Meeting Tip: Learning Names | Gurno.com

As someone who suffers from frequent encoding errors and buffer overflows, I love Adam's idea to start a meeting by mapping the name and location of each attendant, along with their title, etc. Adam writes:

Step 1 - Reconnoiter

Draw a quick map of the table/layout of the meeting. Place yourself on it, to give yourself a reference point.

Step 2: The Combatants

As people introduce themselves around the table, fill them in. If you feel last names are necessary add those too, but don't do it at the expense of writing down someone else's name. You can guess at the last names later. If you miss one, leave it blank and fill it in as soon as you can - if someone else refers to them, etc, etc.

The excellent news that Merlin is joining the parent flock prompted me to write this post. I became a parent about a year ago and I've been battling the "loss" of about 8-16 hours of every day to parenting and the unpredictability element that babies bring to your schedule. I'm interested in hearing what other parents have done in order to keep a grip on their schedule and their lives.

Not all tasks are created equal. Our to-dos all differ in priority, complexity, time requirement, and context, so it’s probably daft to always capture and expose them in an identical way. I have a little trick for dealing with this that’s been working really well for me.

Back in the day, my to-do list was an egalitarian nightmare of inefficiency — verb-centric “next actions” through they all were, I commonly faced a task list that looked something like this:

• call Alice about Foo project
• fix line 125 of bar.php
• fix line 349 of bat.php
• take out kitchen recycling
• buy milk
• buy index cards
• sweep the decks

Now, the problem here might be self-evident to you smarter people, but I was missing an important concept: there is such a thing as too granular a task to track as its own event. In this instance, I was cruftifying my landscape with items that were way too detailed or tiny and, consequently, I’d turned my task list into an undoable roller coaster of un-focus. Just as “projects” are composed of “tasks,” I like to think that “tasks” themselves can often be collected into silos of small “mosquito tasks.” And my solution, as ever: text files and alarms.

stevenf.com ("Don't Use FTP")

Steven Frank, one of the boys wonder behind Panic and their excellent Transmit app says it’s high time to dump FTP in favor of its smarter, sexier sister, SFTP. Of which Steven says “It’s secure, it’s consistently implemented, and it’s machine-readable.”

A lot of people who have used FTP daily for years are surprised to learn that they're sending everything in the clear -- that means the stuff you're uploading as well as your actual password. Makes you think twice about what you're throwing through the air as you update your blog templates via "free WiFi."

Steven says:

How to implement GTD for university students

I always try to credit the source for stuff that I link to when I've learned about it from other sites. In addition to helping my readers connect with voices they may not have heard before, I believe it's just the classy thing to do. (I'm looking at you, "A Listers" -- a lot of you have started dropping vias for everyone but your highest-profile buddies: tacky, tacky).

Anyway, I admit that I'm not 100% either, but in the interest of trying to make good, here are a few of the sites that I find myself reading and linking to a lot. Thanks to their authors and contributors for sending me (and you) to so many interesting places.

The Art of Project Management
by Scott Berkun

oreilly.com — Online Catalog: The Art of Project Management

O’Reilly recently sent me a review copy of Scott Berkun’s The Art of Project Management. I’ve read a couple chapters through, and—as the author himself has recommended—have grazed through a bunch of the sections that looked especially interesting to me. See, I have a marker for a non-fiction book that’s really connecting with me—as I’m reading it, I find myself repeatedly cursing the fact that it didn’t exist earlier. I’m definitely feeling that with this one.

Where so many Project Management books fetishize GANTT charts, waterfalls, and abstract planning methods, most of Berkun’s book lives much further down in the trenches—where misunderstandings happen, dates slip, and bad decisions threaten to derail your project. The book is full of really practical advice on handling these challenges in the real world. And, yes, I really wish it had existed 7 or 8 years ago. As it is, many of my bouncer skills were primitively self-taught.

When the iPhone came out this summer, I was locked into a contract with another cell phone carrier, one that I couldn't escape on pain of a $200 surcharge. So I waited it out, and dreamed my little iPhone dreams all alone with my Plain Jane cell phone and suddenly archaic-looking iPod Video.

To be honest, I didn't really need an iPhone. I work from home, rarely more than a few yards from a computer (we had two laptops and a Mini in our house at the time). I don't travel for work, and when we go on vacation, I never bring work with me anyway. When I do leave the house for extended periods of time during the day, running errands, taking appointments, etc, it doesn't matter because I'd trained myself to plan ahead for that situation. Besides, I never get any messages that can't wait a couple hours until I get back to a computer anyway.

I was amazingly good at rationalizing away my need for an iPhone, but I still wanted one ever so badly. So last week I created a way out.

Oh happy day — the new Delicious is here

In the years since del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo! it’s been hard to get why it remained such a red-headed stepchild. Despite an unbelievable lead in both mindshare, functionality, and ease-of-use (yeah, it’s been my preferred bookmarker for years), del.icio.us seemed to sit there while a dozen social bookmarking sites lapped it with fancier designs and (mostly superfluous) new features. Yay, Yahoo.

Today Y! revealed a beautiful new version of the site, redubbed Delicious.com. You’ve probably read way too much about this, but I want to highlight exactly one new feature: big, 1000-character notes fields.