The Cranking Widgets Blog

Why I Never Turn Off My Cell Phone

One of the major tenets of this whole personal productivity dance is the elimination of distraction. Many productivity-related sites and blogs (including this one) espouse everything from the closing of email clients and instant messenger applications to the wearing of headphones as possible ways to reduce “background noise” while working. Another one that [...]

8 Things You Should’ve Memorized a Long Time Ago

Let’s be honest – part of the reason most of us drank this GTD Kool-aid in the first place was that we were tired of forgetting things. Meetings, lunches, dentist appointments – all the crap that we were too busy (and, frankly, ill-equipped) to recall exactly when we needed to do so. So, [...]

A Roadmap to Spectacular GTD Failure

It’s rather funny to me that I write all this stuff about productivity, GTD and the like – the truth is, I’m probably one of the poorest practitioners of this stuff that there is. My system is constantly a mess, I’m always trying new little tricks and whatnot to get things working better (which [...]

How to Make Your Outgoing Voicemail Message Not Suck

I have a handful of friends who, despite numerous pleas and death threats, refuse to carry their cell phone with them. They’re perfectly willing to leave it in the car while out somewhere, or leave it in their bedroom while watching television in the living room. Personally, these are stack-blowing, what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you-types of behavior, [...]

How I Almost Sent my iPod to Nigeria

Having been a computer guy for many years, I’ve had surprisingly little interaction with eBay. I’ve just never had much use for it, as I don’t generally sell things and prefer to buy things new. A seasoned eBay user is, I would imagine, accustomed to all the regular scams and such that are [...]

Back Online After the Digg Assault

Just a quick one – the previous post (The Definitive Guide to Covering Your Ass) hit the digg homepage 2 days ago, which promptly brought this little blog to it’s knees. After several go-rounds with my webhost’s support staff, things seem to be back to normal.
Anyway, apologies for those who tried to get here [...]

The Definitive Guide to Covering Your Ass

Doing the kind of work I do, I’m often asked questions like “Do you know if the changes to suchandsuch.com were pushed to the live site?” or “Did Timmy get those edits done?”. Hell, even in my own house: “Did [mother-in-law] give [son] a bath?”. Questions to which, most of the time, I [...]

Why Digg and Reddit are Doomed (and Metafilter Isn’t)

I’d hardly call myself an internet journeyman or anything, but I’ve been around “the cloud” for several years now. In that time, I’ve learned a few things about people, specifically how they act on said web. Frankly, the Internet has a way of unraveling some of the best and brightest (as well as [...]

6 Simple Ways to be a Nicer Person

I consider myself to be pretty easy-going most of the time. I tend to get along well with people and I find it pretty easy to talk to most folks that I come in contact with.
As to why I’m a nice guy, that you can attribute to my parents. My father was a [...]

So I Got a New Tattoo…

Nothing productivity-related here, kids. But I got a new tattoo last night (first one in about 10 months or so):

Nora, for those of you who don’t know, is my little girl (almost 4 months old already – sheesh).
And if you want to see a nearly-exhaustive gallery of my tattoos, you can do [...]