If anyone’s interested, a PDF of my part of the presentation is available here, and a t-shirt replete with Internetologist John Gabriel’s most famous (and popular) theorem is available here.
~Jeff
However, what’s really helped me in the past month has been my adoption of a new, very easy to remember mini-GTD method, which I call the “Three-item sticky note.” What it is: a sticky note with three things I hope to accomplish during the day. That’s it. For a working person, I think three items is just about right — too many more, and you’ll be running around like a fool, and any less than three is, let’s face it, underachieving. For longer term planning, I put stuff on an online ta-da list that I can add or subtract to from anywhere.
But ironically, the low-tech nature of the Three-item sticky note is its biggest asset; after I write the three items on the sticky, I stash it in my pocket and it sits there bugging the hell out of me and I can’t wait to throw it out — but I can’t throw it out until I do the items! — so you best believe those things get done.
So this trick has been working for me for a couple months now, but there are other ways to be effective and Get Things Done; what’s yours?
~Jeff
I always suspected Carl Orff had hid some meaningful English false cognates in that Latin; and now, proof. Make sure you crank up your speakers, especially if you are at work.
Side note: it’s been a while since two ldopans posted in one day. Hooray!
The Melancholytron Photoshop filter. Pretty cool stuff, like a free lomo camera, all the better to melancholy up (down?) your Facebook photos.
~Jeff
MUSIC: dramatic string section
V/O: “The Oceanic 6… are off the island.”
FLASH: Picture of island from “Lost”
V/O: “Faced with a challenge… they never expected.”
FLASH: Downtown Soho loft apartment, exterior shot
V/O (wacky voice): “Living together, in a downtown New York apartment!”
MUSIC: “I’ll Be There For You (Theme from ‘Friends’)”
FLASH: Photoshopped cast of ‘Friends’ with faces from cast of “Lost” (Jack, Kate, Locke, Sawyer, Desmond & Ben) with title “LOFT” (all caps)
V/O: From the producers of “Lost” comes the new sitcom: “Loft”!
MUSIC: fade down, back to dramatic string section
FLASH: Back to exterior of loft apartment
V/O (deep voice): Previously, on ‘Loft’…
LOFT GANG sits on couch.
DESMOND and JACK in the kitchen.
DESMOND to JACK: Sorry, brudda, but… some one’s gonna eat your peanut butter.
JACK (holding jar of peanut butter): Great.
SFX: (laugh track)
FLASH (white)
LOFT GANG sits on couch.
KATE to SAWYER (holding pice of paper): What are these mysterious numbers?
SAWYER: Freckles… those aren’t that mysterious — those numbers are your share of the phone bill.
SFX: (laugh track)
FLASH (white)
LOCKE to JACK: Why do you find it so hard to believe!… I didn’t eat your peanut butter?!
JACK to LOCKE: Why do you find it so easy!… to eat peanut butter?!
SFX: (crowd “oooooOOOoooooh!” sound)
FLASH (white)
MUSIC: wacky sitcom entry music (ala “Bosom Buddies”):
V/O: This week, on “‘Loft”…
MUSIC: silent
LOFT GANG sits on couch.
MAN IN POLAR BEAR SUIT enters stage right and attacks KATE on couch.
KATE (close up, scared): Ahhhh!
SFX: (laugh track)
QUICK CUT AWAY
FLASH (white)
V/O: Next week on “‘Loft”…
MUSIC: “I’ll Be There For You (Theme from ‘Friends’) credits”
JACK to LOFT GANG: If you didn’t steal the rent check, and *you* didn’t steal the rent check, and *you* didn’t steal the rent check, then *who* stole the rent check?
BEN: (giggles)
LOFT GANG (in unison): Oh, BEN!
SFX: (laugh track)
V/O: Thursdays at 9 on ABC.
~Jeff
I’m a total idiot for alarm clocks. I seriously have drawers and drawers of them lying dormant, the battery powered ones still ticking the hours away to themselves. In my search for the perfect awakening, I have bought probably 15 alarm clocks in my life, and each is flawed in some fairly intrinsic way.
After 33 years of near-constant iteration, I’ve decided The Perfect Alarm Clock must:
Right now, we’re using a $50 Memorex CD alarm. Its problems are:
So my friend Jon suggested that I have this nifty little linux eee laptop, and maybe I could use that for an alarm clock. And: maybe I can. I found an GNOME app descriptively named “Alarm Clock” which lets me set an mp3 for us to wake up to and set a fairly elaborate schedule that excludes weekends. There’s no snooze button, but I think I could work around that — what I’m finding inexplicable is that I can’t seem to find a full-screen linux digital clock app or screensaver. Seriously, that’s all I want, and I can’t seem to locate it. I tried setting up an xwindows screensaver thingy for gltext, and that works, but it’s *so small*.
Anyhow, any thoughts? I can’t believe I’m the first person to try and use linux as their alarm clock. Also much appreciated would be alternatives that satisfy alarm clock conditions #1-4.
SIDENOTE: This looks promising, but I can’t bring myself to spend that much for an alarm clock. Yet.
~Jeff
Lots of nice iPhone icons presented in a incredibly simple to use way. Tap the icon and add the resulting page to your homescreen, and it will generate a link to the page it refers to.
I’d like to take a quick moment to pimp Remember The Milk. Its a
to-do list manager that I find to be awesome. It uses Google Gears to
integrate into the sidebar of a Gmail window, which is great for me,
since I always have my work Gmail open. The language processing for
adding new events is good too. You can type “write grandma tomorrow”
into the box, and it will make a new task to write grandma, due
tomorrow. There is an email interface as well, but I haven’t had as
much luck sending quick notes to it in a format it parses well. And if
you pony up $25, there is a very nice iPhone version too, which would
pretty much obviate the need for the email interface in most
instances.
Macworld is coming and I always worry about losing my laptop, either by being thoughtless, or by turning my back. With that in mind, I do four things to secure it:
1. I require a password to unlock it from sleep or on startup.
2. I set up a guest account (not the Leopard one) with no password and limited access to software.
3. I installed IPMenu from Loopware to alert me via email whenever the computer’s IP changes. That way, I’ll be notified of the new IP whenever the laptop goes online again.
4. I installed Flickrbooth, so that any pictures a possible thief takes with Photobooth will automatically be uploaded to my Flickr account.
None of these keep me from losing my laptop, but they might help me get it back.
On the network security front, I lock down the firewall, and only access private sites via ssh. And I occasionally crack open dsniff to see if everyone is being so careful.
m.NPR.org is a well put together little site. You can read the text of stories as you can on the main site, and you can listen to them as well. But rather than mess around with figuring out which mobile phone supports what plug-ins and downloading a big media file over cellular, they invoke a little known protocol called “wtai”, prompting your device to place a phone call which then plays the story to you. The downside is that it costs you minutes, and these days, data plans tend to be unlimited while calling plans aren’t. Also, it leaves iPod touch users and the five people who bought those Nokia n-series tablets out in the cold.
In closing, if Rudy Giuliani loves 9/11 so much, why doesn’t he marry 9/11. Then he could cheat on it.
~Jeff
I wouldn’t put a guy like that in charge of a car wash drive-thru, never mind an ideologically divided country teetering on the edge of complete social collapse. Why are we even pretending this douche is a viable candidate?
~Jeff
Seriously, it’s 2008 — even the most hard core pro-life zealot would have to agree that this country already had this conversation, and there are other important conversations we desperately need to have. Let’s move on to the more pressing matters at hand.
~Jeff
