January 10, 2008

  • Thought

    I’m looking for something to get me out of Zombie-mode. Humans need a reboot option.

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January 8, 2008

  • Thought

    I want that GIANT touchscreen web display they’re using on CNN for showing their web coverage on TV (a weird concept in itself).

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January 7, 2008

  • Thought

    Off to bed. Tomorrow is the first day back at work since December 20th. Looking forward to it, but I’ll miss sleeping in.

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January 6, 2008

January 5, 2008

  • Thought

    Doing a quick demo of Twitter for a friend. Easier to show than explain don’t you think?

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January 4, 2008

  • My Super-Clean Inbox

    Over the holidays I took some time to rethink my inbox strategy and I thought I’d share my current approach with you.

    For reference, that’s my brand-spankin’-new inbox you’re seein’ here.

    IMAP

    I’m now using IMAP for work and home accounts. Up until now I’ve been a POP-guy — more out of habit than anything else. With POP you check your mail server and download anything new since the last time you checked. Typically the server then deletes its copy and what you downloaded becomes the only version you’ve got.

    IMAP is wonderful as it allows you to keep all your messages on the server (“in the cloud”) and pull down synchronized copies on as many machines as you’d like (as well as checking messages via webmail). Essentially you’re doing everything on the server and just keeping local copies for back-up and offline use. This is much safer and much more convenient.

    Providers

    My “Work” account is (naturally) my Tucows email account running on the Tucows Email Service (yes we “eat our own dog food”). For my “Personal” mail I’m trying Google Hosted Apps for comparison purposes. I also have a separate Tucows Email Service-based address via Domain Direct for a domain I host there but haven’t actively started using.

    Folder Strategy

    As you can see from the screenshot, I’m going for extreme simplicity. Besides the default Inbox, Draft, Sent, Trash, and Junk folders that come with both accounts, I have only added three folders to manage my messages — Actionable, Archived, and Waiting For Reply.

    Zero Inbox

    I use (and have for many years now) used a “Zero Inbox” approach as recommended by Merlin Mann.

    I process email through-out the day, dealing with each message in turn.

    1. Things I don’t need to act on and can’t imagine ever needing to reference again, I delete.

    2. Things I don’t need to act on that might (even remotely) be of use someday gets dragged to the “Archived” folder associated with the account.

    3. Messages that require action but will only take a few minutes to resolve get dealt with immediately. The original message gets Archived.

    4. Messages that will take more effort than I have time for are marked Unread and moved to the Actionable folder associated with the account. That means that I have a clean inbox and two folders that show the count of things I need to work on related to each role in life. In my example here you can see I’ve got 16 work-related messages and 2 personal messages I need to deal with. I tackle these as quickly as I can but within the context of other daily priorities so I don’t let my inbox drive me.

    5. Any time I send a message that I expect a reply to, I drag the sent message to my Waiting For Reply folder. I check this every few days and follow-up with the recipient if they didn’t get back to me in a reasonable amount of time.

    “Read The Feed”

    One of the best things about moving to OS X Leopard is getting my RSS feeds directly in Apple Mail.

    As you can see here, I subscribe to a bunch of feeds and group them in folders by theme so that I can check feeds in context as I have time.

    “On My Mac”

    One compromise on my system is this small group of folders (closed in this screenshot as they usually are in real life) that contain messages I downloaded via POP but haven’t bothered to re-upload to the new IMAP Archived folders. I have about 30,000 non-IMAP message that I can search via Apple Mail if I need to reference them, but otherwise they’re out of sight and mind in this closed folder list.

    That’s it. I’d be interested in how others are dealing with their inboxes these days or in answering any questions folks have about my system. It works for me but (as always) your mileage may vary.

January 3, 2008

  • Thought

    Finished watching the first season of Heroes. Moving on to season – pardon me – Volume Two – shortly.

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January 2, 2008

  • Twas The Night Before Tucows

    (I got a poem from Lucy for Christmas and — with her permission — I’m sharing it here)

    Twas the night before Tucows, launched their domains,
    Ken Schafer was stirring, simply going insane;
    The plans were all there, displayed on his macable,
    In hopes that domains, will soon be unhackable;

    The macs were all snoozing, with screen savers in sight,
    While visions of starbursts, were haunting him all night;
    With Ken in his office, and Elliot abroad,
    He was checking the URLs that seamed slightly odd,

    When out on the roof there arose such a clatter,
    Ken sprang from his desk to see what was the matter.
    Away to the window he flew like a flash,
    Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

    The moon on the slush, that covered Mowat,
    Gave a dinghy appearance to objects below it,
    When, what to his wondering eyes should appear,
    But a miniature sleigh, and eight cows, instead of reindeer,

    With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
    Ken knew in a moment it must be St. Click.

    More rapid than elephants his coursers they came,
    And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
    “Now, Betsy! now, Martha! now, Ilsa and Daisy!
    On, Patches! on Ellie! on, Moo Moo and Lazy!

    To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
    Now clop away! clop away! clop away all!”
    As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
    When they meet with an awkward, mount to the sky,

    So up to the office roof the coursers they flew,
    With the sleigh full of hard drives, and St. Click too.

    And then, in a twinkling, he heard on the roof

    The stomping and Clacking of each little hoof.
    As Ken drew in his hand, and was turning around,
    Down the heating vent St. Click came with a bound.

    He was dressed all in red, from his head to his foot,
    And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
    A bundle of hard drives he had flung on his back,
    And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

    His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
    His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
    His droll little mouth was drawn up like a truffle,
    And the beard of his chin was as white as his shuffle;

    The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
    And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
    He had a broad face and a little round belly,
    That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

    He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
    And Ken laughed when he saw him, in spite of himself;
    A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
    Soon gave Ken to know he had nothing to dread;

    He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
    And filled all the offices; then turned with a jerk,
    And laying his finger aside of his nose,
    And giving a nod, up the heating vent he rose;

    He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
    And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

    But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,

    MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!

    This is the second Internet/Ken-related poem I’ve been fortunate enough to receive, following my mom’s poem a few years ago.

  • Thought

    Wondering if updating FOUR websites was the best use of a two week holiday. Odds are I end up saying “yes”.

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January 1, 2008

December 31, 2007

  • Move Complete

    It looks like everything is moving smoothly post migration to Typepad. DNS propagation took longer than I expected but my goals was to have everything in place for the end of the year and it looks like that is the case.

    I’m sure I’ll be fiddling more with the look of the site and with tweaking the content, but I’m pretty happy with the results even as they are now.

    Let me know if anything looks funny or is broken from your end!

December 30, 2007

December 26, 2007

  • Back To TypePad!

    I took a few hours this morning to move all the posts I did on the WordPress version of my blog over the last six months to this TypePad version of the blog.

    I’m pretty happy with the move (back) to Typepad and I’m looking forward to playing with the site again (something I couldn’t do with WordPress because it really needs to you to understand basic coding to get things looking the way you want).

    Next step is to update DNS to point here to make it all official.

December 20, 2007

  • Back To TypePad?

    I’m thinking about it. I like my WordPress blog well enough but it’s probably more horsepower than I need. 2008 will be (once again) a year where I focus on simplifying and going with what I care about rather than what I “ought to do”.

December 17, 2007

  • Thought

    Listening to The Editors makes me wonder what would have happened to Joy Division if Ian Curtis hadn’t committed suicide.

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December 7, 2007

December 6, 2007

December 3, 2007

December 2, 2007

  • A Young Person’s Guide To Punk Rock — Siouxsie & The Banshees

    Not all punks were guys. Siouxsie Sioux was part of the Bromley Contingent along with Sid Vicious and Billy Idol and started a band called Siouxsie and The Banshees very early on. At the start I think the band was more a concept — a desire to be in a band rather than a band in fact.

    But after a while they got the hang of it and became on of the few bands to move out of the early punk days and have successful careers as “punk” became “new wave”.

    Hong Kong Garden was always my favourite from the early stuff:

    https://www.youtube.com/v/PF0OjrFIVWY

  • Dear Podcasters — I’m Not Listening

    I have a very long commute to Tucows every weekday. I generally spend two and a half to three hours in the car each day. Crazy, I know. But my family loves our little village (as do I) and the commute is just a fact of life.

    Rather than resign myself to losing 10 to 15 hours every week to mindless FM radio, I decided I’d use the time a little more constructively. For the first year and a half of commuting I listened pretty much exclusively to podcasts in the car. This was great. I listened to Across The Sound, For Immediate Release, Daily Searchcast, Six Pixels of Separation, Marketing Martini and several podcasts each from CBC, New York Times, and Slate. I highly recommend all of them.

    But after a while I realized the the signal to noise ratio on podcasts was leaving me frustrated. To much “welcome from…” and “here’s how you can subscribe…” and “to recap last week…”, and “here’s what I’m doing/did/won’t do…”. It was information for sure, but not information that was useful or enriching — and that was kind of the whole point.

    I also found that most podcasts suffer from diminishing returns. Once I’m inside the head of a podcaster and understand their world-view I get less and less from each new podcast. But finding new podcasts is a daunting task that can’t be done in the car, so I kept listening to the same podcasts despite the decline in useful insights per hour in the car.

    Then a few months ago I basically flipped a switch and decided my commute would be filled with audiobooks and it has been a wonderful, revelatory experience. I’m now consuming one or two books a week. I’m tackling business, science, modern fiction, and classics.

    Essentially audiobooks act are incredibly high signal-to-noise podcasts. Or maybe more accurately, books are like really poorly written and produced audiobooks.

    So sorry podcasters, until you figure out how to compete with Harper Lee, Walter Isaacson, Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, Bill Bryson, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Chip & Dan Heath I don’t think I’ll be listening anymore.