s.j.m.

What colours does a tennis court have?

Posted In: , , . By Sancho

This is an interesting application: http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr

Navigate flickr's most interesting photos by colour. It's actually interesting how difficult it can be to choose the colours needed to narrow down the selection to an object or scene that you have in mind. For example, try to find the colours needed to return an image of a tennis court. I spent about five minutes doing that with no success.
Anyway, have fun :)

 
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San Francisco Predux

Posted In: , . By Sancho

Leaving for San Francisco in the morning and it's looking like it will be a packed, fun time... definitely excited. I picked up a Lonely Planet guide, but I'm not sure we'll get more out of it than the planning we've already done.


With the help of friends, and a lot of websites, there's a lot on the schedule and good list of general things to do: the possibility of going dancing every day of the trip, dinner at Zuni Cafe, a house party Saturday night, brunch at Chez Panisse, hiking (likely something like this at Mt. Tamalpais), a bike trip around the city and across the bridge to Sausalito, Alcatraz, an outing to Napa Valley, ....

The short trip will be busy. I'll be taking pictures, and I'll write the story when I get back.

 
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Friend vs follower

Posted In: , . By Sancho

I wrote a while back a little about Facebook and Twitter, and one more difference has come to mind: friend vs. follower. A Facebook friend request comes with much more attached than the decision to follow somebody on Twitter. Friend requests on Facebook must be approved, while Twitter follower additions just happen... somebody becomes your follower. By labeling the basic relationship on Facebook as "friend", it says a lot when a request is rejected/ignored or when a decision is reversed. A friend request is also ignorant as to whether the person making the request wants to receive status updates or not. The "follower" relationship on Twitter is simple and explicit: a person wants to view your Twitter updates, the only content you can create on Twitter. There's no questioning if your barrage of updates are annoying your friends. The decision to enter a follower relationship is simply reversed without any side effects and the decision to not become somebody's follower only says something about the worth of their updates to you, not about your friendship or any other aspect of your relationship.


Facebook is trying to be too much, failing at the simple things. Twitter is status updates --- status updates done right.

 
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"iPhone"

Posted In: . By Sancho



My iPhone's screen died yesterday. I was in the middle of helping host a visit day for prospective graduate students, so this was a pretty bad time to become unreachable.

I really only needed to be able to dial and receive calls and receiving calls is easy (have the location of the answer button memorized). Dialing is a bit trickier, but I found a solution using tape and a sharpie. I have to first unlock the phone (the slider position for that is in my muscle memory), then, get to the keypad screen (which I've drawn on top of clear tape on top of my screen) by double-tapping the main button. From there, it's clear sailing.

I definitely can't text, or see missed calls, but I've got a phone again. Now I'm just waiting to get an appointment with the Apple Store to see about a bit better of a solution.

In the mean time, you can still call me.

 
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Processing

Posted In: , , . By Sancho

I finished the collection phase this morning. This included items from my Google notebooks, notes on my phone, and previous to-do lists. I also finished all of the mental gathering (all of the tasks floating around in my head). Together, these previous lists, and the mental gathering steps accounted for 120 different actions that I had written down into the software I've decided to use for this system (discussed later in this post). At school, there was one more physical pile, a majority of which was old papers I'd previously read and taken notes on.


I'm now onto processing these items. One problem is, I didn't actually block off a bunch of time for this, so new items keep arriving while I'm still trying to set up the system meant to handle them all.

I'm actually sort of simultaneously processing and organizing: deciding what to do about each item in the in pile, and if it requires some sort of organizational step to handle it, I do that immediately (trash it, set up a new folder, store it as reference material, add it onto my list of "things to do someday", or defer it to a later date, for example). Here's a good diagram of what's going on.

I discovered an awesome tool for all of this. It's called Things by CulturedCode (sorry, Mac users only). I'd already been using the mobile application on my phone, but in a very limited way. It's a complete organizational tool is a lot of what Allen discusses in the book. There's an inbox (where I initially dumped a lot of the material from the mental gathering step) to which you can quickly add items on the go for later processing. You can place actions into specific projects that you've defined. You can associate actions with specific contexts using tags (school, work, phone, waitingfor). You can defer an item in your inbox and place a reminder at a later date to consider it again. You can defer an item to a "someday" list.

Earlier today, I was asked what I liked most about the system so far. Until then, I'd barely finished the collecting phase, and what was most satisfying about the collecting phase was throwing out a lot of junk. Now, after only just starting to process and organize, I'd say the most satisfying aspect of the system is as advertised: peace of mind in knowing that nothing I need to do is untracked by the system. If I've deferred an item for consideration on a later date, I'll be reminded. If I've put something in the "someday" list, it will come up during the weekly review (one of the later phases). If I have a block of free time between items on my calendar, I can quickly scan the list of next actions to see if there's something that I can do in the context that I happen to be in.

The only hole I've found in the system is the lack of a mechanism for organizing the stack of research articles that I've read. I'll talk more about that and fill in a lot of the details left out today in the next post: organizing.

 
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