William Reardon’s Blog

After reading about TRACKS on Marc’s blog, I decided to get it a go. About using it for a few weeks, I’m really happy with it.

Like next action, it’s based on the David Allen’s time management philosophy, Getting Things Done. I really liked nextaction at first, but on a Mac, it just became wayyyyyy too slow after adding something like 75 actions. It got to where it would take ~30 seconds to save after adding an action. Add actions have to be easy & painless, otherwise you’ll start to avoid entering them, so that simply won’t do. (Based on the boards, people on Windows don’t have this problem however.)

I’ve also found that being able to access my list from any computer trumps having a local file (and being able to modify when I don’t have network access). I use multiple computers during the day, so that’s not too surprising. Hopefully next action will continue to evolve — it’s a great piece of software — but for now I’m sticking with TRACKS.

My mom let me know that my aunt’s obituary was in the local paper yesterday. While she officially passed over the weekend, we knew late last week it was inevitable.

Rest in peace, Aunt Barbara. You’ll be missed.

Never, before in my life history, have I been so excited about the prospect of doing laundry.

The dryer for my apartment has been on its death kneel for sometime, two months at least. It went to being able to do a half load of laundry to few jeans to a few shirts to finally where it won’t even tumble empty. I played a game of chicken with the other residents, hoping one of them would call the landlord to have it fixed first (and deal with the hassle of having to be at the unit to have it repaired, etc.) but eventually I caved. I had to.

The laundry situation started to get really desperate. Hanging up clothes to dry will do in a pinch, but is clearly not a good long-term strategy. They get way too stiff and uncomfortable. Don’t ask me how they did it on Little House of the Prairie — maybe fabric softner is like tivo: once you know life with it, you can’t go back.

This past weekend it got bad enough that I had to hunt down a coin-op facility. Not an easy task in southwest Pasadena. All the places listed under “laundromat” in a 2 mile radius of my house where the dry cleaner type. Most where closed and the few that where open, wouldn’t be able to get me my clothes back before Monday. I gave in and ventured (*gasp*) north of the 210.

I’ve been on a minimal life-support type support system, hauling only the minimal amount of laundry I felt necessary, but now I can tackle the mountain of dirty clothes in my room. Yes, once again I shall see the floor.

Between the dryer breaking & the garbage disposal, I went through a bit of a Lord of the Flies moment. Yes, I mean that both as an allusion and literally. I started to wear shirts I hadn’t in years on the weekend so I could wear the good tshirts to work. With the garbage disposal broken, I couldn’t run the dishwasher either… meaning the dirty dishes started to pile up. Until they were all used. All of them.

Anyway, it’s good to be back in civilized life. Or at least at close to it as I’ve ever gotten.

A big problem with search engines is that it’s hard clarify on what you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for C++ class to parse RSS it’s difficult (if not impossible) to distinguish that from various blogs, forums, etc. about C++ with an RSS feed.

To the grizzly bear that ate Timothy Treadwell:

Thank You.

Cattle of the world, you have meet your foe and it is me.

To thank the guys for all the hardwork they’ve been doing, yesterday the group and I headed out to Fogo de Chao. Marc took a photo to document the glourious consumption.

Holy crap did I hurt myself. I’m not sure where, but somewhere out there are a few homeless calves wondering where momma & dadda are. In my stomach, that’s where.

Much like the location in Chicago, the one in Beverly Hills is excellent. Having been to a few other brazillian steak houses, I’ve learned the secret of Fogo isn’t the endless waves of meat alone — with Fogo it’s also very much the quality. The filet migon wrapped out in bacon continues to be my favorite, although there’s now a close second, the garlic beef. So good.

Sitting by Ken was a boon: He likes well done & I prefer medium-rare. Combined, there wasn’t a steak we couldn’t eat.

After a two day trip to northern California, I’m back home.

A word of advice, stay away from the Santa Clara Westin. The free wireless was so erratic I couldn’t stay on the VPN to check my work email from there and they botched an 8am wake call this morning.

Grah.

Is there a simple script out there that you can point at an apache access log and find out how many unique subscribers you have? I can’t imagine it’s too difficult (maybe tedious to figure out all the little quicks, but not difficult), but Yahoo’ing (damn, do we need a better verb for searching Yahoo) didn’t turn anything up. (I even tried using that other search engine.)

I figured I’d ask before trying to write something myself.

I just paid $10 for a small tin of cashews. There’s only two places on the planet where something like cashews could go for $10: an airport & a hotel. If you guessed that I’m in a hotel, you sir, have just won the grand prize.

I don’t feel too bad. I almost opened one of the $5 bottle of water just because I was so damn thirsty and got tired of going & back for to fill a tiny hotel glass from the sink. However, I realized an easier solution was just fill the coffee pot with water & use that as a water pitcher. Figure that $5 saved knocks half the price of the cost of cashews, and suddenly it ain’t such a bad deal after all. (Especially when you’re starving.)

Tomorrow I’m going to head off to the SES conference in the morning. There a few mornings sessions on Blogs & RSS that should be interesting. This is my first non-geek conference (read OSCON) so it’ll be interesting to see how publishers & marketers are thinking about the whole blogsphere. Always good to hear what your customers have to say.

Over on the Yahoo! Search Blog, Will has the announcement of the YPN Beta!

w00t!