Recent Reads

• In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
• Night Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko
• Making It All Work, David Allen
  
• Day Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko
• Perla la Loca (A Love & Rockets book), Jaime Hernandez
  
• Twilight Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko
• Last Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko

Scheduled Unreliability

This blog will be available on and off this weekend as I upgrade the server it's on.

Weekly Review

I just did my first proper, authentic, recommended "Weekly Review". It's got three steps:

1. Get current
2. Get clear
3. Get creative

For "get current", the idea is that I empty my inbox, clear my desktop and sweep through my head for ideas or nagging worries on the tip of my tongue. So, that way, everything in my system is up to date with reality.

"Get clear" means I go through my lists and check off everything that's been done, add things that need to be done. For the purposes of this step, "lists" includes my calendar. The longest part of this step for me is going through my list of seventy or so "outcomes" and making sure that each of them has a next action.

The final step is "get creative". To be honest, by the time I'm done with the first two, it is almost 6pm on a Friday afternoon and this is a mentally impossibility.

Maybe I should shift the whole process to a Monday morning. I'll write a note to give that a try in April.

Not for Lent

As part of a new lifestyle experiment, I've tweaked my router to block my laptop from all net access after 8pm.

The idea isn't to put a total ban on all nocturnal net activity, but rather to make a space for other things in my life. I'll still be available for scheduled calls and such, of course, but no unplanned activity.

I'll know if it works if I deng about less online, and become more focused in my evenings. I'll give the experiment a couple of months at least.

Pee Dee Ay

I'm really, really thinking of getting myself a smart phone. Something that I can carry around that has a good calendar, a good address book, a good todo list manager and a way to quickly make notes that I can easily process later.

Maybe it doesn't have to be a phone. Maybe it can be a separate device. I don't know.

I would get an iPhone, but I'm currently on a plan. The Android phone (marketed as HTC Dream in Australia) looks kind of cool, but... uhh... it doesn't look like I can buy one outright.

Whatever happened to owning things?

Busy

This weekend, I

• Flew over two thousand kilometres
• Met my newborn niece, Matilda
• Did six hours of supervised driving
• Got my accounting up to date
  
• Read Day Watch
• Read half of Real World Haskell
• Proved my infinite superiority at Sudoku

What did you do? :-P

Inexplicable Loss

Innervisions, by Stevie Wonder. I have no idea how I lost this album. All I know is that I feel this loss keenly.

If I had to guess, I'd say I lent it to someone.

Cracking good sermon

Last week, Paul preached on James 1:19-27. Shows what you can do in under half an hour.

It's addressed, naturally, to a church-going audience. Readers who aren't Christians might find it interesting, if not quite as affecting.

More movie reflections

• Transporter 3 is a much better film than Transporter 2.
• But the great thing about the first Transporter was its quirky originality.
• Wolverine looks better than any of the X-Men films, at least from the trailer.
• Will Nicolas Cage please stop?

Watchmen

I saw the trailer to Watchmen last night, and I have to admit that it looks pretty good.

However.

If you are capable of reading, I strongly urge you to read the book before the film comes out. This isn't Lord of the Rings, it's a graphic novel of under 400 pages. If you stick a copy in your bathroom you'll have it read inside a week.

Please.

Church

Great sermon tonight.

Am getting a little bit bored of being asked whether I'm new — it's been a year now.

Avoidable Losses

In the last twelve months, from memory:

• Broken ceramic soap dish
• Broken light shade
• Lost hotel key
• Lost credit card
  
• Lost power board
• Lost US adapter
• Waterlogged shoes
• Lost moleskine
• Shirt left in hotel room
• Lost wallet (found again, minus cash)
• Lost wiimote and wii nunchuck
• Missed flight to Hobart
  
• Fine for missing ticket in Berlin
• Fine for not repaying fine for missing ticket in Berlin
• Broken plunger

Principles of the American Cargo Cult

Principles of the American Cargo Cult: "An ugly image means a bad mirror".

I like this a lot. I don't think the "American" bit is particularly fair: this is common to most Anglo cultures, I think.

Thanks Paul!

Drag

I read a little bit of Making It All Work last night. The first few pages are way too self-important and religious-sounding, which makes GTD look even more like a cult than it did before. Reading it, I could hear Anthony Baxter shouting "It's just a todo list" in my ears.

One thing that stood out: drag. The opposite of flow. The thing that saps fun and life from creative endeavours. It's the garbage bin with the stuck lid, the test suite that takes thirty minutes to run, the blunt knife, the scratch on the DVD, the squeal of feedback during your talk.

Drag disrupts concentration and distracts you from the thing that you are aiming for. Like its physical namesake, it turns useful energy into wasteful heat.

Get rid of it.



(Ok, so it's pretty hard to write about this stuff and not sound cultish. Kool-aid anyone?)

What is school for?

Seth Godin has some ideas. What do you think?