While following some links and websites on the net, I ran across this video clip entitled “Don’t talk to the police”, everyone should watch this video.

On my way back to the office this morning, I decided to stop and take a picture of the sunrise over the lake. I missed catching the morning mist due to having to make a U turn and find a place to park first. Oh well.

I also managed to shoot this at 1600 instead of 200. My own fault for not checking it and not setting it back to 200 after getting some hummingbird pictures a couple days ago.

Even with all of those “issues”, I still like this picture though. It’s peaceful.

As we went to bed yesterday, $wife was rubbing her arms and legs all over me trying to warm up. I said, “Just call me Jungle Jim.”.
She stopped, sat up and said “What?”.
“It felt like you were climbing all over me.”, I said.

She told me to post this.

Friday night I had dinner with family and some friends that I had not seen for a long time. Two of them I find out are in the process of writing a book. One other person that was supposed to be there but couldn’t be due a prior engagement, is also starting to write a book.

This got me to thinking. Not about myself writing a book, I know I don’t have a story that I want to tell that way. But just about writing. The process of it, the drive to do it. All three of these individuals can be very highly motivated and VERY creative. Not the single dimensional creativity that many people display from time to time. The world changing creativity that they bring to every aspect of everything they do.

All three are entrepreneurs, or have been at some time in the past. All three have a technical bent of some kind. (To be honest one is more of a technical pretzel, his interests and projects look more like a sick form of the game Twister than anything else.)

I find myself wanting to read whatever it is that the three of them write. I even find myself wanting to provide feedback for them as an early reader of their manuscripts. But for selfish reasons. I want to be able to tell people that I read that book before it was even published and now it is on the New York Times Best Seller list, or won a Hugo, or some other award.

Is that wrong?

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 -
}

On the way to the office this morning, I saw a something that I had to turn around and go back to see again. Someone managed to take a street light out at the base, and keep going, leaving broken glass and twisted metal behind.

I stopped and called the Dane County Sheriff’s non-emergency number, and let them know. Of course as soon as I stopped my van, turning on the hazard lights so no one else would hit the debris, cars started to pull up on the road ahead of me. They came over and wanted to know if I “was all right”. I had to laugh, it seems they didn’t bother to look at my vehicle and notice that there wasn’t any damage to it.

A few minutes later two Fitchburg Police officers arrived on the scene, took down my info, and started cleaning up the mess.

Hopefully that is the most exciting thing that happens to them today.

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 normally think of myself as pretty savvy and able to spot a scam from a long way off.

Yesterday, I let my guard down.

A kid showed up at the door, typical just out of high school type, drinking a NoS energy drink and talking at 100 miles per hour. He was going door to door selling magazine subscriptions for US soldiers over seas. It’s tax deductible. He gets points towards a trip to Cancun and paying for part of his tuition next year.

He seemed so sincere. I said, “Sure, we can do two of those.” He continued on with his spiel, including things like “Checks are held for 2 weeks before depositing” and “You’ll receive a letter in the mail thanking you.”

We handed him the check, he handed us a receipt, he left.

Then I started to think about it a bit more. I read the fine print on the receipt. I started to get that, “Oh crap” feeling.

I looked up the name of the company on google.

“Face to Face Technologies, Inc” aka “FTFT, Inc.” aka “Dynasty Technologies, Inc”.

First hits are for scam and fraud reports. Oh crap indeed.

I emailed some friends and family who have worked with the VA before and asked if they had heard of this program. I went to the VA website and used their web form to ask if FTFT, Inc was associated with them.

Then I went to bed for some very troubled sleep, waking a few hours later. In my email were two responses, one from the VA saying that they were not affiliated with FTFT, the other telling me to cancel it as soon as possible since it was a scam.

So I called the bank, put in a stop payment on the check. Then I filled out the cancellation form on the receipt, just in case they honor that. It will be mailed later this morning, with delivery confirmation. According the the terms on the cancellation, it must be postmarked no more than 3 days after the original purchase, including Saturdays. Not much time to try and get out of this.

After doing that I thought about this scam. It’s really quite clever. Since you are buying the subscription for someone else, you don’t expect to get anything from it. It hits the heart strings of many due to it being “for the troops”. That it was a kid trying to “work his way through school” didn’t hurt either.

I think I will be adopting my friend Adam’s response to someone asking for donations, especially going door to door. “Send me some literature through the USPS mail, and I will consider it.” or “Sorry, but our budget for charitable contributions has already been met for the year.”. Which in all honesty, it had been. We have a finite amount of money that we give to several charities, but I thought this would be an ok one to splurge on… it’s not like we were signing up to pay for this every year, it was a one time charge.

We’ll see if it actually gets cancelled or if I get to play games with these people later on.

I’m lazy. I don’t want to do the things on my todo list. I find myself thinking “if I could just get things into $gtd_software everything would be better”.
Down this road lies madness! But there is a part of me that keeps asking, “But would it be less crazy than my current, obviously not working system”.
Even if the “not working system” is my will power to just do the things on my todo list.

I wish I could sleep when I really wanted to. Instead, my brain decides to take a tour of any random event or past thought. And I do mean any.

Some of the things my brain has decided to rehash today (yes, instead of sleeping)….

• The Acting Company of Hibriten High School 1994 performance of “Romeo & Juliet”
• Do I have a fiber to go from patch panel A to patch panel B at the office?
• Why don’t I write a blog post about the music I have been listening to lately and why I have been listening to it?
• Why can’t I sleep?
• I should clean my office.
• I should clean my office at home, too.
• Why didn’t that port work this morning during the overnight maintenance?
• I need to order “Small Favor” by Jim Butcher.

Yes, some of these things are “todo” list items that I should probably have on a todo list so that I stop thinking about them. The problem with that is, once I start making a list, I obsess about it. Which means I don’t sleep anyway. So what do I do? I fire up the laptop, look at my rss reader, facebook, twitter, email and then fire up a blog post.

Oh yeah, reaaaalll productive.

Anyone have a location of the Insomnia Fairy? I have something I would like to discuss with that individual.