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What I saw today. Pretty spectacular! Also went to the electric zone through numerous stalls and then ended up at the Giant Yodobashi Camera Store.  If you’ve never been there, you got to see the zone. It has hundreds of stalls of smallish electronic doodads, plugs, gizmos, sockets, USB everything. Just when you think you have seen it all, you pop out and see the “store”. Its kinda like the place I went yesterday but there it was fashion mostly but all down these stalls. In front of that was a large farmer’s market with fresh fruits on sticks. Yummy!

Tomorrow, its Shinjuku and other places. I’m expanding efforts to get around to as much of the place as I can given my dwindling time left.

I have not blogged about how my GTD setup is working and evolving lately but I actually have been making changes. Just to remind folks that my original goal is still the one I am using. Basically:

I want to have a very easy to manage GTD setup using no additional tools or software besides Outlook 2007, my company’s Exchange 2007 server, and my Windows Mobile device with PocketInformant on it.

I actually must admit to wandering a bit and trying additional software which spells out doom for me. But in the end, the workflow has remained but I worked a bit on how I stage my projects in Outlook. Here is how my Geeky Zen to Done thing works now:

Step 1 – I do weekly/daily reviews of things over coffee in the mornings and have a method I like to quickly grab actions. For me, I use OneNote 2007 to catalog things that blur by. I can quickly map these things to Outlook tasks by doing SHIFT-CTRL-5 that need to show up there. I have Outlook 2007 running then with only a few action contexts including @Work, @Errands, @Personal. I have a second task file which is called projects with additional fields that let me name a project, list the tasks, enter resource names for assignments, and I link the projects to OneNote files which then give me a whole bunch of leeway to the brainstorming, definition, and personal delivery mechanisms.

Step 2 – Throughout the day, I get email which requires an action. I grab the email with a right click and drag it to the tasks icon and create a new task. These often have word, openoffice, excel, or powerpoint files attached. I then assign the new task to one of my few action contexts. If I can do the thing in 5 minutes or less I do it. If it takes me longer or its delegated, I also have a @Waiting For action that it goes to. This has meant that bunches of stuff just “gets done” that before I procrastinated on. Yay!

Step 3 – I have my Windows Mobile Device set to show the tasks which is handy and I also use it gather up notes when driving somewhere. The notes end up in OneNote though. There they become tasks or brainstorming or free-form things.

Step 4 – I save all completed tasks by marking them “complete”. I rarely delete a task.

I created additional fields for my “projects” task file which include additional project derivative information. Note that I use a web-based tool called Redmine to actually manage the projects with a team at a task level. This is actually my own project requirements, notes, definitions, etc.

So how does it work and will I continue? I’m not sure. This seems like a bit of work to me but I still enjoy the methodology. If I get tired of the method, I most likely will quit and use some other application or approach. Its gonna take me a month or so of seeing how I like it. My first impression is that classic GTD is a lot of work before you can move to the getting things done level. It means a lot of preparation, thinking, marking, writing. Then perhaps you ready with a blank mind to start. I never can achieve that blankness. Thoughts proliferate and I can never just stop. So classical GTD fails me every time. This geeky Zen to Done thing is more flexible and it seems to work. The final thing will be for me whether it really helps or just adds more time to the management and not the doing.

Time will tell.

Well, in two weeks from today, I’m flying the lonely skies. Going back to Singapore for some days and Chennai, India for a few days. This is a faster trip but there is a lot on tap. We’ve got a lot of momentum at work building.

My priority project is about 75% at the fully cooked state. Its been weeks of very focused activity for a large multi-national integration firm. I’ve received a few accolades which always a person feel better. This project has been a real significant thing for me at work. Its raised the bar for me on what I can do, how I can be a team of one, and really increased my knowledge-base around cloning, imaging, copying of sensitive data. I’m thankful to the team I worked with for stressing me, pushing me, making me feel the fire.

Today I got to leave work at 2pm which was mighty good. I reached the “done” state and could just walk away from it. Next week will be back to being busy but this weekend, I’ll only work for a few hours each day.

Then soon, I’ll get away in a big way. Hop that 15 hour flight to wondrous Singapore. I really love that place and the hotel I stay at rules there. Then on to India and the wondrous Raintree Ecotel with the “above sea level” bar and grill.  Then a week after I leave, I’m back home again. I’ll just be getting used to the jet lag and I’ll reverse the trip

My reservations are made; meetings are set. My boss and the CEO smile at me because they know I want to hit the road. I like the things I do at work and the places work takes me.

Its a new year. I’ve made some changes to try to affect how I do things and to inject some simplicity into it. I have a job I enjoy at Celestix Networks which is imminently challenging, fun, and rewarding at a few levels. I guess overall I am thankful. The transition to simplifying the actual projects, ideas, tasks, goals has produced a few nice results. I’m able to check off things that I do which is rewarding. I also am able to simplify the things which means that they are more easily digested, managed, and done.

Moving to a new system has its challenges and I’ve met a few which in my journey. You have to stay committed to the system and not wander. I’ve looked a few times at what I need to capture those thoughts which pop in at unusual times. I have an idea about a work project when I’m driving and its a delicious, innovative, fun thing to try. But… I could lose the pieces of it. What to do to capture it? Now I pull over and pull out the smartphone and start typing into PhatNotes. Then when I get in, I deglue all the 1000 foot concepts into concrete things which are smaller, leaner, easier to manage and plan. They populate simple contexts and actions from the smartphone. Some may become major contributors to a daily important task to get done. Others become bigger things. Some are delegated. Most get done within a set number of minutes.

This is where the rub is and it takes constant practice to get this right. I tend to drift off into doing unfocused things instead of sticking to the plan. Perhaps this is my challenge.

Another challenge is that I still seem to want to validate my tools against others out there. There are so many web-based and personal productivity tools that the habilis in me strives to download, setup, use. What I’ve seen with a lot of these are that they are way too complex. I’ve found a basic and simple process to doing the “Zen to Done” for me:

The first thing is how I record things. I need a way to grab the idea, define it, place it no matter where I am. Paper does not work for me. The Motorola Q9 or any phone would work with a decent notetaker.

The second thing I need to do is to process those things. Here is where the wandering sometimes comes in. So I have exercised a bit of control and just do the work and do some mental disciplining around the effort.

The last thing I have noticed is when and where the most creative of ideas occurs. I’m sure you all have done this. When you are solving problems, locating solutions, you engage in this primordial creative state where ideas pop around like comets, things join up and then separate. You are doing more. There is a neural mindmapper working; joining ideas to other ideas. Wondering if a previous solution would work this time.

At this level of distracted awareness, I process ideas and formulate a plan that I have to write down. If I don’t; its gone.

Short and Long of it...

It all seems to work. Ideas process, I manage their collection. I use a simple solution to capture the flow. I have some challenges though. My normal and ordinal process is free ranging solutions architecting. Things bubble all around. I need a simpler solution than the classic business focused GTD. Perhaps I need to create a thing which blends the Zen to Done, the methods I have deifned, and offer it up.

Ubuntu 8.10 is not an evolutionary step; its more like a smaller baby step forward. The interface is not consistently different and there are things which kinda bug me about it. There is this crazy problem with keyboard repeating which drove me crazy. Any letter seems able to stage some crazed repeating thing on laptops or desktops. One letter becomes three way too quick and the gnome keyboard preferences don’t do anything.

I tried a few different things like running keyboard rate commands, xset, but finally think I licked it by inserting this into /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section “ServerFlags”
Option “AutoAddDevices” “off”
EndSection

Then logging off and back in again. When you do this, some or maybe most of the special keyboard commands won’t work; but the magic is that the gnome keyboard preference will work. Now you can set them to what you want and you can tell the difference. Now, simply comment out the above three things after making changes that work for you and logout and back in again. For me, this fixes the crazy keyboard things.

This seems to have been around through a few iterations of Ubuntu and I have never noticed it in my Debian Lenny desktop at work.

Other than that, there are a few things I have started using more and more. These were around before but I have gained an appreciation of them. One is SSHfs. This is a great way to mount, use, and securely manage a remote file system. The second is TrueCrypt. Install it and manage those files you want secure.

That’s my ongoing report for Ubuntu Ibex. I like it; but its not some big step forward as I thought it would be. Its more like a nicer environment bounded by somewhat growing amounts of splurg and sloth. Gnome is getting very heavy duty these days I think. Luckily most of my systems, laptops included, seem to do fine. As a last word, suspend and hibernation just work now.

Thanks !

The days lately have been pretty busy at work. We’re preparing roadmaps for calendar year 2009 and its kept me busy defining our strategies for new and updated products around our core platforms. I’m more of a classic product manager at work and tend to get involved in all phases of our products, their support, knowledge bases, maintenance. I think the company appreciates the effort and my boss tends to tell me often that the work is superb and he appreciates the extra effort.

Its Friday night though and there is no work to do tomorrow. I have a few things I want to get done over the next days. One is to have some man sodas that will smooth the week away. They always leave me in a relaxed state, having some alone time, considering not very much at all.

I’ve been messing with Ubuntu 8.10 for about a week now. Its mostly good but there are some frustrations. The keyboard repeat rate seems all fubared and often makes a clickety clackety thing and adds extra keys when I least want them. This does not exist on Hardy. The core operating system seems nice but its hardly revolutionary. Its more of a small jump forward in the punctuated equilibrium of Linux distributions. It also seems more full of fluff and stuff. Almost like a Winnie the Pooh of a distribution almost bursting at its seams sometimes. Still, its light years nicer than the rpm distributions I’ve grown to hate and I like its release mantra.

I could go back to classic Debian but it irritates me as well with its staggered release schedules. I could run Sid there though and that would be fun

I’ll try to return to this environ this weekend and write something of more reason. For now, its Man Soda time!

Its Saturday morning here in Singapore and I’m planning out the day today. I’m going to visit the Singapore National Museum today and then find a place in the evening to get some Chili Crab. Tomorrow, I am off to the Singapore Zoo for a day of stomping around. Monday I may do this cruise to an island for a day. I decided to take some time away from the whole work cycle.

Its a beautiful sunny day here in Singapore and in about an hour I’ll be departing the hotel for a day here and there. I saw the museum in a cab ride and I cannot wait to get there and explore for a day.

Dreams are strange. I read somewhere they allow you to go quickly and quietly insane every night of your life. Last night, I had this dream about RWR which is strange. I still think about him but I’ve kinda decided that we’ve changed too much and my world and his world are too far apart. I don’t know what I’d say in a real world if I met up with him again; but in the dream scene, we hugged. Val was just smiling and nodding like telling me “you should listen to me; of course RWR wants to see you”. But in the real dream I live in, I simply cannot find the way to do anything there in that old prehistoric archeological world I lived in. Its too distant and different. I still miss it too much at times I think. It had the better parts of most things and perhaps I miss the wondrous mix of science and human endeavor that anthropology offers. I guess I will always be a once separated archeologist and will watch the History and Discovery channels. And dream…

My Saturday AM scramble would not be complete without a sense of the “what next” in my life. It seems you reach a stage in life where the what next thing is kind of decided. Its not a case of what you “may” do but what you “will” do. That is strange. The eggs don’t scramble so wild any more folks. The yokes are all in place and the whites don’t spread in the pan. Gosh… I don’t even eat eggs any more. Bad analogy I guess.

Anyways, go out and make it a fine day. If you go to Linuxworld, I’ll be there on Wednesday. I’m not sure why. Call if a step towards Linux after so many steps away.

After 16 hours of flying and 2 hours of crying, I’m here! I actually landed this morning at 2am or so and the last few hours was spent listening to a 3 year old or so decide that he wanted to be pissed off at flying, parental units, food, whatever. I gotta tell ya. If there is one thing that is irritating, dismaying, and leaves one with the desire to get off the plane; its a howling kid at 30k feet with 1.5 hours to go of flight. No sleep, no ipod, nothing could dim that kids bulb. He had to just let everyone in coach know that he was unhappy with it all.

It takes a bit of time to get here folks. Singapore is not some easy jaunt from SFO. My flight was from SF0 11 hours to Inchon in Korea and then another 6 hours from Inchon to Singapore. Going back, I’m gonna change the flights out a bit and fly into Hong Kong for a few nights and then go back home. I’ve never been to Hong Kong so I’m excited. Never actually been to any of the places I’m going this time so its all good!

BTW, I’m staying at the Royal Plaza on Scotts here in Singapore. Its a pretty nice hotel. Today, I just hung around here and ate in the hotel. My next stop is India and I’ll be staying at a very interesting place that our India team booked for me there for a week or so. Its called RainTree and it sounds very nice.

The final cool thing is that my friend AFT from the GAP, Linuxcare, and Levanta days is also over in Singapore so we are gonna meet and party down a bit here in SG land. Undoubtedly, the work gang will take us out as well.

Linuxworld Expo

It appears that LWE is coming up again. I am going to go on Wednesday but for the first time in about 5 years, I’ve not arranged a Linuxcare Labs reunion lunch. It feels a bit strange but I think the time has come to move past that. I feel like I’ve moved past a few things around Linux and perhaps that’s okay. My current work is very challenging, fun, and personally motivating; but my “touch time” with Linux is low. I guess I will go to the expo on Wednesday, see how many of my old friends did not show up this year, get a Debian CD, and drink a few beers with those that do show up.

Since I have a membership in Technet, I get to play with Microsoft’s new offerings as I want to. Call them “evaluations” if you like; but if you are a habilis boy like me its $400 or so well spent dollars. This last weekend, it was Windows Server 2008 time and how to take it to a workstation that I could be productive on, play around with a bit, and perhaps learn something on. There are some great howto articles out there about this trip already so I won’t bore ya with the story of that trip. I’ll just do a few top things I like and dislike about it.  Its worth remembering that I’m running it on a so-called lower end AMD64 4000 single core chip so I don’t get any to hyper-v it appears unless perhaps a BIOS update or a new system board would take me there.  Anyways, first the likes in no particular order:

1. This pup is fast and its like driving a race car all stripped down compared to my Visa 64 install which seems kind of syrupy slow.
2. I’ve figured out how to install stuff on it like Office Pro 2007, Yahoo Widgets, and even the wondrous Blogjet for writing these blogposts. The applications run at least as fast as on my XP Pro build and faster by degrees than on Vista X64.
3. The interface is malleable but there is some power under that thar hood. It seems to be very responsive and those surly UAC errors I never see. Thank!!

A few dislikes to even the road a bit:

1. Installing was fun and it did not like my activation code at first and insisted it was wrong. Then when I wanted to activate it, it spat out some silly DNS non-existant error. Hey! If you wanna tell me to re-enter the code that technet gave me, just ask!
2. Adding roles requires rebooting. Why? On that other OS, I can add a so-called role or feature and I don’t need to reboot at all. It still means mucho power cycle events for a new system
3. Desktop Experience is cool but it takes a bit to get it right. How about enabling it if I install its feature? Perhaps I really want it if I go so far as to choose it?

Final thoughts on the whole thing are varied; but to tell the truth; I like it. I like its stripped down and ready to run nature. I’ve never really hated Microsoft; but I’ve liked other things better. This OS gets me closer to being a powerful under-the-hood thing with great visuals. Its interesting that people donate lots of blogposts about making this into a workstation and draw criticisms about the Vista client side. If both share similar code bases, I don’t get how Vista can be so poky and this can be electric.

Anyways, I am gonna use it for fun and frolic and try different sets of roles and features out. Technet makes the habilis in me smile!

I like to write posts about using Linux and open source most likely because I show how much I don’t know but how I really want to learn. I told a friend of mine once I classified myself as a habiilis or tool user and he agreed. I’m not a terribly adept scripter or coder but I’ve managed groups of developers and consultants and I’ve learned a few interesting facts about how Linux is done (or not) in a few settings. One of the places on and off since 1999 I’ve played is Linux startups. I was talking with a friend at Visa that’s a recruiter today and we were laughing about how these companies juxtaposition themselves, make themselves relevant, build incredible offerings, and even social ideologies. But the one thing that they don’t seem able to do is build themselves a conscience and morality and honesty. I’ve worked, played, learned, hated, and left a few of these companies. I think there is a commonality between many of them. They all think they’re the best until the 5th restructuring or the 2nd cease and desist legal suit. In the case of my favorite star-crossed Linux startup; we accomplished both. Linuxcare just was and the memory is still fresh.

But, as usual I digress. Since I am a habilis and tool user, I rate things on how well they satisfy my needs and whether the tools presented integrate, offer, and let me build. Habilis like to build using the tools. In some ways, the Linux toolkit seems somewhat adverse to this with the classical “tool for every job” mentality. But that’s changing and it has to. To make Linux adoption happen on the desktop; we cannot tell new users that they must learn how to manage 5000 unique tools and they don’t talk to each other – ever. No, dear readers, we must go and further and do more. New users want to learn; but the path cannot be incomprehensible. Operating systems are judged by the user base and not by the complexity of the tools or the pureness of the message. That’s why I kinda left Debian and went to Ubuntu. I simply love Debian and its community; but I am a tool user. I need fresh tools, new tools. I must learn how they work. Simply put if a tool ceases to be a tool, my mantra is to leave it behind. It may mean I go use Windows XP because it has tools I like or tools I need. There are cool and good applications on them all.

Taking it to the streets; we can all learn from what we choose to use whether its a computer, an idea, a plan. An old friend, RWR, once told me “you have to know where you are and what you are doing”. I always remembered that. Its a great chant when I wonder or am unclear. RWR always knew and I admired, respected, and even loved him for it. He had “presence”. Finally put, have you ever met someone with presence? A person who just knew? He could be equally at home in the desert, a fancy bar or a hotel where we tramped in one evening dirty from the field. The hotel attendant believed we were “scum of da earth” and prepared to eject us. Until RWR presented a corporate AMEX card and charged 5 rooms, food, beer. It was a moment of presence.

I have a feeling though that the crop of open source companies I still see do not have presence at any great level. They seem to still believe the press about themselves. They still chant and sing the song egotistical. Its okay. What you have done will soon pass too.