Paparazzikitty

This is Peanut (aka Nutty).



She loves to explore the neighborhood and I've often wondered where the heck she goes. My wife would often say, "We need a kitty cam so she can take pictures!" So one day I Googled "kitty cam" and, after being frightened by this site, I stumbled upon a German site called Mr. Lee about a German cat whose owner came up with a kit to modify a keychain digital camera so it takes pictures at regular intervals. For $30 I figured it was worth a shot.

The kit requires some soldering and assembly, but was available sooner and cheaper than a finished camera. Also, the geek in me just couldn't resist tearing apart a camera and doing some surface-mount soldering to get this to work. It was a bit harder than I expected, but after a couple of hours I had it working. It hangs off the cat's collar and while it's not very heavy, I can't imagine it's something a cat would want to walk around with all day. I figured we'd give Nutty a few hours off "break-in" time with it before sending her out on her first big adventure.

Look out Annie Leibovitz!

The wife's lap. Obviously there should be a kitty there instead of a computer.

Glamour shot of me eating Fritos. Sorry ladies, I'm taken.

Just another Perry Stone wannabe

I like pop culture.

I have an rss feed to Yahoo!'s entertainment news on my home page.

I pay attention to plenty of things that just don't matter.

But between Dom Imus and Anna Nicole Smith I'm about to lose my fucking mind. How is this news? Really, how? Can you tell me that there aren't more important things for Americans to be thinking about?

I found a couple of great articles from Michelle Malkin on this topic. In particular, 10 things more newsworthy than Don Imus. I don't really know much about her, somebody tagged her on del.icio.us as "politics blog conservative Blogs news opinion daily christian independent writer." Not exactly someone who is likely to share my general views.

Here's the thing though, she really gets it on this issue. Is it terrible that Don Imus said those things? Absolutely, but let's remember that Don Imus has been a prick for 30 years. If you had asked me last week who I thought was the most likely radio personality to make such comments, I would have answered, "Don Imus" without thinking about it for more than 2 seconds. I know whereof I speak having been a regular listener of his show for about 3 years when I was in my early 20's. Then one day I realized that he wasn't saying anything new. He was being the same asshole every day and just changing his target based on current events.

The whole Anna Nicole Smith thing is similar. I just can't fathom how this can be considered important enough to rank in Reuters "Top Stories." Sure it's sad and she was a tragic, mixed up person. But the only reason this is "news" is because she was a celebrity. How many tragic souls die every day feeling hopeless and unloved and either overdose or over-medicate themselves to death? I'm guessing the number is closer to 100 or 1000 than it is to 1. If we have to make a spectacle of her tragedy can we at least raise awareness of bipolar disorder or drug abuse or something?

It's times like this that I understand how this country managed to elect Dubya twice.

Getting Things Done - Part 2: Projects, Contexts and Actions

Now that my Inbox is empty, I'm moving on to setting up my Projects, Contexts and Actions. First a quick note on tools:

• Instead of using Kinkless for my base GTD app I'm starting with iGTD. So far it seems pretty good. There's nice iCal integration for Tasks and a Quicksilver plugin to add Tasks on the fly. You can't add a project dynamically this way, but otherwise it's a really useful little app.


• iGTD uses the syntax "Task Title [Project]" to organize Tasks. When Groupcal sees this it stores the Task with the [Project] in the actual title with every sync. Eventually you get "Task Title [Project] [Project] [Project] [Project] [Project] ..." I'll be looking for a fix to this as syncing to Exchange is important to me for data retention and mobile use (Blackberry).


• I have abandoned the Address Book plugin for Thunderbird. The 3.0a codebase was too unstable for me. Not a really big deal and the truly necessary plugin, Quickfile, still works in 2.0pre builds.

I have decided to use 2 simple contexts to start: @Home and @Work. My Project list is only 12 items long at the moment but I'm sure I'll be adding more as I go. iGTD lacks a few things that I think I'll have to implement via iCal or another app that uses the iCal database:

• Daily action list


• Reminders for current and "waiting on" actions

Overall I'm pretty impressed with iGTD though. I like the usage of the standard iCal fields for notes and links. I have embedded wiki and helpdesk ticket links on several tasks so I can easily refer to the supporting docs and requirements. I'm using the notes field as a place to store the path to any supporting files for a given task. I don't think I'd want to attach a file directly even if it was possible as it would probably not be encrypted.

Getting Things Done - Part 1: The email purge

I know, no clever title this time. Well, this is a reasonably serious post and I'm hoping to make this a continuing series.

I'm several days into an implementation of David Allen's Getting Things Done(GTD). Various things in my professional and personal life have come together to illustrate that:

• I have more commitments than my brain can keep in its "RAM".


• I don't have control over all (or frankly any) of the input vectors that bring me information.


• The stress from this lack of control piles up quickly and limits my ability to adapt to the more tactical issues in both sides of life.


• Having 2948 messages (340 unread) in my Inbox is just wrong.

When someone does something to significantly change their life there is often a triggering event. "I'm quitting smoking because they found a spot on my lung." Or, "My girlfriend dumped me so I'll get in shape." For me there wasn't any one event that kicked this off. Mostly I was just getting fed up with the number of things that I couldn't control in my professional life that were making demands on me and my time. While reading up on the techniques I wanted to use I came to the conclusion that I could derive a lot of benefit from this in my personal life, too.

So, what have I done so far? With the help of many tips from lifehack.org, 43 Folders (specifically the Inbox Zero series) and Hawk Wings I have successfully processed my professional and personal Inboxes to zero messages. lifehack.org and 43 Folders are fairly general sites about productivity and GTD while Hawk Wings in a Mac and Mail.app focused site.

While I attempted to migrate from Thunderbird to Mail.app I have found Mail's IMAP support to be seriously lacking. Therefore my GTD toolkit is as follows:

• Thunderbird - Email
  
• Mac Address Book Plugin - integrates Mac OSX Address Book


• Quickfile - enables keyboard-based folder navigation and message filing


• iCal - Calendar


• Groupcal - iCal to MS Exchange synchronization (not a great app but unfortunately it's the only game in town)


• Kinkless - GTD lists and actions. Just a set of AppleScript hooks to create basic GTD structures in Omni Outliner Pro


• Quicksilver - just the best Mac productivity app ever. If you're a keyboard junkie like I am you have to check this out.
  

I haven't migrated everything into Kinkless just yet. But I have implemented the email triaging techniques recommended in the Inbox Zero series and have become friends with deleting and archiving. Just look at my email client (left).

That was Men Without Hats with their big hit "Urban Sombrero"

There's a radio station around here called Max FM. It's some sort of repackaging of the adult contemporary idea. It's generally about my 7th choice of stations to listen to and I rarely get that far down the list. However, today on the way to work everybody else was playing a commercial.

That's right, 6 major stations in the Bay Area all had a commercial on at the same time during the morning commute. Kinda sucky.

So I made my way through my presets and landed on Max FM. The most interesting thing about this station is that there are no DJs. The only talk you hear on the station is by a voiceover actor who seems to be the voice of "Max." What's funny is that the actor is John O'Hurley, aka Mr. Peterman from Seinfeld.

I kept waiting to hear him ask the audience if it knew what happens to a butter-based frosting after sitting 60 years in a poorly ventilated English basement.

Yes Virginia, There is a Tasmanian Devil

We had a great day today.

We. I'm having a hard time coming up with a blog nickname for the other half of "we." Craig has set the bar too high with "The Scientist." I can't just call her "The Sales Chick." And "J" doesn't work for college-related reasons. I guess for now she'll just have to be, "The Fiancée."

Anyway.

We're in Portland, Oregon on our way to Seattle. For a change, neither of us is going to attend any family-related gatherings this Thanksgiving so we decided to have a little vacation. We took the whole week off and are going to stay at what will hopefully be a really cool spa resort outside of Seattle (more on that later, after we've actually been there). A friend of TF (let's call her N) lives here so we figured it would be nice to visit with her and her husband and get a local to show us around town.

After brunch at Mother's we headed out into "the gorge" to check out a bunch of waterfalls. Unfortunately, between the weather and a landslide or two, we didn't get to see a whole lot:


Next was a trip to the famous Powell's Books. Pretty cool, but overall I was more impressed with the little used bookshop down the street from Mother's. Then we went to check out a very cool, very Portland kinda place. It's called Kennedy School and it's basically a hotel and some restaurants. The cool part is that it used to be an elementary school until 1975.


That's right, the schoolrooms are hotel rooms, the assembly room is a movie theater, and (the best one) the detention hall is a bar. If we hadn't already found a cool little hotel downtown we would have tried to stay there. N said there's a movement around town called Keep Portland Weird. Very appropriate.
We then tried to buy some local wine but I don't think we were in quite the right place. This place was more Quik Stop than Beltramo's. After a quick tour of the local adult bookstores we headed over to N's house.

There we met a couple of real cuties that we wouldn't have minded taking home with us:


Thurgood. Yes, after the judge he resembles.


And Jinx.

Finally, we hit Papa Haydn's for dinner. Fantastic. Tons of food, great wine, and a dessert menu that kicks the ass of any other dessert menu I've ever seen.

All in all, a great day. Of course, if you can't have fun hanging out all day with 2 hot chicks and meeting a couple of cool four-legged friends then you aren't trying very hard. Oh, D you were cool too.

Gripe

Wedding planning, fiancee moving in, combining finances. Not to mention typical work stress, home improvement projects and finishing everything before an upcoming vacation.

Yuck.

The term "biting off more than you can chew," has never seemed more appropriate. Most of what's going on right now is good stuff but it doesn't change the fact that there just aren't enough hours in the day anymore.

Case in point:

Usually when my dad calls with a computer problem I can just stay on the phone until we figure it out. He's pretty good about estimating when I'll probably be driving home from work or at least done working and just goofing off in the office.

But today was different. I was on the way home after running a couple of errands (including the grocery store for something to cook for dinner) and he called with what turned out to be a pretty hairy issue. Surprising to him, but without complaint, I had to cut him off at one point and say:

"I'll have to call you back in a little while. I have to start dinner or nobody in the house will be eating tonight."

It used to be that the only one affected by such an event would be me. The fact that the good woman didn't get home from her Napa work boondoggle until 9pm isn't the point. Really. It's not.

Well, maybe just a little.