spain. It was more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. A perfect honeymoon. We found people very friendly and, since we stayed in the old parts of the towns, very easy to walk most places. I think I lost about 10 pounds while there because of the amount of walking we did.
The Bad News…
This past weekend, while we were still away, our house was broken into. They kicked in our two inch thick solid wood back door, literally off it’s hinges. We are still enumerating the items taken. Suffice to say that it is totaling in the thousands of dollar range. All of our laptops, iPods, a DVD player, some watches from my collection, about a third of our wine collection and more booze on hand, some cash, gift cards… And that is only about half the list. Even more painful is that Bethany did not have a very recent backup so lots of her work is lost.
Therefore, please bear with the continued delay between posting as we try to recover (and since my main computer was one of the ones taken).

Not much time to type. Trying to fit a lot of internet into a little bit of time. Just wanted to post real quick about how things are going so far. Here are just a few of the highlights…

• Barcelona is a wonderful city and we did not have nearky enough time there. The apartment we found on Craigslist was perfect and the host, Kevin, was gracious and kind. The aprtment itself was very well located and was easy access to all of the main parts of the city. I can not detail all of the things we did here, I will do that when I return. Let me just say that there were all sorts of wonderful moments and surprises. Too many to list.
• Seville is proving to be equally special in its own way. It is a beautiful city. Very old world. Very respecful of its many influences. We saw and amazing flamenco show last night, had tapas in some wonderful little local bars and had a great walking tour today. We hope to get a carriage ride in as well before we head on to Ronda tomorrow.

• Being able to have the Nokia N800 for internet and VoIP access has been a life saver. It has been a breeze connecting from wherever we can. I even was able to do a little ¨wardriving¨¨with it last night when language barriers prevented the night hotel person and I from figuring out I needed to know what the password was. I simply walked around with the N800 and let it scan for networks until I found an open one. I then connected, started up Gizmo Project and was able to call back home.

All in all this has been an amazing honeymoon so far. Even though Bethany is a bit under the weather we are managing to make the most of every minute. I may post again but I will certainly do a few posts when we return. I would like to go into more detail about so much of what we have seen.

Princess Bethany and I will be leaving tomorrow for our, much delayed but well deserved, honeymoon to Spain. Here are some details, thoughts, and observations I have before we leave:

• We plan on visiting several cities over a 12 day period including Barcelona, Madrid, Sevilla, Ronda and Granada which should give us a fair sense of the country as a whole.
• Most of our travel within Spain will be via Vueling Airlines. They seem kind of like a Spanish version of Easy Jet. Unbelievably cheap fares for travel within Spain. We are not making reservations. We will just show up at the airport, choose the flight we want, put some cash down, and go. Adventure baby!

• While we are staying in hotels in most of the places we are visiting, in Barcelona we will be renting an apartment in the Raval area we found offered on Craigslist. I have had several e-mails back and forth with the very friendly host of the place – he seems like a great guy. I even was able to use Paypal for the deposit. I feel so very 21st century.

• We will be leaving our laptops behind. Instead, I will be bringing the Nokia N800 and a Think Outside Bluetooth Keyboard for our connectivity needs. We will not only use it for internet and e-mail access but also plan on using Gizmo Project to make cheap VoIP calls. I plan to post about how this works when we get back.

• I also have a Moleskine City Notebook for Barcelona which I plan to use the heck out of while there. I have already started writing phone numbers for airlines, lodging details, etc. that I will need. I plan on trying to keep notes on places we eat, things we see, etc. I will post about this as well shortly after returning.

Although we will most likely have internet access available wherever we will be staying, posting will be slower than even it’s recent slow levels. As stated above, I plan to post much of my experience when I get back to compensate. Also, I will most likely be slow to respond to e-mail or comments. I will be on my honeymoon after all.

I am not a hacker. I am not a guy who really needs to know what is going on under the hood. When it comes to technology, I like it to “just work”. I don’t want to have to needlessly tinker with it. This does not mean that I wont tinker if the need arises. I just would prefer not to have to do it unless I want to do so or have to do so, but I prefer the option to be mine. While the words “some assembly required” actually make me a little nervous, increasingly words like “this will void your warranty” or “this will break your licensing agreement” make me even more so.
I am not an open source zealot. That being said, the idea of software that is open source, hardware that is open and standards that are open, garners an increasing amount of weight in my making the decision to use technology. Here are some examples:

• When it came time for me to purchase a new wireless router, I chose one that was based on open source firmware. It works just fine for my needs as it is out of the box. I have no plans to flash it with alternative and more feature rich firmware an time soon. I may never do so. It is just the possibility to be able to do so that appealed to me over other alternatives. The fact that I could add features or capabilities beyond the factory defaults if I wanted to was a huge selling point.
• One of the big selling points in the purchase of my Nokia N800 was the fact that the software platform that drives it is open source and the Nokia’s own developers are really active participants in the open source project. The platform is based on Linux so there are hundreds of applications being ported to the platform. In other words, out of the box the device is very useful but with so many others able to develop for the N800, it can be so much more.

• I have increasingly been using Jabber for IM over iChat/AIM. It is the default protocol in the Google Talk client bundled with the N800. iChat also supports Jabber so it easy for my existing “buddies” to find me there.

• I use GizmoProject over Skype for VoIP. Gizmo is open. Skype is not.

The point is, “open” has become huge for me and I really did not see it coming. I never would have imagined it before recently. Now it is one of the first things I consider when embarking on any technology decision. I suspect I am not alone. I suspect that there are many out there just like me. We are not hackers, makers, zealots or freaks. We don’t want to have to tinker with technology. We just want the option. We just want to be open to possibility.