James Williams dot Me

I wanted to play around with the Windows 7 Beta that’s been floating around the tubes. Unfortunately, I was running too low on free disk space to really make room for another big virtual machine. I needed to clean up.

GrandPerspective to the rescue! Using this little utility, I was able to find my biggest space wasters and trash them (or, possibly, save them to my terabyte NAS).

For funsies, I made a snapshot (post cleanup and Win7 install) of my home directory. I thought I’d share it. (If you’re still not sure how the Web works, click the image for a bigger, clearer picture)

Evernote, the multi-platform “remember everything” application has taken the world (well, some section of it, anyway) by storm. With it, I can jot a note down at work and have it magically appear when I get home. Between Evernote and Dropbox, cloud computing has never been better.

Still, Evernote is far from perfect. Indeed, it’s so imperfect that most of the time I spend using it is actually spent trying to find work-arounds for its imperfections. (Most of this comes from its revenue model. They want to make a living and I can understand that; but I want to use good software. And I’m not entirely willing to sacrifice that for someone else’s rent.) Honestly, I”m starting to get rather fed up with it and seriously contemplating the notion of just writing my own. I’ll probably not do this, of course. It would be a lot of work and I’m very, very lazy. Still, I’ve been giving the matter a great deal of thought; so for giggles I’ve decided to list out what I would have in my app.

The starting point for my ideas isn’t a note-taking app at all. It’s FriendFeed. FriendFeed is currently the high-water mark for the anti-not-invented-hear syndrome. “Why should we write a bookmark manager? Delicious does that pretty well already. Let’s just import those bookmarks.” and “Why should we host videos? YouTube has that market all sewn up! Let’s just import those videos.” and “Behold the power of XML!”.

So why, I wonder, can’t my note-taking app suck in my Delicious boookmarks? Instead, I have to double-bookmark the links I want to store in my note-taking system: once on Delicious and once on Evernote. That’s crazy.

So, picture a private FriendFeed. At the top and bottom of every page is a big, friendly text-box that accepts Markdown. Throughout the day, various actions I take at random places on the Internet make their way into this private feed, each with an accompanying text-box for scribbling notes.

It can be even better, though. For the well-known services like Delicious, it can be smart. It can have an option, “Only import bookmarks tagged with: foo”. So when I want to actually note a bookmark, I can add that extra tag to it. When I just want to bookmark something without adding it to my notes page, I don’t stick that tag on it. Simple. (Things are obviously less nice for the RSS importing. I’m not sure how to solve that.) Each user can have multiple pages (a “notebook” in Evernote, a “page” in Backpack, etc.) with its own feeds and import rules.

And at the top of every page (or in the sidebar or something; somewhere noticeable): search. Really good search. If I can’t figure out how to do really good search, I’ll hand it off to Google site search or something. Google has pretty much proven to me that you can have all the organization and folders and pages and tags that you want, but search is king. All of that stuff can provide hints to the search engine, but at the end of the day, it’s the search itself that will find what I’m looking for most easily.

Improved search is probably why we’ll want tags for notes and titles and all of that jazz. But none of it is required. Because entering data needs to be as easy as possible. That’s why there is a big text-boxes at the top of the page. Get in, type, get it out. (If there’s a good way to transparently save data in a web-browser so you don’t have to click a “Save” button, that’d be awesome. But I don’t know enough about web programming to know if that’s possible.)

At some point, there will need to be an API. A rich API opens up so many possibilities that not including one would be silly. In the spirit of dog-fooding, I’d propose that the API be used to build the site itself. That way, when it’s finally made available, it’s already tested. And any new feature that gets added to the site will immediately be available to devs using the API. Everyone wins.

Sometimes, you’ll just need to store a file. Evernote’s revenue model pretty much depends on this. But I’m not happy with that, because even when you get a Pro Evernote account, you still have an upper bound. One idea I have is to allow each user to provide S3 credentials. Then, any files they upload get stored to their own S3 account and they can pay for the privilege. There are obvious problems with this approach (like the fact that users would be insane to give out their S3 credentials), but I think it bears more investigation.

So I think those are the major features: Easiest possible UI for entering text, great, prominent search, suck in XML from around the web, great API, and arbitrary (and easy) file uploads. I can think of more (revision tracking would be a huge “nice to have”), but I think these are the ones I would need to call it “killer”.

Easy, right?

When one associates with bright and hard working professionals as I do, one sometimes sees someone express the sentiment, “Even if I become absurdly rich and didn’t have to, I’d keep working because I love my job so much.”

This idea is foreign to me. It’s so foreign, in fact, that I have to stop myself from calling bullshit whenever I hear it (fortunately, I’m used to being the odd one out in most things so I can cope pretty well with other people having a completely alien mindset). I suppose that there are, in fact, people who love their jobs so much that they can’t possibly imagine not doing it every day. But these people are the most fortunate of the fortunate: somehow, the very best thing in the world for them was not only attainable but actually attained. Bravo.

Perhaps I’m just honest with myself, or perhaps I’m just discontent, but I’m not that fortunate. That’s not to say that I don’t love my job. I do. I get to do interesting work with really great people and I have a fantastic management team all the way up the chain and, to top it off, the work I do directly benefits the world. As a job, I can’t really ask for anything more. This might even be the best job on the planet for me right now.

But it’s still a job, you know? I still have to get up every day and go, even when I have a headache. There are still pretty awful parts that I have to deal with anyway. That’s why they pay me, right? And it works out pretty well. They give me money and I get up in the morning and deal with the unpleasant bits of the job (but the joke’s on them, because the vast majority of the job is pretty fun!).

So if Bill Gates and Warren Buffet went crazy and gave me their fortunes, I just can’t imagine working for a living. I’d go to school and get a math degree (and since I wouldn’t have to worry about tuition, I could take it a bit more leisurely and avoid the stress) and maybe even more degrees after that. I’d travel the world (I hate traveling, but I suspect I’d like it a bit more if it were by private jet to fancy hotels). I’d start some foundations and try to save the world (Even the actual Bill Gates finally decided this was more worthwhile than working). I’d follow Yo-Yo Ma around on tour for a while.

I most certainly would not use Windows.

Ok. So, maybe I’m approaching this from the wrong angle. Maybe most people, when they consider this topic, don’t immediately jump to becoming fabulously wealthy overnight and still going in to their nine-to-five the next day. Maybe I need to scale it back a bit. Instead of Bill Gates giving me all his money, let’s instead imagine that he’s just going to be giving me a weekly stipend: enough to live comfortably but not outrageously. Let’s say something around $150k a year (and, because he’s extra generous, he’ll pay the taxes on it as well).

That certainly puts an end to my plans of world-tour via private jet. Still, it’s easily enough to go get a couple of stress-free degrees at my favorite institution of higher learning. Or to start my very own Web 2.0 company (as long as I’m the only employee, I would never have to worry about making a profit…). Or I could become a full-time web crackpot, hanging around message boards talking about the aliens who are stealing my light bulbs.

I still wouldn’t use Windows.

Ok. Maybe I’m still imagining too much wealth. Maybe Bill isn’t as generous as I thought and he only wants to give me my own current salary. This, by definition, is exactly enough for me to quit working and still maintain my current lifestyle. I could still start that Web 2.0 company, but as the cost of living increased and Bill’s gift didn’t, I’d be a little more worried about turning a profit and I don’t particularly want to be an actual entrepreneur. Maybe I could still go get a math degree, but the cost of education is soaring and I’d be under similar pressures to get it done in a short amount of time.

Or, I could keep working and double the amount I pull in every year. And, like I said, I love my job so this wouldn’t be a bad thing. It would keep me busy and by suddenly having double the funds available, I’d certainly have less stress in my life when those unexpected bills pop up.

So, in this last case, I suppose I too would keep working. Probably not forever; I’d have more freedom for saving and investing in this situation and might eventually find myself in an “early retirement” situation (and isn’t this just the name we use when people actually do get to quit their jobs and do things they’d rather do?).

But even then, it’s not because I like my job so much that I can’t imagine doing anything else (though, I should repeat: I do love my job. I just have a good imagination.); it’s because I don’t like stress and in that case, keeping my job would actually lower the amount of stress in my life. That would be all sorts of win.

Sadly, this type of naval gazing doesn’t really accomplish anything. Bill Gates, living the dream, is far too busy trying to save the world to throw large sacks of cash in my direction. So I’ll continue to get up every morning and be extremely happy to go to a job I enjoy going to and doing work I enjoy doing and cashing paychecks that I enjoy spending.

The Christmas season is upon us and our culture is once again under attack with Christmas albums and Christmas specials and Christmas themed food items and movies with an implausible Father Christmas calendars with pictures of dogs wearing Santa-hats. Yet it’s only once in a lifetime that one of these myriads of seasonal offerings manages to be so inspiring and so indicative of its time that becomes a holiday staple: It’s A Wonderful Life. A Charlie Brown Christmas. How The Grinch Stole Christmas. A Christmas Story. The Star Wars Christmas Special.

A Colbert Christmas? Sadly, no. Now, don’t get me wrong. Mr. Colbert has once again brought the funny. His special is a pitch-perfect parody of specials of a bygone era (so bygone, in fact, that I’m way too young to have seen any in their original form: everything I know about them comes from parody and YouTube). It combines this parody with Mr. Colbert’s own character’s (Stephen Colbert) unique quirks and running jokes in amusing ways: Stephen can’t get to his studio to do his Christmas special because a bear has trapped him in his mountain cabin. Comedy legend John Stewart stops by to sing a delightful song about Hanukkah. Country music legend Toby Keith stops by to sing about the war on Christmas. English Singer-songwriter legend Elvis Costello stops by to say things like “Father Christmas” and “Happy Christmas” (oh those wacky Brits).

Much laughter and mirth is had by all, especially us as we watched the DVD. Unfortunately, I just can’t imagine re-watching it. It doesn’t have the necessary humor-juice to hold up to repeatable viewings. And, as a parody, it doesn’t have the sincerity needed to become a true holiday classic in the vein of Charlie Brown. Of course, that’s true of all of Colbert’s current stuff, I guess. By its very nature, it’s highly topical and funny at the time; but a couple of months later, what’s the point? I think most people will find the same true of this DVD. Far from being the greatest gift of all, it’s more of an endorsement for Netflix.

At this point, everyone knows about Getting Things Done. The users of this system are almost cult-like in their adoration of it and new blogs posts about GTD tweaks and hacks show up in my feed reader weekly.

With all of this positive attention (and the chance to try new tools, from the low-tech to the high-tech), how could I resist getting things done the David Allen way? But attempt after attempt at organizing my life this way has failed. I’ve carried around a Moleskine. I’ve set up folders and tags and rules and labels and colors in Mail.app and Outlook and Google Calendar and Gmail, and iCal and Media Wiki Remember the Milk and who knows what else. I’ve prioritized and I’ve categorized and I’ve contextualized, but my use of the system never lasts for more than a week at a time.

But here’s the thing: I still get things done. I meet my deadlines at work. All my bills get paid. There are groceries in the house. Christmas presents get bought by the 25th.

My work projects tend to be pretty big and monolithic. “Implement feature X”. And I have to break feature X into manageable four or five hours chunks when crafting an estimate so by the time I actually start working on feature X, I’ve got a pretty good idea in my head of how to logically proceed from step one to step two to step three and finish it. I cross these steps off of a list, but it’s not on my master list in the @featureX context; it’s on the list I keep next to my computer on my desk at work. That’s the context for it.

My other main task at work is fixing bugs. And those are already listed out in our bug database. I don’t even have to cross those off of a list; I just mark them fixed in the database. Again, they don’t need to be on a big master list; the bug database itself is the context.

Things that aren’t implementing features or fixing bugs (like writing my annual self-review or something like that) come up pretty rarely for me. Rare enough that there’s no point in having a system to deal with these tasks (the system would sit idle for so long that I’d forget to use it when the time comes); I can just add an appointment in Outlook and it will pop up a box telling me to get it done. And there’s the context for that: I’m sitting at my desk with Outlook open.

So I don’t have to come in to work every day and review my tasks. I know if I’m working on implementing a new feature or fixing bugs today because I can remember if I was assigned a new feature or finished work on one yesterday. I can just sit down and get to it.

At home, it’s pretty similar. For the most part, I don’t have things to do at home. I lead a pretty laid back lifestyle. When I get paid, I pay bills. When the cabinets get empty, we go grocery shopping. When the house gets messier than I can stand, I stop watching TV for half an hour and clean up a bit. I don’t need a “@house” context because when I get annoyed by the mess, I’m already in my house. That’s the context for me.

So, I guess I’m pretty lucky. In a world where consultants can make a pretty good living teaching people how to get things done, my life is simple enough that I can get things done just by looking around and saying “Oh. Let me do that and then I’ll watch more TV.”

That simplicity makes me pretty happy, all in all.

(For the curious, this blog post was inspired by finding yet another “How To Use Tool Y to GTD” post I came across; in this case, it was a blog post about using GTD with Evernote.)

After taunting us for months, Microsoft finally released the New XBox Experience today all good and proper. Of course, I didn’t actually get to install it until this evening when I got home for work. So that’s what I did almost immediately after walking in the door; almost certainly to the annoyance of Bran.

Initial Impressions:

• It’s very shiny
• The UI, while slick, is somewhat unintuitive. Perhaps I’ll deal with it better after I get over the learning curve; but I’m not convinced that a box plugged into my TV should even have a learning curve.
• Netflix integration rocks.

This last one, though, is tinged with annoyance. Well, that’s not true: it’s smothered in annoyance really. It reeks of annoyance. I’m very annoyed.

Most of the movies that have been sitting in my Watch Instantly queue (I’ve got a Mac so watching instantly on Netflix involves virtual machines or Boot Camp and is generally not worth the bother) have big red noticed next to them now saying “Not available on Xbox” or “Until Dec 01, 2008″.

Which is really another way of saying “Hollywood studios and the MPAA kind of hate you and wish you would just fucking die already (and leave them all your money). kthxbi.”

If major movies and TV shows just weren’t so danged entertaining, I would just boycott the entire industry and be done with it. Unfortunately, with the likes of J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon in their feifdom, Hollywood manages to be one of the brightest points of entertainment around (then, of course, there’s dreck like Two and A Half Men; but that’s easily ignored if not actually boycotted).

I’m not sure what the solution is. As long as I keep feeding at their entertainment trough, Hollywood is going to keep screwing me. I guess I’m okay with that for now.

But I can definitely see myself reaching a tipping point where I just read a book instead. Maybe after Dollhouse gets canceled.

I wanted to start things off strong by getting right into the posts that no one could actually care about. Truth in blogging.

I got home from work this evening to discover Bran cooking up some Indian food. It was the inaugural batch of Indian food since she moved down here. Growing up, our family meals didn’t branch out much beyond fried Americana. So Indian food is a fairly new thing for me (new to the point that I can’t remember the random sounds Bran used to name the dishes); but it’s delicious.

I’m a pretty lucky guy.

Now, we’ve settled down for yet another evening of watching Stargate Atlantis. Various flavors of Stargate have been our primary sources of entertainment for a while now. I’d never watched it before (I bought the first season of SG-1 a couple of years ago, but couldn’t make it past the second episode), but Bran’s a big fan. Big enough that it was imperative to her that I watch it too.

It turns out that this was great for me. I might be late to the Stargate party, but I’ve finally made it and I couldn’t be happier.

Between Stargate seasons, we’re watching Star Trek: The Next Generation courtesy of Netflix. TNG’s first season is much worse than SG-1’s; but I’m confident that once we make it past “Shades of Gray“, things will pick up.

And that’s what’s happening chez James. Can’t get any more boring than that.

Which, honestly, is exactly the way that I like it.

New blog. First post. There’s so much to live up to in a first post. It’s like the first chapter in a novel, which means there’s a lot to live up to.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” or “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.” or “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Or “You might think that if you were about to debut a Macintosh-oriented weblog, it would be quite a stroke of good fortune for some Really Big News to break on the very day you plan to start writing.”

Frankly, I can’t compete. Which, I’m afraid, is indicative of things to come. Those other great works are also distinguished by being long. Their authors wrote and wrote and wrote because they had something to say (or, in the case of King, they wrote well past the point they ran out of things to say). I probably won’t do that.

I’ve left the empty and charred remains of blogs littered behind me as I’ve sojourned down Mr. Gore’s information highway. It’s not unreasonable to expect this one to fall to the same fate. Indeed, I completely expect that.

In light of that, I’ve taken some steps to prevent the ultimate demise of this space. Or, at least, to stave it off a little longer than usual.

First, I’ve purposefully decided that this blog is for the meaningless trite no one cares about. That means that I don’t have to worry about not having anything to say: I can natter on about what I had for breakfast without worrying about boring my audience.

I don’t expect to have an audience.

Second, I’ve attached this blog to a domain that has my name in it. A very little bit of my reputation is bound up with this site. I’ve got some skin in the game.

Third, I’m playing around with MarsEdit. I’m hoping it will make the mechanical act of blogging fun (or, at least, not as annoying as doing things via WordPress). So far, it seems like it actually might.

The downside of that is that I’ll have to spend $30 on MarsEdit. Well, the author Daniel Jalkut just had a kid. So maybe it’s worth it.

So that’s this blog. If you’re reading it, you should stop before you get bored. Go read one of the works quoted above instead.

If you insist on reading anyway, well. Thanks.

It gives me the warm fuzzies, it does.