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Schemas as used in MS Office 2003
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MSFT blogger on using paper and digital in combination for productivity
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YA GTD log.
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Steven Berlin Johnson on his experimentation with DevonThink, an OSX application for managing and interrelating chunks of text.
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Two doctors, some song lifts, and fun. Yes, the London Underground song is as good as you may have heard.
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Rael does some chinscratchin' on the A9 and yellow pages interoperation and the future. Includes ruminations on a placeful context driver for the GTDish among us.
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Updated instructions on configuring and using the nBlog tool for posting to most common weblog interfaces from a Newton
I've poked into David Allen's GTD methodology repeatedly for a good while now - the book has sat on my shelf, come off my shelf, and returned to my shelf a number of times (and yes, it has been read!). For the past year or so I've been happily reading along with the communal experiments over at 43Folders (and the allied Google Group for 43Folders). I even began spinning up a Chicago GTD MeetUp group...
The past month I've been working to get back on the GTD wagon, after a couple months not trying very hard. My lists of Next Actions had gone stale, my projects were (and truth be told still are) underrepresented, and my inbox is not yet empty. But getting back on the wagon, day by day, has been paying off - especially on those days when I have both the self-discipline and the open uninterrupted time to plow through NA lists.
In a recent entry, Kevin made noises about jumping on the GTD wagon himself. So for him (and for me ease in retuning in the future), my system.
For one iteration of my system, I used ShadowPlan extensively, with a master project outline with subitems each tagged with their Next Action contexts (in some cases this was more than one context tag, which in hindsight was excessive syntactic sugar. This outline lived only on my Palm (I love Jeff Mitchell's work, but the MacOSX desktop feels too table-focused for me as yet).
I might have kept that up, but the data entry to the Palm in Graffitti2 seems to be a bit of a step back; particularly on managing word breaks (every L I put at the end of the word became a T!). So rather than write things down, I'd THINK of writing them down, forgetting them 10 minutes later. I looked at using the OmniShadow Plug-In scripts, but they don't support tags yet, which were a pivotal part of the Shadow based system.
For about 3 days I tried keeping my project lists on a thumbdrive and using the pyGTD script to build the nicely prioritized list of actions. But I ran into more problems running the script on my OSX home computer vs my WinXP work computer - I lost actions, or spent 15 minutes cleaning up one file or another when it would inadvertently get munged. If keeping actions in a trusted system is paramount, keeping them in an untrusted system is paramountly foolish.
I've been running a HipsterPDA solution for the last 2 weeks. Combined with some other paper-based and electronic items, it appears to be working reasonably well. The simplicity of the tools has helped me to focus less on the system and more on the doing.
In the HPDA, I am keeping a pair of carddecks; one is a set of context based next action lists (@calls, @comp, @errands, @errands, @home, @homeComp, @office (which subsumes my work computer), and @waitingFor). This deck also holds a set of blank cards, for use in capturing inbox items and ideas when I'm not sitting with a notebook.
The second deck is a set of projects, each with a set of known steps or tasks to complete the project; some projects are never-ending, an artifact of poor project definition on my part. But they're listed, and I have plenty of cards with which to make more.
As I work through the day, I've been trying harder to logbook what I do; decisions I make, configuration options chosen, paths taken. This is easier at the office, where I have been trying to keep logbooks for years. I need to integrate this in my personal life as well. Arguably this could be wikified, but the impermanence of bits in an enterprise has held me back from renewed experiments. I've begun using some Moleskine hacks to try and improve searchability of paper - news on that front in ~6 months.... As I go through the day, I use my logbook as a quick INBOX, transferring actions from the book to the HPDA on a periodic basis.
Why not use the Palm's builtin apps? Because I like to synchronize the hard landscape - and I can't sync effectively at work. As it is, I use an ineffective 'copy outlook to palm by hand' mechanism, but it allows me to keep my personal and work schedules to be blended only so far as I want them. YMMV.
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LaTex introductory material
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Meeeemories
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"That’s what you call ironic."
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XML Essentials for OOffice.(categories: xml openOffice)
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Udell traces the revision history of a wikipedia page on the axes of politics, fact-checking, layout, organization, and damage control
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Archive of CTA ephemera, recordings and stuff
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Notable for the (praiseworthy) transparency in the process, as well as potential inherent good. Reorganizations (and the thinking behind them) can be shrouded in mystery by the time they get outside the organization...
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Review of Sanford "rebel cataloger" Berman methodology
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Anablogging? Some useful tips on maintaining a notebook as blog; between this, vielmetti on lab notebooks and kimbro, good tips on structuring analog jottings
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Joshua S. posts his todo list to tada
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Cornell notetaking forms made in pdf simple.
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wallpaper which dynamically displays a current and historical view of activity in its space (e.g. a cafe), based on individuals and volume. TheGrind needs this.
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Quick tutorial on moving audio from cassette to digital under OSX
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Overview and Introduction to Ruby (with foxes)
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Dashboardy goodness. Gnome.
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1992 thread on Oblique Strategies, including the intriguing reference to a FORTRAN implementation. Oh, the days.
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OSX Oblique Strategies applet
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Call your pet on the phone. This is the thing AZ has been wanting for years....
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Nice looking log for analog journal thinking
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New Yorker in WWII overview
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Localised home for the Omnishadow plugin. The 0.8 version still appears not to support tags, unfortunately.
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Another xmpp/jabber client - java based, very xchatlike
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Macintouch performance roundup of some older and current consumer MacOS boxes
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nofollow plugin available....
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Rosenberg makes a brief case for NLS' bug logging and action tracking system to be protoblogging. Certainly many other elements have arisen from NLS and other augmented workflow, so this may be a leap, it isn't an outlandish one.
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O'Reilly recipes, under a CC license structure
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buried in here is a Newton Script compiler/interpreter, OSS, for various OSes of your choosing.
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Ben Hammersly takes issue with the nofollow attribute, properly playing the role of devil's advocate in a sandstorm of hossanahs
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Local (friend owned) digital processing shop for slide and film scanning, &c
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Fraser Spiers takes apart the work of Steve Jobs' presentation mojo (with a nod to MJDs Presentation Judo)
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Roundup of women in podcasting, by which I expect the construct means 'actual' women, not female impersonators taking down the establishment.
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Bloomington based MP3 Blog
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part one of thre from Merlin on his GTD work.
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In the early 80s, when I went to college, for some reason I really wanted one of these. Reading Defying Gravity recently brought that desire back in a rush, despite no mention or reference...
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Vintage Computing archive, for old boxes, supplies, stories.
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Interesting commentary comparing pricing of the Integral and the Fat Mac available around the same time. And man, so little memory.
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Online reference site for old computers and information. Extensive data inside.
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Because George W Bush has hands-on thought leadership in the OpenAccess movement...
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Quick guide to color codes required for Cat5e cables
This morning, as I watched portions of the SteveNote... AZ said
We're going to be hearing about this for the next few days, aren't we?
Sounds a bit familiar...
As previously mentioned, Kitty and Molly have their paws crossed for Orlando in far off Italy. Molly demonstrates here.
Even in Chicago one can buy what appear to be delicious London tourist paraphernalia, as we discovered at our local Fox and Obel. The larger tins are fruit, the smaller are mint.
Instead, I walked out with some Chinese Five Spice, but not the $17 for a pack of two vanilla beans. That Jamie Oliver must have more money than me.....
I've been long form silent yet for a while, while I've promised others writeups of various events of the past few weeks. Between family visits, holidays, recovery, and work I appear not to have recovered sufficiently to give these events the text they deserve.
So what we've done
- Spamalot - Anne and I (and a bunch of coworkers) went to see this over the holidays during it's preview run at the Schubert Theatre here in Chicago. It's an entertaining farce based not-so-loosely on the beloved Monty Python film of the same name. And it certainly isn't an DaVinci Code, either. Lots of jokes transport themselves from the film, some wittily crudely, others in the service of mockery of overblown Broadway Musicals. I expect it will have a strong run in NYC, but I worry for it's actual longevity. But hey, I would have said that about the Producers I suspect.
- Holiday dinners - we did our usual thing this year. Pizza the night before (AZ's Dad and I agree on the value of excessive cheese). And for the holiday itself we have the judeo-christian mashup of brisket served with latkes. It was delicious, if I may say so myself.
- Gizmos - in the late 80s, before I returned to Bloomington, the Gizmos played a reunion. I missed it, meaning I still never got to see the boys in action. So the announcement that there would be another Gizmos Reunion (the Dale Lawrence version) filled me with no small portion of joy. And I was not disappointed. Two covers (Ramones, Pistols), and all the hits from the new reissue Rock and Roll Don't Come From New York. I've been counseled by my trusted advisors that not having this in your youth makes it hard to love, but uninitiated FOAFs at the show were impressed enough to pick up the disk. It'll be 10 years or so before the next reunion, but clear your calendar now.
- Books for Gifts - Every year AZ and I give each other books for gifts at the important gift giving occasions (xmas, birthdays, Thursday in passing the bookstore...). This year she treated me to three books rocketing to the top of my inbound list.
- Dale Lawrence's "Hoosier Hysteria Road Book : A Guide to the Byways of Indiana High School Basketball" This is Dale's compendium of over 400 Indiana High Schools and their gymnasia and roundball programs. It's a loving portrait, in facts, numbers and diner addresses, of one man's exploration. And the diner tips will come in handy as AZ and I drive to the Southern Annex each month.
- Heny Mitchell's "One Man's Garden" Mitchell was garden columnist for the Washington Post, and has a nearly ephemeral beauty and humor in his writing. I'll be adding his other books to the wishlist soon.
- Antonino D'Ambrosio edited " Let Fury Have the Hour: The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer" This was the true wildcard gift this year I think. A collection of essays (from Sylvie Simmons to Billy Bragg and all the way around the alphabet) about Joe Strummer. Combined with the exhibition AZ and I saw in London this year of Joe's work, it has helped to keep his spirit in my heart.
- ECC's tradeMark came by Chicago for a gig on his current tour with Chromelodeon. Chromelodeon got a bit jam-bandy in their longform, but 8 musicians in video game inspired (and covering) show can make a hellishly beautiful racket. ECC's gig was in good form - at least one new song, and band accompanied oldies (Jesus Carp, Son of Cod) made for a fine, if snowy, night. The night before Mark and I found ourselves on a deserted NEIU campus looking for the studios of WZRD. When we found them (buried in the basement of the student building, of course!), the smell of the station brought back all the WQAX memories one can hold at once. What a great thing, community radio.
- Vulgar Boatmen - Completing the Dale Lawrence trifecta by seeing VB tonight.... lots of wiggle!
Whew!
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Online Dictionary reusing the funky lookahead code made so popular by google.
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Photos and screenshots of various GtD setups(categories: gtd organization)
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Fraser Speirs compares his (abandoned?) GTD app and an OmniOutliner version of the workflow process
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Overview of audio equipment used to produce the Reel Reviews podcast. Some nice gear, accrued over some time.
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Search engine and research information news and blurbage
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GTD WebApp in ruby/rails
- Garage-A-Records
- Turntables, cartridges, audio supplies
(categories: albums turntables cartridges records phonograph)
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Connecting a MagicCap device to WinXP
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MagicCap Listserv Archives
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MagicCap Software, including irc client, httpd, etc
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Software for DataRover
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Jon Jebkowsky et al interview Ken "RU Sirius" Goffman about his new work on counterculture.
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Overview of GTD Task Breakdown structures from How To Save The World weblog
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Connecting a MagicCap device to WinXP
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MagicCap Listserv Archives
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MagicCap Software, including irc client, httpd, etc(categories: generalMagic magiccap)
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Software for DataRover