Author: Andrew Huey

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.

GTD

I finished reading the GTD book today. I picked up Ready for Anything last week, so I guess I can start reading that now. I’m doing well, I think, with implementing GTD at work. I have my files organized. I have a project list. I have a “next actions” list, organized by context. My Lotus Notes inbox is still a bit of a mess, and I wouldn’t say that I have *all* my projects in the project list yet, but I’m off to a good start.

iTunes Plus

Apple rolled out “iTunes Plus” today, their DRM-free, higher-quality audio format. Any songs you already own that are now available in the new format can be “upgraded” for 30 cents a pop. I think this varies if you’re upgrading an entire album — my collection came to $11.70 for 44 songs, including two full albums and a handful of miscellaneous tracks. I decided to give it a shot, but I couldn’t get the purchase to go through. I guess a lot of other people are trying, too. Maybe I’ll try again in a day or two. Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide if I want to preorder the new Paul McCartney and Ryan Adams albums.

There’s a good article on iTunes Plus over at Ars Technica.

Paprika

The NY Times had a review of Satoshi Kon’s new movie Paprika in Friday’s paper. It’s a fairly positive and reasonably well-informed review. Of course, regardless of any reviews, I’d still be dead set on getting out and seeing it ASAP, since Kon is my very favorite anime director right now.

As usual, this movie is only playing in NYC, and not anywhere in NJ, as far as I can tell. I caught a cold after going in to the city to see Once this past weekend, so I’m kind of hesitant to go back in and expose myself to all those big-city germs again any time soon. Oh well, maybe if I just take a megadose of Vitamin C, and avoid touching anything, I can get through it without picking up anything nasty!

more GTD at home

Last night, I started trying to use Backpack for organizing some lists related to implementing GTD for personal stuff. Backpack seems like a good choice, since it’s web-based, and hence available on my PC or Mac, and also at work if need be.

The first thing I figured out is that the to-do list functionality in Backpack is interesting, but mostly useless. It looks nice, but it’s really missing a log of functionality. You can reorder lists, for instance, but you can’t easily move an item from one list to another. (I could get Backpack to let me do this occasionally, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it consistently.) Also, you can’t move a list from one page to another. It’s a lot easier to manage lists simply as part of the body text on a page, in either a plain old bulleted list or numbered list. You can move stuff around easily, just using good old cut & paste. You don’t get the fancy checkboxes this way, but I can deal with that.

I’ve also considered something like GTDTiddlyWiki, or one of its variants. The idea there would be to stick the HTML file into my FolderShare directory. Then it would, in theory, get replicated between my desktop PC, iBook, and work PC, so I could access it from any machine. I’ve heard that all of the GTD wiki variants tend to bog down if you stick too much stuff in them, though.