A group of not so like-minded individuals at work have decided to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and then go out to lunch to discuss it. I really wish I were a faster reader because one month is just not enough time for me to make it through a tome of that magnitude. Next on the list looks to be Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky. I guess we wanted to get polar opposites and see how much they overlap.
As Godaddy economy hosting was rather slow, albeit inexpensive at only $3.95/month, I was eager to find a faster service, if it were economical. Alex called me up near the beginning of the year with news that DreamHost was doing a major deal on 2 years of hosting. For about $20 I got two years unlimited everything! One of the biggest advantages other than speed on DreamHost is that I have SSH access to my site. Another great addition is that I can now use scripting languages other than PHP.
There may still be some rough edges on the blog now that I’ve got it moved. Please let me know if you find any broken links or other problems.
When I hopped in the truck this morning to drive to work I saw the amber low fuel light staring me in the face. I keep hoping the gas will get cheaper before I have to fill up again, so I tend to wait until the light comes on recently. On my way to work I stopped to fill the tank at $4.059 per gallon. I was just staring at the numbers that seemed to go faster and faster as I watched. For the first time ever I spent over $70 for a single tank of gas.
I thought this was amazing until, on my way home I drove past the same gas station and the gas was now $4.159, a full ten cents more than this morning! I guess I should be happy that I bought gas this morning saving over $1.70, but I can’t bring myself to be happy about 4-dollar/gallon gasoline.
On the way home the news report indicated that crude oil had reached a new high today jumping $11/barrel in only one day! That breaks two records: the highest crude oil price in dollars and the largest increase in oil prices in a single day. At lunch with a coworker I was just saying that I thought the price of gas was contingent not on the current price of crude oil, but rather on the price of crude oil at the time the gasoline refinery bought it. That may still be the case, but now I’m not so sure. My coworker suggested that the price goes up when oil prices rise, but doesn’t fall when the oil prices fall. All I know is that I never really believed that the gasoline would reach $4/gallon this year, but it’s not even summer yet and we’re shattering that. Now I’m afraid to believe that $5/gallon is not going to happen.
So I never really updated as promised with how the integration of the FranklinCovey planner and Toodledo went because I never really came to terms with them together. Toodledo was too cumbersome and most importantly doesn’t allow dependency-tracking for next actions. I’ve been playing with the 3.0 alpha version of MonkeyGTD, though, and must say that I’m impressed. MonkeyGTD is a lot more flexible than Toodledo. That flexibility is a blessing and a curse. It takes a bit more fiddling and playing around to get into using MonkeyGTD, but it will not force you into a mold the way Toodledo does. It’s a nice bonus that MonkeyGTD is completely free and can be backed up by copying a single file, too.
A week ago I got a FranklinCovey planner as part of a course I attended on time management. A week before that I found Toodledo (a friend of mine showed it to me). Now I’ve got this dilemma. I find that Toodledo does a great job of managing my tasks for me. At work we use Outlook for email and meeting planning. I am not terribly mobile. I spend most of the day sitting at my own desk at work. I’m struggling to find a use for the FranklinCovey planner. I tried to use it, but so far it just feels redundant. It duplicates all my electronic planning and to-do lists, but it doesn’t update automatically. I feel like it’s doubled the work it takes for me to stay up to date and on top of my projects.
GTD says I’m supposed to have one bucket, one place to collect my stuff that comes in. I have found that there are way too many buckets as it stands now, and FranklinCovey isn’t making things easier.
If there’s a good way to integrate GTD with FranklinCovey, I’d sure like to find it. For now, I’ll just have to stick with what I’ve got, I suppose.
UPDATE: I took the second half of the FranklinCovey class today, so now I know how I’m supposed to use the planner. I’ll report on my progress integrating this with Toodledo and Outlook.
UPDATE 2: The paper planner just isn’t my thing. I found a coworker to donate my planner to. Now I’m using Remember The Milk and App for the milk with great success.
I don’t understand it and I can’t watch it anymore. TV just isn’t what it used to be. Or maybe it’s exactly what it’s always been, but my tolerance is lower. I’m not complaining about the quality of the programs, though. I’m complaining about the TV networks and their feeling like they know best.
Since the primaries started, Tuesdays have become worthless for watching TV shows. Right at the end of The Biggest Loser they broke in with a “special report.” That was all right, I guess, but they still cut off the end of the show for information that was nowhere near earth-shattering. I was pumped for Jericho anyway, so I hopped on over to CBS.
The first thing I noticed was that the CBS HD channel was showing a standard definition broadcast of the beginning of the show. I was disappointed a little bit, but decided that it was still worth watching. After three minutes or so, CBS decided to preempt the show for their “special report.” Now I could understand if they were announcing something important like a tornado headed our way, or if a Godzilla-like monster had eaten the Vice President. I would have even been okay with them announcing a local fire or police chase. But no, they were just telling us that Hillary had won Rhode Island. Then they wasted another thirty seconds talking about McCain having won all 4 states and Huckabee bowing out.
By the time they got back to the show, something important had happened and I didn’t know what was going on. With everything that had upset me so far, I decided to just turn it off. If I want up to the minute election results, I’ll go to the Internet. That’s what it’s for! I don’t want my show to be shrunk or obscured for crawls that repeat the same thing over and over either. If you want to give me election results, then give them to me instead of commercials or add them to the commercial breaks. I don’t care if the show ends up running a little long, but I do care if you are going to interrupt it for things I don’t care about right now.
I didn’t turn on the TV to watch election results. I checked the listings and they said CBS had Jericho on. I turned on CBS to watch Jericho, end of story.
I use GKrellM for status monitoring on my Linux desktop and laptop machines, but have often wished for a way to get some of the same information without running an X server. I searched around and found saidar, which looked like the perfect solution. I went to install it, but I couldn’t find the packages in my distro’s repositories. I was a little upset that I’d have to build the package myself because I was in a hurry at the time. I dug around a bit more and discovered that saidar is contained in the libstatgrab package! It’s great! See saidar in action. Well, I guess it’s not really in action. Just imagine that the screen refreshes every second or so with new stats.
You can learn (but not master) any language in one hour or less. Don’t believe me? Well, that’s what Tim Ferriss says. He says most language learners neglect the most critical first step in learning a new language: deconstruction. He claims that the fastest language learners deconstruct the language they want to learn before they start memorizing lists of vocab words. His reasoning is that for native speakers of a particular language to learn some languages might be very easy, while others might be nearly impossible.
I took an intro to Linguistics course in Southern California and the instructor also happened to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. Most of his students were Japanese students who wanted to learn English, so they enrolled in student exchange programs. My Linguistics instructor and Ferriss both point out that Japanese and Mexican Spanish have very similar sets of sounds (phonemes) in their languages. Many students would become frustrated learning English and wound up learning Spanish from other students at the college.
Treat Language like a sport. If you are very short, you might have more work to do to be a successful basketball player. The same holds for languages that are very different from those you already speak. Learn how to deconstruct a language first so you know what you’re getting yourself into.
I subscribe to the local freecycle mailing list and have filters set up in Gmail to label all freecycle mail and have it get archived automatically so it doesn’t clutter up my inbox. I don’t check it every day, so I just want to see what’s available right now. Sometimes I also have a specific thing I’m looking for. To help look for these things, I use the following search string in Gmail.
label:freecycle subject:offer subject:-wanted subject:-want subject:-needed subject:-need subject:-taken
You can also add subject:bike and it will only return results that have the word bike in the subject line. This assumes that the label you are using for all of the freecycle messages is freecycle.
The vast majority of people ignore signs with more than two words on them. Ideally, signs shouldn’t have any words on them. There were no ducks near this sign. At first I thought that maybe the sign was placed improperly where no one would see it. Another possibility is that the ducks were there until they put up this sign and people stopped feeding them. People near the edges of other parts of the lake were unaware of the sign and fed the ducks there, where they can now be found in abundance. In any case, I thought it was common knowledge by now that you’re not supposed to throw bread at the ducks.
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