Month: August 2007

inbox (not quite) zero

The last time I blogged about GTD, I was down to 632 messages in my inbox. I got that down to 92 today, probably the first time it’s been under 100 in a long while. (It’s back *over* 100 now, of course, but hopefully I’ll get it cleaned up a bit more tomorrow.) Meanwhile, I’ve been using the To-Do section of my mail file to track my projects and next actions and whatnot. That’s working out OK, but it’s not the most flexible system I could have. I may go back to the GTD for Lotus Notes database, and give that another try.

And I watched Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero video this week. There’s not much new there, really, for anyone who’s already well-versed in GTD, but it’s interesting. I’d recommend watching it, if your inbox is a bit out of control and you’re looking for some help.

Hitchhiker’s Guide

“This must be Thursday,” said Arthur musing to himself, sinking low over his beer, “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” — see Wikiquote for many more Hitchhiker’s quotes.

I started listening to the audiobook version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy today. It’s read by Stephen Fry. He does a great job with it. I last read the book back in high school, probably, but I still remember a lot of the dialogue. Great stuff. It really made the commute into work today much more pleasant than usual.

And Stephen Fry lends his voice to this alarm clock too, which is pretty amusing.

FreeNAS

I’m still working on setting up a NAS server for our new Pennsylvania office. I gave up on OpenFiler in favor of FreeNAS today. There’s nothing wrong with OpenFiler, per se, but it just wasn’t looking like it would work well for what I needed. FreeNAS looks just about perfect, though. I was a little reticent about using it, at first, since it’s based on BSD rather than Linux, and I’m just not that well-versed in BSD. It doesn’t seem like you need to know much about the underlying OS, though.

Ratatouille

A friend gave me some zucchini from his garden, so I’ve decided to try making some ratatouille. I’ve never even eaten ratatouille, never mind cooked it, but it seems like something I should try. There are quite a few recipes out there on the internet: the weird one from the Pixar film, an interesting, but time-consuming, one here, one with mushrooms over here, and what I’m guessing is a tradional French version here. I think I’m going to go with something that’s kind of a combination of recipes from two cookbooks I’ve got here at home.

open source stuff

My company is setting up a new (small) office in Pennsylvania, and I’m thinking about using some Linux stuff down there. I’m planning on using IPCop for the firewall, and maybe Openfiler for a NAS.

I’ve been using IPCop in our main office for the last few years, so I’ve got no doubts about that, and I’m quite familiar with it. I’ve never used Openfiler though, or any other open source NAS package. I considered putting an old Dell PowerEdge box running Windows 2000 Server down there, but I’m not really enthusiastic about that; it’s an old box, and an old OS, and I don’t really need all the overhead of a full Windows server. Nor do I want to pop for a Windows 2003 Server. I just need a place to put shared files for a small workgroup. I’m hoping Openfiler works well for that, and is easy to access from a Windows XP client. I’ve been looking at the Openfiler forums, and I think this thread may prove helpful. I haven’t actually gotten around to installing OF on a box yet. I downloaded it Friday afternoon, but I mistakenly downloaded the 64-bit version, and I didn’t realize that until after 5pm on Friday, so I left my machine downloading the 32-bit ISO and went home. I’ll give it a try on Monday.