Category: misc

The value of GTD

It’s been over a month since I started flirting around the margins of GTD, and it’s working pretty well. My inbox sits at about 200 messages, which isn’t bad for the volume of e-mail I get. I’m finding it quite easy to focus on what I need to be doing at any given moment.

In a work conversation today, though, something rolled off my tongue that really put the whole experience in context for me. I said jokingly to a colleague, “Look, my e-mail is so well-organized that I know exactly what I’m not getting done.” There’s certainly great value in that, but I would hardly call it the “mind like water” state that was promised. Still, I strongly recommend it. At least when you know what you can’t do, you use some other bits of the GTD system to make sure it doesn’t just fall through the cracks (still need to write in more detail about my experience, but it’s still on my “defer” list).

Four things

I got tagged (thanks, Matt). Drum roll, please. . . . .

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:
1. Pizza delivery driver for Pizza Hut
2. Grader of state-wide standardized writing tests for public school students in North Carolina
3. Manager of campus coffeeshop / music venue
4. Frozen yogurt shop attendant (fired)

Four movies I can watch over and over
1. Apocalypse Now
2. Boogie Nights
3. Election
4. Anchorman

Four TV shows I love to watch
1. The Daily Show
2. American Idol
3. American Experience
4. Trading Spouses (total trash TV — I love it!)

Four places I’ve been on vacation
1. Thailand
2. Hawaii
3. Vancouver, BC
4. Mexico

Four of my favorite dishes
1. Pat-Ke-Mao, super-spicy Thai noodles, #13 on the Plearn lunch menu (PDF)
2. Seared ahi tuna with wasabi/mustard dipping sauce
3. a burrito in the Mission
4. a home-grilled Niman Ranch burger

Four websites I visit daily
1. Bloglines
2. SI.com (especially this time of year for college basketball scores)
3. SFGate
4. Flickr

Four places I would rather be right now
1. Rollin’ in my sweet baby’s arms
2. Yosemite
3. Hawaii
4. Tilden Park (Berkeley)

Four bloggers I am tagging
1. Ed Ho
2. Matthew Rothenberg
3. Mike Dunn
4. Greg Tyree

Whatever happened to wireless electricity?

Marc Abramowitz recently pointed to Splashpower, a wireless electricity company that supposedly has a working product. The term “wireless electricity” means just what it sounds like — electricity delivered without wires. Wikipedia has a little background on Splashpower with some details on how it all works.

The funny thing is that in November 2003 (in my old InfoWorld blog), I pointed out something similar from a company named MobileWise (a company whose home page is now blank). I never actually saw MobileWise’s product in action, though it seemed legit. Here’s an old News.com story that mentions both Splashpower and MobileWise (“Another start-up, MobileWise, has been developing a similar technology and has announced that Acer plans to release notebooks and handhelds incorporating it in the first half of 2003.” Hmmm — not sure if they shipped).

I’m a geek and hang out with a lot of geeks, so I think I would have seen this wondrous technology at some point if it actually existed. That being said, I have just one burning question: can this wireless electricity power the ignition on my personal jet pack? (heh heh)

Working with the "beginner's mind"

From the excellent Presentation Zen blog (which is always filled with immediately useful advice on delivering compelling presentations), here’s a post that references the concept of “the beginner’s mind,” a term that was unfamiliar to me until now, but one that describes an approach that seems to be common among people I most enjoy working with (especially when coupled with the ability and determination to execute on ideas):

Zen teachings often speak to the idea of the “beginner’s mind.” Like a child, one who approaches life with a “beginner’s mind” is fresh, enthusiastic in approach and open to the vast possibilities before them. One who possesses a “beginner’s mind” is not burdened by old habits or obsessed about “the way things are done around here” or with the way things could have or should have been. When we approach new challenges as true “beginners” (even if we are seasoned adults) we need not be saddled with fear of failure or of making mistakes. As children, Tiger Woods and Yo Yo Ma (and many others less known) made thousands of mistakes along their path to greatness. With an open mind and childlike optimism about what we can become, learning and improvement can be quite remarkable.

I work with a lot of people who fit this description these days — it’s a great way to live.

Unix as literature

Updated a dead link from this article in the archives – 12/09/2010

Every now and then, I wonder to myself, “How in the world did I go from being an English major with PhD aspirations to a total computer geek who enjoys writing code, toying with Apache configs, etc?” In those moments of self-reflection, I’m always reminded of Thomas Scoville’s excellent essay, “The Elements of Style: Unix as Literature.” In the essay, Scoville explains why in his experience, a surprising proportion of Unix geeks have literary backgrounds of some sort (and read the whole thing — this is just a small quote. There are also some nice digs at Microsoft.):

The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn’t seem so mysterious, and pointed the way to a deeper issue: in a world increasingly dominated by image culture (TV, movies, .jpg files), UNIX remains rooted in the culture of the word.

This makes some sense to me. I wasn’t always a “technologist,” though I’ve always been handy with computers. My brother and I ran a successful lawn mowing business when we were kids, and we used a computerized billing system on a Kaypro my dad bought us in the early 80s. Our clients were pretty blown away that two neighborhood kids delivered such sophisticated monthly statements.

From the lawn-mowing geek period, fast forward to the summer of 1993. I was an English major at Duke coming off a really successful semester. I had published an article in a campus journal (with a dense title something like “Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and the Creation of a Subversive Moral Universe” — I actually scanned the letter they sent me (PDF) several years ago) and had placed in the annual English department writing contest for a paper I had written about Kingsley Amis‘ novel Lucky Jim and a relatively obscure novel of the same period, Hurry on Down by John Wain. I was already picking out the appropriate tweed jackets and preparing myself for a career in the ivory tower. Anything related to computers was the furthest thing from my mind. I graduated in December 1993 and went to work in the research library at a newspaper that happened to be a really early arrival on the web (back when Yahoo! could be found at http://akebono.stanford.edu!).

By the spring of 1994, you would have found me neck-deep in Unix books, writing Perl code, cranking out HTML, running a gopher, and hanging out on USENET. It wasn’t long before I was writing Sybase database-backed web apps using sybperl (before the Perl DBI made it unnecessary). I went through a brief period of writing apps with Tcl/Tk, too. I dumped the idea of the literature PhD, and never looked back (which means I can read, but not have to write papers about it).

The post from Joyce Park in the O’Reilly Radar “Burn In” series of posts really resonated with me. Though marriage had nothing to do with it in my case, I followed a similar path from relative disengagement with computers to total immersion. I think Thomas Scoville’s essay gives us some hints as to how that happens (and I’m glad it did!)

Why is setting up a new PC still so painful?

(Follow-up to this post: “How Dell and others can fix the ‘crapware’ problem — honorably“).

This weekend was one of those weekends where good friends with computer problems came a-callin’ in full force. Despite acting as support for many friends for many years now, I still approach the requests with a high level of sympathy for the requestors because setting up and maintaining a PC is still so hard. (Up front: I won’t go to deep into the whole Mac vs. PC thing. . . let’s just accept for a moment that people who are not passionate about computers simply don’t understand why it makes a lot of sense to spend more than $850 for a new Dell with a free printer and a bunch of other accesories.)

This past week and over the weekend, I’ve been helping my friends across the street from me set up their new Dell PC and though it booted up out-of-the-box, it has been ridiculously tedious and frustrating to clean all the trialware and marketing crud off the thing. (Of course, this isn’t news to anyone who has bought a PC recently, but I haven’t bought a new PC in years since I’ve either been using a Mac or a work PC). After tangling with the PC for a few hours, it felt less like a useful tool and more like a child screaming for unneeded candy in the grocery store, except this time the PC was screaming for various online services, anti-virus software suites, printer supplies (hey, the printer is NEW, why do I need toner?!), and online banking services. Click here to sign-up for AOL! Click here to sign up for Earthlink! When I setup their printer, I got the same marketing message in three different contexts at the same time: an icon was placed on the desktop that said “click here for Dell printer supplies,” the small LCD screen on the printer itself displayed the URL for Dell printer supplies (which I won’t dignify with a link here, nofollow or otherwise), and the first test page printed had the same URL for printer supplies. At that point, I expected a Dell representative to kick their front door down and scream the URL in my ear for good measure.

When my kind friends initially called me with questions about all the junk they were seeing, my immediate plan was to go over there and wipe their system clean and only install what they needed. That’s what I’ve always done in the past and it’s a really easy thing to do when a computer is brand new. When I arrived at their house I discovered that Dell didn’t send along a base Windows XP install CD with the machine, though there was a slip of paper in the box with instructions on how to request a restore CD from Dell. Ugh! Why not include this CD in the first place? It’s licensed software that a customer has already bought! (Of course, Dell is not known for good support, so perhaps my expectations are too high in the first place.)

So, Dell is making it literally impossible to do a clean install of Windows XP, then all the junk on the machine makes it more likely that you will have support problems — problems that you will have immense trouble getting solved due to well-documented crappy support (idea: someone should teach the lonely old Maytag repairman how to fix Dell PCs and then he wouldn’t be so lonely).

Of course, I could have told my Quicken-using neighbors to buy a Mac instead, but then they would have had to downgrade to a half-assed version of Quicken, the app they use the most. Sometimes you just can’t win with computers.

I think this explains why a few years ago I saw a discarded computer sitting on the sidewalk near my house with this message scrawled on it in angry black magic marker:

Fuck computers!

We gotta do something about this state of affairs.

Update: Scott Rosenberg just wrote to note that I mis-linked to “half-assed version of Quicken” (accidentally used the previous link to the Maytag repairman. Oops!) I was indeed intending to link to Scott’s recent post on that subject. Thanks, Scott!

Another update: I said in my initial post that Dell did not distribute the system disk, but I just ran through a Dell config for a low-end Dimension B110, and you can choose a Windows XP system disk for $10 extra. I think they should take the confusion out of it, add $10 to the price, and ship that disk with the machine. It’s not just Dell that plays games with the system disks, as David Berlind notes in his response to my post:

This is apparently the new MO of system makers. For example, an Acer Ferrari that I recently purchased for Vista testing didn’t come with a system disk either. Instead, it has a backup recovery disk which restores the system to the exact same state the system was in when I unboxed it.

How the world works

Last month, my good friend Andrew Leonard launched How the World Works (RSS feed), a blog that (in Salon’s words) “aims to bite off small pieces of the big story, while at the same time engaging with the vast complexity of the Internet’s multi-threaded dialogue on the global economy.” The “how the world works” concept debuted with Andrew’s “The World in an iPod” piece in which Andrew literally cracks open an iPod and follows the pieces and parts throughout the global economy. This isn’t just “cool” reporting about the innards of the iPod — globalization is inarguably the story of our times. The “How the World Works” blog picks up where that left off with posts about taking back the word “globalization” (favorite quote: “I’m sure I am not the only person who has a kind of sick fascination with melting icecaps”) and the Camu Camu plant as an illustration of the concept of “bio-piracy” (I wasn’t aware of the Camu Camu plant or the idea of “bio-piracy”. . . until now). I am so subscribed.

I owe Andrew a lot, both personally and professionally (he edited the one and only story I ever wrote for Salon, “The American Way of Snacks,” about a gigantic convenience store convention in Orlando I attended — it’s all 100% true, I tell you!) When I was at Salon leading a team that was implementing open source software all over the place, Andrew’s writing served as a philosophical backdrop for the actual in-the-trenches work we were doing. While I was settling into my first few months at Salon, Andrew was busy interviewing the people who were leading the charge for the software my team was rolling out: Larry Wall (Perl), Richard Stallman (all the GNU stuff), Eric Allman (sendmail), and Eric Raymond (well, no particular software, but “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” was important philosophically). I’m pretty sure that Andrew’s story about Apache (on a general interest web site in 1997!) first piqued my interest in Salon. And there’s this story about Linux that ran literally as I was packing my bags for Salon and California (I arrived the following week). And there’s a lot more open source stuff where that came from.

I found an old SFGate story (no longer available on SFGate.com, but still at the Internet Archive) that put it this way:

Along with Salon’s managing editor Scott Rosenberg, Leonard is responsible for creating what is possibly the world’s first technoculture think-tank, where engineers work alongside writers to make high technology useful and elegant, complicated but accessible. And Leonard’s advocacy of free, open source software gives this think tank its moral imperative.

That quote is probably a tad too breathless (nothing like slim budgets to nudge you towards the “moral imperative” of Linux), but the spirit is on target. Salon was actually running Windows NT with the absolutely dreadful Netscape 3.5 web server (yuck) when I arrived in the summer of ’98, and the tiny tech team needed all the inspiration we could muster to turn that around (and we did, as talked about on Slashdot, PC World, and Webmonkey). It was pretty easy to keep our spirits high when we could depend on Andrew to give us a break from our own hacking and regale us with the tales of his latest interviews.

I’m looking forward to more great stuff from Andrew — welcome to the blogosphere, my friend!

Bonus link: Andrew’s fine reporting on a condom patent lawsuit is definitely worth a read if you missed it the first time around.

Get your flu shots, kids!

I am just now emerging from a flu haze that first registered last Wednesday with a high fever that persisted through Christmas Day. Even after the fever went away, I was left with a cough and a general sense of fatigue that has been difficult to shake even now. Apparently, I’m not the only one — there appears to be a special California strain of the flu going around this year. In any case, I have a feeling that can only be described as deep disappointment that my visions of relaxation and movie-watching were simply not achieved (though there is still a little time). Instead, I was left in that state of being too feverish to read or even watch TV enjoyably.

On the bright side, if you’re gonna be sick, you might as well be sick when the world around you is moving slowly, because then you don’t get behind. And, I have to say, I had a lot of positive things to reflect upon as I drifted in and out of sleeping off the fever, so I can’t really complain too much. Life has been very kind to me this year, and I am very grateful.

The moral of the story: get your flu shot while you can. Don’t be like me and develop your immunity the hard way!