News, Views, Subterfuge
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2005.
Best of days to you all! This blog is closed tomorrow and will re-open for normal business on the 2d of January, 2006. I’m sure I’ll have some exciting news about work stuff that I’ll be ready to blog about. Its kinda interesting and fun and different. Just like most of the other things I have ever done. Most of all thanks to AFT for being there! You came through again bud.
See you all on da flip side of the new year. Remember to add that extra second or you will be all wierded out.
Laterz.
We all know by watching the Discovery and National Geographic Science channels that the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Incans, the Anasazi; all had important and significant concepts of time and the management of time cycles. Whether it was Stonehenge in England or mysterious stone alignments in the Southwest; we all can see that time cycles are important to us as we go through our lives. In my ancient past, I studied the western Mojave Desert prehistoric native americans and they understood the seasonality of things; but if we travel east a bit we come to the wondrous Anasazi. South we can find people that built monumental architecture to do a variety of things; but certainly some was keyed to understanding the passage of time. Taking an anthropological perspective, we understand that we must control its passage, mark its occasions, and then worship it in some fashion. The sun rolling around; the moon hunkering down. Ancient folk understood more of the mysterious cycles and built their own outlining systems to mark their cycles and projects.
Flash forward to our time… We also want, need, desperately desire a way to manage our time. Divide our time into projects, tasks, todos, calendar items. We have a variety of paper tools, proven approaches like Getting things Done, and then sets of software tools that try to make us more productive. Many of us want to synchronize that behavior to our unruly PDAs. PDAs have become more than just Personal Assistants. Take a look at the Life Drive if you doubt me. We are stretching our own boundaries and want single devices instead of multiples. Soon our versatile little assistants will do it all. They’ll be phones, information managers, mp3 players. I want one with 100g of disk space in a Ipod Nano format. Give me a single device that will basically mean no more phone, laptop, pda. I use a Treo 600 here so I am part way there; but a Treo can be kinda whacked out at times. Mine engages in strange and unruly behavior every so often.
But until we reach that, we all seek at some level or another, organization and skills to organize. Is it something like a Palm PDA and some erstwhile software? For my own needs, I am using Natara’s Bonsai to build sets of project management templates which bring together the myriad forces of my own work. My work is divided into sets of tasks, requirements, todos, calendrics, meetings, phone calls. Imagine a single software solution which is malleable enough to deal with it all, manage it on the desktop and PDA. Well, the perfect one does not exist unfortunately. And making one work is work. But… In the absence of OmniOutliner and the “perfect time and task organization software”, I’ll continue to walk the path of testing. So far MyLifeOrganized and Bonsai both offer a great set of value. I also use a Wiki solution to cross some information processing needs and I’ve brought it down to Note Studio because I want a thing which is across the desktop, laptop, and palm form factors.
Will my templates really make it easier as I start my new challenge? Well… I’ll soon know since it all starts in mere days. I have a feeling even well-designed softwrae will suffer under the onslaught of reality and its designs. But that’s okay. If I end up with MLO or Bonsai, I’ll know I’ve done my diligence and I will have done the same thing as some ancient Mayan or Aztec. I will have met time and space and tried to build solutions that would help me deal with them and their mysteries.
In the end, GtD will simply not work for me; because its not mine. Someone else built it. But I can take its concepts for what I need and build something that does. That’s also the wondrous part about malleable solutions. We can design and re-design to our heart’s content. When the summer solstice arrives, I’ll be there with my Treo 
Its an interesting point in the lives of us all. We’re reaching the end of yet another calendric year with a “leap second” added. This means we will all be okay as far as time goes for awhile. Scientists know they have to do this every so often so time does not get away from us and we can show with no lack of certainty that we control time. Controlling time is important for our fragile species because it also allows us to control space. Once we control time and space; we control reality and all it represents. What if there were no time, space, or reality though and all of our waking moments were but dreams? One day we would all wake up and find out what we really were. What would that be? I ain’t sure… I’m still dreaming myself. I think we are children of the cosmos though and through our veins rush diamonds and rust and cosmic dust.
Anyways, everyone has sets of new year’s resolutions that tickle their time and space. Blogs, wiki’s, weblogs, journals. Its where we print out things. We can even tag them so others can find them like this. Then we know that others know that by writing their sensibilities down that we can make our investment in altering our little bit of space and time and reality. Great!
My resolutions and since I’ve tagged!! Wow. Its gotta be the first time I have tagged. I am so freaking proud of myself to figure out that key technology :)… My resolutions:
And that’s it. I’ll probably add a few more extrapolations when the mood strikes me that way. Tune in next year for more “news, views, subterfuge” because there is never enough of any of those in this here blogosphere.
Just upgraded rather painlessly to WP 2.0 here. Upgrading WP continues to be easy. Follow 4 or 5 directions and get done. I still have the tarball of my old WP 1.5.2 just in case I want to roll it on back.
The major change is in the UI for managing and administering the weblog it appears and I’ll have to wait for Senorita and Spam Karma to update. Meanwhile, there is akismet as a anti-spam plugin which I am testing now. It requires a wordpress.com API key.
This is one of the more amazing stories I had heard on PBS. Seems that for years and even more years, a spectacle would unite people at Camp Curry in the Yosemite to an event almost breathtaking in its scope. Here’s a site dedicated to it. The picture really demonstrates what it must have been like back then to see the shower of sparks falling over Glacier Point. When I was a kid, my mom and I visited Yosemite a number of times but I don’t recall ever seeing this event. We were there when it was still going on though; so I think I am going to have to go through some old photos and see if I can find a reference to it in my mom’s belongings.
The picture on the website truly does the event justice and extends the discussions and memories I heard on the California Gold PBS show. This was not a natural event and finally the NPS stopped the event for a variety of reasons. Park crowding, less than honest visitors stealing as campers watched the event, and ecological damage all made their impact on the event.
Its still one of those stories that you hear about and seeing movie footage shot really makes it look like a waterfall of fire cascading over the edge. Truly amazing photos and the memories page on the site is worth reading too. People tend to return on the anniversary of the last firefall to remember and talk with others that were there.
Last few days have been interesting and I rebuilt my web server so had a bit of downtime here on the weblog front. I had a drive in my 3ware RAID1 array that started complaining a bit so I rebuilt and redid the array. Let me just say if you want something reliable, able to be rebuilt, runs on Linux; go 3ware. I don’t know much about software RAID on Linux but true hardware RAID seems very nice and the entry point is reasonable. I live with two primary debian servers that do mail, web, backups, archiving (long-term), and other myriad tasks. On the desktop and laptop side I have two XP systems and two SuSE 10 Linux systems. The desktop applications are what you would expect on such. The way it works for me is to use this little beauty called rsync to move my stuff around a bit to protect my mp3s and datafiles. I don’t really care about the linux itself since I can redo it all in about 30 minutes even with a drive failure. I got spares. If the controller itself goes out, it would take me a bit longer; but I could still salvage from my second system and be back. Bare-metal backups are vastly overrated in my setting here at $HOME. Perhaps in data centers or in critical environments, its different.
So in the case of my home network, I feel it is intelligently designed and powered by Debian GNU/Linux. I cannot see doing this plumbing work on Fedora or something personally. Debian is much more suited to these tasks. SuSE would be kinda scary But as a desktop it suits me very well.
As far as the hopeless causes go, I’ve spent some months deliberating on what Linux needs to do “next”. Not so much what it does now. Its doing it aferall; good or bad. But we seem to be in enterprise “heaven” where we all just believe that by the good graces of the IBM’s, HP’s, and Intel’s; it will all work out okay. I used to believe in this also. But its fallacious thinking. The ISVs will not rescue Linux either. No way. So is it all hopeless? Are we all doomed and is this magnificent bit of disruptive technology doomed to fragment? Bad, bad, bad… 
I answer a resounding no! But we must wrest control over the apparatus away from those that feel by simply writing standards that everyone will adhere to them or even believe in them. I would ask the question I asked here before… If a standard is no longer relevant is it still a standard? I don’t know. But I think not. These things all have lives of their own and systems, cultures, ecologies of all sorts must simply evolve to stay relevant. Its something I worry about because I think we have this possibility and probability to make something that shines and reflects what we have done.
Lets not drop it and get 7 years bad luck.
testing a new blog client
That this weblog is probably gonna go on a short hiatus…
The job front has just become much more interesting and provocative so I will be moving to a new position doing some work that is very challenging; but also means I’ll be pretty busy building some things which need to be built. If you read along here, I’ve posted a lot lately about organization and time management which emulates to a level the Getting things Done philosophy and methodology. I kinda cheated a bit because I really had no “inbox” to process but now things are gonna “het” up so I am going to apply the wonderful teaching to my new job in the hopes of building sets of projects, tasks, next actions that will allow me to effectively manage the chaos of building a new thing. I’ve built new things before and its challenging, requires a lot of attention, and multi-tasking in many ways. I think DA’s book calls out a few of these ideas and though I kinda cheated on the personal stuff, I’ve wanted to reach an organizational level where I was able to clearly define a thing, do it decisively if its within a 2 minute window and then defer or delegate otherwise. But the real power is in knowing what its next action is. As a project manager, this kinda sinks home to me. Because we PM’s do that a lot as we define and refine projects. We kinda know in our guts that there are things which have to be done next.
So, in the interests of not posting to my weblog so frequently in the next weeks, I’ll make an attempt to post here with some timely subterfuge every so often. I have some things around Linux and standards that I have been saving of late. Those things have been redefined as someday/when actions though, so they are gonna wait.
Bye for now all you bloggers and webloggers and wiki’ers or whatever. May the force shine bright in your keyhole.
After silently considering the mores and approaches we use to become productive, and reading DA’s book on Getting things Done and rereading certain chapters; I believe that humans are always at crossroads of productivity and inertia. My own approach blends what I need into sets of outlines, collaboration tools on my Treo, and sync’ing things in both directions. I’ve come up with what I consider a concept/model approach to doing a GtD implementation that will work for me. It works for me like this:
What an Implementation Looks like
Here is what my implementation looks like in a nutshell. I sat down yesterday and jotted, recorded, found and removed all the things that needed it. You kinda become a “tabula rosa” or blank slate with this process. I think its easier to do this when you are not at the height of multi-tasking work, home, and other stuff. I was able to reach a consensus with things in a day; but I wanted a geek’s approach to GtD and not paper. I don’t deal well with paper and my handwriting has reached the point where it simply does not work. So, I created projects where I need, found @Next Actions, created a staged approach a bit different than the classic one where my calendars and meetings and time-required objects are linked to the projects where they occur within projects but they also live outside. As I go through locating various facts, I record them in a wiki Inbox for processing either on my Treo or desktop. Notes may be sync’ed to my Treo as well. Bonsai then comes in and is the central nervous system for my approach and I can create calendar items, todo items, and simple recordings and etchings of my places and traces. As far as I can tell there is no single tool that will extend all this so one needs to use the “best of breed” of all of them.
Overall, doing the mind cleansing works the best when you don’t have “plate items”. Like thousands of things on your plate which could mean your virtual, physical, mental Inboxes are all crowded with inter-dependent crapola. Changing the way you do things means exactly that; but I have a feeling that geeks will try different ways in a search for the perfect way. It may cause a person to not really live up to the potential but instead forever try different ways. The main things are definitions at various stages.
Next Steps
I got the feeling that at a concrete point out there we will have the “geeks way of Getting things Done” in a package that allows one to not only build out the core but also extend it to syncing with the existing data sources on a Palm device. Meanwhile though, my approach works! Its let me find some freedom.
This is the final part of things and I’m fast approaching a decision point on what I will use. Basically, the two finalists are:
Both of these are only for my geeked out Getting Things Done trials and tests. I’m still maintaining a set of personal wiki pages on another tool which works very well for my purposes these days.
When I am a habilis
I am Mike the tool-user, hear my roar! So, comparing the two tools above is like apples versus oranges. Bonsai provides a very clean conduit for its palm component and you can setup outlines, multiple mindmaps of categories, keywords, next actions, planning, somedays, perhaps things. It all resides in a central XML-based file format that then syncs to a palm application that runs on my Treo 600 and is remarkable in and of itself. If all I wanted, and perhaps I will want this, is a single laptop and Treo/Palm solution, this would be the one. However, I don’t operate that way here. The ideal way is to have a tool which will allow uses across a small network and over a VPN connection. So from a basic perspective, Bonsai is great but there are some issues with sharing the work file I’ve created. But perhaps in the end, I will only want a single source that is shared on a palm device. We’ll see. The second thing that Bonsai excels at is mind-mapping. Measuring, mapping, mental geometry. But since it is an outlining tool primarily, it has a set of limitations or has not been developed to extend itself in depth. Lets take an example perhaps…
Lets say I have a call I want to do and record the information from the call in a document or set of notes that I can find easily later on. The call produces a set of Next Actions which I could merely outline as actions or contexts; but what I really want is a way to create something new as a container to hold notes, bullets, factoids. How to do that? I have to link to a document perhaps in clear text or another application that I go off and create. The notepad ability in Bonsai is limited to a few 32k or so of lenth. Not terribly good for a manager that wants to over record. But… I could live with it as long as I can build sets of outlines and depths that work. So Bonsai has a set of plusses and minuses around collaboration and depth.
If I apply the same criteria to my other application, Note Studio; it becomes much easier. I can develop pages which allow effortless linking using WikiWords and then cross-link, backlink, go crazy! It also has a palm component; but as I mentioned when I started this whole thing out, it also does a palm sync. Very nice! Its not an outliner though. It builds collaborative pages and you can share the pages between systems and users easily.
What I think I get to with the second solution is not a real Getting Things Done thing. Its more of a Geeky Getting Things Done which uses collaboration approaches within the classic approach but extends them in many directions. It makes the habilis in me want more. But, its uncomfortable to use more than one tool for a thing like this. I want “the tool” and I want the tool on my Treo as well. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want or need the constant beeping of an appointment missed because I cannot operate that way. My brain does not respond well to Outlook reminders or chirping. I need a fuller and more balanced environment and I won’t miss things.
So, now I have used a set of templates that a person built for Note Studio and I’ve implemented my own GTD approach which carries forward a few ideas but also makes things work better for me with sets of definable Next Actions, Contexts of things, Someday wanna be things. Its time to really become a habilis and go test. Life is sure to get more complex soon and I want to be ready. In the mantra of GTD, I need to sit down and compile and list and act… Find all the things and have sufficient time to go through them. I’ve spent a few days here and there doing that
