Snolquamie Falls
15 miles east of Bellevue. Not too far away. If the weather stays nice, this is something that can be done in April/May.
See more progress on: plan great summer weekends
Putting Stuff Into a System
The one thing that put me off GTD initially, was the fact that there was a “system” that needs to be put into place. I’ve tried it yesterday, after buying the necessary equipment from office depot, and found that it wasn’t overly onerous. It was quite liberating actually. You point to a stack and say “be gone”. You grab a handful of manilla folders and your labeler and get to work on a stack. Within minutes, the stack is reduced to no more. Things are a little more organized in my apartment. There is a stack of things in my inbox but at least I know how to deal with it. In fact, it’s helping me unpack the last few boxes from the move.
I can’t say enough about getting a good labeler. I didn’t see the point of one at the start. Clarity of printed text is the only concrete advantage over hand written text. But having the labeler made it “fun” to organize things. Maybe it’s the novelty factor or maybe it’s the formality of typing text. I’m not sure. I got the Brother PT-1950. It was pricey but it came with an AC adapter (the main requirement). With other models, the AC adapter was an extra 20 dollars. Expect a good labeler (with an AC adapter) to cost you at least 70 dollars.
The file cabinet arrives Tuesday. For this weekend, I made do with some cardboard boxes and I’m transferring stuff to the file cabinet when it arrives. The book recommends manilla folders over hanging folders. I don’t see the advantage of one over the other (especially with the cardboard boxes). This may not be true with a proper file cabinet where manilla folders feel faster to work with. For archiving files, I think hanging folders are a big win if you want to use cheap bulk cardboard boxes. You want to keep them around but don’t need fast access to them. Like the memory hierarchy in computer organization.
I’m about a third of the way done. Hopefully I can keep up the pressure and have everything squared away by next weekend. Just in time to take my vacation too.
See more progress on: get things done
Northwest Trek
Northwest Trek
This might be interesting. It’s slightly more than halfway between Seattle and Mt Rainier. The main attraction is the wildlife that you can see.
See more progress on: plan great summer weekends
In Response to a Question….
Cool and dangerous Hannibal is a soldier for life. He was a well respected colonel in Vietnam who was forced to hide in the underground after being charged for a crime he didn’t commit. The leader of the A-Team, Hannibal is a crafty tactician and as he always said “I love it when a plan comes together.”
Which A-Team member are you???
Drop Off
I finally got around to dropping my form off at H&R block. They looked at it really quickly and said I need to bring in some additional statements.
That means I need to start organizing my various papers laying about in stacks around my apartment.
See more progress on: do my taxes
Getting Started With “Getting Things Done”
Link: 43 Folders: Getting started with “Getting Things Done”.
I’m on my way. I picked up a hipster PDA yesterday. I’m headed to Office Despot again today to look at filing cabinets. Just browsing online, it looks like the Crate & Barrel one isn’t that expensive. Most of the two drawer filing cabinets cost about ~$130.
A bunch of other supplies also need to be picked up today. An index card holder as a inbox, a labeller, manilla folders, a new file tote for archival storage.
ThermaPAK
Link: ThermaPAK.
With CPUs getting hotter and hotter, I’m glad someone came out with this product. I don’t want to get 3rd degree burns to vital parts because my CPU is hot enough to fry stuff with.
Sun Microsystems Contrarian Minds: Guy Steele
Link: Sun Microsystems Contrarian Minds: Guy Steele.
“I’m now not convinced that a single programming language can serve everyone’s needs, because the needs are so diverse.”
- Guy Steele
I was reading this month DDJ and saw that they had awarded Guy Steele the 2005 Excellence In Programming Award. Guy has worked on many of languages I’ve used: C, Java, Scheme, Lisp. One of my favorite programming books has Steele as a coauthor:
“C: A Reference Manual (5th Edition)” (Samuel P. Harbison, Guy L. Steele)
I used an earlier version of this book to learn C 8 years ago favoring it over the universal favorite K&R. He is also the primary author of Common Lisp: The Language. He had a hand in R5RS (which is one of the nicest language definitions to read) and the Java Language Specification.
He is now working on a new language Fortress. I’ve googled for it but there isn’t much available. I’m looking forward to seeing what new ideas it will have. I have a feeling it is a language I will use in the future.
Ubuntu Linux Screenshot
Woo Hoo!!!
I got Ubuntu Linux running on my old powerbook. The only tricky bit was getting the ISO image I downloaded yesterday burnt onto a CD. From various comments I read on the forum, the standard Apple Disk Utility does not work with the Ubuntu Linux PPC LiveCD ISO image. Initially I thought it was a bad image. To get around this, I used the cdrecord package from fink to burn the ISO image.
sudo cdrecord dev=IODVDServices hoary-live-powerpc.iso
Once I burnt the image, the other interesting challenge I faced was booting the powerbook from the CDROM. I googled for it and found out that when you restart hold down on the “C” key. That is the letter C and NOT the Control key. I made the mistake the first time of holding down the Control key.
Finally I heard my CDROM rumbling away as it tried to boot from it. Lots of console messages went by until it started up X and dumped me in front of GNOME. Screen resolution was 640x480 which made it look terrible (I guess it didn’t detect my LCD correctly) and I couldn’t find any application that would allow me to reconfigure my display.
Network connectivity was available. I opened up Firefox and was able to browse the web. I even took a screenshot and uploaded the image to Flickr. I played around with the shell and poked at the various menu choices (games, OpenOffice …)
Performance was spiffy. The system was much more responsive than when I’m running OS X. To be fair though, OS X does run more processes in the background.
Overall, it was a good first impression. I need to figure out how to get the screen resolution fixed but other than that no major issues. The new question I have is whether I can install Ubuntu onto a firewire drive and run Linux off that. Being able to dual boot Linux and Mac OS X would be awesome. It would allow me to start using Linux around the house again.
New Interesting Books
Two new interesting books are now available. The shipping time for them seems a little long. Must be popular reading at the moment.
“Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs” (Mark Jason Dominus)
A friend mentioned that this was a Perl book he was looking forward to reading. I’ve not thought of Perl as a functional programming language. It’s ugliness as a language tend to muddy those aspects of it. At some point, I’m reading this book to see how functional programming is colored through a pair of Perl colored glasses.
“Java In A Nutshell (In a Nutshell)” (David Flanagan)
The 5th edition of this classic book. I learnt to program Java using the 1st/2nd? edition of this book. Looks like I’ll use this to learn the new language features in Java 1.5. Also, It’s now 1000 friggin pages long. How bloated has Java gotten??? :) From Amazon’s product description, it looks like the girth of the book is due to the coverage of the tools and frameworks supporting Java. That’s the right thing to do because the tools and frameworks are the most important part of the platform. I hope they cover some of what I want to look at.
Looking forward to reading both of these books…