I still dig EverNote

I’m still digging EverNote.

Mann remixes Postel?

Is Merlin Mann restating Postel’s law? Postel says: “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.” Merlin says “be very consistent about how you store information but exceedingly generous about all the ways you might cap…

Earworm:

“Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega has to be somewhere in the top 5 all-time worst. It’s been over a decade since that song received airplay, and I STILL wake up with it jangling through my head like a ten-ton hangover.

For the last 13 years for some horrible reason I often wake up in the morning with the Bobby Brown song, “Every Little Step I Take.” And all throughout the day, I can never get it out of my head. I have heard the song since I was 13 and that was 16 years ago. So what gives?

The most “persistent” earworms (as defined by revisiting me many times over a course of many years) are:

• Gilligan’s Island theme (yes, how sad is that…now I can get rid of it by doing the trick of singing the words to Amazing Grace to the saem tune…)
• Girl from Ipanema (and I *HATE* that song)
• Kashmir - Led Zepplin (at least I liek this one)

The most adamant one was “I Don’t Mind at All” by Bourgeois Tagg. Good Lord. I couldn’t remember who the song was by or even any of the rest of the lyrics (though I could hum the tune). I called the local 80’s station. No love. I asked at Best Buy (what was I thinking) and the local independent record store (at least that had some hope of succeeding). I finally called in this big guns, a friend of an ex-boyfriend of mine, who I think might know every song ever written. I hadn’t talked to him in years, but three days after I sent the email to “editor at citysearch” (which is where I thought he worked) that basically said “Hi. I am trying to reach Jerry because there’s this bad 80’s tune with the lyric “I don’t mind at all” and something about “misery loving company”, Jerry emailed me back with the answer. (And then I had to find a used CD place that had the blame thing!!) Whew.

The funny thing is that the radio in my head is so insistent that when I was in the 9th grade I made an index card of the songs that I could “play” (in my head) to banish any bad earworms (though I hadn’t heard that most apt term at the time) that I carried in my wallet. I still have the card.

Earworms? Good name for them.

“In 1814 we took a little trip, …” “I’m Henry the Eighth, I am, Henry the Eighth, I am, I am. …”

re Next Actions and dependencies:

I currently use a wiki as a web-based personal organizer, but I want something with more structure. I’m now writing a new wiki-like organizer that knows nothing about Projects or Next Actions. It only knows about tasks and waiting-for dependencies between tasks. My organizer will then DERIVE your Project and Next Actions from this tree of task dependencies:

Projects = tree root, i.e. tasks upon which no other task depends (no task is waiting-for this task) Next Actions = tree leaves, i.e. tasks which have no dependencies (waiting-for no other task)

I haven’t tested this idea yet. In my head, it seems like an elegant way to create order from chaos. However, I worry that management of task dependencies will be too cumbersome for a web-based app. For example, how does a user input task dependencies? How does a user view a tree of task dependencies? Are dependency cycles OK?

There was an app that did versioning of your whole system for OS 9, called Rewind, I think, from Power On Software. The trouble was that constantly versioning your whole system can be resource-intensive. I used the app for a while, but it ended up being more of a pain than it was worth.

“In the Meantime” - Spacehog

and

“Immigrant Song” - Led Zep

Once I hear or think of either of those songs, I’m stuck with them the rest of the day.

Earworms? I’ve got a whole can of them. The worst was ‘The Bear Necessities’ from the Jungle Book. I woke up with it going around my head one morning (actually, when I woke up my brain was half way through the song), and it was on continuous repeat for about 3 days.