Good news and an opportunity for San Franciscans 2010

I'm very relieved that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget & Finance Committee has maintained funding for the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team program. This is a wonderful, practical, and free program to train ordinary San Franciscans to stay safe and, where possible, help others in case of disaster. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee the funding will be preserved in the future, so take advantage of the program now while we have it.

Why should you care?

California has a 99.7 percent chance of having a 6.7 magnitude earthquake or larger during the the next 30 years. The likelihood of a more powerful quake of 7.5 magnitude in the next 30 years is 46 percent. Such a quake is more likely to occur in the southern half of the state than in the northern half. ... the probability of a 6.7 magnitude earthquake or larger over the next 30 years striking the greater Los Angeles area is 67 percent and in the San Francisco Bay Area is 63 percent [source]

The best way to deal with this threat is to understand what it would mean for you and your household and how you can reduce your risks of being badly hurt during a quake. Take the classes, they're free and interesting. Download the NERT manual and learn how to put together an emergency kit. Get involved with your local team and stack the deck in favor of coming through the next big shakeup unharmed.

San Franciscans, once again, why should you care?

Because we have 17,000 residents per square mile and only about 300 firefighters on duty at any given time. You will need to be self-sufficient, especially in the first three days after a major quake.

It's not hard to be ready, but you do have to start preparing.

Every week, from now until the ground moves, devote a little time – even just a few minutes when you can't take a class or do a bigger safety project in your home – to providing for your future.

Definitely in motion on my road 2010

My latest Discardia post is about choosing what you most want and don't want in your life and then bearing those priorities in mind when faced with options (which we are all day, every day).

Here are my choices:

I want...
1. to be thriving in a great relationship.
2. to feel healthy and strong.
3. to be a published author.

I don't want...
1. to work in a cubicle.
2. to have little control over when I do what.
3. to be stressed all the time.

I'm making great progress on all of these goals. I quit my office job just over a year ago, went into business for myself as a productivity and life coach, started writing my book about Discardia, devoted more of my energy to my relationship with Joe, and consciously began designing my life for less stress.

The feeling healthy and strong part has been tough, though, I have to admit. I hate gyms. I have a weak knee and a weak ankle which make running or jogging very unattractive. Really, the only exercise routine I actually like and seek out many times a week is walking. As someone with a project of walking the city of San Francisco – every street, every block – that's not a surprise, right? :)

During the past two years I've made various attempts to up my activity level. I tried the Wii Fit for a while; fun, but not inspirational for daily activity. I got a pedometer and renewed my focus on my SF walking project; definitely a help, but not always compatible with working on a book and maintaining a happy home many hours a day.

Yesterday, I think I finally found the sweet spot: a treadmill desk.
I moved my Ikea office armoire to the other wall so the space in front of it wouldn't block our path to the back bathroom, switched the shelves around so that the extending desk surface could hold my monitor at face height when I'm standing, and put my treadmill in front of the desk. There are a couple tweaks needed – the typing surface needs to be an inch or two lower and the stereo speaker buzz needs to be resolved – but in the first part of my day today (less than two hours) I've already strolled at a comfortable speed of 0.7 miles an hour (while typing and reading) and logged over 2700 steps.

I can see that with this setup it will be very difficult not to reach a daily goal of at least 10,000 steps. Also my energy and alertness levels are both higher than when I'm sitting in a chair. Awesome!

Notes on my setup:
- LifeSpan Fitness TR200 Fold-N-Stor Compact Treadmill
- nice finished board
- two scarves to tie board on treadmill handles
- blanket under board for padding and as additional safety grip
- Ikea armoire with extendable shelf
- cheapish monitor
- MacBook
- creativity

Handy city info for your address 2010

I was checking to confirm who my city supervisor is when I found this handy dandy service from the San Francisco government. Just type in your address (or a cross street) and you'll find out

• Your parcel information (block & lot, zoning, lot area)
• Elected officials with links to their home pages (Board of Supervisors, U.S. House of Representatives, State Senate, State Assembly, BART Board of Directors)
• Street information with – woo hoo! – street sweeping info for both sides of your block
• Nearest school and public library

Hooray for public information!

Away From *A* Keyboard 2010

For the first time that I recall in many years I am at home without my computer. That is to say without all my memorized logins, auto-complete entries, documents and other files, and my full music collection. My MacBook is with the geniuses for a few days having two problems repaired which are not uncommon in white Macbooks: cracked keyboard surface along front edge and bulging battery. The latter was a new problem and prompted my finally letting it out of my hot little hands for the service period. That and Joe setting up a marvelous improved backup setup which improved my confidence.

But part of the reason I love the web and living in a geek household is that this is not really slowing me down. Using one of our other computers, I'm listening to music on Pandora and since most of what I do takes place in a browser anyhow, I haven't run up against any "oh, that has to wait for me to get my machine back" roadblocks.

Only one dumb mistake: should have sync'd OmniFocus with my phone so I'd have all my projects and to-do's. But really, am I going to run out of the obvious stuff so fast? Actually, this could be a benefit; it will steer me towards working on the most physically obvious tasks and that might mean our house and my desk are going to be a lot nicer by the end of the week.

Ahh, then Pandora pulls out of the aether a favorite song from an old album I only had on vinyl – "Rab's Last Woolen Testament" by Robin Williamson & His Merry Band – and I know everything will be just fine.

=====

Update: Apple called back in four hours to say my computer was ready. !!! New battery, new keyboard, not just fixed but cleaned, and all no charge. Sometimes being a fangrrrl really does feel justified.

And then today I was dismissed from jury service immediately because they already had enough people. Woo! (Though I'm kind of disappointed because for the first time I actually have a flexible enough schedule to do it. Ah well, next year, perhaps.)

Great power, great responsibility, and unsolved challenges 2010

Here I am once again pulling back in frustration and anger from my use of Facebook.

I don't want to have to do this. I want there to be an easy way for me to keep up with people I like, to promote things I like and help them succeed, and to engage in good conversations about what's happening in the world. I want the web to be smart and save me redundant effort. I want it to be easier for information and reactions to it to flow throughout multiple sites. I want people to be able to use the tools they are most comfortable with and for that choice to be independent from the content encountered through the tools.

But I don't want my or my friends' demographic information and details of our activity to be continually and pervasively leveraged for corporate marketing purposes. I want it to be possible to share and participate without providing a neatly packaged commodity that can be used to alter our perception of the online world.

What Facebook's new Instant Personalization feature reminds me of is that manipulation of our online reality. Certainly the list of wants I gave above would be a change to my online reality of great power, but such a change demands great responsibility. It demands transparency – what is being changed, by whom, and what other ways might it be presented to someone else? – and it demands control – opt in, not opt out. Facebook is not demonstrating that responsibility, nor does its history or the statements of its CEO suggest it is likely to.

In many specifics this is a design problem. My experience with the feature so far is that it's very hard to see what is happening or why. I want to give permission before a site can use my data or my friends'; that's something I should decide, not Facebook's business partnerships team. I want a way to lift the hood and see just what's being done underneath. I want a way to have a certain thing not done – and I want that way to be very obvious and easy.

Think about the difference between visiting an Instant Personalization site (e.g. the surprise of seeing my contacts from Facebook's list of articles they commented on when I visit a site I didn't even know they were reading and then trying to figure out how to stop that sharing of data with this site) vs. visiting a site and having Firefox ask if I want to allow this site to open pop-up windows. The former is confusing and opaque, the latter clear and easily controlled. I don't want to have to fumble around trying to figure out how to prohibit the undesired action after the fact, I want to be asked first and be given the option to set a policy for this site henceforth.

Why does this matter? I am very confident that Facebook's marketing and business growth aims do not map exactly to a map of my trust. Just because they might think a particular company should be allowed to receive a package of social data (me, my demographics, who my friends are, and all their demographics, for instance) doesn't mean I would ever choose to package up all that info for the site myself.

"But it's public information!" you might say. Perhaps – though my confidence over what will and won't be shared is shaky given Facebook's company culture  – but the information wasn't shared by me (or my friends) for this purpose or context. It wasn't packaged by us for use across the web. There's a difference between me saying to Facebook "my friends can know when my birthday is" and Facebook saying to an online store "this user falls into this demographic group by age, gender, and location" so that they can adjust their pricing based on market research of what that particular group is willing to pay for their products. That's a hypothetical example off the top of my head, but it certainly seems to fit within the existing capabilities of the feature.

What compounds all these concerns is the fact that Facebook friends can share your data. User A can go to Site X and by not blocking the feature tell them all kinds of things about his friend User B. Maybe User B never goes to Site X because she does not trust them with her information, but it's passed out of her control now.

In the course of removing all my "friends" on Facebook (and letting each know we're still friends in non-Facebook contexts), I was chatting about these concerns with my friend Glenda Bautista and she brought up a great analogy:

When you add a friend on Facebook or allow someone to add you as a friend, you end up being responsible for each other in your actions. As she said, it's messed up logic to have to treat a tool like this as an STD, but that's just what it is: socially transmitted.

Play safe, gang.

Facebook questions on day one (updated) 2010

(a.k.a. "Oh gawd, I hate you, Facebook; why doesn't anything make sense? At least the Devil gives you a deal when you sell your soul!")

((Update: a.k.a. "Yay! The Discardians are gathering! And, omigawd, I haven't connected with this person in years. This is really cool!"))

I've been online almost more than sleeping for the past 11 years... this should not be so hard and it shouldn't take hours and hours.

I had to create a personal profile in order to create what I wanted, a Page for Discardia where fans can congregate & have discussions, etc. Fine. That part was fairly easy (credit where credit is due), but I've spent the last three hours banging on integration problems.

1) Why don't I see a big ol' link to my Page (Discardia) from my Profile (Dinah Sanders)?
Can't even figure out how to add one. The little blurb box under my picture doesn't accept HTML. Currently only able to get to the Discardia page by going back in my wall to when I became a fan of Discardia and clicking on it. (After I have 25 fans I'll be able to apply for a nice short URL, but only halfway there.)

((Update: Apparently because the integration of Pages with Profiles is still pretty weak. Ya can't do that without custom FBML effort.))

Only thing I've been able to do so far is add the Favorite Pages app which adds a new tab that lists them in reverse chronological order, so Discardia – the one I thought of adding first because it's most important – is under all the others. Why is this even an app instead of part of Facebook's own functionality? Surely there must be a better option.

2) Why isn't Twitter integration doing what I keep telling it to do: show Discardia tweets on the Discardia Page Wall and not on the Dinah Sanders Profile Wall?
I did realize that to avoid redundancy - a very undiscardian trait - I should syndicate Tumblr only to Twitter and then Twitter to Facebook, but that last piece of the puzzle isn't falling into place.
(Tumblr, big kisses to you; your syndication process to Twitter was easy and worked quickly.)

((Update: Apparently because the official integration doesn't include it. Facebook, come on; I thought you were out to crush MySpace.))

3) Why am I not getting email notifications of new fans of Discardia?
Can't even find controls for this from the Page. (The whole Page vs. Profile thing is a rough road indeed.)

((Update: Apparently there's a weekly email. That'd be a great thing for Facebook to send the owners of newly created pages after they get their first fan. "Not much info for you this time, but here's what your weekly update will include..."))

Intellectual property, the online life, and physical death 2010

The recent loss of my dear friend Brad Graham and the memories it brought up of another wonderful person we lost too soon, Leslie Harpold, has me thinking about what might happen to my online presence when I die.

In remembering Brad, many of us began to worry that his wonderful voice online as expressed in his Bradlands.com website might be lost to us as Leslie's was.

I'm fortunate to have a family that understands and celebrates the important role the Web plays in my life. My mother – who could, as my principal emergency contact on all documents calling for such a thing and beneficiary on any life insurance policies I've ever had, argue persuasively that she is my primary heir – has a thriving online life herself, primarily through Flickr. She's also, like me, a writer and would, I think, understand my desire that my works be preserved.

However, the legal position is unclear. My websites have always had copyright statements - either explicitly or implicitly "All Rights Reserved". Some of my Flickr content is Creative Commons licensed, but I have not taken the time to review and update all of my public creative output and its stated license terms.

And why is the legal position unclear? Because I do not have a will. Because of course I'm not going to die anytime soon. Of course. Never mind that Brad was younger than I.

So, yes. I should make a will. But I'd also like to find a way to make it easier for people to declare their intentions without that step.

We in the United States have CC0, which is basically a "No Rights Reserved" license. We have traditional copyright which protects our work for 70 years after our death. But we don't have an easy way to say "While I'm alive, this belongs to me, but after I die, I want to give it to the public domain."

Evan Roth has suggested an "Intellectual Property Donor" sticker for the back of your driver's license, just like an organ donor sticker, but it's unclear that this would be binding since it does not appear on the works to which it applies. It seems to me that a succinct statement which could appear on the work itself, much as a copyright statement does, would be easy to use and legally stronger.

I've got some homework ahead of me, learning more about this topic. I'll be looking at sites like The Digital Beyond and, in particular, their list of service providers in this space. I will also be attending the session "Become Immortal: Understanding the Digital After Life" at SXSW Interactive in March.

Please share your thoughts in the comments and let me know if there are other resources I should be checking out.

---

The clever Lillian Chow remembered the details of what I only had a vague echo of in my head: Neil Gaiman wrote a great post about this concern and provided, with assistance from lawyer Les Klinger, a tool – a simple will – to help address it. This takes the approach of naming trustees rather than turning things over to the public domain, but it does provide a model we could start from.

Any estate, copyright or other lawyers want to weigh in in the comments on that idea and/or on a phrase which could be used on the bottom of a website to reference it. Something like "Copyright © John Doe during my lifetime, transferred to public domain upon my death, per my will."

Experimenting with movies 2009

Here's a little diary post which I whipped together mostly thinking about the pecha-kucha ideas.

Warning: It's a two minute diary not a one minute diary as titled, oops, and the audio came out a trifle louder than I expected thanks to a better microphone than I'm used to.

My process was to record the slideshow in Keynote, then export to Quicktime, then upload that to Vimeo. Ideas on improved approaches are appreciated in the comments; I decided to go for "imperfect and up today" rather than making it a big project that might get bogged down.

Improving your style in a few easy steps 2009

Even if you once were on top of the image you projected through your clothes every day, it's easy to get stuck in a rut and stop noticing changes in yourself, perceptions, and the condition of those old favorite clothes.

For a lot of us, though, we've never been on top of fashion at all. Maybe like me you grew up comfy without a lot of pressure to worry about your appearance. That's ideal when you're a kid, but tough when you're trying to make a good impression professionally. Certainly like everyone you're carrying around some baggage from your past. Maybe it's a color or kind of clothing you're convinced you shouldn't wear because of something someone said long ago. Perhaps an urge to hide some part of your anatomy that you've built up embarrassment about - I see the early bloomers nodding here, remembering being the tallest kid in the class or the girl who first needed a bra, and hunching their shoulders forward. Or maybe you've just been following along with the trends as they pass through the stores and your closets, never having devoted the time to find and celebrate your own personal style.

I'm not suggesting we all suddenly need to be studying fashion magazines and spending all our money on the latest clothes. I'm working from a simple thesis:

Each of us looks better in some things than others.

So why not wear more of those things and less of the others?

Step One: Figure out what you like.
Start paying attention to what draws your positive attention. It's fine to also keep track of what you don't like, but the goal here is to begin collecting images that please you, especially those relating to fabric, color, silhouettes, but really anything can act as inspiration. Yes, certainly you can paste into a scrapbook, but I'd be wary of too much of that lest you focus on what's in current magazines only. You want to draw from a larger pool of ideas. Learn how to take screenshots on your computer (on Macs shift-control-command-4 is your friend!) and start grabbing those details for a journal kept in a word processing file. It's easy to copy an image to your clipboard and then paste it in with a comment of what you like about it.

Look through picture blogs like Nerd Boyfriend and Fashionist to attune yourself to people who are really shining out as individuals beyond as well as through their clothes and accessories. Take a look at this entry from Nerd Boyfriend about Michael Caine for a good example of how perfectly normal clothes can amplify a personality.

Be sure your explorations include things you're passionate about and explorations in unfamiliar environments. Expose yourself to new experiences and old things viewed anew.

Step Two: Figure out what you're like
You can do this in parallel with step one. What are your best qualities, both physical and otherwise? A great guide to this is the book 10 Steps to Fashion Freedom: Discover Your Personal Style from the Inside Out by Levene & Mayfield. Your local library probably has a copy. Give yourself credit for your great smile, beautiful skin, expressive hands, or whatever your best physical assets are. Accept and embrace your other strengths - are you reliable, funny, kind, resilient, patient, forthright, charming, sensitive, vibrant?

Decide what 2 or 3 things are the impression you most want to create. A few example personal style statements (taken from 10 Steps to Fashion Freedom) are "I project a substantial and meaningful presence", "I present a confident and sophisticated image", and "My personal style exudes quality and individuality." Your personal style statement needn't be completely reflected in your current best qualities, but should be supported by them. Make sure it works for who you are as well as who you're heading into being

Step Three: Take Inventory
What clothes do you have and how do they interact with your body? This can be a big project so you may want to take it in stages. Pick a category of clothes which are important to you either through frequent use or because you'll need them for an upcoming event. Don't pick the category which makes up the majority of your clothes; you want to get a quick sense of this step without exhausting yourself. Ideally do this with a camera with a self-timer in front of a full-length mirror with lots of good lighting. Bring in extra lights, especially if you have a lot of dark clothing or your pictures won't capture the details which will be useful later.

Do this when you have time to relax and are in a good mood. Do not let yourself bog down in emotional baggage or bad internal talk as you look at yourself. Remind yourself of your best qualities and stay on track. Personally I find staring in the mirror can be tough - I weigh more than I want to - so taking photos was a great way to get enough distance to assess what works and what doesn't in my wardrobe.

The big advantage of the self-timer is that you can get pictures of yourself from the back and the sides. I found a few surprises among my clothes where things which are very flattering in front have details which makes the bad fit strangely.

Work your way through this category - suits or formal dress can be a good place to start - and then take a look at your photos. What new things do you learn about your best features? I found my hands appeared far more graceful than I'd expected. What negative patterns in your existing wardrobe do you uncover which you'll want to avoid in future? When I looked at my outfits as others see them, I realized how many things I have which are way too big for me and are unflattering as a result.

As you look through your pictures, watch for colors which make you look great. It's amazing the difference a color which complements your skin and hair can make.

I wouldn't have guessed a charcoal grey would make the color of my lips, hair and, though you can't see them in this photo, my eyes more appealing, but it turns out to be a far more flattering color for me than pale pink.

Don't count on your photos as the best way to document your colors; like me, you'll probably find your lighting isn't good enough for that. A great resource in identifying them is to compare the good looking garments to Wikipedia's "shades of" pages which include samples and color names. So handy! Just take a little detailed screenshot of the color you need and start to build up your palette in your style journal.

Step Four: Cut out the bad choices
Life is too short to wear stuff that makes you look crappy. Friends & family, charity, or trash, just get the worst stuff out. Better to have fewer choices than constantly have to route around the bad ones, especially when you're tired or feeling low.

I found it helpful to think about the clothes I'm keeping as belonging to two main categories: best and casual/adequate. The latter includes not only very informal clothes, but also ones which show too much wear to remain in the "best" group. There are also some in this group which are in good condition, but in a less flattering cut or color than I'd ideally like. Note that anything out-and-out unflattering hit the donation bags, these are just the ones that are "okay for now".

In future, I want to buy primarily into the "best" group with the idea that most if not all of my informal clothes should be of such good quality that they could migrate over to loosen up an otherwise dressy ensemble. Think about the impact, for example, of a really good pair of jeans worn with fancy shoes and a stylish blazer and shirt. That same pair of jeans could be worn with hip sneakers, a plain silk blend t-shirt, and a cool hoodie from an indie designer to create a fully casual outfit. Or any of the other parts of that casual outfit could be pulled in with more formal pieces to add ease and character.

If it's all good stuff and it looks great on you, mornings get a lot easier.

Step Five: Take opportunities to upgrade
As you eliminate garments or relegate them to your "merely adequate" group, start a wishlist of replacement pieces which will be more flattering in fit, color, and in reflecting your personal style statement. As I write this there are three pieces in my physical inbox awaiting addition to my shopping wishlist with notes "get this style in one of my colors", "too large! replace with a medium petite, ideally in a more coral pink & less salmon color", and "too long in body & sleeves, too loose in waist; need petite?".

Unless you're blessed with a huge budget or were fortunate enough to have a great collection of clothes already, pick out one to three pieces on your wishlist which you most need and which will be most versatile and just get those for now.

Don't forget to be creative with how you turn bad clothes into good; consider trading your clothes at a second-hand store you like that has regular buying days and use that credit to shop their shelves for your wishlist items.

As with most of life, just start leaning each of your choices in the direction of the future you want to have and you'll be amazed at the progress you'll make in six months or a year.

Moneydance for Mac? 2006

Hey, anyone have an opinion on Moneydance? I'm finding that even after all this time my Quicken-soaked brain has never adapted to Budget and I need to go back to something a little more like how Quicken used to be back when it wasn't a buggy piece of crap.

Seems like since I don't go to the beach that often, the apparent increased risk of zombie attacks isn't enough to scare me off giving Moneydance a try.

Filtering SPAM in Gmail 2006

Am I missing something here? Gmail now puts my email arriving in Gmail now has "***SPAM***" in the subject line of junk mail which makes it very visually identifiable to a human. It seems to be entirely accurate so far in what it marks in that fashion really being crap.

However when I decide to trust it and set up a filter to fling all those messages into my SPAM folder so I never have to look at them, it appears that the asterisks are some sort of wildcard and I can't make a query to identify those messages without grabbing everything that has "spam" in the subject (e.g. "Re: your question about spam filtering").

Was someone at Google just not thinking? Or being too obscurely clever for the rest of us to follow? Tips appreciated.

===

Kevin set me straight. (Thanks!) It must be coming from the TextDrive mail handler, so it's a case of incompatibility between their flagging and Gmail's search functions. I'll put in a request for a change for a different typographic treatment when the flag gets added.

Buying a new phone and/or camera 2006

I'm frustrated by the picture quality of the camera in my Treo 600. I also find it kind of large and heavy and am no longer really using the PDA features that often since 9 times out of 10 I have my laptop with me.

I have two choices:
- buy a tiny little phone and a separate tiny little camera
- buy something like a Samsung MM-A940

I'm tending toward the latter because I'm not that fussy a photographer and mostly want decent snapshots easily sent to my Flickr account. I'm probably not going to do any cropping or other processing so taking the photos from the camera to the laptop is an extra and unneeded step for me.

Anyone got any thoughts on a good camera phone?

I've got Sprint now and can get a rebate for being a long-time customer, so I'm sticking with their San Francisco phon selection (though I could also go to anything Nextel now that they've merged). Only feature I care about beside the camera is that it might be keen to have Bluetooth, but it's not necessary. Don't want tv on my phone or fancy-ass ringtones or any of that cruft.

Getting Things Done: how I'm using it 2005

I put a stake in the ground October 6th and started using Getting Things Done [quick overview of GTD] to manage my activities. I moved things out of my email inbox into the appropriate places (I "processed" my inbox, in GTDspeak).

Having that clean slate is proving tremendously helpful to keeping me focused and motivated. I am much less stressed since the change and finally making headway on a lot of old tasks.

Since I'm a software product manager and the go-to person in the company for my products, I am both working on detail-heavy, rapidly iterating projects and very, very frequently interrupted with questions, some of which need immediate response and some of which are more theoretical "wonder if we could make the software do this?" ones. GTD is proving very helpful for me in keeping these details from being lost, staying focused on what needs to be done now, putting the energy and resources I have to work on the actions which I'm best able to be productive with at the moment, and keeping my sanity.

Here's how I'm configuring things:

My email inbox in Thunderbird represents incoming information and the tasks I want to work on today:
--- I use a red label for URGENT/DO NEXT items. (I assign labels as part of my processing step).
--- an orange label is a 10 minute task (should be able to move this task forward or even finish it with a quick burst of action)
--- a green label is a 30 minute task (needs a longer chunk of focus)
--- an olive label is a project which needs its next 10 or 30 minute action identified (I find these just sit around not moving forward until they get a clear next action that can be done quickly)
--- a purple label is waiting for someone (but expecting either that it will come back to me today or that I want to remember to nudge that someone on if I haven't heard more by end of day)

- I have placed a physical inbox on my desk for incoming papers, in-slips (see below) and physical things to deal with today.

- I also have a dedicated "inbox" pocket in my laptop bag which is used for taking inbox items for work from home and vice versa.

- I have "@waiting on someone" folders in both Thunderbird and on desk for "waiting, not expecting action today"

- I have a tickler folder in Thunderbird containing 43 folders, emptied into the inbox each morning

- I use iCal for "hard landscape" appointments like meetings and conference calls and recurring tasks (e.g. every week send a business development activities update to the person who combines everyone's into one update for the executives)

- KGTD for management of projects, somedaymaybe, and to some degree a quick way to see the status of things

- folders in Thunderbird for reference (e.g. by customer code, by release & within that line item code, plus some "other people's products" and "other departments" folders)

- physical folders for reference (these are only made as needed: for each release & within that for each line item we have meetings on or for which I have other physical notes, a handful of non-release-specific projects which have physical notes, and the general year folder. The general year folder receives all other physical notes or event agendas, which are added in in chronological order with the latest in the front. I guess this is Noguchi method without the shuffling based on last use (since I think it's harder to remember last use date than creation date)).

I have a whole lot of little yellow slips of paper close at hand at all times. In fact, I have a big stack by my inbox, a small stack with a pen right under the front edge of my monitor, some in my wallet and some on the little table next to my couch at home. When something pops into mind "Oh, I should call Hepsibah about the status of the Foo project", I write it down and put it  in my inbox. I don't do it or add it to KGTD or anything, I just get the idea collected and get on with the action I'm actually trying to do when my brain veered off.

Note that this is for all kinds of ideas from "print the directions to the party" to "write a book about Discardia". It doesn't matter, just capture the idea - if it's a lot of stuff, do a quick mind map on a bigger piece of paper - and then I decide what to do about it later when processing the inbox.

 

I think there's still some overlap between what gets tracked where; I'm definitely in the stage where this is all shaking down still. I was using iCal to mark out time to do things, but it made me look completely overbooked all the time and meant a lot of scooting things along. Ticklers work better. I'm moving "soft landscape stuff out of iCal and into KGTD as part of my collection process. The next step will be to only use Thunderbird for things where I need the email information as reference or it's a less than 10 minute task so it isn't worth logging in KGTD. I've just started using the start date in KGTD and will probably give that a tickler role (rather than writing a one sentence email draft and filing it in a tickler folder).

As Merlin said in at least one 43 Folders post, it's not the details of the system, it's the act of thinking about what you want to do and then deciding what to do right now. So far this is sure working better for me than anything else I've tried. I mean a LOT better.

Mmm, this GTD Koolaid is super tasty.

Getting Things Done 2005

I'm just getting into David Allen's Getting Things Done again and finding this time that I'm really going to be able to implement it. I had adopted some of his approach philosophically on a prior reading, but now I'm ready to put the full process in place. The glory of the clear desk, empty inbox and focused mind await!

In addition to reading the book, I recommend reading Merlin Mann's 43 Folders website (introduction to his take on GTD, all GTD posts) and Mac users should check out Ethan J. A. Schnoover's Kinkless KGTD (introduction, endorsement from Merlin).

I'll be writing more about Getting Things Done in the coming months, I know. I am already feeling the benefits at work.

ICE - In Case of Emergency 2005

Here's a good idea which I found on the blog of a man in New Zealand I've never met and who's site I can't remember how I reached:

Add an entry in your mobile phone's contacts for ICE with name and contact info (e.g. "ICE - mom" and then her name and phone number on separate lines below). Emergency services can use this to contact the appropriate people should you have an accident and need medical authorizations, etc.

This got me thinking that it's also a good idea to have an entry for Home or Mom because if you lose your mobile phone, many folks (e.g. lost & found coordinators at Filco festivals) know to look for that and call to say they have it.

And on the same concept, it doesn't hurt to have your business card in your wallet and in a pocket of your backback with "this is my wallet" and "this is my bag" written on it. Lots of people who find lost things like reuniting them with their rightful owner; make it easy. (But don't put your home address in there; there's no reason to give an invitation to further robbery to the person who snagged your wallet at that crowded festival and knows you aren't at home).

Fine hosting, for the discerning web geek 2005

The TextDrive hosting for life offer returns for a limited offering. Get in while the gettin's good.

==== Update July 13, 2009: See updated notes here for other things to consider.

Luck and lessons 2005

The past 30 hours or so have proved instructive and contained some nice surprises.

I went out last night to 12 Galaxies to see Rube Waddell perform.

Lesson 1: To be sure you get your ass out of the house on a Friday night when you're kinda tired and "oh maybe I'll just watch a movie", invite a friend to join you. You will go, so as not to let down your friend (especially a friend on crutches because of his broken leg).

The show time said 9pm. We planned to meet there around 9:30. We arrived and after a little while the opening band (Carnivale Johnson or something that sounded kinda like that) went on. Rube Waddell didn't go on until, jeez, musta been nearly midnight.

Lesson 2 (which I already knew): Bands never start at the announced time and there is never only one band on a Friday or Saturday night.

The opening band was odd and fun. The second act, though, holymuthafuckinCeehristonacrutch was he ever good.

Luck 1: That opening act was a great discovery.

It was Hamell on Trial and that guy and his lil' acoustic guitar makes speed metal bands look like pussies. Great stuff. Check out his tour dates and make sure to see him. I bought his live cd from when he opened for Ani DiFranco in 2000. Mighty fine.

Lesson 3: Opening acts sometimes put on a better show than your old favorite you actually came to see.

Rube Waddell was playing well, I think, but the sound mix just wasn't working for me and I was getting tired. I listened to the first half dozen numbers and then slipped away to take a cab home to sleep thinking "oh the lovely sleeping I will have, oh yes..."

Luck 2: Sometimes you get a ride with a really nice cabbie.

I flagged a cab in front of the club and Hey! It's my friend Vern! Kickass!
We had a brief visit slightly impaired by my fatigue. I made him take some money for the ride which he woulda comped me. Least I could do for the poor guy having to work while I got to go out and play. And then go inside and sleep.

The sleeping was really great.

This morning I got up and futzed around the house for a few hours then set out to return a DVD to the library and then go sell clothes.

Lesson 4: Places that buy clothes are really fussy.

I should have remembered what I found out last time: unless it's pristine or a good brand in good shape or really really distinctive, Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads don't want it. I could have saved myself a lot of hassle if I'd brought the half dozen things I thought there was a good chance they'd want and put the "maybe they'll go for it" stuff straight into the Goodwill bag.

Hauling a box of stuff down there and then having them buy two things put me a bit out of gear. Then when I took my $15 credit and found a rather nice green sweater to spend it on, the clerk was so distracted by talking to his friends that I couldn't get his attention to get my checked box with the stuff they didn't want. I had to go to another clerk to get it. I left the store annoyed (partially with myself for bringing so much, it's true) and it was only after I walked up to Duboce Park, caught the trolley to Cole Valley and had gotten off again that I realized I didn't have the green sweater. (I must have somehow left it on the counter because I rearranged my box outside the store before I set out for Duboce and it wasn't in there). I called and they were very nice about it, but unfortunately they couldn't find it. Another woman came up and had put her stuff all over the counter after I finished paying so we think the clerk must have bagged my sweater with her stuff. All I can hope is that she'll bring it back because I quite liked it. I'll check in tomorrow and they'll give me credit for something else. Best outcome I could hope for at this point I guess.

Lesson 5: When shopping, make sure you have everything before you leave the store.

I sold one more thing at the Haight Buffalo Exchange and wanted to trade it for some fantabulous 4" heels but they were too big so I got a sexy sweater instead. Then I took the unsold stuff to Goodwill and lightened my load.

As usual I stopped in at Held Over, my favorite thrift store, and though I didn't find anything absolutely incredible, I found a couple good things - stockings and a nice sweater I really like even though it looks like I stole it from my grandma - and the staff were really friendly as usual.

Afterwards I went for a fresh green salad at People's Cafe and when I realized I wanted to read with my meal, remembered my planner has the Palm Reader software with a bunch of copyright-free books.

Lesson 6: It's good to be prepared with your own amusements should you be waiting somewhere.

One delicious meal and some of the Essays of Oscar Wilde later, I boarded a bus for downtown and walked to EQ3 to buy a sofa. I found them through their good rating on Citysearch and was pleased with what I saw on their website. Since I was able to quickly look at all their designs, read about their product specifications and see the colors online, I just had to confirm my decisions in the store and sit on the "Betty" loveseat to make sure it's actually comfortable. I was very pleased with the price being under $1000 with delivery. I was really afraid I wouldn't be able to find a nice piece of furniture to invest in that wasn't going to really dig me in the hole. It's still a bunch of money to shell out, but it's not going to force me to live on Maruchan Ramen for months on end. At last there'll be more than one comfy place to sit in my living room! (Well, at last after it gets delivered in a month and a half or so).

Lesson 7: do your research before you shop and shopping will be less of a pain.

Since EQ3 is across the street from Trader Joe's and I'd already promised myself the luxury of a cab ride home after walking all over the place, I went and bought some things that are hard for me to pick up without a car. Couple bottles of wine, some frozen food; nothing fancy and not a lot of stuff, just enough to make me feel that I'd gotten even more done today than planned.

If the weekend ended with that, I'd feel I did pretty well, but - O joy! - it's only Saturday night and there is a whole day more! Thank you, labor unions.

Hope you're all having a good weekend out there.

Things I Bought 2005

...which turned out to be a good purchase:
- big laundry baskets from Ghana bought through Novica (This particular style no longer available, which makes me even more glad I got them when I did.)
- Ikea dresser set with very simple lines (Malm design)
- McCroskey mattress
- black leather chair and ottoman (got 'em at Macy's about 8 years ago, will still be using decades from now)
- Netflix membership
- Spaghetti Puttanesca at Stelline on Gough St.
- Sunset Magazine in July 1989 with this great recipe for gazpacho
- iMac (Even though I only used it for two years before switching to...)
- PowerBook G4
- ZeroShock case for it from Shinza
- anodized Calphalon cookware

...which turned out not so great
- MiniSync (cable tangles way too easily, company good about replacement first time, but retangled it within a very short time and am giving up on the retractable aspect. Will try taking it apart to at least have a good small cable for travel.)
- $125 down pillow bought with $2000+ mattress (Yeah, I can tell it's better than my Ikea pillow, but it ain't 15 times better. Watch out for the upsell whenever you're in that stunned state on making a major purchase.)

Support the people you care about 2005

One thing I'm doing more of is buying from friends. Tonight I bought a year's supply of hosting from Textdrive. For one thing it costs half what I've been paying the admittedly excellent folk of Hurricane Electric who have hosted this site for much of its life. For another it's the project of my friend-I've-never-met Dean Allen, whose dogs I look at every day.

One thing I unfortunately did not realize is that their interface is as cryptic to me as Hurricane Electric's and I'll have to get a sysadmin friend to help me actually set up mail and migrate my domain. It's a good thing I know geeks and they like home cooked meals...

Several minutes later now I think maybe the domain name server change is automatically going to happen and mail may just start working except that I now need to change my mail program to go to the right place and put up a redirect page to go to the TypePad site and that means I shouldn't have an automatic DNS redirect because all I really need hosting for is mail service and I've bought TextDrive hosting because it's becoming apparent that Six Apart aren't going to get around to it anytime soon and god damn but I hate managing this crap.

***

No, wait, I'm wrong. The switch doesn't happen until I tell my registrar to look to a different DNS server. Okay. Good. This is less daunting now.

=====

Update July 13, 2009: This turns out to have been a bad choice, unduly influenced by sentiment. They were not set up to support a non-programmer/sysadmin user like me. Furthermore, I did not need their core services (oriented toward those hosting their own complex, dynamic sites).

The life lesson out of this is most definitely not "don't support the people you care about", but rather "figure out what your real, current needs are - not those based on who you used to be - and then whenever possible meet those needs with services from people you care about".

I have burned a lot of emotional energy on this, perhaps more because I had doubts about it at the time which I ignored. It was a chunk of money at once which made it feel like a greater cost & harder to think about walking away from. It was a mistake because I didn't need the services, but that was hard to embrace because it took years to feel okay about no longer being a web designer/developer. That is a role that was last my full-time job in 1999. Ten years and I still get an occasional twinge of guilt over not knowing how to do a particular thing with CSS! Talk about a candidate for Discardia, sheesh.

Moving on.

I need this. 2005

My friend Kellie has a new business: Girlgear Industries.

I am definitely going to be ordering her first product


Kickass!

Ungrabbed 2004

Is it just me? I just can't get into Gmail at all. I mean, I can log in, but I don't think of doing it. I'm not all excited about using it. It's probably at least partially that I am doing a lot of offline mail reading & writing and, obviously, web-based mail ain't gonna be so hot for that.

Mostly though I think it's that I use my inbox as a way of managing stuff I want/need to do something with. When it's done I either save it or trash it, but most of the personal stuff gets trashed. Gmail's approach is a little different somehow and I'm just not compelled to make it fit me. Or me fit it. At the moment I'm kind of stuck with it since everything that isn't to my name at my domain is going there. The spam filtering is great, but I just somehow find I don't want to hang out using Gmail.

Can't quite put my finger on it yet. I think part of it is that filing/trashing things as a way of checking them off as "okay, dealt with that" isn't one click. Anyone else have an opinion on it? Love it? Hate it? Eh?

Good advice from Jonas: 2004

"Don't buy the memory at the Apple Store. It's way cheaper elsewhere and the 'Getting Started' manual explains in step-by-step detail how to put it in your Mac."

Damn but he was right. 1GB of RAM from Apple $700. 1GB from Newer: $280 with shipping.

[Thanks to Kevin for suggesting I try Newer when Small Dog Electronics, who I normally trust for my Mac needs, didn't have memory.]