Good ‘ol Merlin Mann, gotta love this quote:
Yeah, I know smart execs have delegated for centuries. But I can envision a world where sweating over your beepy electronic device starts looking about as “executive†and “pro-active†as sucking on a crack pipe in the break room.
Lately I’ve taken to treating the phone like any other information source, it can wait its turn. There’s a stack of magazines sitting under my desk that have been waiting longer for attention than some of my text messages. That hardly seems fair now, does it? 
Ben McConnell hypothesizes that having brilliant thoughts in the shower has something to do with bathroom design. Although I agree 100% with the notion that thoughts are clearer when ceilings are higher (or nonexistent), I think it might be simpler than that.
My feeling on this is that as you’re standing there naked and wet you can’t race off and action the first thought you have (no doubt getting distracted by another anyway). Taking a shower also presumably consumes very little brain power; there’s usually no-one else around, no email, no mess, so you are free to think without boundaries.
I actually have a magna doodle on the wall in my shower so that I can draw pictures or write down my ideas as I have them. Inevitably it gets used for entertaining diagrammatical conversation with other shower users, but from time to time it has saved me from forgetfulness.
PMQ have posted about the world’s longest pizza, at 264 metres it is a certified Guiness World Record. It doesn’t say whether or not it was all eaten, or whether it tasted any good! For that matter, it doesn’t tell us what the toppings were either. Perhaps it evolved from one end to the other? Did it taste better at the start when they were all fresh and motivated, or better at the end when they’d all had lots of practice?
5 hours, 100 people… hmm that is less that 53cm of pizza per hour per person. I can make pizza faster than that!
Well, this supports my claim that you really don’t need a car when you live in Wellington CBD. More workers in Wellington CBD than Auckland CBD. I didn’t know that.
On a related note, I really like how my gmail calendar (using ghs) sends me sms messages 15mins before my appointments. Just enough time to get to a meeting anywhere in Wellington CBD even if I’ve forgotten all about it. Better than phone calendar reminders, somehow much less irritating.
Why on earth can I NOT search for partial strings in gmail??? Are google not the kings of search? It’s ridiculous!! For example, searching for “clean” will not find “cleaners”… this has caused me grief trying to find emails several times already. I’ve requested partial string searches as a feature. I even read the help section:
Keep in mind that Google Mail search will not recognise matches to partial strings or matches that are ’similar’ to your query, including plurals and misspellings. If you search for travel, Google Mail returns messages containing instances of travel, but does not return messages including travels or travles.
I’m thinking of officially changing my weekend from being Sat & Sun to being Sun & Mon, or maybe Sun & Wed? Can’t decide. I do know that having a day off per week when everybody else has a day off is great, but having a day off when everybody else DOES NOT have a day off is possibly even better. So clearly, I want both, but do I want two days together, or to break the week up some more? The main push for this is that working on the weekend is so very productive (no distractions, its amazing how much gets done), but for reasons of sanity and variety it is very important not to miss the weekend entirely.
For a long time now I have treated Sunday as Project Day. A lot of people do this actually, its the day around home that you embark on some project, most times you won’t finish it, and quite often its not a very big project. Putting up a new shelf in the kitchen, planting some herbs, building a lego robot, doing a painting… all qualify as long as they aren’t your normal work.
I have been thinking that I’d like to build a web application to manage and prioritise my list of Sunday Projects. Then, naturally I thought it could track anybody’s list of projects, and people could sign up and provide advice or feedback on others’ ideas; like “don’t use [blah] brand of [blah] to fix that [blah] because its no good.” or “make sure you put your herbs in a sunny spot that doesn’t get much wind or the dirt will dry out too quickly.” or whatever. And then I thought it might be cool if people could volunteer to help each other out on their Sunday Projects. Might be a fun way to meet people AND get stuff done.
So some day, some Sunday, maybe I’ll sit down and make my wonderful web application.
This morning I joined Tim, Tim and Tom on their morning swim at Oriental Bay. What a great way to start the day, I’m still energised. Sitting here drinking my delicious earl grey blue flower tea while the daily buzz goes on around me, I’ve been getting through my massive list of very-important-things-to-do at what seems like an astonishing pace. Or maybe it was the wheatgrass shot that we had afterwards?
So I got a 4GB USB stick for xmas. In trying to come up with the most productive use for it (rather than simply storing a bunch of music etc) I have spent the past few hours installing a whole lot of Portable Apps for Windows onto it. This way I really won’t need to carry my laptop around. So far I’ve got working:
Portable OpenOffice, Firefox (with my fav extensions), Thunderbird, Sunbird, ClamWin, Suduko and Gaim from the PortableApps Suite InstantRails (incl. Apache, MySql, phpMyAdmin) and RadRails (requires JRE on the USB stick or on host computer) DSL 3.1 (Damn Small Linux - Embedded version, just download and run, what fun!) Portable Skype (it works with Skype 3 even though the website hasn’t been updated yet) Portable RSSOwl (it works with RSSOwl 1.2.3, just replace the main app folder) Inkscape IrfanView GIMP Portable Notepad++ NVU Portable PortaPutty WinSCP Portable Edition 7-Zip Portable CDex And I still have more than 3GB remaining!!
Some apps required special “Portable” editions, mostly when they would normally make use of the Windows registry, and some you can simply decompress or install and then copy/paste onto the stick.
Initially I was planning to somehow squeeze Ubuntu onto it and then install all these (or equivalent) applications and run them that way, but this seems more sensible for the time being. The next trick will be setting up automated backups, data security, and virus protection (it has ClamWin already but I have to remember to use it).
I just received my third update to the Agile Web Development With Rails book from the Pragmatic Programmers. I really like this whole beta thing that the world has gotten into, getting hold of things when they’re nearly ready is great. I get it earlier, I see the updates often and appreciate the little enhancements as they go in.
