So I used my job change as an excuse to try switching my work next action lists to something computerized. I took a look at Things, OmniFocus, and The Hit List; The Hit List didn’t have an iPhone counterpart, OmniFocus seemed a bit heavyweight, so I gave Things a try.

And I ended up rather liking it. At first, I was somewhat taken aback by not being able to map the (to me quite important) GTD concept of waiting items directly to it. But once I decided not to get hung up on that, I enjoyed the program: it’s easy to use, it’s great to be able to pull up a quick entry box to get ideas out of your mind, and the clutter problem that I’d been having with my paper system has completely disappeared.

Things also has one very nice feature that isn’t a standard part of GTD (though it is part of the pomodoro technique): it encourages you to flag actions as ones you’re planning to do today. For several months, I’d been making a tentatively daily plan at the start of the day at work, and I really like the results: it means that I rarely have to refer to my entire next action list during the day, and it makes it easier for me to take care of items that are important but not urgent or ideas that, for some reason, my mind is resisting doing.

In fact, that last point is important enough that I’ll go on a bit of a digression on it. (Partly in hopes that I’ll figure something out, because I don’t claim to have all the answers here.) Too much planning is bad: plans go stale as reality marches on without them (and, in particular, unexpected events can cause priorities to shift quite quickly); and planning takes time, which has a real cost. But avoiding planning entirely isn’t good, either: our lives are too complicated for us to always be able to make the best choices even about a narrow area on the fly, and without plans, it’s too easy to get buffeted around, chasing the urgent over the important.

So you need to balance these two forces. (Or, better yet, come up with a synthesis.) GTD’s next action concept is a great step in that direction: you do just enough planning in advance to be able to make a bit of concrete progress in a project, but you don’t overplan by committing to when you’ll take that next action or by committing to the details of later actions on that project.

That one useful way to ease to this tension: you focus yourself on a single project and are a bit vague about time. But today lists provide an orthogonal easing of tension, this time focusing on a single slice of time but looking across projects. To get them to work, you make sure to have a few minutes of quiet at the start of the day (when walking Zippy when I get up, after checking my e-mail when I show up at work) when you can look across the existing list of next actions on all of your projects and see what might be a good idea to work on next. But you don’t commit to actually doing all of that (surprises can always arise), and if you don’t finish an item on one day’s list, it’s just fine to remove it from the today list when the next morning rolls around. Done well, it only takes a few minutes, it makes it very easy to figure out what to do next, and it helps you make progress across a range of important projects.

So, once the evaluation period ended, I paid for a copy of Things, installed it at both home and work, and bought the iPhone app as well. (Which I sync with my home copy.) And I’m quite happy with my choice; aside from the reasons mentioned above, the iPhone version is quite usable, and it’s made my weekly reviews at home go a good deal more smoothly, for reasons that are idiosyncratic enough to not be worth elaborating on here. It’s not a perfect piece of software—I’m still not convinced by its handing of waiting items, and some of the concepts that it has aren’t sufficiently orthogonal (e.g. there are actions you can do on standalone tasks that you can’t do for tasks that are part of projects)—but it works more than well enough for me.

It’s also changed my GTD usage. For one thing, it has the notion of Areas of Responsibility; that’s a part of GTD that I’d never spent much time with, but once I had software that mentioned it, I started thinking about it a bit more. And I realized that some things that I’d been thinking about as projects (e.g. read books, take care of tasks around the house) are actually areas of responsibility, and are best managed as such. The other thing is its use of tags: that’s the way Things handles GTD contexts, but putting a tag on an item you’re creating on the iPhone version adds just enough friction to be a slight annoyance. And, once I realized that, I also realized that, in fact, GTD contexts are never useful to me! (I’m not saying they’re a bad thing, just that my life isn’t complicated enough in ways where they are helpful.) So now I’m moving away from using tags as GTD contexts, instead just keeping around a few special-purpose tags with other meanings.

I’m very happy with the results, and plan to keep this system for the forseeable future. I still have my paper notebook around, e.g. to take notes about blog posts, but all in all moving the portable part of my system to my phone and the non-portable part to a piece of dedicated software is working nicely.

Which happened last month: some events occurred which made me think that it would be wise for somebody in our family to have a cell phone, we were about to go on vacation, and I was in an Apple store for an unrelated reason. (Repairing the new iPod; good thing it was still under warranty, but I continue not to be impressed with the reliability of Apple’s hardware.) So I walked out of the store with my first cell phone.

About which I have no complaints at all. I was getting a lot of the iPhone’s benefits from having an iPod Touch (I spend a lot of the time at home and work, both of which have WiFi reception, and I can even get WiFi wandering around Mountain View), but it’s still useful having internet access even more frequently. And right before that trip was a good time to get one: the hotel we stayed in on the trip advertised itself as providing free WiFi, but it didn’t actually reach into our room, so I had to go down to the lobby to use it. (Other downsides of the hotel: they used funny-smelling cleaning chemicals; while trying to figure out if they had wired internet, I noted that their phone jacks had no cover, leaving an unsightly hole in the wall; the phone also didn’t have instructions on how to call various locations within the hotel (though pressing 0 got me to the front desk); they shuffled me to an 800 number for my questions about WiFi access; and one evening even the lobby WiFi didn’t work. I will try to avoid the Holiday Inn in Decatur, Georgia in the future, and indeed the chain as a whole.) And it also never crossed my mind that my father-in-law wouldn’t have internet access at all in his house. So I was glad to have a phone available to feed my Twitter habit and look up the occasional piece of useful information.

Fortunately, my mother-in-law had perfectly nice internet access; I even got some reasonable programming done on vacation while in her house. In general, it was a quite pleasant trip; very relaxing, and our hosts were fine with me lounging around and programming rather than, say, visiting Stone Mountain. Though I did go see some sights; in particular, the manta ray at the Atlanta aquarium really is wonderful. We had some quite nice food, too, most notably at Rathbun’s.

And, as I write this, I’m at Agile 2009; having a phone is proving useful to allow me to call home without worrying about exorbitant hotel phone charges. It’s only being moderately useful in terms of internet access, though: the interior of the hotel is pretty much one big dead zone. (I would have naively thought that Hyatt would find it useful to work with AT&T to ensure that one can get cell phone coverage in their hotel, but apparently not? Speaking of hotels that I’m not too impressed with, I’ll add Hyatt to the list: they charge for internet access; the ethernet cable in the room has the plastic locking bit at the end broken (which they could certainly afford to replace, given that they’d make up the cost in a fraction of a day of internet charges); the food prices are ridiculous; and the bathroom manages to hide the light switch, the toilet handle, and the kleenex in odd locations. I may be imagining this, but there may even be something wrong with some of the power jacks in the room; though it may be that my power supply is going south.)

I still think that $75/month is overpriced, especially since I can’t, say, use the phone to get internet access for my computer. But the iPhone and the iPod Touch really are wonderful devices, with their mix of being a solid music player, a very credible internet access device, and a very credible application platform: a more than worthy addition to my pocket.

I tried a few workarounds, including blowing away the database and restoring from the WP export format (including a detour through editing a php.ini file to allow uploads larger than 2MB); I still kind of think that might be the right approach, since I’m now worried about what further problems might be lurking, but the restore seemed like it was taking too long so I gave up and killed it. Ultimately, what I did was take my mysqldump backup, replace the occurrences of CHARSET=latin1 with CHARSET=utf8, and reimport it. This probably doesn’t work in general – see this post for some subtleties – but I’m hoping it worked for me. (In particular, I doubt there are too many places where I’d used non-ASCII Latin-1 characters.)

I think things are working fine now, but please let me know if you notice anything weird…

But I failed. The obvious problem was that I just couldn’t get the Mini to display well on the TV. I’d been warned that it’s hard to get it to display well on CRT TVs, with the borders going over the edge of the screen, but also had been told that there are third party products that let you deal with this. I downloaded one of them, but it just didn’t work: the TV stayed blank whenever we installed a custom resolution, including the ones that the program started us off with. (Good thing I was doing this through a VNC session!)

To make matters worse, our TV is particularly odd in being an HD TV in a 4:3 resolution. The Mac really wanted to display at 1280×720, which meant that everything on the screen was stretched vertically: when I watched videos on it, actors looked even more anorexic than they do in real life. If I could have dealt with the edge-of-screen issues, 800×600 actually looked fine, but I kind of like having a menu bar visible at the top of the screen.

If we could have solved the display problems, we probably would have stuck it out, but I’m fairly sure that would have been a mistake in retrospect. For one thing, while I’d done some advance research to locate online sources for some shows Liesl and Miranda like, I hadn’t done a thorough search, and it turns out that the shows I’d thought of first were unusual in being relatively easily available. Also, getting a Mini didn’t really solve the more important device problems we had, namely that there was too much contention for our one laptop.

So I returned the Mini and got a MacBook. (And we decided to continue our cable subscription, meaning that this really did cost money, instead of being able to hallucinate that it would sort of pay for itself after a couple of years.) Which I’m really happy with: it’s a nice machine, and over the week and a half since we’ve gotten it I’ve never either not been able to find a laptop to use or felt guilty that I was preventing Liesl or Miranda from using the laptop.

Swapping computers turned out to only be the first of three visits to the Apple store that weekend, though. I got up on Sunday morning and turned on the Mac to make sure that I’d be all set to record a podcast over Skype. And it was a good thing that I got up early to try that out, because I couldn’t connect to the internet! I cursed the router and rebooted it; I still couldn’t connect, so I started cursing Comcast instead. But before calling them I plugged the laptop straight into the cable modem, and it connected fine. When I played around with the router a bit more, it turned out that the router’s administrative interface could ping the outside world just fine and that machines within the wireless network could ping each other and the router just fine: the router had simply decided that it wasn’t up for actually, you know, routing.

Sigh. So I recorded the podcast plugged into the cable modem, and then went shopping. Actually, I was happy enough to replace the router—every few months, it stops working and needs to get rebooted, usually at inconvenient times when I’m on vacation and really want to be able to connect to my home machine to respond to e-mail or review Japanese or something. (Yes, I should probably move both of those off of my home machine.) And I’ve gotten tired of hooking up a hard drive periodically to back up my Mac, a problem that will only get worse with two of them around. So a Time Capsule seemed like a good idea: back to the Apple store.

Once I got home, though, it turned out that there was another problem. The Time Capsule says it supports WEP, but apparently what that means is that it’s willing to connect to existing WEP networks but won’t start one of its own. So I had to either turn off encryption or go to WPA; I would have done the latter long ago, but I had devices in the house that, bizarrely, don’t speak WPA. I figured I could live without having the DSes on the internet (and I’ll probably buy a DSi soon enough anyways, our DS Lite’s touch screen is getting a bit flaky), but my Linux machine is connected to a wireless bridge that only speaks WEP, and that’s a more serious problem.

Fortunately, Apple has a solution to that problem, too. So: back to the Apple store for the third time that weekend, the fourth time in two weeks, the fifth time in just over a month. After ignoring the person in the orange shirt who said things I didn’t want to hear, I got to talk to a person in a blue shirt (who remembered me from one of my earlier visits) who confirmed that yes, the Airport Express would do exactly what I wanted. (And, as a bonus, extend my wireless network a bit, though actually the coverage upstairs was already pretty good.)

So I bought one and went home. I set it up to extend the existing network and act as a bridge, and told it to reboot; it didn’t find the network. Took a deep breath, tried again, and everything worked just fine. And has been fine ever since; as a bonus, it also has a USB jack to plug in the printer, so I don’t have to fiddle with swapping cables around for that.

Not a bad outcome, all things considered. I wish I hadn’t had to go to the store three times that weekend, and I’ve certainly learned a bit about not letting optimism cloud my advanced planning. But I’m really glad that we have a second laptop now, and it’s very nice to click on the Time Machine menu icon and find out that this machine was backed up 9 minutes ago without my even noticing it. It’s too bad my DSes can’t connect to the internet, but I have a hard time worrying about that too much. It’s nice to know that the Airport Express works, I would even be tempted to get a second one to extend the wireless range downstairs except that, now that I’ve checked on it, it seems that the Time Capsule’s signal is enough stronger than the old router’s signal that we don’t have any dead spots in the house any more! And if we’re going to be unexpectedly spending money on various bits of computer gear, it’s best to be doing it in the same month when I find that we overwithheld our taxes by an amount that will cover those expenses almost exactly.

Our house is now strewn with boxes, though; I really should clean that up this weekend.

Conveniently, Apple has just upgraded the Mac mini, so we’re going to go with that. It will replace our current DVD player; we’ll also have iTunes and various web options for video and audio. Never having done this before, though, I’m requesting advice from anybody with experience with this sort of thing.

Some things I’m thinking about:

• For HD video, we currently have a spare component input and a spare DVI input (no HDMI, the TV is too old for that); it looks like the mini should work fine with the DVI input.
• For high-quality audio, we currently have a TOS link input; it looks like a simple adapter should let us convert the minijack optical audio port on the mini into TOS link.
• I am worried about controlling the thing: this is a computer, not an appliance, so we’ll need a keyboard and a mouse substitute. For use from the sofa, we’ll want those to be the same device (i.e. a keyboard with integrated touchpad/trackball/whatever) and for them to be wireless; any suggestions? I found that surprisingly hard to accomplish the last time I was shopping for keyboards. (I have no idea why touchpads are everywhere on laptops but very hard to find otherwise.)
• Hopefully the Apple remote will work acceptably for watching DVDs, despite its minimalist nature?
• Any recommendations for good online video sources?
• Anything else I should be asking about?

Thanks in advance for any and all advice.

This is true, but it’s actually a strength rather than a virtue, and being at a conference really brings that home to me. Sure, it’s possible that there are people that I’ll meet here with whom I’ll feel a mutual immediate strong connection. But what’s a lot more likely is that I’ll run into many more people whom I’ve enjoyed my interactions with, whom I would like to have some contact with in the future, but whom I’m not likely to even start exchanging e-mails with, let alone call or visit them.

And the perfect thing for me to do in that situation is the combination of following them on twitter (as a sort of small-talk chit-chat way of getting to know them) and of subscribing to their blog (to get to know how they think in a more deeper way). Maybe I’ll get bored in a few weeks, in which case no big deal; maybe, though, I’ll find myself looking forward to what they have to say, maybe they’ll reciprocate with me, maybe we’ll find ourselves looking forward to our conversations in those fora.

Certainly there are many people that I follow on twitter whom I would be more than happy to get together with should we be in the same city at some point, but for whom that wasn’t the case when I first became aware of them, and for whom I’m fairly sure that both of those feelings are reciprocated. And I don’t know how I would have figured that out without these media. For that matter, there’s no reason why uncovering a deeper connection should be the end goal: there are also people that I’m perfectly happy to stay in loose contact with via these more tenuous connections, perhaps exchanging the occasional e-mail if there’s something prompting that, but with no further deeper contact. These media are opening up new Levels of Scale in the space of possible connections; that’s a good thing, no?

Over the last few months, though, I’ve run across more and more blogs and other web pages which took a very plain approach to layout. This is something I understand: I’ve read thousands of books that take that approach, why not use it on the web? So, last night, when I ran across one such blog that was using WordPress, I scrolled down to the bottom to see what theme it was using, and took a look.

The theme was basic2col. It’s a very plain theme; as the author says, “Basic2Col is just what it says – a basic two column theme for WordPress. The theme was created to have a basis for a new theme, but you can of course use it as is.” And I rather liked it as is, so I decided to download it today and give it a try.

After giving it more of a look, there were a few things I wasn’t thrilled about. Most notably, it sets the font size in the body to 70%. This is something that I see all the time, and I never understand: as a web user with aging eyes, I like to set the default font size in my browser to something that’s comfortable to me. So why do so many web pages feel compelled to disregard my preference? And, of course, they almost always override it to make the font smaller instead of bigger. Kids these days.

Fortunately, as mentioned above, the theme is designed to be customizable: in fact, the download page also contains a “customb2c” wrapper that lets you segregate your changes in separate files, for ease of upgrading. So one

body {
  font-size: 100%;
}

later I was off and running. As a bonus, that also made the body wider, which was another thing that had bothered be about the original design.

I did a bit more poking around: I increased the margins here and there, I did some header bolding to give a bit more of a visual separation between posts, and I changed the sidebar a bit. But I mostly left it as-is, and I was pleased with how easy it was to do the tweaking I wanted.

Yours in simplicity,

• Visualizing the Python commit history.
• Leadership, responsibility, and sausage.
• Solving sudoku games via package management.
• Japan, computers, appliances. (Via Niels ‘t Hooft.)
• Breakpoints as a checklist.
• Programmers, insecurity, source control.

• I linked to a movie of strandbeests (amazing wind-powered sculptures that walk along beaches) before; the creator has done a TED talk with more background.

  (Via Giles Bowkett.)

• How to draw hands.

  (Via Drawn!)

• This year’s rice paddy art.
• I am a sucker for dialogues; having them be about the video game business is even better.
• Minus, a thoroughly delightful webcomic. I should go through them all again… (Via Dan Bruno.)
• I laughed out loud at the second menu. These ones are amusing, too.
• Abandoned cities. Provides some interesting context for the second part of Shenmue II. (Insert obligitory lament on the nonexistence of Shenmue III…)
• Transcriptions and discussion of Zelda (specifically Ocarina) music.
• How adding tools for user-generated content can significantly shorten the developers’ content-generation time. Constant refactoring, taken up a level.

• Pachelbel’s Canon and Korean breakdancers. And now I know what a gayageum is…

  (Via How the World Works, which also has several other nice renditions.)

• Brecht and MGS2.

The steps, as best I remember them:

• Install the virtualbox package, create an image using the suggested XP defaults.
• Run it with an XP installation CD that came with my defunct laptop. Fortunately, the CD turned out not to insist to be running on Dell hardware or anything.
• Click on the window, and notice that keyboard input stops working when I do that. Curse; what is it with these keyboard problems that I’m having when trying to get this game working? Right-control doesn’t work to get out of it, so I switch to a non-X login (Control-Alt-F1), kill virtualbox.
• Try again. Note that keyboard passthrough works fine as long as I don’t click on the window, so I can either use the mouse or the keyboard. Well, the installation seems to not require me to move the mouse, so let’s go with that.
• Except that it does require me to click on the screen where I’m entering user accounts. Sigh. My keyboard has occasionally temporarily lost mouse control – maybe there’s something weird about the PS2-to-USB converter that I’m using? Run out to the store to buy a USB keyboard and trackball. (Incidentally, my hand doesn’t like the trackball that I bought any more than it likes a mouse; I wish non-laptop keyboard with integrated trackpads hadn’t gone completely out of fashion.)
• Come back, plug it in. And have a remarkable stroke of luck: I’d left the computer in the non-X console. When I switched back to the X console, my typing monitor that forces me to take periodic breaks decides to kick in. And it managed to grab the mouse/keyboard back from virtualbox, yay! So: click the mouse on the entry field where I need it, wait for the typing monitor to kick in again, then type in the information I need.
• After that, the rest of the installation completes. And, when I get XP installed, I can install the “guest OS extensions” which allow mouse passthrough as well as keyboard passthrough. So now I can click and type without excessive workarounds.
• Do a zillion OS updates, because I can’t bear to have an old XP install, even if it’s behind two layers of external network protection. Pleased at how the networking stuff Just Works in virtualbox.
• Install Grim Fandango. Seems to work, but no sound? Ah, I forgot to tell virtualbox to provide a sound card to XP; when I do that, I get sound.
• But the sound is choppy. Grumble, but there’s not much I can do about that, and it’s not so bad as to make the game unbearable.

So I’m ready to go; I’m looking forward to the game club kickoff on Monday. Hmm, why didn’t we start on a weekend? This weekend is busy, though (Miranda’s birthday, she’s 9 years old!), so I guess that’s just as well.

All in all, I’m pleased with my virtualization experience; the keyboard problem was a serious one, but (unlike with wine), I managed to resolve it, and I’m getting the feeling that there must be something weird about my setup. Given the complexity of what’s going on, I was pleased how smoothly things went other than that.

The other nice thing about virtualization: I saved snapshots of the machine at various points. In particular, if I want to revert to a clean XP install (after applying updates), I can; that might be useful for future games, if I run into weird conflicts.

And then I did my weekly e-mail spam folder scan, and discovered that gmail’s spam filters have been on overdrive the last few days; I get the feeling that it’s been rejecting a third of the mailing-list mail that I received, and a few important pieces of non-mailing-list mail. Sigh.