Category — Productivity

I subscribe to a number of life hack/productivity blogs, including the usually good Zen Habits, published by Leo Babauta. Leo is the master of the link bait headline, and recently put out a post entitled "Everything You Wanted to Know About Simplifying Your Life, and Way More" which goes on to list 28 previous posts on simplifying your life.  Of those posts, 9 of them have the classic headline formula of some number of things to do X (like my headline here or ‘Top 12 ways to get people to click on your links’).

Assuming Leo only has one idea in the non-numeric headlined articles (doubtful), I add up 295 ways to simply your life.  Let me give you a hint.  If you need 295 ways to simplify your life, I’d start by cutting down on reading about simplifying your life.

Like I said, Leo usually writes good stuff, but he might as well have linked to his archive page. Granted he warns you don’t need to read everything he links to, but if that sort of warning is needed, it should be enough warning to the author that the article needs some simplification.

[photo by nerovivo]

Lawrence Lessig has a great op-ed piece in the New Your times today on Orphan Works. His solution to the problem is one he has suggested many times before (I think I first read it in his Wired Magazine column several years back) - move to a system similar to patents.  The initial copyright period would be shortened and extensions would not be automatic. If the original owner still thought there was value in the work, they could extend there copyright for a small fee (he suggests $1).

A hired expert shouldn’t be required for an orchestra to know if it can perform a work composed during World War II or for a small museum to know whether it can put a photograph from the New Deal on its Web site. In a digital age, knowing the law should be simple and cheap. Congress should be pushing for rules that encourage clarity, not more work for copyright experts.

The current iteration of Lessig’s argument is framed from the standpoint of small public institutions like orchestras or museums wanting to display or perform certain works, but I’ve also seen it framed from standpoint of the mashup/remix culture.  From using samples in music to combining various prior works into something new.  If a work had no more value on its own and the author let it fall into the public domain, it is available sooner to those artists that could give it a new lease on life.

Mashups!?! Think this is just for people looking to steal some artwork?  Walt Disney built his empire on works in the public domain - all of the early animation masterpieces came from fairy tales in the public domain. If you’ve got a school-age daughter, you know how big Disney’s "Princesses" are, including Cinderella.

If you’re a Wisconsinite like myself, you’ve got a double chance to do something - both Senators Kohl and Feingold sit of the judiciary committee.  Take a moment to let them know your thoughts on the matter. You’ll have to use the contact forms on their respective sites, neither take direct emails.

See also previous post:
Great Analysis of Pending Orphan Works Legislation

Clay Shirky gives a talk at the recent Web 2.0 conference talking about where people find the time to do activities on line.  After you get done wincing at the "Web 2.0" part, take a look. He draws a correlation between the shift to an industrial society and the shift to an online society. At the turn of the last century, the cultural shift was so great that society numbed itself with gin.  He maintains that for the past 50 years, they big cultural shock was this amazing amount of free time.  Post World War II, people started working more and more five day work weeks and didn’t know what to do with the free time.  Society numbed itself this time with TV.

It is an interesting talk.  Most folks I know that are hardcore "online people" watch little to no TV. Those that do bought TiVo years ago to compress what they do watch ("TV on your schedule" was an early tag line.) They usually view TV as an another information source and loop it in with others in their life.

Props to Lifehacker for linking to the video.  A transcript of the talk is on Clay’s website.

Say it ain’t so!  Just now I started getting the following on all my domains hosted on Google Apps:

I logged into the web interface for all my mail account, including a generic GMail account and all mentions of IMAP are gone from the settings page.

Did Google just shut of IMAP, or am I missing something?

Update: Seems to be quite a bit of noise on the Google Apps Google Group (say that ten times fast)

Update #2:  IMAP seems to be coming back.  Google evidentally lost their IMAP servers and instantly got 1000’s of support calls on it.  Nothing like crowd-sourcing uptime monitoring.

I’ve been gradually whittling down my feed list in Google Reader and am actually up to articles posted this week.  I mentioned before how much I didn’t like Apple trying to shove Safari down my throat, turns out I’m not alone. According to ComputerWorld, a lot of corporations aren’t happy, then again I’m not surprised. 

During the time I spent in Premier Support at Microsoft, I got the sense that most IT Administrators at huge corporations idea of a “perfect world” would be one where none of the employees had a computer and no one accessed any of the servers.  Anytime Microsoft had some sort of “update” there were immediate cries on ways to block it. After my initial thought of, “No. I do not want Safari” I immediately thought, “I wonder how many companies are going to be mad at this one.”  Question answered.

FWIW (and this is documented elsewhere) If you keep getting nagged about the Safari “update” the solution is pretty simple, in the Apple Software Update Window, pick the “Tools” menu, then “Ignore Selected Updates”

Even though I’ve told multiple people my next PC will probably be a Mac (the 24″ iMac quite the seductress), Apple’s software seems to leave a lot to be desired. When I came into work this morning I was greeted with this on my desktop:

My first thought was, “I sure don’t remember installing Safari…  but, did I?” So I looked through was was installed on my PC and, no, it’s not there. Apple is seeing fit to leverage its position on my PC this it has with iTunes into being my browser. Too bad every Mac user I know has told me when I get the above described Mac to immediately install Firefox since Safari is teh $uX.

Microsoft took it up the poop chute when they forced IE7 out to everyone, yet this is somehow acceptable? I could see getting prompted for this svelte (as compare to iTunes) 22MB update if I had one of the preview versions of Safari installed, but I don’t. Sorry Apple, no I don’t want your crappy software, and furthermore, when I do, I’ll go get it myself. Until that time, pour yourself a nice tall glass of go eff yourself.

I’m slowly plowing through the backlog that is my Google reader list, catching up on a bunch of stuff.  Dan Dantow, who writes the handy writing tips blog Word Wise, shares a little hack for email to prevent sending something too early - write you email in reverse.  Craft the body, then the subject, then pick the recipients. This has a number of advantages, two of which be the subject will probably be better, and you won’t send it before you’re done. I can’t count the number of times Outlook has sent an email before I was done with it, usually by some inadvertent key combination. This little trick gives you a safeguard since Outlook (or any email program for that matter) can’t send an email without someone to send it to.

Flip, Don’t Flop [Word Wise]

I got this tip from my co-worker  who is the company guinea pig for our Vista deployment.  Ever feel like you don’t have as much real estate with Vista?  It’s partly because the window borders (a/k/a chrome) are obnoxiously think by default when you’re running the Aero interface. Try this tip.  Open the Personalization Screen by right-clicking the desktop and choosing “Personalize”:

Click on Window Colors and Appearance: 

On this window, you can tweak colors and transparency (he says he hates the transparency and turns it off, I don’t mind it), but we’re going deeper.  Click on the “Open classic appearance properties for more color options” link:

We’re still heading deeper, click “Advanced…”

We’ve arrived!  Under the item drop down, select “Border Padding” and set the size down from 4 to 1.  I also shrank my title bar and menus down from 19 to 17.  Keep in mind, you’re not changing the font size, so don’t think you’re going to be squinting. Were just putting some of the chrome on a diet.

Ok yourself out of the dialog box hell and you’re done.  Windows feel a bit more trim under this setting and I definitely feel like I’ve got more usable screen real estate.  Give it a shot and tell me what you think

As I mentioned last week, I upgraded my Samsung Blackjack to Windows Mobile 6.  I wasn’t one of those people itching for this upgrade.  I was pretty happy with the phone as-is(was?) Casually browsing different forums you’d see various people lambasting AT&T for delaying the release of the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade for the Samsung i607, better know as the Blackjack. Nonetheless, a co-worker mentioned it was available and I jumped in feet first.

So far the coolest feature is the key shortcuts in email. I don’t know how I stumbled across them, but if you are looking at the main list of your emails or messages, hold down the zero key.  Up will pop up a list of key shortcuts for acting on your emails:

0 - List Shortcuts
1 - Reply All
2 - Reply
3 - Mark Read/Unread
4 - Flag
5 - Move
6 - Forward
7 - Delete
8 - Download Message
9 - Send/Receive

I mainly triage email on my phone. Generally, I’ll read the email, and if I only need it for future reference, I’ll file it away in a folder.  Now, I hold down “5″ and the folder list comes up, I pick the folder and I’m done. Doesn’t save a ton, I could hit menu, 4, but it is one less keystroke.

In addition to getting my corporate e-mail over the Exchange ActiveSync connection, I get email from two IMAP accounts I have (one for this domain, one for my photography business) . Since I’ve yet to figure out how to get it to check those mailboxes on the same schedule as ActiveSync, I check them manually (it took two nights in a row of getting a new email notices at 3am before I knew I had to stop that in order to stay married.) Pressing and holding “9″ kicks off the send receive and I’m in fresh mail business.

I have no idea if this shortcut list was there in prior version.  I’ve been using some version of Windows Mobile for Smartphone for about four years now and don’t remember it.  Nonetheless, it does make life a little easier.

While the Holidays were nice, it is nice to try and settle back into a routine, or at least have the prospect of doing so. I know the time for reflecting on the past year is supposed to take place in December, but I’ve been pretty much offline since before Christmas, so I’m a bit late.

Last Year’s Resolutions

Looking back to my list from last year, I hit 50% of my goals.  I ran in not one, but two marathons, and finished one of them.  I also managed to post a whole lot more here in one year than I did in the whole time I had my blog on MSDN. I hit somewhere over 200 posts last year (I’m too lazy to count), but still don’t really have a direction for the blog, which still suits me fine for the time being. (I looked the other day and they finally shut me out of my MSDN site.  Up until about July I still had edit access. )

Where did I miss?  I only read maybe two works of fiction last year - Angels and Demons as I mentioned in my post, and The Hobbit.  So much else  took my attention that I’m not sad I didn’t meet this goal. 

I also didn’t update my MCSD.  This goal was probably a result of my Koolaid hangover from working at Microsoft so long.  While I did do quite a bit of actual software development (my primary reason for leaving), I also opened my eyes to the world outside of Microsoft.  While I’m still focused on ASP.NET development, I’ve dabbled a bit in PHP, mainly in helping to maintain WMSE.org.

What About This Year

Toward the end of last year, I read a great post by Christine Kane on a better way to set goals for the New Year.  I don’t know where along the way I added her to my Google Reader feedlist, but she doesn’t write that often and when she does it’s usually insightful, so she’s stayed through a lot of the purging that I do when I find myself dedicating to much time to reading RSS feeds.

Christine points out that typical New Year’s resolutions have  a DO-HAVE-BE model, “I will DO this thing. So I can HAVE this thing and I can BE this thing.” She turns it on its head and says to start at BE.  Pick one word to guide you through the year and let your actions come from that.

So I’m choosing the word “healthy.”  If I got to pick two words, the second would probably be “balance” but that would be partly in support of the first.  While I ran a ton last year, and got in pretty good shape from it, I think it was at the expense of a lot of other healthy routines I had.  Plus, since the marathon, I’ve been running a lot less (”a lot less” meaning zero.)  Hopefully I can strike a balance and improve my health this year, both mental and physical.

Photography

One thing I thought was my list last year but isn’t, was to make some money with my camera.  I did manage to do that.  In September I got the first five star rating from the Popular Photography editors on their PopPhoto Flash blog and my image made it into a web exclusive article. Sadly, that didn’t net me any money, but it did give me some confidence to become a professional photographer, at least part-time.

While I haven’t sold any of my stock photography yet, I did do several portrait sessions and sold some prints.  Below are some shots from that:

I’m going to keep at the photography, too.  Try as I might, I can’t bend “healthy” into that endeavor, but do have one straight-up New Year’s resolution.  I’m going to take at least one picture everyday for the whole year and post it up for critique.  Not an original by far, but one that sounds challenging.  I haven’t figured out where I’m going to host the project, maybe Flickr, maybe here.  I’ve got my shot for yesterday, and will get my shot for today. 

Once I have a home for the project, I’ll put up a link here.

Thanks for sticking with me on this huge post.  It grew bigger than I planned.  Thanks also for stopping by my site.  Feedburner still tells me I’ve got dozens of subscribers, and the logs say I still get a fair amount of traffic on the site itself.

I hope you all stick around to see what this year brings.