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Flash forward… 10 hours later in Singapore. After sleeping for about 4.5 hours at the transit hotel in the T3 terminal. Mike is ready. Sitting at Gate B2 because B2 is the place for the Hong Kong to SFO action. Full flight I am told. Checking diversions. Mp3 player charged. Kindle ready to go. Sleep mode soon activated.

Its interesting that after so many flights back and forth that I can finally sleep on the plane. First few flights no sleeping at all. Flying from Chennai last night was good. Fell asleep next to this rather irritating Australian guy who complained about everything. Flight 5 minutes late. “is this bloody plane going to take off today or not”. Kid crying. “shut the brat up”. Food not perfect. “what’s this crap?”. So glad to nod off and not let him up to the bathroom until he looked full and round and fully packed. I felt like saying “shut the f up. what the f is the used in complaining? the flight don’t get there any quicker with your stupid mouth moving”. But I restrained. The flight is 4 hours long. Too much time to breed angst with a neighbor. So instead, I slept and he grumbled about the bathroom. I have to admit to pretending to not hear him when he started needing to remove package in the lavatory. I was ipod’ed so volume up with Pearl Jam.

Now on to the next…

This weekend is the last one in Chennai. I’ll be spending it all at Goa at the sight of a historic Portugese fort. A place with two swimming pools and the beautiful arabian seacoast right there. I plan on setting up an ambitious level of non-accomplishment which will include ipod, music, books, and watching people. I am doing absolutely no tourism; no rushing to catch this or that bus, train, or plane.

I leave tomorrow at 430pm and will be at the resort hotel by 7pm. It’ll be time then to catch a bit of dinner, walk the beach, and inspect the hotel environs.  I come back Monday evening by 8pm or so and come back to the New Woodlands for one more night. Then off to the Raintree Hotel for a night. Then I leave.

First stop is Singapore for a day and a night; then on Friday off to Hong Kong and back to SFO after some hours of patience. It will be very good to get home. I will be back in the Fremont office after a weekend of jet lag on December 7th. Yay! I miss the Fremont office a lot.

I’ll be back in Chennai around March or April 2010.

I flew out Thursday at 2:10pm Singapore Airlines Flight 15. That took me to Korea where I was there long enough to realize that I still had about 6 hours left after flying 12 hours to get to Seoul. The last flight definitely is the longest boys and girls. I got to the hotel room at 2am local Singapore time. I think I did something kinda like sleep but perhaps more like being unconscious in a bed for about 5 hours and woke up hungry. Head downstairs but first plug in my Starhub Simcard so I can do stuff here. I have all day here in Singapore to get over the 12 hour flight and then back to Changi airport and on to Chennai tomorrow morning at 9am. That flight takes about 4 hours. I’ll be back to staying at the Raintree Hotel first for two days and then on to the New Woodlands for some period of time. As you can tell by the Flickr feed on this page, New Woodlands is right there in Mylapore district and I’m excited to get back. To me, its a hub of food, fun, and a lot of history and I’ll be spending some bit of time, yet undefined, in Chennai this time.

Now I’ve done my ablutions including showering, food, and even writing another blogpost to fill up my mysql server at home. Home. I’m not sure where home is these days. There is the place back in SF which has some things I need to think about. There is traveling and all the homes you get when traveling. Perhaps its more like home is where the hat rests these days. Well, perhaps baseball cap

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!