How I use Trunk Notes

Keeping my digital life organized with a wiki works so much better for me than hierarchical storage systems, rigid todo lists, or flat plain-text buckets. My search for the ultimate digital lifestyle tool has taken me through so many different apps and systems, but with Trunk Notes I finally feel like I’ve almost achieved digital nirvana.

A long journey

I guess it all started when I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) 5 or 6 years ago, and I’ve tried so many different todo apps, note taking apps, organizers, etc since it’s just not funny. The apps I use fall into two main categories: task management, and information management. Tools to help me get stuff done, and tools to help me store and retrieve notes, data, etc.

Todo, or not todo

The first serious app with checkboxes that I recall using was OmniOutliner, which I tried to bend to a kind of GTD system until I bought the desktop version of OmniFocus when it first came out. It’s strict adherence to the GTD doctrine was too too much for me. Then I found Things by Cultured Code to be a simpler approach, but I would ultimately become frustrated by it’s lack of cloud sync and the developer’s complete disinterest in engaging with their customers, despite being very successful. From there, my todo pilgrimage took to me Wunderlist, a nice, simple, cloud-synced todo app. It was close, but I found that lists were becoming too cold and clinical for me, I needed something more organic, and found myself using Backpack by 37 Signals.

What I liked about Backpack was it’s concept of pages that can contain anything, notes, images, todo lists, whatever. It didn’t impose any form or function onto you, you can can do whatever you like with it. What I didn’t like about it was the $24/month required to access some of it’s features…

I also had my eye on TaskPaper, which takes a simpler text-based approach to managing todo lists, but it still uses a proprietary cloud sync service which customers have reported as being unreliable, and while the developer is planning to add DropBox sync at some point, his other apps are getting first priority.

Fortunately, in the meantime I discovered Trunk Notes!

There’s a hole in my bucket

For information management, I use and love Yojimbo by Bare Bones. It’s essentially a bucket to hold links, notes, pictures, PDF docs, passwords, serial numbers, etc. Again, my only gripe with it is a lack of cloud sync. There’s an iPad app, but it’s read-only, and requires wifi sync to get data into it.

So for plain notes, I ended up using SimpleNote because of it’s excellent could sync, and ubiquitous presence as desktop and mobile apps. It’s basically an omnipresent text bucket.

Unfortunately I’d often find myself having to search in multiple places to find something because I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. This arrangement left me wanting for a single system with cloud sync, to store notes in plain text and rich-text with images, passwords, and also manage todos. With Trunk Notes I’ve finally found it!

An organic system that grows with you

It’s so cool being able to take an idea, create a page, add some notes with links, insert a picture, jot down some todo items, and then have it grow organically out into other pages covering sub-topics, or breaking large projects down into sub projects, and having it all interlinked, tagged, and searchable. The wiki features of Trunk Notes alone are a revelation, not because wikis are new or I’ve never used one before, but I’ve never had one I can carry around with me in my pocket on my iPhone, and also access from my Mac and IPad. The coolest thing though, is Trunk Notes custom functions, which can turn it into a very capable, and powerful todo system.

Ubiquitous capture, automatic processing and retrieval

Here’s how I use Trunk Notes' powerful functions as my todo system. You can begin any line on a page with an “action” using a @, and then add dynamic functions to a page which collect every item from your wiki beginning with that action. I use them as tags, but you can only assign one to each item, so they’re more like contexts. As I work at home in front of a computer all day, contexts don’t fit my workflow, so I use the following actions to automatically filter and retrieve tasks:

• @next – regular todo items


• @due – Trunk Notes can process date stamps following the actions, allowing them to be scheduled and automatically float up to my dashboard


• @today – a quick way to flag tasks for today


• @done – changing an item’s action to done followed by a date stamp removes it from the other filters


• @someday – don’t really use it much though. Someday/maybe should really be called probably/never…

My home page has a dashboard showing a summary of tasks due today, and a 7 day summary of upcoming tasks, as well as quick links to my todo section:

• I’ve created pages with name prefixes
  
  
  
  
  • Todo
    
    
    
    
    • A dashboard using Trunk Notes' functions to show me all of my today, upcoming, and next actions on a nice dashboard
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Today
    
    
    
    
    • Filters all tasks @due today, and tagged with @today
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Next
    
    
    
    
    • Filters all @next actions
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Scheduled
    
    
    
    
    • Filters all @scheduled tasks
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Someday
    
    
    
    
    • @someday tasks which I’ll probably never do
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Home
    
    
    
    
    • This is where I drop home tasks. When Trunk Notes filters tasks into lists, it links back to the page they’re from, which behaves in effect as contexts or areas of responsibility.
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Home:Someday
    
    
    
    
    • I try not to put anything in here…
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Home:Archive
    
    
    
    
    • Move stuff out of the home list when it’s done to clean it up
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Work
    
    
    
    
    • A dashboard of work tasks. I can freeform here with links to project pages, notes, todo lists, etc
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Work:Someday
    
    
    
    
    • Really try to keep this one empty
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Todo:Work:Archive
    
    
    
    
    • an increasingly massive list of completed tasks, kept for reference. When I complete a task I tag it with @done and a date stamp, so can go back through the archive to check when certain things were completed.
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

I also keep an INBOX page, and have a link to the inbox and the main todo dashboard in Trunk Notes' special customizable footer, so I can quickly capture ideas. On my Mac, I’ve assigned a hot key using Alfred to open the inbox page in TextMate to quickly capture ideas. It works quite well, and TextMate can render the Markdown as HTML.

Workflow

For notes, passwords, links, etc I just create a new page and tag it accordingly. If it’s related to another page/project I’ll link them together. For tasks, if it’s a single actionable item I’ll add it to my top-level home/work/school page. For larger projects I’ll create a new page for them and link back to it from an item on the corresponding top-level page. Within the project page I just throw notes and todo items together without actions so they don’t clutter up the dashboard pages.

At the start of each day, I’ll check my home page for today & upcoming tasks, process anything sitting in the inbox, and then drill down into the home/work/school pages reviewing next actions & upcoming tasks and deciding what to work on today.

At the end of each day I’ll go through completed tasks tagging them with @done and archive them, I’ll process the inbox, review my next actions, and generally faff around on my pet project pages gathering research, jotting down ideas, inserting pics etc.

I’m looking into using the DropBox files with Automator/AppleScript to automate some of that, but that’s for another time.

A full bag of tricks

Some other cool things Trunk Notes offers:

• text snippets – can quickly insert regularly used text
  
  
  
  
  • can dynamically evaluate functions, for example to insert the current date/time
  
  
  • I use snippets to insert checkboxes with an action, and a notes field (using custom CSS…)
  
  
  
  


• custom CSS
  
  
  
  
  • I use a span for my todo notes, and use the custom CSS to style them
  
  
  
  


• include portions of other pages into the current page
  
  
  
  
  • it can even grab a random line, which I use to add a quote of the day to my dynamic footer
  
  
  
  


• dynamic header & footer
  
  
  
  
  • the header & footer are special pages which you can edit and fully customize. I have links to my inbox & todo list, and a random quote from my quotes page.
  
  
  
  


• encrypted pages
  
  
  
  
  • you can encrypt a page, and use it for storing passwords! A sprinkling of custom CSS makes it a very viable solution.
  
  
  
  


• images!
  
  
  
  
  • you can insert images into the page, which are stored on DropBox
  
  
  
  


• wifi server
  
  
  
  
  • it even comes with it’s own built in server for interacting with your wiki from a desktop device
  
  
  
  

Really, the possibilities are endless. Because it uses Markdown, I even use it to type up drafts of documentation and then use other tools like TextMate to finish it into the final product. It’s also handy for typing up blog posts like this one :)

Well, this got a bit long and ramble-y, maybe I’ll jot down a next action to refine it into a cheat sheet.

Slow carb diet - 100 days - before & after

Today marks the 100th day since I abandoned processed carbohydrates & sugars and replaced them with whole foods like beans, legumes, meat, and vegetables. I lost 5Kg, gained a significant amount of muscle, and have never felt better.

These may not be the most pleasant pictures to look at, but I'm posting them here more for my benefit really, just for posterity:

Before
First, the before photos:

This is a floppy tummy, accumulated during a month overseas overindulging in food & drink:


Side profile, slightly distended, droopy manboobs:


Upper arms - some preexisting muscle development from martial arts, but no visible lats, pectorals, etc:



After
Now for the after pics, 100 days after starting a slow-carb diet, and supplementing my existing martial arts training (3 times/week) with kettlebell swings. No protein or body building supplements at all, just whole foods and exercise.

Front, waist line significantly reduced, had to tighten belt several notches, and can wear pants I hadn't fit into since my twenties! visible lats. More developed pectorals and shoulder muscles, or at least better defined from a reduction in body fat. (I'm not flexing here, just raising my arms)

Most noticeable I think, and the extension of the lats.


And here's a side profile:


And some combined before & after shots:

Front:


Side:


So, here are my before & after shots from 100 days on a slow carb diet with kettlebell swings. I do a bunch of different swings with a 12Kg kettlebell, and have worked up to 75 reps with a 20Kg kettlebell, but still broken up into multiple sets. Started out with sets of 20 reps, so 20 + 20 + 20 + 15, and have worked up to two sets now of 50 + 25. I change the reps by 1 each time, and only do it twice a week now, so by the next time I report back after the next 100 days I should be up to a single set of 75 reps! Looking forward to that. Not the pics, being able to do that many swings...

Shark Tank - observations for start-ups

Recently, I read an interview between Tim Ferriss and Daymond John about how he built up his multi-million dollar business, and from there I found myself watching and keenly studying the TV series Shark Tank. In Shark Tank, successful business people, including Daymond John, form a panel of investors. People come on the show to pitch to the sharks in the hope that they'll invest in their company.

There's a recurring theme I've observed amongst the entrepreneurs (can never spell that word...) pitching their ideas to the Sharks:

• They rarely have significant sales.


• They almost always over value their companies by offering too little equity in return for too much money without sales to support them.


• They are very often torn between wanting to cash-in on the company and get rich, or to keep working in the business and follow their passion.


• They rarely agree to surrender a controlling stake in their companies (51% or more). Offers from the sharks have been turned down because the owner has an emotional connection to their business and doesn't want to turn it over to someone else, yet without an injection of capital it will most likely fail.


• They very often over value "potential" growth
  
  • $10,000 sales last year and growing somehow makes the business worth $500,000 to a million dollars, more often because they've already invested their life savings into the company and mortgaged their family home. The sharks might invest $20,000 or more in a company like that, but only in exchange for 100% equity, which the owners usually refuse.
  
  


• They're often unclear on what exactly they need the money for - is it for R&D, inventory, marketing, salaries? Quite often what they have has the potential to be a tidy small business, but doesn't have the kind of explosive growth potential that the sharks are looking for, and as such they would be unlikely to see a significant return on their investment.

The sharks respond very consistently - they are first and foremost investors looking to increase their wealth:

• They always ask for sales numbers - gross revenue, and net profits for the last year


• They want to know how many existing customers they have, or at least what contracts they've already secured


• 
  They immediately value the company by multiplying the net sales by the proportion of equity being offered.
  
  
  
  • People usually ask for around $25,000-150,000 in exchange for 10-25% of their company
  
  
  • This would value their company at $250,000 to a million dollars or more
  
  
  • They are often found to only have $50,000-$100,000 in sales, from which the sharks would value their company at about double - $100,000-$200,000
  
  
  • When asked why they think their business is worth so much more than the numbers suggest, invariably they'll talk about passion, or how much of their own time/effort/money they've put into the business
  
  
  • The sharks invariably give them a harsh lesson in reality...
  
  
  
  


• Even really great ideas with no sales are usually rejected straight away


• When a company has significant sales, but is still in the early stages of development, the sharks will usually ask for a controlling interest in the company (51% or more, often 100%) in order to protect their investment


• Even with significant sales, the sharks will often look for a contract with a major brand or reseller for mass-market products rather than attempting to muscle into an established market


• Licensing deals are more attractive to sharks than selling widgets - they'd be more interested in owning a license they can sell to a major manufacturer than trying to bring a stand-alone product to market


• They will often offer to buy 100% of a company and pay the owner an ongoing royalty, which they usually refuse, despite the sharks offering to use their own capital and expertise to build up the company


• They always ask what their investment will be used for.
  
  
  
  • Quite often the person has unrealistic expectations of what it will actually cost to develop their business.
  
  
  • Sometimes they think the sharks will give them capital to buy patents, or produce inventory, or spend on marketing - they never do; they simply want to buy a share in what they perceive to be a profitable company with potential for great growth.
  
  
  • The sharks won't invest if the money will simply be used to sustain the business, or keep if from collapse
  
  
  
  


• Patents are attractive, and will often make or break a deal


• They never invest in ideas with no substance to help turn it into a product


• They never invest in individuals/brands without a viable product/business to help them develop one

Studying the show has reaffirmed my belief in the importance of building a business for profitability, for two reasons: a business must have value to be profitable; I want to add value to the world, and a business must be profitable for it to be attractive to investors; I don't want to stare at a computer screen forever...

This may be less true on massive scales, for example a social network like Facebook/Twitter with literally millions of active users will be able to generate revenue by the sheer brute force of their volume, but before they had those numbers they had to prove themselves by building a popular product. When they were starting out, no one would go near them, but they scratched an itch, and it proved to be hugely popular. Had they taken their idea to investors and pitched them saying that although they have zero revenue, and only a few thousand users, they just need some capital to invest in infrastructure and they'll be able to get millions of users and generate tons of cash...

1. Have an idea


2. ???


3. Profit!!!

I don't think so. It's probably more like:

1. Identify a real human need


2. Build something to satisfy that need


3. Work your arse off for years developing and marketing your product to be revenue positive

Success with the 4HB slow carb diet

Last xmas we spent a month overseas mostly holidaying and over indulging in delicious food and copious amounts of alcohol. When we returned in January, I had put on 5Kg, and so decided to get a copy Tim Ferris' latest book, The 4-Hour Body and give it a try.

Before doing anything else, watch the brilliant video trailer!

My goal was to replace the 5Kg of excess flab with muscle, a body "recomposition" goal. I lost the 5Kg within a couple of months very easily, while eating more than I ever have in my life! I'm feeling fitter, and stronger than ever before, and I owe it to two simple changes to my diet and exercise habits.

The basics
The basic premise is pretty simple, and is comprised of a special diet combined with specific exercises. I was already fairy physically active, with martial arts training 3 times a week, but the recommended exercises have definitely seen a rapid increase in strength, and the change in diet has been spectacular to say the least.

Dietary changes:

• replace all forms of high-GI carbohydrates with low-GI, high-protein beans & legumes


• Cut out all sugars, fructose, and dairy products such as cheese, milk, yogurt


• Consume large quantities of fresh, low-GI vegetables


• Consume large quantities of lean meat, such as fish, beef, pork, and chicken


• Once a week, enjoy a "cheat day" - eat all the bread, pasta, fruit, cheese, chocolate, etc that you want!

I've been on the slow carb diet for several months now, which means I haven't been eating any wheat or dairy products, or any fruit at all during the week, but instead I've been eating lots of meat, veg, beans, and eggs. The book suggests using magnesium and calcium supplements, but rather than just buying some pills from a supermarket blindly, I decided to go to the doctor and get a blood test. Today we went over the results, and I couldn't be happier!

Empirical results
I was worried about my cholesterol levels, with all of the meat & eggs I've been eating, and also wanted to check magnesium & calcium to see if I should be using supplements, and also vitamin D seeing as I work indoors. The results were better than I was expecting!

My biochemistry results were all excellent across the board, so no need for any additional supplements! I'm taking once capsule of 1000IU of vitamin D3 a day, and the doctor suggested perhaps I could cut that back to every other day. The surprise for me though was the results for the lipids and HDL. My HDL cholesterol (the good kind) were high, and my LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) were low. At first I was a little concerned about a "cholesterol" level being high, but my doctor looked at me and said "can it be bad to have a high level of good cholesterol?". Point taken. The book talks about good cholesterol having benefits, such as helping with insomnia, which historically is something I've always had trouble with, and I can now say finally that I now longer have any trouble getting off to sleep. This is another one of those things that I wish I'd discovered sooner!

The theory is that high-GI foods can cause an excessive spike in blood glucose which tends to be stored around the body as fat. Low-Gi foods on the other are converted to blood glucose more slowly throughout the day, and are more satiating. I've found that I now eat about twice the volume of food as I used to, but don't suffer the inevitable sugar crash that typically accompanies a large carbohydrate-rich meal. No more dozing off in the afternoon, I have consistently high energy levels throughout the day!

Another pleasant side-effect of the slow carb diet is that you no longer feel hungry between meals. I have my breakfast around 8am, and lunch four hours later at 12pm, and don't feel hungry at all in between. I have a light snack in the afternoon usually comprised of celery sticks & peanut butter, and that keeps me going until dinner at around 6:30. Again, I don't feel hungry in the evenings, despite rarely going to bed before midnight. I'm trying the book's suggestion of taking a spoonful of almond butter before bed which is intended to keep blood glucose levels from dipping too low in the morning, but I've never been an early riser so it's hard to say if it's helping directly but generally I've been sleeping much better and feeling more energised.

As for the "cheat day", mine tends to start on Friday even with beers, and extend right through the weekend... It's so awesome being able to pig out on whatever I want once a week knowing that I'm not gaining weight or affecting my health adversely!

Exercise changes
This wasn't a change so much as a supplement. I do martial arts training every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, so I started out by adding a special exercise routing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. In recent weeks I had found myself feeling a bit exhausted by the end of the week though, especially considering how many repetitions I've worked up to now, so I've cut out Wednesdays. Only made that change recently, so too early to draw any conclusions from it yet.

So what's the big secret? Russian kettlebells. I started out with a 20Kg kettlebell, just going 75 repetitions of the two-hand swing, but a month or two ago I added a smaller 12Kg kettlebell for a wider range of movements, like the one-hand snatch. Kettlebells are an excellent supplement for marial arts training, because they exercise a wider range of muscles together at the same time in movements that are more similar to natural activities that free weights or gym machines, and they increase explosive strength rather than sheer bulk and lifting power.

They do increase core strength, but I've also recently added a gym ball for focusing on more on that. Still working towards visible abs, but probably have to get my body fat % down a but lower first.

Conclusion - it works!
What put a huge smile on my face was to hear the doctor say "whatever it is you're doing, keep doing it!". That in combination with the excellent blood test results validate that the perceived increase in overall health & wellbeing I've experienced are supported by empirical evidence. I intend to keep working towards my goal getting a reaction from someone along the lines of "what the fuck have you been doing?!"

I'll laugh and say "beans and cannon balls"...

Oscilloscopes & software development

One of my first jobs was as an electronics technician where I would build, and test, professional audio visual equipment. My work bench was covered with an impressive array of tools and gadgetry, one of the most impressive being the trusty oscilloscope. To the uninitiated, it appears to be a complicated display with a vast array of control dials and buttons, and it's certainly one of the more difficult test instruments to master.

A typical application of an oscilloscope, or CRO for short (from the now dated acronym Cathode Ray-tube Oscilloscpoe) it to display the waveform of an electrical signal on the screen. The classic noob mistake when first learning to use them is to change too many settings at the same time, resulting in a wild, unintelligible display on the screen.

My boss would often chastise me and remind me of two important principals which would serve me well later on in software development:
* always start from a known baseline
* never change more than one thing at a time

With a CRO, there's a sensible default setting that should always be used to start with because it usually will display something, and from there only requires minor adjustments to achieve the desired result. I'd equate that in software development terms to setting up test fixtures with sensible data and making sure you've isolated the code to be tested.

With so many dials and buttons it's easy to make the mistake of tweaking and fiddling in a panic and ending up with a garbled display. The more experienced operator will only make one adjustment at a time, and if it doesn't have the desired effect return it to it's sensible default position before trying a different adjustment. Similarly, when developing software it's tempting to hack and slash instead of methodically working towards the goal, but it often leads to breakages and a mess of spagetti code which no clear way of knowing exactly what caused the error. Try something, if it doesn't work roll it back and try something different.

I was reminded of the CRO analogy recently when I had a bunch of tests failing while trying to modify some functionality. After trying in vein to work out why my modifications were causing the breakage, I rolled them back and tested again, only to reveal than a recent update had introduced the breakage, not my modifications. So I fixed the failing tests, merged my update back in again, and re-tested. That way I know that I've started from a known baseline, and only changed one thing at a time, so if anything breaks it's my change that broke it, and from there I can work towards fixing it.

Fault-finding and testing faulty electronic equipment gave me a good mindset for software development that I'll always appreciate. Just as we'd always be sure to comprehensively test all our equipment before shipping it to customers to keep the number of returned products to a minimum, following test driven development before deploying any code to production keeps the number of bugs and rollbacks to a minimum.

Finding a muse - CPC doesn't work for everything

...or maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

Recently read The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, and loved it. I just wish I'd read it years ago when I had the opportunity to put it into practice before things got out of hand with the busyness and the tiredness and the being grumpy and depressed and not knowing why. I learnt a new word: "procrasterbating". Living in your email and reading industry articles on RSS and checking in on Twitter for updates isn't conducive to productivity or peace of mind, but it's weird how you somehow subconsciously rationalize it. I took the book's advice and went on a media fast, set up an email auto responder and turned off my email notified, unsubscribed from most of my RSS feeds, logged out of Twitter, and even stopped compulsively checking my inbox over breakfast, weekends, etc. and you know what? The world didn't end!

I can check most of the boxes for things from the book like working from home, having the freedom to travel & work abroad, pursuing interests in martial arts and language. Why is it that it's not until I see them presented in a book as something to strive for that I really appreciate them?

Anyway, been looking for a "muse", a means of generating residual income with minimum human intervention. Some time ago, I launched a site selling wine online. It's a niche market, selling imported European wines in Australia. It would appear to be an ideal candidate for becoming a muse, except that I haven't had much luck driving traffic to it from CPC ads.

The problem is two things:
* wine related keywords are expensive
* there's very little "local monthly volume"

Expensive keywords mean is that my margins are too tight. You can calculate your maximum CPC bid by starting with your revenue per sale, let's say $100 for example, and working with an anticipated conversion rate of 1% which would require 100 clicks per sale - a CPC of $1.00 would only see you break even. There aren't many worthwhile keywords that go for less than $1...

The low search volume for relevant keywords that get any kind of click through rate much over 0.05% basically means you don't get any clicks. AdWords will helpfully recommend hundreds of vaguely related keywords, but even if they do provide more clicks, their low relevance to your product will result in a lower conversion rate, which amounts to more money flowing out of your pocket and into Google's coffers...

My theory on this, and it's one I've seen proposed elsewhere, is that the people who actually click on ads fit into particular demographics that don't necessarily cover all products, services, and industries. There is a strong online community around wine, but search volumes suggest that online buyers are mostly looking for a bargain, not a $50 bottle of rare "noble rot" wine.

It's one thing to have a fully functional shopping cart hooked up to a cash register, but "build it and they will come" does not hold true at all. Where to go from here? Printed advertising probably.

Different types of people

There are some who look at the world and see amazing beauty in nature, and to them it's something they want to preserve and cherish, something precious they want future generations to be able to enjoy.

Then there are some who may actually share a similar appreciation of the world around them, but dissimilarly feel compelled by it to stake out their claim to part of it, whatever the cost.

The prior work to preserve endangered species, rain forests, and coral reefs, they get behind projects that promise clean, renewable energy, and think long-term about how the things the do today affect those who come after them.

The later, well, they somehow find a way to rationalise things like this, and are still able to sleep at night.

I saw this photo of the aurora borealis this morning:


The green fire of the southern lights


It's so beautiful. I'd like to hope that we'll still be here to appreciate the green fire of the southern lights for many years to come.

Water & air

Air menitik - Water Drop by emrank

Imagine we are drifting through space in a massive ark. It has a limited, finite water & air supply, and organic systems that recycle and cleanse the water & air as it's used. It can support life, but not indefinitely of course.

Our attitude towards how we use water & air would be completely different. We wouldn't pollute the air with carbon dioxide, or dump toxic chemicals into the water supply. We would ensure that the recycling & filtering systems were always operating in optimal condition.

Now shift our perspective, zoom out, look at the ark which is carrying us through space - it is the earth. It is in trouble.

To whom it may concern...

Wassup blog!

So I'm walking home the other day on beautiful sunny afternoon, when I spot an abandoned computer monitor on the side of the road. It's becoming an increasingly common sight these days, especially the old eye-destroying CRT monitors, but especially so in this particular street. Seems someone is always dumping stuff there.



I had almost walked past when I noticed a message pinned to the nearby tree. It reads:

To whom it may concern:

The number to call for general household rubbish pick-up is: 1300 655 006. This is a free service. Please show some consideration for fellow residents & do not just expect that someone else will clean up your pollution. Make the call if you leave the rubbish.

Thanks.

That's pretty cool. Sucks that the person had to go to all that effort though, must be a really easy life for the kind of person that can just leave shit on the ground without it troubling their conscience.

Oh, and also, buy some wine if you fancy ☺

RIP Sharkbait

We had a tragedy in the family yesterday - Tyler's pet goldfish died. It was his first pet, given to him for his 7th birthday not even a year ago. He was heartbroken, really upset about it, just cried & cried for hours the poor guy. It was really painful for us to see him so upset too.

So in memory of Sharkbait, Tyler drew this picture:



I asked him what the "POP" with a person in the "O" is. He said "That's me shrinking, it makes a POP noise". Then I noticed the little person in the fish bowl with Sharkbait. Then I suddenly had something very important I had to go and do in another room, something very grownup and manly that definitely wasn't wiping a tear from my eye too...

Bye Sharkbait, we'll miss you!

Cactus face

Cactus close-up, by r-z

"Hey Dad, what's that green plant with the spikes?"

"A Venus fly trap?"

"No, the other one"

"... you mean a cactus?"

"Yeah, your face is like a cactus!"


Apparently I have prickly whiskers, just like a cactus ☺

23" Cinema Display power adaptor failure

Thank you so much to the gentlemen working at the Maccentric service center in Chatswood!

This morning started out as though it was going to be "one of those" Mondays. A blackout over the weekend had taken out my beautiful 23" Cinema Display after having just received a notice from the power company that the rates were going up by more than 10%! Talk about adding insult to injury, but fortunately I'm here working in dual-monitor mode now and I've never appreciated it more.

Everything else in the house was fine when the power came back on, but the power/status LED on the Cinema Display was flashing in a peculiar way and not working. A bit of Googling lead to an Apple knowledge base page which revealed that the sequence of flashes indicated a problem with the power adaptor. So I made some calls to the local Apple stores asking after a replacement.

The closest store informed me that according to their technician it can be swapped out with a generic unit available from any electronics retailer. Made a mental note not to visit their "genius bar" and called the bigger store in the city where I was advised that a replacement part can in fact be ordered by making an appointment with the genius bar. I decided to skip that and went back to the Next Byte store I'd originally bought it from.

They referred me to the Maccentric service center which was just around the corner. Turns out they actually had a replacement unit in stock! I bought it, took it home, plugged it in and - got the same flashing status light. Shit, at this point I'm worried that my worst fears have been confirmed and the monitor itself has been damaged. I had to call them back anyway to give the serial no. of the monitor, and when I did the guy suggested that I bring it back in to try it with the PSU from a 30" Cinema Display because he had seen that fix the problem before.

Not an hour later I had dusted it off, packed it up, and driven it back into the store. Unbelievably, they also had a 30" PSU in stock as well, so we unpacked it, plugged it all into a Mac Pro on a test bench, and my beloved Cinema Display sprang back to life! I just had to pay the difference between the 2 PSU models and the problem was solved!

So I highly recommend Maccentric for any Mac repairs you might need, the staff were knowledgeable and professional, and by recommending a $140 power adaptor they saved me from having to replace a very expensive and beloved monitor.

Thank you again to the Maccentric service center, Spring St. Chatswood!
http://www.maccentric.com.au/home/contact/

(And a big F-U to Energy Australia for blowing it up in the first place!)

Clouds and planets

Hello blog, it's been a while! How's things? I've been busy over on Twitter: http://twitter.com/beet

Austin Mini Planet by Hi I'm Santi

Just wanted to quickly recall a conversation I had with my son the other day:

We were walking home from school on a grey, rainy day when he asked me where planets come from. Whenever he asks anything which is even vaguely philosophical I always avoid offering my own opinion and just reply with "what do you think?".

He went on to say something along the lines of: "Well, clouds kind of stick together to make rain drops, so maybe planets were made the same kind of way. Maybe there was all this dust and stuff and it kind of stuck together and turned into planets."

I was taken aback and had to ask if he'd heard something like that somewhere before. He then went on to ask where plants and animals came from, and how people were made. Maybe the cloudy weather had him in a contemplative mood that day.

Fortunately we arrived home just in time to save me from having to either offer my own opinion or pretend I don't have one. I really want him to keep asking awesome questions like that and find his own answers as he grows up.

He never ceases to amaze me with how a child's mind which has been spared any kind of indoctrination can see things so clearly sometimes.

Green bins

An update to the ongoing saga with the gardens in our rented town house:

I've previously mentioned our real estate agent sending us a confrontational email about being in "breach of contract" because the gardens were not up to spec. Well recently we received a much more civil email asking us to attend to some creeper vines taking over the front garden. We've just renewed our lease for another 12 months, at a 4% rent increase, and were assured that the weed situation would be taken care of by a contractor because the weeds were present before we moved in. Two quotes from independent contractors later, nothing happens, and I get an email asking me to attend to it...

What we thought were some nice little bushes have since proved themselves to be be poplar trees by growing from only a few feet to over 1 story high. Meanwhile, the creeper vines do their part to try and overtake the garden by continually overgrowing and if left unchecked inevitably covering everything. This is the second time I've had to spend a day getting rid of them.

Rather than making a big deal of it, I reported that I have removed the vines, and asked if when a contractor does finally come to attend to the poplar trees they could dispose of them. The reply simply asked if I can just use our green bin. To explain, each of the 30 or so town houses in this strata have a tiny wheely bin for general rubbish which is collected daily, and those with gardens are supposed to have an additional green bin which can be used for garden waste, but only once a month or something. The closest thing to a green bin present at the property when we moved in looked like this:




The agent was aware of this, having received the very same photo via email and then coming to inspect the situation in person after we moved in over a year ago. Nothing has been done since, but rather than a pile of crap in one corner of the garden I'm fairly sure that we should have been provided with a functional green bin. Actually, there shouldn't have been any noxious weeds in the garden in the first place, and if there are it is certainly not the tenants responsibility to dispose of them...

Well fuck it, we're thinking about buying something soon, but we'd have to think twice before buying from this agent.

Conroy wants $43 BILLION dollars to build his own damn broadband network then...

In his relentless pursuit of Australian internet censorship, Senator Stephen Conroy has proposed that the federal government let him build his own fourty three billion dollar broadband network, undoubtably with filtering built in. Our 3 main ISPs, Telstra, Optus, and IInet have refused to participate, so he thinks he'll just roll out his own... the man is clearly insane.

Listen Conroy: we don't need faster internet connections, we need more bandwidth!!! We also don't want or need a mandatory internet filter.

Steven Conroy fielding questions about The Great Firewall Of Australia (internet filter) on ABC1 Thur 26 9:30pm AEDT

GetUp! are taking questions to be posted to Steven Conroy when he appears on ABC1 for a Q&A session about his proposed Australian internet filter at http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet&id=580.The form only appears to allow you submit one question though, so here's a few more that I'd like to hear his answers for:

"Please explain how the internet filter is more effective at addressing issues in society than educating parents and children to raise public awareness about the internet and how to use it responsibly?"

"Please explain how limiting access to information about issues in society does anything to address the actual problems that cause them? "

"How will making it more difficult to access inappropriate content online in any way prevent people from engaging in inappropriate behaviour - will they not simply find other communication channels?"

"What specific research can you refer to that clearly shows a correlation between an increase in inappropriate behaviour and an increase in internet usage?"

"Quoting specific research sources, what are your predictions for the decrease in inappropriate behaviour that will result as a direct result of the internet filter?"

"Please give a specific example of a well case of inappropriate behaviour that could not have been perpetrated without access to information on the internet."

"As the vast majority of inappropriate behaviour is conducted offline, would it not be more effective to address the societal problems causing it directly and in so doing affect both offline and internet behaviour?"

"Please quote specific research which shows the percentage of inappropriate content found both online and offline and explain why it is more important to target the internet."

"Why do you feel your role as Communications Minister includes deciding what comprises "inappropriate" content and what gives you the right to impose your moral compass over others?"

Cultured Code support broken?

Please, Cultured Code, maybe it's just me but I'm having major issues with Things Mac/Touch:

• Syncing between Mac/iPhone is sloooow.... Once it's finished sending data, Things Mac saturates the CPU for at least a minute while "Processing"...


• Moving items is also slow. Just dragging a single item out of the inbox into an area invokes the spinning beach ball of death for several seconds.


• Seems to affect anything related to moving/re-positioning items

Your support system seems to be broken, I submit bug reports, get an automated response, and that is the last I ever hear of it. So I tried using the forums, but after creating 2 accounts with different email addresses I am unable to log in and post questions. I can search and browse though and see that I'm not the only customer experiencing similar issues.

Please help! I love things, I written before about why I prefer Things' tags/areas to OmniFocus' more rigid GTD contexts/projects. I'm begging...

Only humans dream?

Web censorship plan in it's final death throes

From http://www.smh.com.au

Senator Nick Xenophon's stocks just went up in my book:

Xenophon said instead of implementing a blanket mandatory censorship regime the Government should instead put the money towards educating parents on how to supervise their kids online and tackling "pedophiles through cracking open those peer-to-peer groups"

So glad to know that I'm not alone in opposing the internet filter:

The policy has attracted opposition from online consumers, lobby groups, ISPs, network administrators, some children's welfare groups, the Opposition, the Greens, NSW Young Labor and even the conservative Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who famously tried to censor the chef Gordon Ramsay's swearing on television.

Thank you to GetUp for their efforts, glad to have given my support. Their telephone poll found miniscule numbers of people backing the filter:

This week, a national telephone poll of 1100 people, conducted by Galaxy and commissioned by online activist group GetUp, found that only 5 per cent of Australians want ISPs to be responsible for protecting children online and only 4 per cent want Government to have this responsibility.

Looks like Netspace found most of their customers strongly opposed, 6% strongly for, and the rest presumably not giving a shit:

A recent survey by Netspace of 10,000 of the ISP's customers found 61 per cent strongly opposed mandatory internet filtering with only 6.3 per cent strongly agreeing with the policy.

Federal Reserve Enegery System? Gawd no!!!

An article on Earth2tec titled Does the U.S. Need a Federal Reserve for Energy? reports that John Hofmeister, founder and CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy proposed exactly that at an energy symposium. (wtf is a symposium?)

As though the damage the federal reserve banking is putting us all through right now isn't enough, now they want to control our energy the same way as well? No thank you...