From the Orient

Sunflower 1, originally uploaded by sarabian.

I’ve been playing with the Sets feature from Flickr. This is my “Flowers and Butterflies”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/49503190365@N01/sets/13452/ set.

I’m rather impressed by the “latest version of Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. I’ve always been impressed by Firefox, but the Preview Release has a real polished, this is ready for the big time, feel about it.

Apart from fixing “my little bloglines/tabbrowser issue”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2004/09/08/extensions the latest release has small but important enhancements such as a better default theme; the same theme as before but just better. I’m no UI expert but there are small changes on the spacing and icons that improve it.

The Improved Find is excellent, and Live Bookmarks would be very useful if I still used bookmarks. Someone not using a feed reader, and used to favourites and bookmarks would find this very useful indeed. Simon Willison points out that “a killer app for Live bookmarks”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/09/14/liveBookmarks would be where your “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us feed as a live bookmark “will give you access to your most recently added items within the browser UI”

What I think would be the killer-app would be when you can drag a link into that bookmark folder (as you can with normal bookmarks) and that is automatically added to you linklog. Automatic, synchronized, live linklogging from your browser.

I’m not the only one wondering why Gettting Things Done has become popular in weblog circles again.

Seen as I’ve been “using it for over a year and a half”:http://www.dellah.com/orient/2003/01/01/resolute I thought I’d just comment that whilst it hasn’t changed my life in the horrible American chat-show style way, it has made me more organised and productive. I’m certainly not a black belt and my wife mocks me sometimes when I reach for my Palm. However, it is only a gentle mocking because she knows if I put it into my system, it will get done.

I won’t write about my system, because “I think everyone who GTD’s sucessfully has their own system”:http://merlin.blogs.com/43folders/2004/09/intermission_or.html (that is the beauty of the book; it is a framework rather than an application), but I will just tell one small success story.

I’ve lived in my current house for 6 years, and one a few occasions have idly wondered if the light switch in the kitchen was in anyway related to the bulbless halogen light in the back garden. However, at no point had I ever done anything about it. When you are in a DIY story are you going to remember that idle thought about the light switch?

With GTD in place, I had that idle thought again, and the thought entered my system as a Someday/Maybe project. In a weekly review a few weeks ago, I saw the project and decided that it would be useful to have a light in the back garden as the nights are getting longer (today is the “autumn equinox”:http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/AutumnalEquinox.html and can anyone in the UK not whisper Equinox fast and urgently as in the theme of the “eponymous TV program”:
http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/tv-programs/equinox/?)

Next time I was in the garden, I got my ladder and had a look at the light. It looked like it simply needed a new bulb, so I added “buy new bulb” to my @out/errands list. Later in the week, I had to go to Homebase to get algae killer (the decking has got very slippery) and got a new bulb at the same time. Later that same day, the bulb was installed, and I finally worked out, after 6 years, that the light switch that did nothing really did light up the garden. For 6 years, I’d been going into the garden in the dark.

Its small, but it’s a good example of the power of the next action, project list and weekly review. If you do start using GTD, I’ll offer one piece of advice. The Weekly Review is the cornerstone of the system. Without it, the system will fail, you will not keep it up unless you take some time in the week to do the weeding.

My new toy :-

Loaded roughly 60 albums onto it and I’ve only got 31Gb free now.

I wonder if it time for NASA to implement the idea of “Crash only software”:http://www.stanford.edu/~candea/papers/crashonly/crashonly.html into their projects. Consider the Genesis space capsule. If they had designed it to crash into the desert, then they would have been able to recover all the data from it.

Meanwhile, reports of a crash-only version of Microsoft Windows have been denied.

“Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com and the “Tabbrowser Extension for Firefox”:http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions.html.en don’t like each other very much. You can click on folders in Bloglines and get the posts, but not on individual feeds. Whilst annoying, this hasn’t been too much of an issue until after I’d been on holiday. My link lists folder had nearly 2000 unread posts and I couldn’t read them all in one sitting.

“IE view”:http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=35&vid=156 and “the great”:http://philringnalda.com/blog/2004/08/getting_back_out_of_ie.php “Firefox View”:http://www.iosart.com/firefox/firefoxview/ to the rescue. From bloglines, I enter Internet Explorer. I can click on individual feeds and pick them off one by one. If a page interests me, I can click Firefox View and it opens as a new tab in the background in Firefox. Kludgey but magic. And isn’t IE annoying to use after being with Firefox?