Geek History

I stumbled across these photos while cleaning out some of the junk that was piling up in our cellar. They were glued (cringe) to a piece of red laser perforated paper. The last photo was particularly poor and showed only part of my first PC clone, a metal-cased Kaypro beast. I had traded in my Atari ST when I transferred to Plymouth State College (now University) after my freshman year. Compared to the 386’s we had in the computer lab it was a slouch and I eventually returned to the Atari ST. Before abandoning the Atari I had a PC extension (it was an actual 8086 chip housed on its own little motherboard and connected via the DMA port) and the Mac emulator. As you can see from these photos I was in the Atari camp in the 8-bit days as well.

Weird Al meets WoW

I was a long time World of Warcraft player starting from the 2nd beta up until about 4 months ago. I quit cold turkey because it was just chewing up too much of my time and scaling back prevented me from playing with guildmates with whom I’d been questing with for nearly a year. Today a friend of mine linked me to this video. The song itself is very fun and the WoW video is excellent work. Check it out.

Update: iTMS has the song if you are so inclined.

Last Day of Caffeine

Today was my last day of any form of caffeine in my morning routine, the completion of a process I started in September. Aside from a few headaches which may or may not have been due to the caffeine reduction the entire process has gone quite smoothly. You too can quit the addiction if you want to. But remember Yoda’s wisdom, “Do or do not. There is no try”.

PBS on iTMS

PBS content on iTMS == Good

$7.99 for a single episode of Nova != Good

I am a supporting member of public television at least in part because of Nova and it is one of my TiVo season passes. Nova is a great show but is it 6 bucks per episode better than other TV content? I’m hoping this is some sort of mistake, but if not it is disappointing.

First Steps into GTD

I’ve known about David Allen’s Getting Things Done for some time now but I hadn’t really looked into it. On tuesday I decided to take action and purchase the abridged audiobook from iTMS. This was partly driven by seeing GTD mentioned around the blogosphere but also because I’d just come off a week of not feeling productive because I was very unfocused. I was making changes all over the codebase of Anzan and I knew this wasn’t a good approach. The GTD audiobook resonated with me and I could see how such a system would work for me. I could also see there would be some challenges in determining things like contexts. Rather than spend too much time worrying about any problems I plunged into the collection phase which really turned out to be more of a mind sweep for me since I don’t deal with paper much. The resultant list of projects/actions is quite large which served to further convince me that I did need to get this stuff out of my head and into a workable GTD system.

I decided to use Kinkless GTD because it seems to be fairly mature given what it is and Omni are working on OmniFocus. I already had a license for OmniOutliner (2 actually because one was included with my MacBook Pro) so I upgraded to Pro and got started populating my Projects and Actions from my mind sweep list. So far Kinkless seems to be working well but I can definitely see that creating the appropriate set of contexts will take some time. To that end I’m considering using Fast User Switching to simulate a work environment vs. a home environment for my computer use. If anyone has tried this please leave a comment with your experience.