unsure.org

10 Geeky Laws That Should Exist, But Don’t | GeekDad | Wired.com

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:49:04 -0800

10 Geeky Laws That Should Exist, But Don’t | GeekDad | Wired.com:

Magnificent list of should be laws. in particular I like: 2. Lucas’s Law: There is no movie so beloved that a “special edition,” prequel or sequel cannot trample and forever stain its memory. 9….

Earlier this year, Michael Pollan posted a request for...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:04:15 -0800

Earlier this year, Michael Pollan posted a request for reader’s rules about eating on Well, Tara Parker Pope’s health blog. Within days, more that 2,500 responses were received. Here are 20 of Pollan’s favorites.

List of animals with fraudulent diplomas

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:02:03 -0800

List of animals with fraudulent diplomas:

From the article:

In several cases, pet animals (most often cats) have successfully been “enrolled” in suspected diploma mills in order to investigate or demonstrate the fraudulent nature of the degrees issued by those institutions. Several such cases have received extensive media attention, and at least one cat’s degree helped lead to a successful fraud prosecution against the institution that issued the degree.

My question is why cats?

VMware ESX and ESXi Scripts & Resources

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:40:00 -0800

VMware ESX and ESXi Scripts & Resources:

I can’t even deal with how intense this guy is. vGhetto scripts to reimplement a lot of vSphere functionality. Of particular interest is ghettoVCBg2.sh but there is a lot of impressive stuff in here…

Anxiety - Lightweight To-do Management

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:36:37 -0800

Anxiety - Lightweight To-do Management:

Nice todo manager, good options for how to bug you and how to get out of the way. Other features include integration with OS X calendar / mail backends and being free as in beer. I’ll see how long it…

The power of @clarkbw as seen by google analytics. I wrote up a...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:06:00 -0800

The power of @clarkbw as seen by google analytics. I wrote up a quick post on running raindrop on ubuntu and this is what happened, I went from zero readers, to several hundred, down to about 20.

Rad.

It’s a busy day on the internet. (via FFFFOUND)

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:50:19 -0800

It’s a busy day on the internet. (via FFFFOUND)

“Bring me my monocle, I want to look rich.” —...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:05:57 -0800

“Bring me my monocle, I want to look rich.” — Space Ghost.

This is a well spent 10 minutes (don’t forget pt. 2) it’s horribly surreal but one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Also this explains one joke … kinda.

I had a great time at the trailblazers game last night. The Rose...

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:06:35 -0800

I had a great time at the trailblazers game last night. The Rose Garden was pretty nice, i’d love to see a concert there.

How an American soldier is made

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:50:24 -0800

How an American soldier is made:

Great story in photos of a soldier from high school, through deployment, to coming home and getting married. via Kottke

Wiki | Docs / NetApp Filer, NFSv4, and Linux

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:05:43 -0800

Wiki | Docs / NetApp Filer, NFSv4, and Linux:

Decent howto on doing stuff with a netapp machine. Saved my ass today in a complicated VMware / Tivoli / Multi- network thing. Thanks to buzzco for that.

Photo

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:18:34 -0800

marco: World of Goo’s pay-what-you-want report has some great...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:13:30 -0800

marco:

World of Goo’s pay-what-you-want report has some great statistics about the average prices people paid. This one was surprising: I expected Windows users to be the cheapest, but I didn’t expect Linux users to be the most generous.

Anyway, if you haven’t played this ridiculously good game yet, go download the demo. If you like it, buy the full version ($20, direct download, DRM-free).

World of Goo is one of the best new games I’ve played this decade. Really. It’s that good.

Setting up raindrop on Ubuntu Jaunty

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:07:48 -0700

Just a quick howto for getting raindrop running on Ubuntu. For added points this server is ‘in the cloud’.

Couch DB

apt-get install automake autoconf libtool help2man subversion
apt-get install build-essential erlang libicu-dev libmozjs-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/branches/0.10.x/

cd trunk
./bootstrap
./configure
make
sudo make install
adduser —system —home /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb —no-create-home —shell /bin/bash —group —gecos “CouchDB Administrator” couchdb

chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/etc/couchdb
chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
chown -R couchdb:couchdb /usr/local/var/run/couchdb

chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/etc/couchdb
chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/var/lib/couchdb
chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/var/log/couchdb
chmod -R 0770 /usr/local/var/run/couchdb

sudo -i -u couchdb couchdb -b

Raindrop Pre-reqs

sudo apt-get install python-twisted python-dev python-setuptools

wget http://launchpad.net/paisley/0.1/0.1/+download/paisley-0.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf paisley-0.1.tar.gz
cd paisley-0.1
sudo python setup.py install

wget http://python-twitter.googlecode.com/files/python-twitter-0.6.tar.gz
tar -zxvf python-twitter-0.6.tar.gz
cd python-twitter-0.6
sudo python setup.py install

Get Skype4py from http://sourceforge.net/projects/skype4py/
tar -zxvf Skype4Py-1.0.32.0.tar.gz
cd Skype4Py-1.0.32.0
sudo python setup.py install

sudo apt-get install python-feedparser

The Rest

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Raindrop/Install

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-10-4)

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:06:33 -0700

My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-10-4)

Video

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:59:44 -0700

It’s very strange not having the lyrics to this song cut...

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:02:34 -0700

It’s very strange not having the lyrics to this song cut through your head. Feels like it’s missing a little something though.

eceu:

Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes) covers NMH’s “Two-Headed Boy”.

(Seattle, 7/11/09)

Ten things we don't understand about humans

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:50:41 -0700

Ten things we don't understand about humans:

#4 Teenagers: Even our closest relatives, the great apes, move smoothly from their juvenile to adult life phases — so why do humans spend an agonising decade skulking around in hoodies?

Inbox Zero: My Experiences

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:37:19 -0700

Inbox Zero

Inbox Zero is a concept that boils down nicely, email is taking up too much time. Most of us have a workload that exceeds our resources, you won’t be able to fix that problem but you can choose what takes up your time. My standard operating procedure for email was to check it when I logged into work, deal with some of the easy stuff, put most of it off, and eventually ignore most of it. For quite a while now I’ve been following most of the Inbox Zero tenets, for personal email it has never been too bad. Work email is another beast though and developing a process to deal with it has helped my mental sanity and productivity quite a bit. Also I get to brag on twitter about having nothing sitting in my inbox.

So first a few links to start out:

The index of Inbox Zero at 43 Folders, they have quite a few articles about the concept and how to implement it. In particular I like the Philosophy and Better Practices articles.

Less Email

Unsubscribe to Mail

Look at the bulk email you are receiving, if you don’t read it consistently, unsubscribe. I know you’re thinking ‘but it may be important’. Stop. If you don’t read it, unsubscribe. Now.

Look for alternate means of consumption

If you do read it, or really need to be aware of the content take a moment to evaluate. Does it need to come through your inbox? Can you consume through RSS or another mechanism like google groups?

Digests

Can you move any subscriptions from ‘per message’ to daily or weekly digests? If so it’s easier to set aside time to work through the emails and keep current on a topic. It also just takes up less space. I will say that I hate most digest formats though.

Filter

Things you do need to be aware of or mailing lists you do read consistently can be dealt with without hitting your inbox. This is done through mail rules that will bypass your inbox and put your mail somewhere you can batch process it as appropriate. The goal is to kill constant interruptions and make your inbox a place to work and communicate from, not a time sink.

Mail from People

When you scroll through your inbox, sort by sender, and look for people who are just slamming you with email.

FYI, WFH, WTFBBQ emails

If the sender is informing you of status that doesn’t affect your day to day operations ask them not to copy you on the message. If this is not possible or they are unwilling then it is time to set up filters for likely subject or body lines and squirrel them away in a folder that won’t hit your eyes unless you want them to.

Project or Account info

If you keep getting messages from the same project manager or group of people working on the same topic check and see if you really need to be getting all these notes. This is not to advocate checking out of projects you are involved in, but to evaluate the appropriateness of email as a project management tool. Sometimes email is the correct mechanism but often there is another appropriate repository for this type of communication and you should utilize it.

If this isn’t an option asking (nicely) to digest email communications to once or twice a day longer emails may be effective.

SPAM

Good Luck?

Keep less Mail

Archive or Delete

If you don’t need it get rid of it. If you may need it archive it. Don’t let it sit around keeping up space and mindshare. Again, especially with work mail I find that archiving is the way to go, my disk space is cheap and I’m happy to have a large mail file if I have things I need. That being said I do my best to move information OUT of my inbox. This means placing shared content on wikis, generally interesting information onto blogs, and project specific information in project management tools and wikis.

Schedule Email Time

For me email is a 3 times a day activity, when I start my workday, sometime shortly before my lunch break and before I head out for the day. If you need to schedule time for it on your calendar, for me it’s an informal approach. Otherwise I try not to look at my email. This means, that when I do look at my inbox a few rules apply.

First Rule

If you have time to look at it you must have time to answer it. If it takes less than 5 minutes to respond, just do it then. It may suck but waiting won’t make it suck less. If it’s a task that takes longer than 5 minutes I set a todo WITH A DUE DATE. Usually end of day but occasionally longer. You don’t need a fancy ‘Getting things done’ app to take care of it, notepad can be enough, whatever it takes to make yourself honest. If a reply is expected let them know you are working on it, where it sits in your queue and when they can expect to see the result. This doesn’t go over well in the beginning but if you consistently deliver on projected results you’ll build credibility and people will respect your replies (usually).

Second Rule

Your inbox is not your information repository. Find somewhere else for your information to live. This may be Evernote, a blog, a wiki, a folder on your filesystem, a personal Tiddywiki or some other tool. Make sure it is searchable and make sure it’s backed up. It’s important to ensure you are not an information gate keeper, so publish this stuff. Make sure it’s consumable by others, when appropriate, and always consumable by you.

Feedback loop

Finally, the more email you send the more often you’ll get emailed, it’s pretty basic. Don’t send out WTFBBQ messages yourself, don’t forward clever things, and try to send out less emails and make the ones you send more focused on content.

Bookmarks for 7/30/09

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:00:44 -0700

How IBM and Apple are kicking Google’s and Microsoft’s Butt - The gist is that Apple and IBM have a clear focus on specfic industries and do a better job than either Google or Microsoft at focusing their whole company and a defined goal. This is very true for Apple (the article makes the point that Apple was able to expand to phones while keeping dominance in the mp3 player segment). I think it’s true for IBM in so far that it has more direction and focus than, say google, but in general it could use more. I think the real story here is not so much the focus, but instead it’s the movement away from commodity products and focusing on the premium segments while staying somewhat competitive in the commodity markets.

How the Web and the Weblog have changed writing - Phillip Greenspun is one of my favorite website authors hands down, articles like this one are a great example why. The thesis is the web provides an avenue for publication that allows you to write in very short form or medium length (bigger than a magazine, shorter than a book) with out watering down the content. The filler example kicks ass.

In the 1980s Steve Ward, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, described a sure-fire dieting scheme. “All that you need for my diet is graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil,” Steve would explain. “The horizontal axis is time, one line per day. The vertical axis is weight in lbs. You plot your current weight on the left side of the paper. You plot your desired weight on a desired date towards the right side, making sure that you’ve left the correct number of lines in between (one per day). You draw a line from the current weight/date to the desired weight/date. Every morning you weigh yourself and plot the result. If the point is below the line, you eat whatever you want all day. If the point is above the line, you eat nothing but broccoli or some other low-calorie food.”

It’s hard to like Android - This is a run down of the standard issues with Linux vs. Windows. On the upside it’s very customizable, on the downside it needs to be customized. You can fix the problems, but do you want to?

iPhone Application Design Patterns - I hadn’t thought before what kinds of design patterns were being used on the iPhone, I’m curious how this translates to Android and WebOS platforms as well. I’d like to dig deeper into this space.