Merlin,

Can you listen to it from a mac? QuickTime won’t play it.

Tnx!

It’s in RealAudio.

I thought mms:// is windows-media? mplayer seems to have problems too…

I’ve never been able to listen to a podcast from NPR. And I have a lowly pc at home. =[

Okay, I might be stupid, but I’ve been listening to the NPR audios for a long time now— are they known as Podcasts?

I am impressed at Paul for going back to basics. But peeps need to be able to control themselves. If the Internet is distracting, don’t log on. You’ll have to evolve your thoughts to survive in this world. So that means adapting to technology. I used to be one of those “people” who made fun of cel phone users, until I discovered it myself and have become what I made fun of. But now, my relationships are better, and I stay in touch with my older parents who live far away from Los Angeles. But someones my pocket phone gets overwealming. And I turn it off knowing it will always be there.

But doing what Paul Ford did? I don’t think not!

I did a post of this on my site— http://organizingla.blogs.com/organizingla_blog/2005/11/getting_back_to.html

Merlin, you are brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

If you click on the listen link, you should be given a choice of Real Audio or Windows Media, I have the official Windows Media Player for OSX Installed from MS, and it loads quite nicely, I do use the g4 Optimized Firefox builds, so I don’t think it has any default association for anything, and I just told it to play using WMP. YMMV, email me if you have any questions, those Linux users out there, you can, I think, convert Real Audio to MP3 or such with Gstreamer, any willing to convert it and post it should or I suppose, someone using WMP on OSX and AudioHijack could do similar. Cheers

What a jerk. :( Poor man who can not control him self. It’s like a smoker who sees a pack of sigaretes and can not say no - computer addict nothing else.

Well, to be a computer addict is a problem. I do not blame that.

But what I see a problem is that he is trying to confince other people that this is not his personal problem but everybody have a problem like this.

Yo Mac users - click on NPR’s “Help” link and it will tell you how to make RealPlayer files play in RealPlayer an not QuickTime. Thank you NPR for doing this.

As for Mr. Ford, the poor man must spend hours at the magazine rack. And I can’t imagine his adult ADD when his local ‘general store’ upsized to a ‘supermarket’. “What? There are two choices of cold cereal?” I’ll alert the sheriff.

Ford suggests using DOS to get back to basics and unplug, but you can do it with less pain by just buying an old Mac dedicated for writing work. I use an old powerbook that doesn’t have games and is too slow to connect to the internet. Using DOS hurts my head.

I have great willpower, but less so when I write. You’d be surprised how productive you can be by not being in the same room as a computer internet-ready (or if you only have one room, turn the thing off). It helps.

Folks:

I think Peter Ford is on to something here, regardless of whether you think it is a computing addict’s coping mechanism, dispute the utility of DOS, or feel it doesn’t apply to you because of personal self discipline. Truth is, it applies to more of us (myself included) than we might care to admit. Many of us, particularly those who remember when Paul McCartney was in a group before wings, and computers occupied rooms, not deskspace, developed our work and learning approach in a much less intrusive, single-task oriented productivity culture. Your biggest intrusion was the phone, and if you were not at your desk, it also wasn’t a problem. I truthfully believe that focused, single-topic tasks can result in some of my (and quite likely your) best work because we can put all the resources of our best processor, our brain, on that one task. Peter Ford simply advocates for one means for doing that. There are lots of other means, and I don’t want to get into a catfight over whether folks work better in a multi-tasked, background-busy environment, some do—my kids for example (or at least they believe it to be so)—and some don’t. I just know that I have been slowly backing down from multiple devices and trying to focus on single projects at a time, including focused periods of email work, then task 2, then 3, etc. (identified using the David Allen GTD approach), and it works for an old guy like me. I also have an earlier, version of the alphasmart, the 3000, and it has it’s place in my arsenal of useful tools. I use a paper planner as a sole source of organization, and all my tools—laptop, alphasmart, logitech IO digital pen—are subservient to it. Ford has found one way to do this, and it may or may not work for you, but let’s not disparage personal success—we are all busy enough that we should celebrate and share when we find something that works for us.

“Paul McCartney was in a group before wings” - That would be the Quarrymen, right?