Archive for May, 2005

Finally. Since the Tiger upgrade, I haven’t been able to down­load any pod­casts using iPod­derX due to soem error. They just released ver­sion 3 which offers disk use man­age­ment, iPhoto inte­gra­tion, playlist cre­ation and more. I’ll have to take a look.

Apart being cut off from the audio part of our beloved inter­web (and not hav­ing time or energy to find another setup), sev­eral things annoyed me about the errors caused by the Tiger-upgrade.

While post­ing stuff about the upcom­ing 3.0-release, the guys at iPod­derX didn’t want to post about the Tiger-trouble. This could, how­ever, be found at the sup­port forum, which is all nice and fine, but no way am I gonna signup to voice that I — also — have prob­lems. It’s not a tool the same way, say, Mov­able­Type or Word­Press is a tool. It’s a piece of soft­ware that should work. And while I have all kinds of respect for soft­ware devel­op­ers, more than three weeks of non-functioning podcast-downloading is a bit too long for my liking.

I’m not ask­ing much. Just a decent update on what’s going on. Some peo­ple had luck doing lit­tle tricks found in the forum to get their soft­ware to work. For us not that lucky, well…

And don’t get me wrong. I can eas­ily under­stand why you don’t wanna spend time fix­ing stuff when you have a new ver­sion com­ing up. But either push the beta to the cus­tomers who have trou­ble or com­mu­ni­cate a bit clearer.

And now: Head­phones on, pod­casts in, iPod­derX doing over­time suck­ing the fat pipe.

Vester­bro Bymu­seum har for nylig lanceret Vester­bro Site — seks audiowalks på Vesterbro. 

Seks unge for­fat­tere og kun­st­nere tager pub­likum med ud på en audiowalk rundt på Vester­bros gader og stræder. Det sker med en MP3-afspiller og et sæt høretele­foner som ledsager. 

Per­son­lige guides gen­nem tider og steder fra en lånt MP3-afspiller. Eller: Down­load fil­erne selv fra Flamin­go­ef­fek­ten. Jeg sid­der i skrivende stund lige over for bymuseet, hvor starten går, så mon ikke man kunne finde plads på sin iPod og gå en omvej hjem…

So, GTD — after Dave Allens book — is all the rage, and has been for some time now. It’s the anal, hack­ing approach to your own life; how to tweak your setup to deal with the flow of stuff, know what to do and not to do, all to make you more pro­duc­tive and relaxed about tak­ing time off. Fit­ter, happier…

GTD-fans will already know about 43Folders and the 43FoldersWiki (pro­duc­tiv­ity OSX hints, yes yes), To-Done (which at time of writ­ing has some advice on being a more pro­duc­tive blog­ger, how about that) and sev­eral other related sites are start­ing to shoot up.

In short, GTD is very much about man­ag­ing incom­ing stuff; get­ting it done at once, del­e­gated or put some­where where you’ll come back and do some­thing about it. Define what’s the next phys­i­cal action for any given task and you’re good to go. It takes a bit of setup and first of all quite some self-discipline as any­thing that doesn’t go into the sys­tem is pretty much des­tined to get lost — and thereby not done. It is pos­si­ble how­ever, to imple­ment some of it with­out going totally OCD.

Allen’s book, while a lit­tle self-help-book-ish (which is even more the rage), offers some decent ideas for man­ag­ing your flow, but — as it has been critized for else­where — some­what puts ‘online’, ‘at the com­puter’ etc. in seper­ate cat­e­gories from work­ing, not tak­ing fully into con­sid­er­a­tion that a lot of us basi­cally live out of our lap­tops, mak­ing this way of think­ing not quite accu­rate. Our ‘inbox’ pretty much is our inbox (who needs paper?) in the mail appli­ca­tion of choice, ‘online’ equals all work­ing hours just as ‘at the com­puter’ means ‘when we’re awake’. Most can be applied, though.

With the launch of OS X Tiger, more pos­si­bil­i­ties have come to play. Spot­light in addi­tion to Quick­sil­ver can do some good things to your setup.

So far, I’ve actu­ally just done what I should have done years ago; get­ting into the habit of emp­ty­ing my inbox, keep­ing proper lists of things to do etc. Don’t under­es­ti­mate the power of Delete. I have an Archive folder where ref­er­ence mate­ri­ale, stuff I might need later on, go and a Cur­rent folder for stuff that’s directly linked to next actions in projects. Newslet­ters (the very few left after the rss-revolution) get routed else­where, just as ongo­ing larger projects with heavy amounts of mate­r­ial have got­ten their own fold­ers for easy recov­ery. Incom­ing emails are being dealt with one way of the other — or deleted. 

For now, I’m try­ing to use iCal for to-dos; I put in the project name and the next action, addi­tional info goes in the com­ments. I try not to have more than about 30 things lined up and the lat­est ver­sion lets you drag things which is fine for priority-flagging. Impor­tant things go at the top. The list-functionality itself leaves a lot to be desired, but so far I like the fact that it’s bun­dled with my cal­en­dar where Base­camp–mile­stones are inte­grated. The lat­est ver­sion of iCal also offers nested cal­en­dars so I’ve got lots of color-coded cal­en­dars, grouped in biz, per­sonal, pet-project-like groups — the col­ors improve the read­abil­ity of the to-do a lot a well.

File-wise I’ve been run­ning a strict setup with regards to the plac­ing of client mate­r­ial. In addi­tion to that I’m try­ing out Spot­light tags in com­bi­na­tion with Smart­Fold­ers — it’ll let you tag doc­u­ments for easy Spotlight-recovery, so you can place your stuff whereever you feel like. Two Smart­Fold­ers on my desk­top keep track of a speci­fik project and the lat­est down­loaded pdf (I still have my Stuff-folder though). I need to get into the habit, but it might prove very use­ful with projects includ­ing mate­r­ial from other projects, per­sonal dodu­ments etc.

In addi­tion to iCal, I keep the Tickler-file as sug­gested by Allen; it lives out of my usual hier­achy of files but is easy acces­si­ble via Quick­sil­ver. You can append text to any file with­out open­ing it which is per­fect for tick­ling; you just wanna get the idea out of your head and into the com­puter. The trick is to actu­ally review the var­i­ous files you cre­ate this way. I still need to adjust to this.

As far as paper­based mate­r­ial go, I’m still a slug. If you’re into sta­tion­ary, there are lot of pro­duc­tiv­ity porn tricks out there and hon­estly: Who can resist the smooth sur­face of a manilla-envelope? It just breathes con­trolled, orga­nized well-being… Thing is, though, the whole ‘living-out-of-a-laptop’-deal makes me wanna get every­thing into dig­i­tal form which is fine for bills that need to be payed; a sim­ple to-do-entry and you’re good to go. It’s much worse with var­i­ous printed mat­ters that need review­ing, sign­ing or what­ever. A stack of paper trays will do for now, but I have a feel­ing that the mul­ti­ple stacks of…stuff…that’s sit­ting on my desks could be dealt with more effectively.

For project out­lin­ing, there’s Instiki run­ning locally, Base­camp takes care of the most impor­tant (client) to-dos and dead­lines, inte­grated into iCal, I track my hours directly in my online eco­nomic sys­tem which makes billing a breeze (and also means I never have to meet with my accoun­tant — that’s pro­duc­tiv­ity). I’m not hooked on reminders, if I end up that way, I guess my phone or iCal can han­dle that. 

I’m sure there’s some­thing I missed — and other things I should just start doing.

Update: Juri takes it one step fur­ther.

Dig­i­tal Web Mag­a­zine: End of the Agency

Of the 100 some com­pa­nies and web agen­cies (com­pa­nies that build web sites, if you don’t like the term ‘agency’) I know, I’d say about 1/2 of them are really just groups of free­lancers work­ing together to pro­duce beau­ti­ful inspir­ing designs with inno­v­a­tive func­tion­al­ity. The age of the web agency is ending. 

Yup, that’s how it is. It’s all about stay­ing flex­i­ble — with regards to cutomers and with regards to your­self hav­ing fun with your work.

From the Free Float­ing Fac­ulty:

PIRACY!
Under the theme PIRACY! We will dis­cuss file­shar­ing as a form of knowl­edge exchange and pro­duc­tion. We will dis­cuss the term piracy, not as in tak­ing to claim, but as in tak­ing to share and dis­trib­ute as talk about pirate media on the basis of the his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of the pirate radio Radio Mer­cur. We also invite the activist net­work Pirat­grup­pen to talk about their work and their fights with an out-datet leg­is­la­tion and to take part in a dis­cus­sion on file­shar­ing as a demo­c­ra­tic tool.
We will screen the movies Ski­bet er ladet Med…, a Dan­ish com­edy from the 1950ties about a pirate radio sta­tion assem­bling Radio Mer­cur, as well as the clas­sic Cap­tain Blood, star­ring Errol Flynn.
We are work­ing on pro­duc­ing PIRADIO at the Free Float­ing Fac­ulty in Chris­tian­shavn.
For this work­shop we will also use the venue Stub­nitz.

May 17th: We board the boat Stub­nitz to dis­cuss file­shar­ing and piracy…
Place: between “Lange­bro” and “Den Sorte Dia­mant”.
Time: 15.00 to 19.00 

The Huff­in­g­ton Post on the iTMS and for­mat trou­ble:

If he isn’t care­ful Bill Gates might just Beta­max him while the crowds cheer him on.

Post sum­mary: iTMS is just as evil as every­one else, gets credit for get­ting the ball rolling.

Jailed for a Song, skip­ping com­mer­cials should be con­sid­ered steal­ing. What a beau­ti­ful idea. It’s not just the usual “we’re afraid of being robbed now that we’re sit­ting with our last cen­tury busi­ness model and wait­ing to under­stand what’s going on out on the inter­web”. It’s a lot worse. It’s bul­ly­ing peo­ple into con­sum­ing your prod­uct as is. Can’t offer a rea­son­ably priced prod­uct with­out com­mer­cials? Fine, fig­ure some­thing else out. Insist on com­mer­cials? Fine, make them inter­est­ing and we’ll all still watch. But cut the legal crap, mkay? [via Keld Bach]

Ah, damnit. I’m never gonna keep my over­draft down… iTMS has launched. Insert usual yada-yada on the strange indie/electronica selec­tion avail­able. On the pos­i­tive side: Found a band called Gear­whore. I have no idea what it is — but I’m think­ing of adopt­ing it as a title..

I’m black. I’m female. And I like CSS too, bitches!

Indrøm­met, jeg er en kende skuf­fet over ikke at finde ‘ræv’ som en pro­duk­t­serie hos Oti­con.