Category Archives: News

Ants Marching

Posted by on December 27, 2011 No comments

Okay, this is kind of gross.  But if it helps someone else it is worth sharing.  The area where we live in is absolutely saturated with LBA’s – little black ants.  We have had every kind of bug guy out, and NOTHING seems to keep these dudes at bay.  As long as they stay outside, we can live with it.  But when the weather turns cold, or sometimes when we flood the yard (we have flood irrigation), they move inside.

I’m pretty sure the ants have setup a nest inside one (or more) our walls.  But when they showed up in our closet, I felt like I needed to do something.  I have heard the Borax and sugar works in getting rid of them (poisons the queen) but in my experience it never worked.

Until, I came across a YouTube video that contained the real “trick”.  The recipe is simple but brilliant.

  1. Mix 1/2 cup sugar with 1 cup warm (or hot) water.
  2. Add 2 tables spoons 20 mule borax.
  3. Stir until everything dissolves

Now here’s the magic part:  Soak up the syrup with cotton balls

The cotton balls really make all the difference.  The mixture will be thicker than water, and sticky.  But soaking it up with cotton balls allows you to drop the balls on an ant line.

But does it work?  Check it out:

This was one of 5 cotton balls we dropped on the ant line.  Within an hour of dropping them all 5 were swarmed with ants, but 24 hours later they were all virtually empty and the total number of visible ants had dropped to 4.  That’s right FOUR.  Total.  You could count them on one hand.

In the past what would happen is we would spray, wipe, clean, and pray.  Eventually the ants would show up somewhere else, usually within 12 hours.  But with the Sugar Borax cotton balls, the ants seem to be receding, and not coming back.

So if you’ve got little black ants, give it a try.  I hope it works as well for you as it did for me.

Kindle Fire To the Rescue

Posted by on November 28, 2011 No comments

Or… I dropped my iPad2.

So I wrote about how un impressed I was with my Fire, and as I turned back to my iPad – I noticed that my slick – solid – sturdy aluminum case – was dented!  And not just any dent, it was dented right where you plug in the connector.

Disappointment #1

Apparently it slipped off my arm rest in my F250 and landed just right on one of the steel posts that holds in the back seat.  Until you really look it it, it’s kind of hard to believe how tight the tolerances are on these things.  No way could I get a pair of pliers into the gap to straighten it out.

And with no access to the connector plug, there is no way to charge the darn thing.

So I made an appointment at the Genius bar and took it to the apple store.

Disappointment #2

Turns out Apple does not have an accidental damage policy for these things.  And they can’t repair it.  Say what?  That’s a 64GB 3G iPad!  What do you mean it can’t be repaired?  Not by apple anyway.

Suuuuuuck.

Fail #1

I go to Fry’s electronics and buy the smallest, skinniest pliers I can find and try to straighten the port myself.  No joy.  All I’m doing is scratching the surface and I’m afraid I’m going to break the board inside the slot.  Time to get help.

Let’s hope there’ s not a Fail #2

So I go online, find a company that says they can repair iPads.  I sign up, and take my baby to Fedex and ship it out.  God help me.

Kindle Fire to the Rescue

So that leaves me tablet-less…  or does it?  I still have my Fire!  And so I start to poke around with the skinny 7″ unit.  Without the option to use my iPad I’m forced to really assess to the Fire.  And now I have to say… if I couldn’t own an iPad I would definitely want one of these.  And if I didn’t already own an iPad, I think I would give the Fire some serious consideration.  If you don’t know what you are missing then the Fire is a very impressive little box.

Works for my books, I’ve downloaded a couple of games and they work pretty darn well.  And I can stream some old TV shows (Why isn’t Quantum Leap part of Amazon Prime?  Really?).  It’s not iTunes and the iPad but this little bugger cost $800 LESS than my beefy iPad 2.

And I now see that they’ve added email and some other useful apps.  I still find Android scattered and generally not nearly as polished as iOS and iOS apps.  But for $800 still in my pocket I think I could learn to live with it.

I’ll update when I know how my repair went.

Facts Suck

Posted by on November 23, 2011 Comments Off

Or the death of a good story.

So I was talking about Coral Castle with some friends, and I remembered some stuff from T. Lobsang Rampa (thanks for the reference dad).  And then it hit me.  When I first heard about these things… there was no internet.

Funny, I wondered what the internet had to say… sigh.  Facts suck.

First Coral Castle.  If no one saw Ed Leedskalnin lift this stones, then no one owned a pretty decent camera back in the thirties to take these pictures.
Apparently the secret of the great pyramids was a block and tackle.  Or as Ed was quoted as saying, “he understood the laws of weight and leverage well”

Well, turns out another trouble maker from FLINT Michigan learned those laws of weight and leverage pretty well too.  Only this guy is alive today and owns a video camera.

A carpenter by the name of W.T. Wallington it seams figured out that if you understand the laws of weight and leverage you can move around some pretty massive stones with not a lot of effort, BY YOURSELF.

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/

Check out his videos.  They are ridiculous.  Turns out a very heavy stone is exceptionally stable on a fulcrum.  In other words, stick a pebble under a big hard stone and you can move it easily.  The heavier it is, the more stable it is.  In his words:

once a weight is close to balance on a single point, rotation can be initiated and the object becomes stable

For those of you keeping score at home (check your physics text), the clever idea here is that he’s using the LOAD as the LEVER.  By using the principles of balance and inertia he is able to move really have stuff quite easily.

You’ve got to check out his videos showing moving these things around.

Finally, he kills my pyramid odyssey dream.  (one of my favorite books).  Because he does what no one else seemed to be willing to do – some MATH.  Turns out, with these techniques, you might not need that many people to build the pyramids.  At least not as many as people thought.

For continuous hoisting at the Great Pyramid working a 40 hour week, 50 weeks a year, and for 25 years, only 20 horse power would be required.

If you watch his videos (see the Egyptian Hoist) it becomes obvious that a little ingenuity, and some clever use of physics makes man a pretty awesome creature in his own right.  No extra-terretrials needed.

Doh, that clever, clever brain of ours!

So I’m a little sad that these fun stories appear to be no more than that, fun stories.  But how cool is that we live in an era where not only did someone figure it out, they videoed it and put it on line for my entertainment!

Brilliant.  Wait, maybe we DO live in magical times.

Kindle Fire

Posted by on November 19, 2011 No comments

So,
I got my Kindle Fire. I ordered it the minute I first heard about it. Except for the Kindle 1 I order a new kindle every time they introduce one. Largely because I’m a big fan of eInk displays. I’d look at some other readers but… I now have a pretty darn large book collection with Amazon so I’m “tied in”. I really love the way their system works so why move? Again it’s the software.

But I also own an iPad, and I was anxious to see what Android could do. In fact, almost everything I own is Apple if it has a battery now (Phone, Computer, Laptop, Tablet). I’ve head so much about Android – I wasn’t going to buy a phone to check it out, and $500 for a tablet I’d hardly ever use seemed like a waste. But an Android Kindle sounded like a great idea, especially for $200.

So here’s what I learned.

It’s a not an iPad

While that may be obvious, one of Apples real strengths is their attention to detail. They charge a premium but they also deliver for that premium. Excellent screens, snappy response, everything just “works”. Android is becoming the new windows. In other-words, android appears to be the king of it-works-well-enough.

Everyone points to, there aren’t many apps. But it’s more than that. The Kindle Fire is really highly tied to Amazon’s services. Like the original Kindle it is not a general purpose computing device, or even general purpose media device. For example, how do I load personal videos onto the Kindle? And what about my photos? Can I put those on a kindle?

If it is possible it is not obvious. No, the Kindle is a portal into content you buy and manage through Amazon.

Secondly

It’s unresponsive at times. You just get so used to touching the iPad and it responds to you instantly. Most of us use computers crippled by bloatware, or anti-virus filters (Macaphee would you PLEASE JUST STOP!) and crud, and time that it’s really are to have a computing device that responds INSTANTLY to your touch.

There are multiple times where in using the Kindle I thought it had crashed, or hung up, or I wasn’t sure what was going on. It would just sit there unresponsive. It was weird.

But it’s only $200!

Now, I am probably unusual in that I have both units. What’s more, the kindle was cheap enough that it was worth the try. If you don’t have a tablet yet, or an eReader it really does fix some of the things that people didn’t like about the original Kindle and maybe that’s where it should really be compared. In fact, Amazon may consider it a triumph that it is being compared to the iPad and other Tablets instead of being compared to the other products in its family – the eInk readers.

(Cr)Apptastic

Before I move on, I do have one final dig, and it’s more of an android issue than a Kindle issue. The weird thing about buying a new platform is that you are looking for new experiences. New software. New newness. However, very often what happens is that you end up buying the same applications you know from other platforms.

Plants vs Zombies? Got it on my phone, my iPad and now my Kindle. EA Sudoku. First got it on my DS. Now I have it on everything I own. (I just really like their version of it.)

OliveTree Bible reader. Best bible reader I’ve found.

However, one thing about android is that sometimes, stuff doesn’t work. Or it can be confusing. Take plants vs Zombies. There is a kindle fire version! But also a regular version for sale. Why are both available? What’s the difference? Other than the title, it’s not obvious or easy to find out. And take OliveTree’s bible reader. I own several bibles, but when I click on the link for the store more on the Kindle… it doesn’t work. Nothing happens. “What?” They shipped this?

But I digress. I suppose in principle the reason you get a Fire, or a Kindle for that matter is that Amazon is expending tremendous effort to make sure that they media they present on it runs really well. And for the most part, their video, music and book interfaces work really well.

I’m very tempted to sing up for Amazon Prime and while I have it for a Month I’m using to watch some TV episodes. I’ve uploaded a small part of my music library to Amazon Cloud Player so I can try that out as well.

But in truth, I’m tied to iTunes, so this probably won’t make a big difference for me. I have so many ways to listen to my music around my house the fire won’t be how I consume music.

Kindle Fire vs Kindle 3

But like I was saying, the Fire really should be compared to the traditional Kindle. And if you look at it from that point of view it is an outstanding product at an oustanding value.

Display

The main comparisons are obvious. You now have access to video and color content. The presentation of books with images is so much better on the Fire than it is on the Kindle 3 with it’s eInk display it’s not funny. However, in broad daylight the Kindle 3 still rules. Get some direct sunlight on your Fire and you have a hard to read screen. Nothing beats eInk for sunlight. Not that I get to spend a lot of time reading in the sun, but it is one of my favorite things to do, if I can get a sunny day is to read something good on that amazing black and gray screen. The closer it gets to paper the more awesome it is.

Given however that 90% of my viewing is indoors of some kind I have to say…

Advantage: Fire

Size and Weight

The Fire is a comfortable size – 7″, but the weight and thickness are a tad disappointing. I really like the slimness of the Kindle 3 and it is light.

Advantage: Kindle 3

Note: The new Kindle touch should be an improvement over the 3 even extending the difference.

Battery Life

This is a no brainer. One of the things that I love about the Kindle 3 is I can charge it once and use it for a week. The Fire’s battery life is roughly on par with any normal computing device or netbook who’s battery life is measured in hours instead of days.

Advantage: Kindle 3

Keyboard

This isn’t as obvious, but I actually like the Kindle Fire screen keyboard better than the Kindle 3 keyboard. Why? While you may argue that buttons are superior to little virtual boxes, for me the reality is that I type on a kindle so rarily that giving up that much realestate to a keyboard seems like a waste. I would MUCH rather have a bigger screen, and the Fire does that. Plus I’ve just gotten used to typing on a touch screen. What’s more with 7″ of screen, the Fire keyboard feels HUGE compared to my iPhone.

There you when you need it, gone when you don’t.

Advantage: Fire

Web Browsing

Duh…

Advantage: Fire

Ruggedness

I haven’t dropped my Fire yet, but I’m going to guess…

Advantage: Kindle 3

Conclusion

So at the end of the day, if you own an iPad there really is absolutely no reason to buy a kindle fire unless you are a tech nut like me and you could buy one heavily subsidized with Amazon gift card points like I did.

If you don’t own an iPad and you have an old Kindle, it might really be worth taking a look at the thing. It is a pretty awesome upgrade to a normal kindle and it will get you some iPad-”like” features that you’ll probably enjoy.

If you are looking for a real tablet however… The iPad can just do so much more than the Kindle, and it does it better, with more polish, you just have to ask yourself is it worth the extra $300?

By my way of thinking yes. For example, I wrote this on my iPad. Not doing that with a kindle. And this is cheaper and easier to use than my laptop, plus it’s more versatile with a longer battery life.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have some Zombies trying to get into my house. I need to go plant some pea shooters and sun flowers to take them out. That is how you stop Zombie invasions right?

GTD Sustaining (Part 4)

Posted by on October 6, 2011 Comments Off

The On Going Battle

As I sit here and write this 33 tasks have become available for me to work on. Oh joy. Will I get 33 things done today? I don’t know. Probably not. More than half will probably get pushed off.

But that in itself is very useful. As I start to see projects being perpetually delayed, maybe I should reconsider them. Things that aren’t worth doing may never be worth doing. David Sparks talks about the value and freedom that comes from DROPPING projects. If you’re never going to get to it, then give it up. Let it go. Free your mind. I haven’t gotten there yet, I’m still coming to grips with all the stuff I diluted myself into thinking I could get done.

I feel like a project junkie. Yeah, I’ll take another hit. Just one more. I am a hoarder of the unfinished. How did we get there? That’s probably another story for another day. But the bottom line is that awareness is curative. Why would I take on one more thing if I’ve got so many things I’m not doing?

But the beauty of GTD is that it’s actually shocking how many things you can get done in parallel if you just tackle things by context. And that gives me hope, and makes me feel better about myself and what I am capable of.

So there you have it, an update about my personal GTD odyssey. I know many people have used the system and I thought I would provide more of a tutorial like David did, but I find the system really effective. I’m just worried whether or not I will stick with it. It’s a lot to manage. And spending so much time planning can be daunting. But I encourage anyone with a bone pile of moribund projects to give it a try. You may surprise yourself with how productive you really can be.

Those Sneaky B4$t#rd$!

Posted by on September 30, 2011 No comments

Yesterday, I wrote about using Filters to clean up your email.  It has made a HUGE difference in helping me maintain an empty inbox.

There is a saying that you can not be efficient with email because for every email you ship out, you get 1.2 back.  So the more you email the more you get.

However, I wonder what the statistics are on all the sneaky ways email marketers (from companies you like!) work to get around your filters.

Every day.  every single day I get email showing up that does not match my filters.  Amazon.  Ebay.  Microsoft.  All companies I use, work with, or buy from.  I have filters for all of them.  More than one in fact.  Yet they keep coming.  Right there, in my inbox.  NOT in the folders I have carefully constructed to hold their chaff.  What the heck?

The longer I keep up this battle – I’m getting a much clearer picture of how many weeds I allowed to infest my mental garden.  If you only have room to hold 7 thoughts in your working memory, how can you afford to let 700 random ideas pollute your precious working mind?

This has been a crazy battle.  I’m wondering if I’ll ever win.  At least its down to 1 or 2 stupid new things a day, but I’m wondering if I can get it to zero.

Getting It Done With Focus! (Part 3)

Posted by on September 29, 2011 Comments Off

OmniFocus

I first bought OmniFocus 6 years ago when the OmniGroup first created it. I worked through all the Betas and bought it when it was released. I even got it for my iPhone. But the lack of syncing made it really hard to use. And Man… it was COMPLICATED!

But now… I believed I could make it work. First, OmniGroup had introduced their outstanding free sync service. What’s more, my weeks of using RTM had given me a system. Something to implement. I didn’t want ALL the bells and whistles of OmniFocus. Just one. Folders. I needed to start grouping my projects in a way that I could handle them.

As the scope of my planning grew from a few dozen tasks, to a few hundred, RTM got me over that hump. But when my planning threatened to jump to a few thousand tasks (seriously), I needed more. But why a few thousand?

I’m 45 years old. As much as I’ve tried to pair down, it is unbelievable how many projects I have accumulated. I don’t know what your house is like, but as I walk through mine, I see video games I haven’t finished. Books I mean to read. Pictures that need hanging. DVD’s I’d like to watch. And those are just my personal projects. Then there’s the house stuff, the family stuff – and I haven’t even scratched the surface of work yet.

If you really go through 10 years of accumulated “stuff”, you might be surprised how many “projects” you’ve accumulated. Once I had success managing a few projects, I wanted to do more. And I still have not captured everything weighing on me. My life is fenced in by guilt. I see it in every corner of the house. The storage closet that’s full of broken head phones and cast off sun glasses. Boxes of pictures that need organizing. The Laptops under my desk that – well hell, they should be worth something right? Oh yeah and Linux is cool. I should be able to do something with that.

It’s simply overwhelming… and it’s there. Where I can see it. A daily reminder of failure. A pile of incompetence. Guilt, guilt, guilt. Get to me, get to me, get to me. Argh!

No wonder my brain feels overloaded. How can it possibly remember all this stuff? The answer is it can’t. And it shouldn’t try. But I need a system that CAN hold it all, so I can systematically, relentlessly, progressively plow through all this crap and weed out what I AM going to do and what I am NEVER going to do. Enough waiting. As Yoda said, “Do. Or Do not.” He’s right. There is no try.

OmniFocus Ninja

So once I made the decision to work with OmniFocus, I sought out people who really had used OmniFocus to see if I could learn anything. And what I came across was gold by David Sparks, the genius behind Macsparky.com. David created a series of 3 videos called being an OmniFocus Ninja. The direct link to the three articles are:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

David pointed out some REALLY useful tricks. Among them…

  • Don’t use Due Dates! Use Start Dates to move tasks into the future.
  • Use perspectives to create reports and views to really focus
  • Use Dragon Diction on the iPhone to dictate todo’s
  • Use MailPlane for gmail integration. There’s a brilliant clipping plugin and suddenly my gmail acts like my Mac Mail.

That last tip was HUGE for me. Why? Because it finally allowed me to get my inboxes at home and work to ZERO. How did I do that?

Step 1: Create filters for all the automated emails you get.

I mean, this is stuff I’m interested in or care about. But it hijacks my attention every time I go into my email. So I want those things to go into folders where I can view them at my discretion. Much to my chagrin, my supposedly 7 automated emails… turned into nearly 70 categories of newsletters, notifications, and ads. This doesn’t even include receipts (I want to see those. If I spend money I figure I better pay attention).
Guess what. My work email was the same! So a HUGE chunk of my inboxes got cleared out, and stayed cleared out.

Step 2: Start clipping into OF

The key here is that if an email requires an action, then I can clip a link to the email into OmniFocus for follow up. And sure enough, many email relate to projects I’m working on. This handily little thing really dramatically changed how I viewed my inbox. Suddenly I wasn’t relying on my inbox to remind me of things I needed to do, or remember (like the piles of unfinished detritus scattered about my home). Things I need to remember are in OmniFocus. Things I need to FILE go into Evernote.

Step 3: File Emails into their proper Folders

Once I’ve touched an email, I file it. Or Delete it. But there’s NO REASON to leave it in my inbox. It’s either something I need to do, file, or delete. Those are the only options. At home it took me about a day to get to Zero because for the most part I was on top of everything, I just needed to pair down the inbox of read but un-acted on emails.

Work was a lot harder, because I got in the habit of ignoring it. I had 800 unread emails in my inbox. Well after running 70 odd filters to get rid of the automated mails, and then dumping anything and everything more than 60 days old – I mean really, what the heck do you say to someone you haven’t talked to in two months? – I got down to 50. Then a few days later 40, then back up to 60, then down to 30, and finally by Monday I got down to zero.

Step 4: The Daily Battle

Some days I get 20 emails or more in each email box! That’s when plowing through stuff is hard. But I can use my GTD rules. Send to my Task Manager (OmniFocus), File it, Delete it. That’s it. Of course, I can choose to act on an email with a reply, or some other quick action and then just get rid of it. But on the whole, I try to stick to the discipline of not leaving things lurking around.

Getting It Done With Milk? (Part 2)

Posted by on September 22, 2011 Comments Off

Starting GTD in RTM

Like I said in my previous entry, I’d tried to get into GTD before, and I’d even used RTM to try it. It’s really nifty how you can share tasks with another person. However, without a real system to use it, it always died on the vine. Sometimes you just need someone else to show you the way. And This time however, I had an approach and I started small. The general idea was to just focus on my personal life, and slowly but surely start to integrate the things I needed.

First off, I found this excellent blog on implementing GTD with RTM. That was a great start.

I would use Tags and smart searches to create the functionality I needed. Each project would be a list, and I would tag each action with a context. Then, I would create a smart search for each context – these were dynamic lists. The key to making RTM work initially was the idea to keep the context tags simple (web, calls, errands) and likewise I had a few stock lists to dump stuff into (ps-Daily, wk-Daily, ps-Someday, wk-Someday). If you start with those, it’s shocking how much stuff you can get done.

Then, for projects (despite RTM not explicitly handling projects), you make a list then I would prepend each list with a letter to indicate what it was. [P] for a project list, and [L] For a check list. I realized that I could use RTM to hold my check lists. Another thing that I think is really important and many, many ToDo apps have no clue how important this is to staying organized. Despite the fact that they have the ability to handle creating lists of things with check boxes, they don’t seem to grasp the significance to difference between a Task List and a Check List.

But I digress. Sufficient to say that I find it tremendously useful to have lists of items I can check off when I am trying to complete tasks. My sorry old soggy brain can’t remember very many details. In fact, it reminds of something I heard in college. I had a classmate who posited the “Conservation of Stupidity”. He argued that we all must carry a finite amount of ignorance around us our entire lives, so as we learn new things we have to jettison old things.

So I got into the GTD dance with Remember The Milk. And it worked really well.

RTM Strengths

Like I said, with RTM you really can enter new tasks FAST. Their short cuts make it simple to capture a lot of information with your keyboard. And being able to save intelligent searches effectively made RTM a nifty database for tasks. If I could organize my projects by step, then use the search to display reports by Context. I could make it work! And it did.

RTM Weaknesses

However, RTM does has it’s limitations. The more I used the tool, the more unwieldy it became. First, list management is a pain. It’s part of the Settings, not really part of the task management process. And as I started to follow the true GTD process… capturing everything, I mean ALL of my projects and lists… I discovered that the number of lists became unmanageable. Suddenly I had 5 rows of Lists, projects, and context view reports. Just trying to find the thing I was looking for became a chore. I needed something more. And trying to use Due Dates a surrogate for Start Dates created another problem. How did I really know what was due? I ended up with lots, and lots of badges warning me that I was LATE.

A really good task management system should reduce stress, not increase it with artificial warnings. I needed another tool.

I was ready to step up to some heavy duty planning tool.

Enter OmniFocus

Getting It Done… Again?

Posted by on September 15, 2011 Comments Off

Okay, it was about a month ago that I got back on the GTD train. I’m not exactly sure what caused it, but I think was really starting to feel overwhelmed and I had a number of personal projects that were driving me crazy. Strangely I was being pretty productive with my coding projects, but stunningly ineffective with everything else and the stress was getting to me.

Now this is probably my third trip to the GTD dance. I first learned about it 6 years ago, and I thought it was the bees knees. But the incredible attention to detail usually overwhelmed me and I’d give up. But then life would completely overwhelm me and I would come back to it. So this time, instead of being completely doe-eyed that I’d convert everything I started small.

So I started in my personal life. And I started to go through all the todo apps I’d started to collect. I realized that perhaps some software had advanced since I’d last taken a tour through the world of todo apps.

What I needed (or wanted) was something that would let me enter tasks on my Mac, then take them with me on my iPhone. If there was an iPad version that was a bonus. But the goal was to be able to quickly capture information with a full sized keyboard, access to online resources, and then be able to take those lists of tasks with me where ever I went.

I knew the one important thing about Getting Things Done, was that I needed contexts. The ability to look at my tasks from a different point of view. In fact from a very specific point of view, the environment or context by which they would be executed. Having two points of view was critical to effective GTD for me.

The other thing I really wanted was the ability to set a start date for my tasks. One of the best, but hardest to implement ideas I found in GTD was the idea of the tickler file. You stick tasks you can’t act on yet into a future folder. That way you don’t have to think about it until the task comes into a time frame when you can actually do something about it.

For example, every two weeks I have to open the flood valve in our back yard to irrigate our lawn. I want to be reminded the day before but I don’t want to see that reminder in my to-do list every day. Or perhaps there a BluRay movie I want to buy. It won’t go on sale for a few weeks, and it doesn’t really matter which day I buy it, but I don’t want it to show up on my BestBuy shopping list until I can actually buy it. I love start dates. Very few systems seem to support them.

I think it’s important to point out that a start date is not a due date. A due date is something that REALLY has to be done by a certain day. Things like this probably really belong on a calendar, but if you have to complete a task by a certain date (like turn in a homework assignment) having it in your daily tasks is better than sticking it on a calendar in the future where you may forget about it.

The key difference is that a start date constrains WHEN you can act on a task (and when it takes up precious room in your brain) and a due date constrains when a task MUST be completed. After watching an excellent video series by David Sparks of Macsparky.com, I now rarely use due dates. I employ start dates religiously to help manage my mental load of what I’m going to get done and when.

So, where to start?

To Do Apps

I’m looking for todo apps with a Mac client, and an iPhone app. A web based client is okay, as long as it’s easy to use and quick. The apps I looked at were:

Things
Toodledo
Remember The Milk
ToDo
Get It Done

Initially, I completely discounted OmniFocus as being way too complex and expensive. Ironic, as in the end that is the tool I use daily. But I’ll get to that.

What worked what didn’t

Things – I love the look of things, it’s simplicity, and the power of tagging. What absolutely kills things is the lack of syncing. While I can sync between home and work – oh yeah, another critical requirement. Their syncing between iPhone and mac is atrocious. They really need a syncing solution and they don’t appear to be working on one. Plus it’s expensive. Boo Things.

Toodledo – Was absolutely one of the best solutions I looked at. While they don’t have a desktop client, their website in general is excellent and they supported all the features I wanted. Except, their syncing with the iPhone just didn’t work. If you created a project on the web, it didn’t show up on the iPhone and changes on the iPhone didn’t sync back to the web. It was crazy. What’s more, they had SO MANY options for each task, entering tasks on the web felt clumsy. Despite Toodledo’s great features, I can’t use something if it doesn’t work and the sync killed it for me. Rats Toodledo

ToDo and GetItDone Looked promising. I didn’t like GetItDone’s $40 a year subscription fee. I’ve had OmniFocus for 5 years. At $40 a year, would be like spending $200 for an app. Heck, I don’t like paying that for Office. I’m not paying that for a task manager. ToDo looked promising but was slow.

Remember The Milk The winner for me was Remember the Milk. Bar none it had absolutely the fastest mechanism for entering tasks (capture is important) and it was simple. There was an outstanding blog post by a user who explained how he used RTM for GTD and that gave me the handle I needed to start using it. The iPhone syncing worked flawlessly and once I got the idea down I could begin using it.

Next… How I started with RTM.

Rangers win. Seeded 5th

Posted by on August 2, 2011 No comments

The Chandler Rangers defeated the CT Goose’s Gamers this morning 11-0 in 5 innings. The win left the Rangers with a mark of 2-1 at the end of 3 days if pool play and seeded 5th in the D-Bracket.

They play the South Ohio Tomahawks tomorrow at 8:00AM EST.

I pray I cam wake up early enough to score cast that!

I hope everyone has been enjoying the game updates.