Getting things done (part II)

Well, turns out it's a year and a half since I unwisely announced that I was going to adopt the Getting Things Done system.

It didn't stick, but the situation didn't get any better. So now I'm having another go, concentrating just on my Gmail account, using the approach described in this article.

I've made a couple of changes - the filters don't depend on me being the sender, so I can send myself reminders from my work account, or Eva can send stuff straight into my action folders by using the right extended gmail addresses.

And I've set up a "Done" folder and filter so I can give myself a little pat on the back at the end of the day or of the week.

Will this work out any better than last time? Let's prepare for the worst and hope for the best...

Update: Just got a Zero Email Bounce on my gmail inbox, after bobbing along at 995+ for a week or more. Scott Hanselman refers to the "psychic weight" of having 1000 or more emails in your inbox - maybe the only way to understand what that phrase means is to feel it suddenly lifted from your shoulders - aaaaah!

Have to think about aiming for ZEB on Outlook at work - but Outlook 2003 isn't quite so helpful to this process as Gmail.

What was that?

I've been taking an interest in Erlang and wondering how suitable it would be for anyone launching a non-telecoms web project, so I was quite impressed by this strong endorsement yesterday from the co-founder of a start-up called MochiAds.

Naturally the next question you ask ourself is "how real is this company?" - so I did a double-take when I spotted this techcrunch post today, which seems to show them getting real traction even in private beta.

Nice to think that my technology hunches haven't gone totally rusty...

The other view

Well, after the somewhat negative tone of an earlier post commenting on a TechCrunch item, here's something to get your eyes on the horizon, your foot on the accelerator and your heart in gear.

To hear the following Teddy Roosevelt quote from someone with the entrepreneurial credentials of Yossi Vardi really adds something special:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Churchillian, I'd call that, except that Churchill was always better on matters of war than more subtle and pervasive issues like citizenship.

Johnny and Jake rock out

Improvement on a certain video - the "Dad-dancing" has been replaced with something cooler. Behold: Johnny on the deck, best friend Jake on the sofa!

Update: 2007-10-17 - got video link working
(video shareable under this CC licence)

Web 2.0 infrastructure and the start-up day-dreamer

I see that Powerset have just started publishing their business models, and "This first set helps a company that intends to index the web whether it is better to purchase, lease or create virtual servers on Amazon EC2."

Thinking of Amazon, they've announced FPS (Flexible Payment Services) to go with their S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud ). There's less and less excuse for the intrepid developer with a dream not to have a go.

Until you read this by the founder of hireahelper.com, in which he describes how he designed the entire site and spent $3,700 getting a friend of his in Pakistan to code it all.

So being a developer is now probably a handicap to anyone thinking of starting something up. Ruby Tuesday was right: "catch your dreams before they slip away".

parallel futures?

Great blog on What would you do with 80 cores? by Sean Koehl, an Intel researcher. This is one of my longer-lasting hobby-horses - I find the argument that we will eventually run out of steam on single processor architectures quite persuasive, and I would love to have a go at programming the 80-core teraflops research chip (is it as similar to the transputer in spirit as it appears to be?).

My hunch is that when and if explicitly parallel processing has taken off, the wave of change that this generates will open a window for optical computing, which has enormous potential for analogue and digital parallel processing.

In the mean time I'm learning Erlang as a background recreation - it's always good to give the grey-cells a work-out.

Republican virtues

I may not believe in God, but I can understand and respect the urge, in those who do, to seek his forgiveness for a serious sin. A touch of humility from those in power is always refreshing to the rest of us.

But passing on the news that you have in fact received not only your wife's but also God's forgiveness seems to me to reflect a slightly different virtue.

A stopped clock is right twice a day

I know a stopped clock is be right twice a day, and even my clothes may start looking fashionable about once a decade, but I've pretty well given up hope on my economic forecasting being proved right.

But if I'm going to get it wrong, I might as well get it wrong on the record and go down with all flags flying.

Evan Davis is worried about first quarter figures for UK real household incomes and savings.

And the boys have told us that they are planning to go back to Poland (once they've finished painting our new place, we trust) because Poland has is co-hosting the Euro 2012 football championship and no longer has enough workers to build the stadiums.

I think the property boom will be seriously over within six months. I've thought this for at least three years, and the market has made a liar of me for at least two and a half years, but let's make a prediction and see.

Waiting for the PRT wave, part II

An interesting Wired article on future engines - it seems that a surprising amount is happening here in the UK.

I've written before about my hunch that Personal Rapid Transport is a technology that may yet transform our worlds - my interest in this article is that some of the future engine technologies mentioned, such as the PMLFlightlink Wheelmotors in Hampshire, would appear to be highly suitable for PRT components such as ATS Ltd's Pod.

I suppose we also have to consider the possibility that electronic cars may be so successful that they kill the demand for PRT, thus leaving us with a second-best solution. Actually I could live with that, if the roads really were cleaned up and quietened down. But I don't think I will have to. Big developments like town centres, out-of-town shopping malls, airports and campuses are built using scarce resources, for specific purposes. Wasting money and space on road surface and parking has only ever been the price paid for efficient and flexible access. If and when a better alternative can be demonstrated to exist, then I believe it will be adopted - and rapidly.

On Ian McEwan

The advantage of a sleepless toddler is perhaps the unexpected reading opportunity - so started and finished On Chesil Beach between 4-something and almost-7 this morning.

It's a short book (166 pages) and given the apparently small focus of the narrative - a young couple on their wedding night in 1962, both virgins, both nervous - it's surprisingly gripping. This is perhaps a measure (perhaps intended) of the author's accomplishment, as is a hinted-at matter in her background which he confidently leaves un-explicated.

I can't help wondering if the title is also intended to be a reminder of the poem that lies, un-named, like the subject of a riddle, at the heart of the both the plot and themes of his last work, Saturday.

Is this kind of business a compliment to the reader's intelligence, or just a smug re-working of Mornington Crescent? I don't know, but I can see how tempting it is.

Revenge of the Zimmers

A band of OAPs with a combined age of over 3,000 have recorded The Who's "My Generation" for BBC 2's Power to the People programme, which I look forward to watching tonight at 9 o'clock.

The video is amusing and moving, and has created a massive stir. And if you feel that a 90-year old singing "hope I die before I get old" is in dodgy taste, try and remember how you felt the first time you heard Bono's "tonight thank God it's them instead of you". There are more important things to feel uncomfortable about - that's the point of this exercise.

It makes me proud to be a BBC licence payer. If not so proud of being part of a society that regards our elderly as an embarrassing expense.

Silent protest

Robert Scoble, the blogger I've followed longest, is going silent for a week in protest at the attacks on Kathy Sierra.

What has our internet come to?

Don't imagine anyone will notice, but I'm following suit. It seems kind of pointless, but less pointless than anything else I can do.

Third time lucky

I took Johnny to the swimming pool at the Brixton Recreation Centre for one more try after two unsuccessful visits, where despite his love of bathwater he'd clearly found the whole swimming pool environment rather alarming.

Unlike our first visit the training pool was open this time, albeit after a ten minute wait for a lifeguard to appear. This is good - it's warm and has metre-wide, shallow steps going into it, perfect for aquatic toddlers to get used to the water. But Johnny wasn't impressed by any of this, and when I tried to lower his feet into the water he scrambled up my tum until he was clinging limpet-like to my shoulder.

I was almost ready to give up when I had the ridiculous idea that maybe I could get him used to the water without prising him off my shoulder, so I lowered myself onto my back with my head and left shoulder sufficiently raised to stop either of us from drowning, and waited for him to get bored. Jake's mum Melissa waded by and helpfully did a bit of splashing for Johnny, then he did some splashing with his hand, then he sat up on my chest and did some kick-splashing, and at last he slid off and waded around the knee-high top step.

With trumpets playing fanfares in my head, I lent him my hand to step out of the pool and back again, and then for stepping onto the waist-height second step and back a few times. Finally, when I was all ready to quit while we were ahead, he decided to step down to third step -up to his chest - and up again.

Two very satisfied individuals left that pool with smiles on their faces, one of them with his head full of notions about the importance of combining logic with spontaneity - until a post-pool Melissa punctured it all with her observation that we had made a fine sight, Johnny on me, me on my back, like the ship's cat on an upturned hull.

In praise of Babytype

My favourite new utility is Babytype, which makes your computer into a wonderful baby-proof activity centre - every key pressed pops up an image and makes an entertaining noise, rather than sending emails to employers and old flames or reformatting the hard disk.

The only flaw was that I kept having to dive across the sitting room to start Babytype whenever Johnny approached the keyboard, which he can now just reach. So I asked Raize software if it could be turned into a screensaver, and got the following helpful answer:

First, you need to go to the directory where you installed BabyType. The default location is "C:\Program Files\Raize\BabyType." In this directory, you will find several files. One of the files is named "BabyType.exe".

Select the BabyType.exe and then select the Edit|Copy menu item. The select the Edit|Paste menu item. This will create a copy of the file which will be named: "Copy of BabyType.exe".

Next, select the File|Rename menu item and change the name to: BabyType.scr

Then finally, select the File|Install menu item and Windows will install the program as a screen saver.

I would like to say that this works perfectly, that the sitting room PC is now goes into Babytype after 5 minutes without use, and that the reply was sent on Saturday night, which is pretty damn impressive for a product that currently costs a mere $19.

Great product, great attitude. Thanks!

Of Barbies and burqas

Interesting comment by Ophelia Benson on what religious fundamentalism and the commercial sexualisation of ever-younger girls have in common. Have I become a feminist without realising it?

Of course, the complexity always seems to re-emerge under a different bit of the carpet. Even at eighteen months we see our firstborn as "all boy". Naturally we both hope for him to grow into a happy and fulfilled man, so maybe we take even more pleasure in those sides of his character which we hope will help him become an alpha male (such as the fearlessness and joy with which he clambers up his cot and somersaults over the edge onto the sofa) than we would if he was a girl.

And marriage itself teaches you a lot (especially those innocents who've never lived with a partner before) about the reality of the differences of the sexes. But then it teaches you a whole lot about the realities of individual difference, and about adjusting to them.

As with religion, I think I respect sexual difference because it's an indivisible property of individuals - it's when you turn that around that things seem to start going wrong.

Adventures in Johnnycare

Eva's doing an online test for her OU course in accounting today, so I've taken the day off to look after Johnny. After a pizza at Franco's in the Brixton Arcade (officially called Eco nowadays, but us old-timers like the old name) it started raining, so I took him to Adventure World in the Brixton Rec.

Adventure World is great - a safely padded three-dimensional maze of slides and ball-pits, ramps and rope-bridges. So in we go, happily chasing each other round until we find ourselves going down a ramp. Johnny's technique is rudimentary - he basically goes spread-eagled and slides down until one foot hits a padded rung, at which point he starts spinning until he hits the next one. He stops half-way down, turns his face up, opens his mouth, and "Waaah!"

Well, he knows he's stuck but he isn't in full meltdown yet, so I lift him by both hands and let him slide until both feet are square on the next rung. Down goes his bottom, up go the feet and he slides to the next rung, and so on all the way down. Have I traumatised him? He immediately heads down the next ramp, this time just holding my wrist with one hand as he confidently bum-slides all the way down.

Ah, the magic and rewards of having a toddler - the growth in skills, the growth in confidence - and it's pretty cool seeing Johnny learn stuff too.

Culture wars - is there still a fence to sit on?

It seems to me that you can have respect for individuals or respect for cultures, but these will inevitably lead to contradictions at some point, and that if and when the contradictions become serious enough you have to start making choices.

This article and, of the debate that it kicked off, this supporting piece by Turkish German author Necla Kelek, persuades me of the case for valuing respect for the individual above respect for culture.

Thanks to ButterfliesAndWheels for the link

The semantic web - no longer a pipe-dream?

Let me be rash - I've just had my first look at Yahoo pipes and I think this will prove a major milestone in the evolution of the web. I believe that the semantic web is appearing under our noses, not as the result of the ontologies and predicate reasoning that I used to imagine would be involved, but through a rapid evolution of bottom-up folksonomies and strength-off-association relationships, which in fact are a better fit to the loose-fit metaphorical reasoning we actually use in practice.

I'm too tired and coffee-wired and busy right now to write my own pipe - but I'll be doing it as soon as work and domestic circumstances permit.

Sometimes progress is progress

I've been chatting with a fellow-commuter on the Hampton Wick train, Caroline from Stylish Resorts, for a few years now, and it's pretty obvious that she really cares about the service they give to their clients going out to the Seychelles (where she comes from), Mauritius and Dubai.

Old-fashioned, personal service, you might think - just the kind of thing that is being destroyed by impersonal modern technology?

Well, Web 2.0 just caught up with Caroline - one of her clients gave her a rave review on a tripadvisor.com forum, some of her other clients joined in the fan club, and now her phone is melting down faster than a cocktail ice cube on an Indian Ocean beach. She didn't know where the new callers were coming from at first, but soon discovered not only what tripadvisor.com is, but also that their forum readers were more likely to conclude a deal than the regular callers. She also discovered that the competition were reading there too - or at least the competitions' headhunters.

Speaking as a techno-optimist, it's nice to see the dream materialising for once, and so close to home. I just thought I'd share the good news.

Francis finds Flickr

Finally started posting some of my snaps - I'm particularly fond of this one of Johnny on a swing which is one of those lucky snaps which just works. And when I say luck, it really was more fluke than judgement - my little Dimage X60 has a lag of around a second, so to get him mid-swing I had to press the button when he was just approaching the highest point and then pan hopefully as he swung forward again!

An old-timer returns

Two weekends ago my friend and former neighbour Beatrice came from King's Lynn to visit us here in Brixton - she bought well-chosen presents for Johnny and we all went to Franco's (as we old-timers call Eco) for some serious pizza, followed by a trip to the British Museum for their Byzantine money exhibition and some Greek and Roman glass.

I'd just like to report that the nice yellow flowers Beatrice bought are, to my astonishment, still blooming in their bowl by the window.

Coping with the Web

Two excellent links which reduced the gloom of starting yet another Monday morning at my desk - first, an article on Forbes magazine (from an ad in gmail - shaming naivete or sohisticated support for the Web 2.0 business model of a valued service?) Beware of Infomania - the point is not so much the common-sense tips as a couple of brilliant quotes:

The Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London conducted clinical trials with volunteer office workers to measure how a constant flow of messages and information affects a person's ability to focus on problem-solving tasks.

Participants were asked first to work in a quiet environment, and then while being inundated with e-mail, instant messaging and phone calls. Although they were told not to respond to messages, researchers found their subjects' attention was significantly disturbed.

Instead of boosting productivity, the constant data stream seriously reduced the volunteers' ability to focus. The study reported that an average worker's functioning IQ falls 10 points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming e-mails, more than twice the four-point drop seen following a 2002 Carleton University study on the impact of smoking marijuana.

and

Professor Hugh Heclo of George Mason University observes: "In the long run, excesses of technology means that the comparative advantage shifts from those with information glut to those with ordered knowledge, from those who can process vast amount of throughput to those who can explain what is worth knowing, and why."

which I think does rather illuminate the problem.

The second link, from the Juice Analytics blog, talks about the other side of the same coin - what to do with all this information, and they link to the amazing We Feel Fine project. All I can say is, load it and see for yourself.

Chinese activist "Beat himself up" - whatever next?

This could be farcical if Fu Xiancai hadn't been beaten up so badly - when returning home after being summoned by the police - that three vertebrae in his neck were broken, and he is unlikely ever to walk again.

His issue? He campaigned for people displaced by the Three Gorges dam. In effect he was hindering economic progress in the name of human rights - the property rights, presumably, of people to their homes and farms.

At the end of the 19th century The Economist famously forecast that the USA would overtake the UK as the world's leading economy in the next century. The equivalent forecast now is that China will overtake the USA in this century. It's hard to view this with quite the same degree of equanimity.

Whatever you might think of US conduct in Guantanomo (and I think it has undermined both the reputation of the US and respect for international law) and of the invasion of Iraq (and I went on two demonstrations to express my views on that) the fact is that having the USA as the world's greatest economy did, at least, show that being a society based on democracy, free speech and individual rights was compatible with economic growth and national success despite the temptation for incompetent and corrupt governments everywhere to argue otherwise.

Until or unless China is mature enough to have evolved a system of law which protects its citizens and their rights, I'm pinning my hopes that less-hyped dark horse in the economic growth stakes, India. What's more, I'll bet that if India does succeed in outgrowing China, it will be because of the greater social stability and freedom from expropriation provided by a free press and the rules of law, not despite it.

Poetry and science

Came across this quote from my favourite poet, Philip Larkin, in The Week (itself quoting The Independent)

I search myself for illusions like a monkey looking for fleas.

Two days later I found myself browsing Edward Tufte on the Columbia disaster, where he quotes Richard Feynman's famous (and, it apears, sadly ignored) conclusion to his appendix to the Challenger commission report

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Just one of those pleasing coincidences.

This morning

I checked that Johnny was still cuddled up to Mr Monkey in his cot in the sitting room, and had a bath. Pulled on some clothes and went back in to the sitting room, have a look into the cot. Johnny's now wide awake, giving me his usual big smile from the bottom of the cot, both arms stretched out. As soon as his shoulders are off the sheet he straightens his back and legs to get on to his feet as soon as possible - this is new in the last couple of days, he's so keen on being vertical that he'll pretty well refuse to sit down or lie down. He sits in my left arm as I pull back the curtains. It's a London kind of day, nothing special, a bit grey, but as usual we inspect the world quietly for a bit, cheek by cheek. I like the way that someone normally so full of beans can appreciate the quiet moments too. Then it's time to switch on the radio (without letting Johnny grab the remote control), change a well-filled nappy, feed him, chuck him in bed with his sleepy mother, and head off to Brixton tube station.

Why am I writing this here? In case I should ever forget.