Announcing Shorty

Thu 24 Aug 200603:08 AM

Stick a Database in It, It’s Done

Wed 23 Aug 200601:11 AM

For months now, I’ve been using the superb Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage my to do lists. I like it a lot. It’s a beautiful hack of the excellent-in-its-own-right OmniOutliner Professional that uses ingenuity and a healthy dose of AppleScript to turn that program into a fairly robust expression of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” philosophy of personal time management.

Yet it’s still a hack. Ethan J. A. Schoonover, the author of what᾿s commonly abbreviated as “kGTD,” has done a tremendous job of turning OmniOutliner into a malleable repository for categorizing and manipulating reminders and to do items. As good as it is though, I’m rarely able to forget its limitations when I’m using it; the fact that OmniOutliner Pro wasn’t conceived from the ground up to handle this kind of data and the way users interact with it is often too easy to see.

Stick a Database in It, It’s Done

Wed 23 Aug 200601:11 AM

Meetings in Progress, Lots of Them

Mon 21 Aug 200611:33 PM

One topic that I covered in my speaking appearance at An Event Apart NYC last month — and also in the interview I did for Signal v. Noise in which I compared workplace notes with Google᾿s Jeffrey Veen — was my meetings calendar. I attend a lot of meetings at The New York Times: standing meetings, impromptu meetings, managers’ meetings, work meetings, development meetings… lots of them. For better or worse, the company culture is one that breeds a surfeit of meetings.

A lot of people would think this is bad. The prevailing wisdom in business talk today is that meetings are uniformly counter-productive, maybe even destructive. I’m not sure that I would argue with that; I can’t deny that, with a schedule like mine, I occasionally sit in on some meetings that just aren᾿t all that necessary. But neither can I say that I agree that meetings are a wholly bad thing.

Install Ubuntu Like You Mean It

Thu 17 Aug 200609:10 PM

This is going to be a very brief overview of what I learned about installing Ubuntu on my Macintosh. Remember that my proficiency with all things Linux is very low on the list of impressive bodies of knowledge; I learned all of this from scrounging through Google searches, forums and Ubuntu’s own well-meaning but scattered documentation.

What Do Sports Center, The White House and Saturday Night Live All Have in Common?

Wed 16 Aug 200611:47 PM

Ubuntu for Dummies

Wed 16 Aug 200612:09 AM

Having had my curiosity piqued by recent, high profile defections from Mac OS X to the Ubuntu Linux distribution, I decided to see if I could get it running on my old Titanium PowerBook G4. Ubuntu bills itself as “Linux for human beings,” designed in a “it just works” fashion that brings the open source operating system as close as it’s ever come to being as simple to set up as, well, Mac OS X — the operative word being “close.”

To be sure, I know almost nothing about Linux, nothing about the functional distinctions between distros and desktops, nothing about sudo or the command line or how to install packages. That said, I’m reasonably savvy when it comes to technology. I have no trouble getting around the thornier corners of Mac OS X and administering it short of entering commands into the Terminal, and I can generally acquire most new technical concepts fairly easily.

AIGA Wants YOU

Mon 14 Aug 200607:52 PM

Things are moving quickly for me since joining the board of directors for AIGA New York. I’ve been hard at work putting together some events that I hope will spark a bit of interest from designers who, until now, might not have thought of AIGA as being the sort of organization that pays a lot of attention to their particular needs. This was the number one concern I heard when I first informally polled readers about the organization a few months ago, and I’m doing my best to fix the situation. The first of these events will take place in October and it’s going to be small yet huge; it’s too early to talk about it in any detail now, so stay tuned.

Pick Your Pleasure in Panels

Thu 10 Aug 200609:57 PM

Hugh Forrest and his tireless team over at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival are soliciting community feedback on programming for their next annual conference (09-13 March 2007, for early planners out there). There are one-hundred and seventy-three panel proposals in twenty-three categories up for consideration, and tons of them look fantastic. The challenge is to pick just ten of the proposals that appeal to you most, and submit them to the main pool — all of this is done through their Web-based Panel Proposal Picker .

Of course, I hope that four of your top choices happen to be the ones that I proposed. For quick reference, here’s a quick rundown of those ideas.