In my eternal pursuit of the “mind like water”, I’ve noticed certain aspects of my productive life are, how shall I say, somewhat lacking. As much as I like to think I have a handle on my responsibilities and obligations, sometimes things fall through the cracks (and we all know what a no-no that is). So, having come to terms with my fallibility, I’ve made an executive decision…

I’ve gone ahead and gotten myself a secretary.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Sir! Aren’t you a lowly programmer with a budding family and a tight budget? How can you afford such an expense?!”. Well, yes, that’s true. I’m not exactly rolling in it right now, certainly, but it doesn’t matter because my new secretary costs me nothing. In fact, she’s not even a real person (just a technicality, really). Folks, meet Sandy…

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How many times have you received an email with a subject line that said something like “Question” or “FYI”? Or, worse yet, had no subject at all? For all the millions of email messages that traverse the Internet every day, the ability to effectively formulate an indicative subject message seems to be fairly unimportant to [...]

Weather for Fullerton, CA This is a Sponsored Post Living in Southern California, I’m constantly amazed at how consistently beautiful the weather is here. Not a day goes by when I don’t hear about a blizzard on the east coast or the unholy amount of rain in the Pacific Northwest. Now, I can make all [...]

After spending several months flirting with all manner of web applications, notebooks and the like, I think I’ve finally settled on my GTD implementation of choce. Backpack, a product by the venerable 37 Signals (makers of Basecamp), is simply fantastic. When considering my previous idea about the two types of web-based GTD systems, Backpack is [...]

For those who aren’t readers of the venerable Lifehacker (and if this includes you – for shame ) – Adam wrote a little windows application awhile back called Texter that allows you to create hotstrings that expand to longer pieces of text. For example, when I type ‘cwb’ and hit Tab, it replaces ‘cwb’ with [...]

I have a confession to make. I get way too enamored with new and fancy ways of getting my crap in order. Which means I’m regularly transitioning between GTD implementations (and this frustrates me to no end, I assure you). I’m not kidding – when a new GTD app shows up on my radar, I’m [...]

Of all the possible uses for a computer, email is probably the most pervasive (perhaps second only to regular web browsing). From Bill Gates to your Aunt Betsy, everybody’s got an email account these days, possibly multiple accounts. It takes very little effort or know-how to get an email address, and there are literally hundreds [...]

Since posting WinStikker awhile back, I’ve had a few requests for the source code so people could monkey with it themselves. Well, ask and you shall receive. This probably won’t interest most of you, but to all the C# hackers and stikkit enthusiasts out there, here it is. I’ve created a subversion repository and imported [...]

Long gone are the days of feebly visiting every website on your daily reading list, checking for new content. These days, all the kids seem to have their favorite RSS reader dialed in with all of their favorite blogs and newsfeeds, eating it up like it’s Thanksgiving dinner. But, dear friends, there’s more to effective [...]

(Update: WinStikker is now Open Source!) Any more of this stuff and people are going to start to wonder if I work for Values of n (makers of Stikkit – and no, I don’t work for them – yet . After writing the python script described (badly) in the previous post, I was somewhat inspired [...]