Author: Andrew Huey

GTD book

Well, I went out and bought the GTD book today. Let’s see if I can finish reading it in a reasonable amount of time.

So far, it seems like a worthwhile read, not just some mushy new-age stuff, or patently obvious stuff, or completely impractical advice that would never work in the real world. It does seem to contain practical advice that might actually be useful in my day-to-day work.

I’m kind of curious about how I might get some of this to work with my existing software tools. I’m currently managing my priority list via my Lotus Notes inbox, using follow-up flags. That’s not the best system possible, but it has the advantage of residing directly in the system where most of my to-do list items originate (i.e. e-mails from other people).

GTD

I’m usually not much for productivity systems of any kind. It all seems to me like it should just be common sense. Keep track of your to-do list, prioritize, and so on and so forth. I’m falling so far behind at work now, though, that I’m actually starting to look around to see if there’s anything out there that could help. I know there’s no magic wand I can wave that’ll get four months worth of work done in a week, but maybe there’s something out there that could help me whittle down the list a bit, and take some of the stress off me.

I’ve seen the “Getting Things Done” system mentioned a lot over the last couple of years, and I’ve been somewhat curious about it. I think I’m finally desperate enough to start looking into it. An excerpt from David Allen’s book is available from Business Week. I read that, and it makes some sense to me. There’s a page of links and stuff about GTD up at 43 Folders. There’s a link there to a podcast series, interviewing David Allen, that might be interesting. I think I’ll give that a listen, after I catch up on DNR.

I’m not sure if I’m ready to buy the book yet. Maybe.

my robot brain needs beer.

At work today, I got rather overwhelmed at one point, and the phrase “my robot brain needs beer” just popped into my head unbidden. Checking the internet (of course), I see that it is a phrase uttered by Machine Man (aka Aaron Stack) in Warren Ellis’ excellent Nextwave series. Googling that phrase returns a whole barrel full o’ hits. Apparently, the phrase has become a bit of an internet meme or something. Looking through the first few pages of hits, I couldn’t find a scan of a panel with Aaron actually *saying* the phrase though. Disappointing. I was hoping to find something to use as my wallpaper. If you look through the various entries that come back on that search, however, you will find a bunch of interesting stuff. For instance, Adam Warren’s DeviantArt page!

iTunes economics

Lately, I’ve been adding money to my iTunes account from various sources, rather than just putting stuff on my credit card. I’ve been cashing in pennnies, nickels, and dimes at CoinStar, and getting iTunes credit in return. And, a while ago, I bought a $50 iTunes card at CostCo for $45, and put that into my account.

Today, I was buying a gift certificate for someone from AmEx, using my rewards points, and I decided to spend some points on an iTunes certificate for myself while I was at it. I didn’t look at the fine print too closely, though. The certificate you get through AmEx is a 50 song certificate, rather than, say, a $50 certificate. The difference seems to be that you can only use it towards individual song purchases, as explained in this tech note on Apple’s site. So, that’s a bit of a pain, since I’m usually only buying albums. Also, song credits expire after six months or so; regular dollar-value credit doesn’t. I guess I’ll have to spend it on individual songs, and maybe buy some albums song-by-song rather than all at once.

NYC stuff

Interesting stuff in NYC over the next few weeks:

I’ll have to see if I can free up some time, and maybe talk a friend into checking at least *some* of this stuff out. I’m not getting out of the apartment enough lately!

ACM

A few months back, I blogged about ACM’s deal with Safari and Books 24×7, where ACM members can access a subset of these online libraries. At the time, the book selection on both sites seemed to be a bit out of date. Well, they’ve updated the selection on both sites today, and there’s definitely more useful stuff up there now. They’ve (finally) got some ASP.NET 2.0 stuff, including the “ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference” book by Dino Esposito, which is pretty useful. They even have some stuff on WCF and WPF.

The printing capabilities on Safari have gotten a bit more useful, too. I don’t remember exactly how it used to work, but it’s definitely easier to print a big chunk of text than it used to be.

I’m not sure that much has changed on the Books 24×7 site, though. I think there’s more .Net 2.0 stuff than there used to be, but I did a search on “Vista” and found nothing at all, initially. That’s not good. (I later found two Vista books that inexplicably did not show up when I searched for “vista”.) The Safari site has about four Vista books, which is OK, but not great.

asp.net performance

We’ve been having some trouble with our main ASP.NET application in work recently. (It’s our intranet, basically.) It’s been growing a lot lately, with more and more functionality being added to it, and more and more users accessing it. It’s running on a Windows 2000 server under ASP.NET 1.1. I have a new server set up that I’m planning on moving it to — it’s running Windows Server 2003, and I was planning on upgrading the app to ASP.NET 2.0 before moving it over. Given the performance problems, though, and my general lack of spare time, I’m thinking about moving it over as is, just to see if that helps, then maybe upgrading it to 2.0 later, when I have some time.

I know that there’s probably a lot I could do to tweak the performance on this application. We’ve done very little in the way of performance-tuning on our ASP.NET stuff. I discovered a book from Microsoft yesterday, Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability, which I think should be some help in guiding us through some tuning and optimization. The book is available as a PDF download, and it’s about 1100 pages. I read through a couple of chapters tonight, and it’s definitely got some useful advice on ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and SQL Server tuning. There’s plenty more in there too, but that’s all I’ve had time to read so far. I’m finding it useful enough that I went over to Amazon and ordered a used copy of the dead tree version. Highly recommended, if you need to do some .Net tuning, and you’re not sure where to start.

KeePass

I finally finished entering all my passwords into KeePass. I previously blogged about this here and here. So it looks like it took me a little over a month to get this done.

I see that the author of KeePass is working on a 2.0 version, rewriting it in .NET/C#. That’s pretty interesting; I’m curious to see if anyone will create a usable Mac version (running under Mono). Some of the features he’s including in 2.0 sound good too.

Now, I just need to come up with a viable way of keeping the database in sync between my PC and Mac. I may try doing it with FolderShare. I’m using that on my work PC and home PC right now, to keep some files in sync between the two, but not on my Mac. There may also be a way to keep the file in sync with .Mac; the challenge on that would be automating it on the Windows side, I think.