Saw this on Paladin Schmaladin, I spent hours playing both games. Makes me want to go to my parents place and liberate the NES.

Thanks to my friends Tim and Jeanette, I now have my very own homicidal maniac plushy. A Dick on a stick!

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, head over to LFGComic and start reading.

Here are some followup notes for the LOPSA-Madison Time Management Round Table discussion.
(This was also sent to the mailing list)

Tools that we talked about:

Remind – Calendar

todo.sh – Task list

The books we had were:

“Getting Things Done” by David Allen

“Time Management for System Administrators” by Tom Limoncelli

Websites:

One of the websites we mentioned was 43folders. This has ceased to be the “Productivity Pr0n” that it used to be, but still contains lots of good information, tips, tricks and ideas. It may be easier to just start from the beginning of the blog and work your way forward to the present.

Inbox Zero Videos and info on the how and why of getting your inbox cleaned out.

LifeHacker Also a good productivity site and good source for ideas.

We also referenced back to Franklin Covey a few times.

Just remember, the best tools to get organized and keep on top of your tasks, projects and other commitments is the one that works for YOU. What anyone else does, while it may be helpful in showing what is available, may not always be what you need or want.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But if it is, diagnose it and get back on track.
The hardest thing about getting and then staying organized is the discipline to do whatever it is that you need to do, and do it every day.

---

Below are some shell functions and aliases that I use to make remind and todo.sh a little easier.
This should be able to be copied and pasted directly into a .bashrc

# GTD
alias t='~/bin/todo.sh -d ~/.GTD/todo.cfg'

# print out the todo list and 2 weeks of the calendar on login
echo " -- TODO --"
~/bin/todo.sh -d ~/.GTD/todo.cfg ls
echo ""
remind -w$(echo ${COLUMNS}) -c+2 ~/.GTD

# put the above in an alias
alias gtd='t ls;remind -w$(echo ${COLUMNS}) -c+2 ~/.GTD'

# my remind and todo.sh data files are stored in ~/.GTD and managed
# with subversion.
gtdcommit() {
    cd ~/.GTD
    svn commit -m 'auto commit'
    cd -
}

gtdupdate() {
    cd ~/.GTD
    svn up
    cd -
}

I finally bit the bullet and got an Audible.com account. This may have been a very bad thing for me to do. The first audiobook that I got was “Turn Coat” by Jim Butcher. Now I want to get all of “The Dresden Files” books in audio format. James Marsters reading was excellent.

Being able to “read” a book while working on things around the house, while running cat5 at work, on the drive to and from work…

There are quite a few books that I am looking forward to reading, including the Shannarra books by Terry Brooks. The real question is going to be if I can get by on 2 credits a month, or if I will end up buying more books than that.

I have been reading Wil Wheatons blog off and on for several years. His stories and things that interest him seemed to always be not quite what I expected. I was kind of thrilled to follow some of his tweets and see that he is a a Led Zepplin fan.

Then I saw a tweet a few minutes ago that he was putting a PDF version of his latest book up for sale for $5. I told myself, “Self, you should go buy that!”. Then I did a dumb thing. I went to his blog instead of following the link in his tweet.

There, was a post about an artist named Zoë Keating. There was a youtube video embedded, so I hit play. I totally forgot about the tea that I had just started steeping upstairs. Like 20 minutes later I finally went upstairs and got it. I spent those 20 minutes listening to the youtube video, then reading her website and blog, then going to iTunes and ordering both of her albums.

So now, I am going to sip my tea, listen to Zoe Keating, and hopefully make it back to Sunken Treasure.

In a tweet from LeoLaporte, he linked a blog post from Mark Zuckerberg where Mark explained that they were pulling the previous version of the ToS out of revision control and putting it back into place until they can come up with a better one. Way to go for public pressure and outcry!

I’ll be honest, until the recent discussion about the changes that facebook.com had made to the terms of service, I haven’t thought about it since I started using it. I won’t say since I signed up, because I did that initially with no plans to ever use it except to look at some pictures that a friend had posted there of his house.

Later on, a few other friends found me on facebook and so I started to slowly use it. Adding friends from High School that I had long ago lost touch with, even connecting up with someone that I went to gradeschool with! It was all kind of fun and exciting, creating links back to people that I just didn’t have the time or inclination or resources to track down before.

But now, with the changes to fb regarding content, I am unsure if I want to continue using it. As I look back at things I have done on fb, I discover that the main thing that I have been doing is just updating my status, and reading what friends are updating for their status messages. I don’t need fb for that. I have a blog. I also have a twitter account. With those two thoughts in my head, I have been kicking the idea around of either killing off fb entirely, not that they will delete the small amounts of content that I have put up or of just piping my twitter updates to it along with my blog posts and not going to facebook.com at all anymore. But would that be enough?

I know that it is too late to get the genie back into the lamp, I have far too much information on the intarwebs from mailing lists, old websites, et cetera. But I am trying to think more about what I put out there, even if I can’t un-ring the bell.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I do want to feel connected to people, even if it is in a superficial, in passing kind of way. I am on multiple IM networks, I am on IRC almost any time that I am awake. I check my email with the kind of compulsive habit that I wish I could apply to other parts of my life. And of course I also play World of Warcraft, which has a whole list of other people, blogs and forums that I “connect” with in some way.

After much thinking about it (I started this blog post several hours ago, then went to bed), trying not to be hypocritical or to jump on a somewhat popular bandwagon, I am going to keep my facebook account. I will just be little more careful about what I put on there, and most likely will try to integrate twitter and my blog into my life a little more.

After reading a blog post again that a … well, I can’t say we are friends anymore, it’s been a long long time since we had a meaningful conversation, lets call him a possible new-old friend. Anyway, he posted about using Blog RSS Feed Reader fb application, so I am going to follow his lead and see if it works for me.

I just watched “Bill Gates Unplugged” and I liked some of what I saw.
Having lived in Swaziland when I was a kid, malaria is more than just something I have read about. My father is a teacher right now in Public schools, so the issues that we have with our education programs in the USA is again, more than just something I have read about.

One of the things that Mr. Gates suggested was to use cameras in every classroom. On the one hand this sounds like a great idea, and I realize that there is little to no expectation of privacy in a classroom. However my fear is that once people get used to the idea of being “spied” upon, they will accept and even welcome, more and more scrutiny into their daily lives. That said, I am hard pressed to think of a more scalable way to accomplish what he suggests of having classroom content recorded and available for anyone to review.

I know several people, many of them teachers, will feel threatened by some of the ideas that Mr. Gates brings forth. Including that after three years of teaching there is little, to no improvement in a teachers ability. Or that having a Masters degree does not mean you are a better teacher.

I think I may have to have a chat with my dad about some of these ideas, since he is a teacher who has been doing this for more than three years and has a Masters degree.

The Setup:
“Gruber mentioned today that he contributed to The Setup on waferbaby. Cool idea—I love seeing how experts in the field do what they do…”
(Via The Weekly Review.)

So do I.

Since I have heard about Mr. Gruber from multiple sources, including Merlin Mann of 43folders.com fame, I decided to go check “The Setup” out.
Oh dear.
I found toys!

Caffiene keeps the display from going to sleep. Yay! I had been using a custom power profile and shoving the mouse all the way up in the top right hand corner to keep the screensaver from kicking in while watching Netflix “Watch Instantly”.

And because I was looking into mac software again, I decided to see if GnuPG for Apple Mail was updated yet… low and behold, it is!

Which lead to my next must have feature in a mail client, the ability to have multiple “identities” or at least From: addresses. A little more searching on the net and voila! Just have to add email addresses separated with a comma to the Accounts -> Email address field.
I can’t believe it is that simple.
Now if only this setup will be stable, I guess only time will tell.

I ran across this article, where a researcher has stepped up to say that there isn’t a link between violent video games and school shootings.
Duh.
You might as well try and say that Music is resp… oh wait, they tried that too.. ummm. Well, it must have been the movies… crap, they tried that too… I know TV… wait.. nevermind…

Why is it so hard for people to accept responsibility for their own actions? “The devil made me do it” hasn’t been a valid defense for a long, long time, but people seem to always be looking for something else to use as the new devil.