Just a quick Merry Christmas to everyone. I’m thankful for the beautiful day we had here and thankful for my fortune in having a roof over my head, food on the table, a job, and a wonderful family that blessed this holiday. I hope that the new year brings peace and prosperity to everyone.
Happy Thanksgiving
Despite the fact that Good Morning America started their broadcast this morning with a story about a plane crash that killed six people including children it’s been a pretty good day.
Parades watched on TV? Check. Walk at the forest preserve with the kids? Check. Good wine? Check. A great Thanksgiving dinner? Well, at the time of this writing not quite yet but a check eventually.
Hope all of my US friends are having a wonderful Thanksgiving.
On having a clear head…
In my new experimentation with GTD I’ve learned something that I just never paid much attention to in the past: energy level is a very important aspect of the whole system. It’s great to have a list of stuff to do but if you never have the energy to accomplish anything the lists are pretty pointless. I’ve got some big projects that require me to do a lot of mind work and I’ve found, and have come to accept, that doing those projects after work just isn’t going to cut it. By the time the kids are in bed and I’ve already been engaged in work all day I just don’t have the mental capacity to start working on other things that require a lot of thought. So I tried something different.
For several weeks I’ve been getting up about an hour earlier for a couple of days and it’s made me hugely successful in accomplishing some of my goals. My brain is well-rested (well….most of the time anyhow) and I have more overall energy. Those days I was able to get a lot done in the extra hour I had. So tonight I’m starting that routine a bit more formally. I’m going to go to bed earlier and wake up 2 hours early. With the house quiet I can do whatever thinking I need with the energy I need and without the fear of being interrupted.
“None of you Twits are as clever as you think you are”.
So says the all-knowing “Mike” in the comments on Roger Ebert’s post about how to Tweet. Of course Ebert was going to get replies from the folks who supposedly don’t care or think it’s a waste of time.
“Holly Martins” chimes in:
Twitter is just another marketing tool for people like you. Good luck with it, I’m not interested.
For people like you? Movie critics? People who lost the ability to speak due to cancer surgery? Curious what she means by that? She’s so not interested she not only read a post by Ebert about Twitter she actually responded to let us all know just how little she cares. She cares so little that she takes the time to comment on how disinterested she is? How odd.
“Jim Stewart” contributes:
Much ado about nothing
I’d swear he was tweeting.
But there were a few gems like this bit by “Cynthia Langston”:
I’ve shunned tweeting, blogging, Facebook’ing, Ipad’ing and the like, preferring instead to spend the my precious time in the real world, having real life experiences. Then today, I realized that the bulk of my “real life experiences” involve standing in line at Target, arguing with idiots at customer service counters, glaring at jerks who make noise in movies and conversing with my friends about Dancing With The Stars. Need to rethink this.
That is actually a supremely tweetable bit if it could be edited down to 140 characters 
“sincronizar”?
“Sincronizar”: Definitely the most interesting spelling of “synchronizer” I’ve seen in awhile.
Said Goodbye to Hostmonster.
My shared hosting account with Hostmonster is now closed after a year. Overall I actually had a pretty good experience with them save for the ridiculous CPU throttling. I understand why they do that however they have to really watch what they’re doing. The way its working now is just a bit repressive. It’s a non-issue now. My blog is where I want it to be . It’s cheap. I don’t have to worry about updates. I just need to actually write stuff
Goodbye Squarespace. Hello WordPress.com
Three days ago I wrote a post about trying Squarespace as a blogging platform. Three days later that trial is done. I had planned on giving Squarespace a trial of a month or two. Fantastic service from the quick look I had but I ended up moving my blog to wordpress.com from my self-hosted environment on Hostmonster. The intent was to try both services because I wanted something hosted on a platform where I don’t have to worry about site performance issues. On Hostmonster my WordPress set up was experiencing a lot of CPU throttling which seemed ridiculous given the amount of traffic I receive on any given day. Looking at what they define as slow-running queries against MySQL I was also baffled because nothing was very slow. My desire to debug those kinds of issues is smaller than zero so it was time to look at one of the hosted solutions where the only thing I needed to care about was writing blog postings.
For such a small traffic blog I do have some pages that are routinely very popular via Google searches. When I imported my posts to Squarespace it created a bunch of custom URLs to maintain those WP-generated permalinks which is great. But for trial purposes anything created after that initial import wouldn’t have the same link structure. On Squarespace everything ends with “.html”. If I had done a significant amount of writing over the next month or two on Squarespace I would have been in trouble as far as Google search results go because I wouldn’t have been able to map those URLs to something in the wordpress.com permalink structure so that my results on Google were valid. Since my intent was to try both services, losing my potential Google ranking on those pages when I started a wordpress.com trial wasn’t an attractive option to me. There were two other items that weren’t obvious issues for me: the social aspect that comes with using the wordpress.com platform or integration with Twitter for new posts.
A blog on wordpress.com has the ability to become part of the full social structure of the set of blogs hosted there. I’m writing because I want to, but the point of making it public is to have other people read what I’m putting out there. I’d hope that for many of the types of posts I write somebody might get some value from them. With a wordpress.com account there is already a large social network built up. That simply isn’t an option on Squarespace. That’s not an overall problem with the Squarespace platform but it’s a feature I want that they don’t offer. If I’m going to be paying $10 or more a month for a service I want to make sure it serves my needs as closely as possible.
The other thing that Squarespace doesn’t seem to offer is a way to post new entries to Twitter. On my WordPress self-hosted install I used the WP-to-Twitter plugin. I don’t have the plugin option on wordpress.com but they do have the ability to link up a Twitter account, Facebook account, etc. to accomplish the same thing. Again, this is something I really want and Squarespace doesn’t offer it and again if I’m going to pay $10 a month for a service…
All that being said Squarespace is really cool. The website editing system is fantastic. The iOS apps are far better than what WordPress is offering. At the end of the day though the cost for a custom domain with wordpress.com is $1 per month. The beautiful thing though is that there are fantastic options out there if I change my mind. Options are a good thing
La Russa retires. End of an era.
Wow. Tony La Russa announces his retirement. Way to go out but end of an era.
Comments Off
My iPhone Home Screen
Since I’ll never get on a high-profile site like Macsparky.com here is my home screen :)
OK. So I’m a data junkie. Oh, and GTD rules.
They say the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one right? But I’m starting to come to grips with the fact that I am in fact a data junkie and it’s time to embrace that
I get overly excited by weather facts and statistics. I love to tag things on my computer even if the tags aren’t useful later. I love to collect information on my financial situation (even if I’m not going to look at it very often). I love to fiddle with personal time management software and experiment with “systems” for keeping my life in order (even if I don’t pay attention to it later).
But honestly? I’m feeling a hell of a lot better lately just accepting it for what it is and jumping in with both feet. I’m feeling more in control with my task list and I’m feeling pretty damn good about it. I always liked GTD an connected with it but always ended up falling off the wagon so-to-speak. This time it’s clicking.
I’m going to be writing on this subject quite a bit because it’s an important subject to me and I’m excited about the impact it is having on my life, even in such a short period of time. If I can help even one other person with something I write that will be awesome. So stay tuned.
View more by category: General (198), Technology (97), Apple (44), Food and Drink (61), Life (40), Environment (36), Uncategorized (35), Politics (32), Music (28), Java (50). .
