James Williams dot Me

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.