Month: June 2007

12 Byzantine Rulers

For some reason, I was thinking today about an article I read some time ago, about a series of pocasts on some area of history. After a bunch of searching, I think this was the article. It’s about a podcast on the history of the Byzantine Empire. This series has been mentioned in a few different places, so the Times article may or may not be where I heard of it. Either way, it’s something different to listen to, whenever I get tired of tech and comic book podcasts.

I was looking around a bit today at the stuff on iTunesU, and some of that might be interesting too. I listened to parts of a few random lectures; most of them sound like… college lectures. I suppose that’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but it’s not compelling “daily commute” listening. I’m tempted to listen to this Data Structures course from Berkeley, just to refresh my memory on this stuff. Maybe I can find a class on design patterns. I’m too old to have learned that stuff in college; design patterns didn’t really take off until about five years after I graduated. (Gotta keep learnin’!)

Memory Almost Full

I bought the new Paul McCartney album, Memory Almost Full, from iTunes, the “deluxe” version for $15. Right after I bought it, I found out that eMusic has it too, though just the basic album. I could have downloaded it from eMusic under my monthly download allowance, and it would have cost about $3.25, given my current plan. I don’t really feel bad about paying $15 for it, though, since it’s a good album, and eMusic doesn’t have the extra stuff you get from iTunes.

Meanwhile, this guy doesn’t really seem too impressed with McCartney’s new album. I disagree with almost everything he’s saying here. I do think that there are a couple of really catchy songs on the album: “Dance Tonight” and “Ever Present Past” strike me as being at least as good as anything by Gnarls Barkley. And I think the album stands up pretty well as a whole. And I know it’s about the “art” and not the distribution, but I think it’s kind of cool that he’s on iTunes and eMusic and YouTube and all that.

Jott

I signed up for a Jott account today. Jott is a service that lets you send e-mail to yourself (or others) by calling a toll-free number from your cell phone. The email gets run through a speech-to-text translator, so you read it, or click a link in the e-mail to listen to it.

I stumbled across this service today while I was looking for something else. It might come in handy. Part of the whole GTD idea is to have a way to capture thoughts pretty much wherever you are. Jott could be useful for that, if I’ve got my cell phone on me, but no pen & paper.

And I’m hoping Jott doesn’t sell my cell phone number to anyone for marketing purposes. (I’m pretty sure they won’t; they do seem to be a legit company with a reasonable privacy policy.)

GTD at work – week 2

So today was basically the end of week 2 of trying out GTD at work. My desk is pretty clean now, and my files are labelled and organized. I’m keeping track of my projects and action items in Notes, in the To-Do section, per the GTD and Lotus Notes doc from DavidCo.

I’m still a long way from cleaning up my Lotus Notes e-mail inbox, though. In the past, I’ve basically used a system where I flag any actionable items using Notes follow-up flags, and just leave everything in my inbox. What I’m trying to do now is go through my inbox for 2007 (2006 is archived in a separate database) and either move messages to a reference folder, delete them, or put them in an “action” folder. My plan is to continue using the Notes follow-up flags (to indicate priority, at least), but to try and get a functional folder system going so that I can get that inbox to empty. I’m not terribly worried about getting to empty real soon, since I’ve already got myself well-trained to either (1) act on a message immediately or (2) mark it for follow-up. I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now, so it’s not like there are a bunch of actionable items hidden amongst the 5000 messages in my inbox. Anything that’s actionable is already flagged.

I took at shot at my second weekly review today, too, but it was a half-hearted effort. I’ve been fighing allergies for the last few days, and I’m just out of it. And I’m still way behind on a number of projects. I’m taking steps to try and get things moving, but there’s still a lot to do.

Well, I suppose this post was more of a “personal journal” entry than a useful blog post that others might find interesting, but I felt I needed to write it, just to review this stuff myself, and get it out of my head.