Nontrivial Exercises

Refurbished iPhones Available

My cost of entry just went down by $100, but it’s still $500 more than I have in the budget right now. Hmmmm.

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apple, iPhone, I want an iPhone

Inbox Zero Update - Work Email

After renewing my commitment to manage my email - and consequently my actions and activities - more effectively, I wanted to give an update.

As I shared last week, my personal email management is going quite well. I created an Inbox DMZ as Merlin suggested and moved all the items that were sitting unacted-upon in my inbox to there. Some of these were BACN, but old BACN goes bad after a while. So I haven’t thrown them away completely, but may soon.

At work, I’ve also done fairly well. However, over the last 3-4 days things have backed up a bit and I have some work I need to do today to get back to 0.

So, it’s catch-up time. I’ll check back later this week to see how far I’ve come.

Tags: gtd, inboxzero, productivity

Microsoftmoric Error Reporting

I have to use a windows pc at work. I bring my Mac along to work for comfort and to actually do stuff when I need to.

I’ve started using Skitch on my Mac last week (thanks for the invite, Blake) and love it. It’s only a Mac app, though, so I’ve tried using Jing from TechSmith for windows. The Jing Project has some of the same aspirations as Skitch, but is not quite as snazzy.

One of the most unsnazzy things about Jing is that it simply crashes on my windows pc. It requires .NET 3.0, which I installed last week. I opened a support request with TechSmith, who were very responsive. They suggested I uninstall .NET 3.0 and .NET 2.0, then reinstall them.

How Microsoftmoric - just uninstall and reinstall. Just restart. Just kick it hard. Then maybe it will work.

Well, it worked for a few days, now it’s just crashing every time I start it up again.

The crazy thing is that the Microsoft error reporting dialog comes up, and it offers to show me what the error report contains. This would be the debug info that the Jing support people could use to actually help debug this problem. Hmmm, this could be useful.

The nice error reporting dialog will show me the debug info in a small little window, but I can’t select it or copy it. It’s just there and then goes off to some database in Redmond somewhere.

After some digging, I found where it writes the actual error / debug file. However, the DW20.exe process locks that dump (.dmp) file during the error reporting and prevents me from opening it or copying it to actually get at the data. After it send the report to Redmond, it then deletes the file.

How incredibly dumb and frustrating. Microsoft won’t let me get at my own debug data when something goes wrong.

The Microsoft help pages don’t. The only idea I came up with is to manually kill the DW20.exe process in the middle of the error report, which unlocks the .dmp file. The .dmp file is either encrypted, though, or encoded in binary because I can’t read it in notepad.

I did open a new support requrest with TechSmith and give them this error file. Hopefully they have some developer magic to read this file.

It’s experiences like this that prove that Microsoft doesn’t put the user experience first in their design. That’s why people love Apple - they are focused on the user experience. And that’s why using a PC and dealing with Mircrosoftic idiosyncracies can be so frustrating.

Interestingly, my complaint here is about Microsoft, not Jing, even though Jing is the application that is crashing. When you have a platform that is untrustworthy and unfriendly, users direct their frustration at it more than at the stuff that doesn’t work on top of it.

Apple certainly isn’t perfect, but at least I can get debug data when something goes wrong.

Tags: microsoft, error reporting, user experience, microsoftmoric, jing, jingproject, apple

Inbox Still At Zero

I’m still keeping both my work and personal inboxes at zero. Here’s proof!

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gtd, inboxzero

There Is A Love Stronger Than You

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God, love, video

Twitter Spam

I suppose it has to come, but it surprises me just a bit. Twitterspam.

I’ve had about 5 new followers on Twitter in the last couple of days who are doing nothing more than pimping their products - health supplements, get-rich-on-the-web programs, etc. I call it Twitterspam.

I suppose it makes marketing sense - Twitter is an easy way to get your “message” out to potentially a lot of people. It’s nice that one doesn’t have to follow the Twitterspamers so we don’t really have to see their updates, but I guess I’m just a little disappointed that spam has found its way into the reaches of an app like Twitter.

Maybe if we ignore them they will go away?

Tags: twitter, spam, twitterspam

An Oasis at Home

[submitted to the Oasis Project via TeachMac; I have granted the Oasis Project permission to use this material in whatever means they would like]

Your home is your place of refuge from the world. It’s the place where you nurture and are nurtured, where you give and receive love, where you rest. When you walk in the door of your house, you enter an environment that you have created, a place with your own comforts, creations, memories. Your home protects you from the elements - the wind, rain, heat and cold outside as well as the daily battles, disagreements, fights, obligations and annoyances of the outside world.

You host parties in your home, inviting others to share in your comforts and enjoy your collection of memories. You raise children in your home, giving them a safe place to grow, learn, explore the world and themselves. You have pets in your home, showing and teaching responsibility to other living things by caring for and enjoying other creatures.

Your home is the best place in the world.

But for victims of domestic violence, all of this is turned upside down. What should be a place of nurture in stead becomes a place of torture. What should be the place of rest from the day’s troubles, in stead becomes an escalation of suffering. A collection of comforts becomes a heap of horrors. In stead of protection there is only fear. Rather than comfort there is condemnation. Physical rest and growth changes to terror and injury.

Their haven has become a war zone.

There is a way out for them, however, but as in most wars, victory comes with help from the outside. Domestic violence is a closed system that will not stop itself. The solution lies in intervention from those outside the system. The Oasis Project gives women and children who have had their homes taken away by domestic violence - the refugees of this war - the safe place of nurture that they need. The comfort and protection that was unavailable now becomes available for these women. They can finally let their guard down, finally rest, finally grow, finally heal.

Support the Oasis Project. Your gifts help heal the wounds of the war of domestic violence. Your contribution helps end some of the suffering, helps provide for them what you probably already have - a safe place to rest, grow, love and be loved.

Help for victims of domestic violence comes from you and me.

Technorati Tags:
oasis project, domestic violence, teachmac

Inbox Zero and Making Sandwiches

I just watched Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero tech talk he gave to Google last week. I’m a big fan of David Allen’s GTD methodology - read the book, organized my projects, got the t-shirt - and so I’ve already bought into the philosophy of de-cluttering and acting on things as soon as possible.

Yet, what I know and what I do are often different. Over the past year and a half I’ve really let my discipline slide in the area of managing my email. Both my work and my personal inboxes have swelled to between 200 and 500 emails, most of which are read.

Merlin’s talk inspired me to deal with my problem. The most profound thing he said to me was his analogy of the process at a deli.

Customers come in, stand in line, then order their food. A worker takes their order, then gives it to the cook who makes the desired sandwich.

It’s not really important to the operation of the deli just how they take the orders, whether they’re stacked a certain way, organized alphabetically, taken on special paper or electronically. The orders are simply the means to get to the creation and delivery of the sandwich.

It is so easy for technophiles who are attracted to shiny computer objects to get hung up on the system and lose sight of the reason they have a system. I’ve tried a few different systems to manage my GTD - Microsoft OneNote, wikis, GTD Outlook Add-In, paper to name a few - and I consistently get distracted by fiddling with the system.

I forget that the reason I have the system is to make sandwiches.

What I re-learned from Merlin is the imperative of actually doing your work rather than organizing your work. Act on every email you can before you categorize it, put it in a project, annotate it, organize it or color it shades of green. Make the system as transparent as possible and actually do stuff.

I’ve implemented my Inbox DMZ in both my work and personal email systems as of 2 days ago, and currently have both inboxes at zero. I’ve gotten a lot more done in the last 2 days with regards to email than I have in quite a while.

Merlin has a nice series on 43Folders on the idea of Inbox Zero, and his Google Tech Talk is below.

Technorati Tags:
inboxzero, merlin mann, gtd, productivity

Twitter API as the Social Presence Standard?

Dave Winer yesterday in his Status of the Platform, 2007 edition, suggests that the Twitter API may be a great standard we should clone for other apps.

Much as RSS 2.0 was a format used to communicate between various UserLand products that turned into a lingua franca for an industry, the Twitter API may end up having significance outside the confines of the startup that’s launching it.

Perhaps the Twitter API - or the Twitter platform itself - could be the model for a “social presence” primitive that could be used for all apps that want to integrate presence information, as I opined yesterday.

As Dave also suggests, it sounds like a good subject for a BarCamp …

Tags: twitter, api, social networks, barcamp

Facebook Extravaganza and Social Network Progression

Facebook is becoming the newest social network place-to-be-seen. The recent opening up of their API to provide various types of apps has a lot to do with the current popularity. Robert Scoble has a great list of his favorite Facebook apps - as compared to the list of the TechCrunch interns, who approach things from a 20-something perspective.

I’m chronologically in-between the interns’ twenty-something and Robert’s forty-something perspective, but I do like almost all the apps on Robert’s list better - and those that I haven’t tried yet I’d be interested in doing so.

The problem Facebook presents us with now is that it’s yet another social platform that vies for our attention. Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku also compete for one’s online social allegiance, and if you’re one to follow the herd or are easily distracted by shiny objects (and their online counterpart of new web services), then you’ll find yourself quickly overwhelmed by all the social networking you’ve suddenly become obligated to do.

I believe the next progressive step we need to make in the social network space is a way for them to easily work together. We have figured out how to connect people easily around specific themes, interests, or causes and create an online community. We can enrich each other’s lives by finding new and easier and cooler ways to connect with other people and get to know.

The next step should be to connect the networks.

Example. We now have this idea of “social presence” and status. Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Facebook all provide a system to update people about what you’re doing. However, I want to be able to choose which platform I use for my “social presence” and then have that update to any other platform I use.

All of this is somewhat hackable today (Facebook can update Twitter, Twitter can’t update Facebook without a lot of hackery). But it is not easy or intuitive.

Could we define a set of meta-actions that we apply to social networking and then create standards around these? Let’s start with “social presence” and define an open API with a set of primitives for how any app could update another one with “presence” information.

I bet smarter people than I could do this, and I think we need to in order to make social networks truly usable.

BTW, you can find me on Twitter and on Facebook, but not on Pownce, Jaiku or MySpace.

Tags: facebook, social networks, twitter

Mentos + Diet Coke Redux

My sister is taking on the strange-mint-diet-softdrink establishment, enlisting the help of her coworkers. Here’s the first edition.

Losing My Muse, And Finding It

I haven’t written to my blog in a few months now. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to, or haven’t thought about it. I have. I simply became overwhelmed with the rest of life and didn’t make the effort to try to keep up this vital outlet for me.

I lost my muse.

I’ve come to understand that part of my mental holdups are due to the complexity that I tend to create around myself. The design of this blog had become too complex, with too many little hacks and workarounds that required fiddling and updating. I didn’t start because I knew I couldn’t finish in a timely manner.

Well, I’ve decided to simplify the design. Here’s the new design, now bereft of many of the visual distractions I had before.

I want to write, not fiddle with my blog design.

I will add more stuff - just a little bit more - and tweak a few things here and there, but this is it for now. I’m going to focus on what I really want to be doing, which is writing and taking pictures.

Thanks for reading.

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writing, blog