This truly made me LOL!

From 9GAG – Speed dating

You might think: that’s impossible?! You must not get an email!!

Well, I get a fair amount of email every day. This is how I deal with it.

First off, I go through and delete all the email I don’t need to work on and don’t need to keep a record of.  That helps alot.

Second, I go through all the email I don’t need to work on but DO need to keep a record of. I select that email and then have a Lotus Notes agent file all that information.

Finally, I go though the email I have remaining and write out my todo list for the day. I reply to the email I need to reply to right away, and I file the rest. The point is to work off the Todo list, not use the Inbox as a todo list, for it is a very inefficient one at best.

For people who use Lotus Notes, here are the details:

1) I select all my email and mark it all unread. Now I have an inbox full of Red. I change the setting from View All to View Unread.

2) I go through the list and click Insert on all the email I want to file. As I do this, my Inbox starts to decrease. I can do this very quickly.

3) I select all on the remaining Unread items and then have an agent move them to a temp directory.

4) I change the setting from View Unread to View All. These are all the emails I want to file.

5) I have two folders I file things. One is called File and one is MyCurrentProject. I sort by name and then select all the people from MyCurrentProject. That will be the bulk of my email, and mostly every email from someone on my project will pertain to my project. I have another agent that grabs all the email selected and throws them into the MyCurrentProject folder. Then I select the rest of the files and throw them into File with still another agent.

At this point my Inbox is down to Zero. I have one last agent that takes the files in the temporary folder and puts them back in my inbox. But I also could leave them in my temp folder and work on them from there.

The trick is not to have email hanging around. Treat email like dirt: the way to keep you inbox clean is to regularly sweep it out so the dirt doesn’t accumulate. 🙂

I must admit, when I was younger, I always thought Lincoln’s facial hair was odd. Why no mustache, I thought? I had it in my mind they must go together, and Lincoln must have looked odd to his contemporaries.

Turns out his beard was quite boring compared to some of these 25 Awesome Civil War Facial Hair Styles.

For example:

You can see more at Buzzfeed: just follow the link.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for this)

I’ve heard Aloe Blacc’s “I Need A Dollar” and thought it a great song. It has a feel of some of the great songs of the 60s, which their mixture of protest and their blend of soul, funk and the blues. Now you should give it a listen, but you should also watch the video. It’s really well done, given that it is a split screen. That could be hackneyed, but the director does something interesting around half way through the song. Watch.

What’s fascinating to me is that one of my other favorite videos is Lauryn Hill’s Doo Wop (That Thing). It also uses split screen very well, and it also does a great job of revitalizing classic sounds in a current settings. See here:

…can be found here at IBM developerWorks.

Besides being an IBM employee that works with alot of smart people on “Cloud”, I am a big fan of anything done by the folks at developerWorks, including this. Well worth a look.

For extremely fine shoes, head over to Leffot in NYC. They were recently featured in The Sartorialist, but their blog and their web site has alot more detail. Simply amazing shoes, from casual ones like these:

To more formal styles like these:

Amazing. Go to their site. Better still, go to their store and get yourself some good shoes.

What is it? As they say on their page:

Sparked is online volunteering for busy people. At Sparked, we’re driven to make volunteering convenient, fun, and full of impact. We call it “microvolunteering” because you can do it whenever and wherever you have time. And now, with Sparked Enterprise, you can get your whole office volunteering together!

I’ve been doing it for a few months now and I love it. I even got a write up on their blog for the work I did with their API! (Taking our API for its first Spin | Sparked Blog). I highly recommend you check them out and start microvolunteering yourself. How? Go here:
Sparked.com – microvolunteering by The Extraordinaries – Team Volunteers

This article (Shareable: Changing Models of Ownership) and especially this image:

..is a great way to think about ownership. I think this graph, which is symbolic, would change for different items. For some things, like cars, the burden curve might rise higher than a small object that gets stored away.

The article also talks about how digitization changes things. Well worth a read. (H/t to Swiss Miss blog).

From time to time in the U.S., people criticize TARP for bailing out the banks. This is stupid. Plain and simple. TARP stopped the Great Recession from becoming the Great Depression II. Not only that, it made money: TARP Bank Programs Turn Profit After Three Financial Institutions Repay $7.4 Billion.

People have all sorts of theoretical reasons for not liking TARP. The conclusion they come to is wrong. TARP delivered.

Perfect for Monday morning: pop music that is upbeat and seems simple. I’ll bet, though, you’ll be thinking about it for some time after. The beats, the tempo changes, the layers of instrumentation, even the clapping, is really well done. The video’s fun, too. See/hear:

If you want to see more of Sophie Madeleine, her site is here: Sophie Madeleine

When  this came out, I thought a) this is new and fun and b) this woman will not last a year. Well, i got A right!

YouTube – Madonna – Lucky Star [Official Music Video]

If you are well known and you use Facebook, you may want to maintain some degree of seperation from your personal and public life. To do that, you can try different approaches. One of these is to use everyday Facebook for your personal stuff and Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups for your public side. **

To understand the difference, check out this Facebook Tip: What’s the Difference between a Facebook Page and Group?

(** Unless you want 1000s of “friends” to manage. Hint: you don’t.)

Nathan Myhrvold is our Charles Foster Kane and the projects that he takes on are his Marion Davies. Since leaving Microsoft, he has involved himself in activities that are as spectacular as they are useless. His latest work is this epic: five volumes, 1522 recipes, and 2438 pages of scientific cooking. It took 46 people around 5 years to create, costs $1-10 million dollars, and will set you back $625. Impressive, yes?

You can just see yourself running down to the local book store to get it, yes? You can imagine making it THE reference book in your collection of cookbooks, tossing out those old things currently on your shelves, I’ll bet. Actually, I can imagine a very limited audience for this book, and the influence of it being very minimal.

But never mind that, let’s look at Myhrvold’s recent talk at the TED conference. Myhrold and his team have come up with a way of dealing with malaria. How?

Yes, that’s right: use laser beams! Astounding, for sure! Practical? Not so much.

All of this is in keeping with his current job. Since leaving  Microsoft in 1999, he has been the CEO and founder of Intellectual Ventures, “a firm ded­i­cated to cre­at­ing and invest­ing in inven­tions”, and according to this (Green Pioneers: Godfather of nutty inventions – Times Online), they have submitted over 30,000 patents. Sounds like a lot, and it is! How many game changing products have they come out with? Well, none. “Intellectual Ventures has earned about $1 billion in licensing revenues and paid out $350m to inventors. It has first refusal on inventions from more than 100 universities worldwide”. Basically they don’t invent anything. They just lock down ideas and piggyback off other companies that actually do the work.

To me all of this is a shame. It’s easy to slam Myhrvold as an egomaniac or a glorified patent troll. What I don’t understand is why a guy that rich and that intelligent does what he does. He should be making the future. Instead he dives into extreme attention-getting activities that amount to little if anything, while people like Ferran Adrià or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs remake the world. He gets alot of slack from people who interview him and write about him. Perhaps they are impressed by his obvious intelligence or the sheer epic quality of the things he takes on. I wish someone who is really making a difference would have a talk with him and get him to focus less on himself and more on a monumental problem that he could not only overcome, but develop some humility in the process. That would benefit us all: certainly much more than a $600 cookbook does.

P.S. If you must, you can go here (Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking) to learn more about his book. If you really want to learn how to cook well, check out this book, The Way to Cook by Julia Child , or get this magazine, Cooks Illustrated, both of which I think are superb.

If you want to see ex-Microsoft employees taking a much more practical and effective approach to malaria, go here: Our Work in Malaria – Overview & Approach – Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Finally, I don’t have to tell you this, but if you want to see people changing the world with technology (and patents), go to Apple or Facebook or Twitter, to name a few.

P.S.S. It’s 2021 and he is still useless. Here he is taking pictures of snowflakes. Read to the bottom and you can see other photographers essentially dismissing his approach. Typical.

The NYTimes.com missed the bigger picture when they did this feature on Miranda Cosgrove (The Good Girl, Miranda Cosgrove – NYTimes.com). It’s true, her recent career trajectory has matched Hillary Duff and Miley Cyrus. What the article glosses over is just how much acting she has been doing for some time now. I know, having kids who grew up over the span of her career, I’ve seen her in TV (Drake and Josh) and movies (School of Rock). I think she is going to be acting in bigger and better things for sometime to come. I think she’d be smart to take some time to transition out of the tween phase and then come back as a young actress, like Jodie Foster or Emma Watson or Natalie Portman. I can’t see Cosgrove going away any time soon.

American Express Launches Digital Payments…

less than two weeks after Visa’s announcement that it was launching its own peer-to-peer digital payment system…The credit card company today unveiled Serve, its new digital payment and commerce platform.

Users will be able to send or receive money from their Serve accounts, which can be funded by a bank account, debit or credit card, or by money from another Serve account. With the new AmEx digital payment system, consumers will be able to make payments via the Serve website, via their mobile phones, and with merchants who accept American Express cards. Accounts will be accessible via Android and iPhone apps and through Facebook.

For people who have complained about the costs of using PayPal, consider this good news:

The lack of fees might be a good way to lure new customers, but AmEx says those fees won’t be high after that initial six month period. Customers will be charged for putting money into their Serve accounts – 2/9% plus a $0.30 per load – and will be charged for ATM cash withdrawals – $2 after one free withdrawal per month.

Can be found here: Danziger Projects – BIG SHOTS

YouTube – Kate Nash – Nicest Thing Live on Abbey Road

This is a great recipe:

There’s not much I can add to improve this recipe. Make it in the 7 Ways that Mark Bittman suggests. Once you get the hang of it, you can do some things like add more or different vegetables. I think that would help. Otherwise it is simple and delicious. You will never buy lentil soup again, for this recipe is very easy and very cheap.

This great image is from Goleen Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, and St. Patrick North Wall Fourth Window Saint Patrick Detail 2009 09 10.jpg – Wikimedia Commons

You might ask: Japan is a wealthy country, why should we in other parts of the world help? I think there are a number of good answers to that, but you need to know more about how this works. As this article states (Does Japan need your donation?)

The Japanese are world-renowned experts in disaster preparedness, relief and recovery, and Japan is the third largest economy in the world. There should be no mistake that the Japanese government and Japanese organizations are well-equipped to take the lead.

And as this article shows (Charities Rush to Help Japan, With Little Direction – NYTimes.com), some organizations, like

The Japanese Red Cross, for example, has said repeatedly since the day after the earthquake that it does not want or need outside assistance.

So, should you donate? Well, if you just read the headline of this, Don’t donate money to Japan by Felix Salmon at Reuters.com, you might not. But even he recommends donating to organizations who do this work day in, day out. Indeed, if you did donate to the Red Cross, and if they didn’t use the money in Japan, they would use it when the next disaster hits (as it surely will). Same with organizations like Doctors Without Borders (MSF). Indeed, as someone pointed out, just knowing that people care and are donating to help them will likely go along way to help the people of Japan psychologically. Your donation now will not be wasted.

It is going to take time for Japan to rebuild. There may be an opportunity to donate your time or money or efforts later as well. Even a visit once things are stable is something to consider. (I recall the tremendous promotion that NYC did after 9/11 to get people to come back and visit. It may be tourism, but it also helped the New York economy and New Yorkers too. What was true of New York will be true of Japan.)

So the money you donate to good organizations will help, if not Japan now, then some other desperate place later. What you donate now will help improve the morale of the people of Japan. And what you give later will be important too.

Japan may be a wealthy country with plenty of resources available to it, but in terrible times like this, anyone in their position could use help. So help any way you can.

I love this image:

It’s a food painting.

(From the excellent tumblr blog Thought for Food )

FOMO: the Fear of Missing Out, is the topic at Caterina Fake’s blog, Caterina.net.

It’s a thoughtful post, and as I recall, it is a fear that I had when I was younger. However, as I get older (and I believe this is true generally), I think the predominant fear one has becomes the fear of being left out. What’s great about social media, wireless connectivity, mobile devices, and other technology developments is that it gets easier to be connected and stay connected. I was sitting on my couch one Saturday night and I was a) responding to email from the Nova Scotia b) texting my daughter to see what she was doing in Toronto c) listening to music being posted on blip.fm from friends in the U.S. d) looking at photos being posted on Facebook and flickr.com from around the world e) responding to people on twitter from everywhere. What struck me was how interconnected I was with the world. Where once I might have felt isolated being by myself, having all this technology allowed me to be connected, and it made me happy to have it. It was the joy of being connected.

Now I think FOMO is a better acronym that JOY-C. And I have no doubt that people experience FOMO. But I am happy to have all my additional connectivity and JOY-C.

Really!! See Antarctica, 1961: A Soviet Surgeon Has to Remove His Own Appendix – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic

Are combined in this great poster above. I would also recommend you donate to agencies that do this work day in, day out, like MSF. 

More great artwork to aid Japan can be found here.

(Found via Swiss Miss)

Adam Schwabe (@adamschwabe on Twitter and a former colleague at IBM) has a good rundown on the cost of developing an app here: The Race to the Bottom for Native Apps | Teehan+Lax.

Any organization considering developing an app would do well to read this first in order to better understand what they are getting into. Adam is not just passing on what he has read elsewhere: he has strong experience with developing mobile apps, including the successful Rocket Radar. Take a look.

There are lots of good sources, but to me the best right now is NHK WORLD TV on USTREAM. It’s the official NHK WORLD TV news station from Japan (think CNN, CBC, BBC or Al Jazeera) and it is live and in English 24-hours a day. Watch.

She’s a great dancer. But here wikipedia entry says it better, with quotes like:

With her mane of platinum dreadlocks, her physical power and her mastery of the full-body barrel jump, which looks like a horizontal pirouette, her image was a signature for the company

and

…she gave heart and soul to her art. She embodied dance on the outer edge, performing with passion and generosity, dazzling audiences worldwide.

Now she will be performing here: Harbourfront Centre – World Stage 2010:11 | Louise Lecavalier

Here’s an old video of her from her days with La La La Human Steps (Infante c’est destroy). She dances great throughout, with an amazing display of her power and virtuosity starting around the 2:15 mark:

Well, you could do yourself a favour and check out this site: ONE DAY ONE APP | Showcase Of Selective iPad Apps. Not only do they have a ton of interesting apps you could download, but they come out with a new one every day. Plus, I am delighted to say they have my site listed in the footer of their blog. But even if they didn’t, I’d still recommend it. The iPad is great, but what makes it even greater is good apps. Go find some good ones at this site.

See the source: CGPortfolio – Pawel Hynek. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the pointer.

Can be seen here: Shot from the hip: B&W Toronto street portraiture. Shots like this:

Great stuff, and lots more. Check out the link.

From the always good blogTO.

Funny!

(thanks to @remarkk on twitter for this)

YouTube – Steve Jobs pitches iPad on Dragons’ Den – 2010 Unwrapped with Miranda Hart – Preview – BBC Two

Google came up with this:

Like alot of IT shops, I believe, they thought being a good manager meant being more technical than the staff you manage. It turns out that isn’t it. The list above is more important. To see how Google came to it, see: Google’s 8-Point Plan to Help Managers Improve – NYTimes.com (which is where the list above came from).

Today, March 14, can also be written as 3.14, which just so happens to be the start of Pi! Hence the new “holiday”. 🙂

Speaking of Pi, check out this cool mnemonic by Alexander “Sasha” Volokh:

“How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the tough lectures involving quantum mechanics; but we did estimate some digits by making very bad, not accurate, but so greatly efficient tools! In quaintly valuable ways, a dedicated student — I, Volokh, Alexander — can determine beautiful and curious stuff, O! Smart, gorgeous me! Descartes himself knew wonderful ways that could ascertain it too! Revered, glorious — a wicked dude! Behold an unending number: pi! Thinkers’ ceaseless agonizing produces little, if anything! For this constant, it stops not — just as e, I suppose. Vainly, ancient geometers computed it — a task undoable. Legendre, Adrien Marie: ‘I say pi rational is not!’ Adrien proved this theorem. Therefore, all doubters have made errors. (Everybody that’s Greek.) Today, counting is as bad a problem as years ago, maybe centuries even. Moreover, I do consider that variable x, y, z, wouldn’t much avail. Is constant like i? No, buffoon!”

By counting the number of letters in each word, and considering the end of each sentence to represent a zero, one can easily reconstruct the value of pi to 167 digits after the decimal point:

3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502 8410270.

However many digits after the decimal you want to remember it, have a great pi day!

(Thanks to Eric Andersen @eric_andersen for this!)

Years ago, decades ago, I read how Steve Jobs pressed the developers of the early Macintosh to cut down on the boot up time of the machine. Think about it: for most Windows users, there is an acceptance that it takes minutes to boot up your machine. Jobs wanted the Mac to boot up in seconds. Now, years later, he is able to get the iPad to be available in no time at all.

There are a lot of reasons why Apple products are successful: I am sure this relentless perfectionism is one of them.

(Image from the NYTimes story, by Jim Wilson)

IPad ‘Smart Cover’ Opens to Instant Access – NYTimes.com

From The Sartorialist:

Some people have commented that they don’t relate to the runways shots that I have posted on the blog during fashion week. They say they can’t afford the clothes or the looks don’t relate to their everyday lives.

I understand these comments but I challenge you to try and look at these runway shots in a new way.

Fendi, for example, was really about fantastic color combinations. Even if you didn’t like the clothes you can focus on the color schemes. These suggestions of color can be used whether shopping Fendi, or Zara, or vintage.

Maybe another collection – like Yohji – would be all about proportion and texture. Wearing all black is difficult but new ideas in mixing shape and fabric textures can be invaluable in keeping a monotone wardrobe fresh.

Dries and Gaultier’s strength’s have always been their great ability to mix genres and cultural symbols. I love the idea of Tibetan Fireman.

All I’m saying is don’t let the lack of funds keep you from having fun with fashion.

Great advice.

is featured here. Very impressive!

(Thanks to Roger Ebert for this via twitter)

It seems that it is acceptible now to look down on people who don’t use Gmail as their prime email account: swissmiss | What your email domain says about you. As someone who has been using email since 1983 — well before the Interwebs, as the cool kids like to say — I must say this is totally ridiculous. I’ve used various forms of email over time, from internal IBM email to Yahoo! to Hotmail to Gmail and some others that have come and gone. I have stuck with Yahoo! because I have had my account there for along time and I am not keen on Gmail. I was happy Gmail came along: it forced Yahoo! to bump up their size limits and get competitive. But I am also a fan of Yahoo! in general. Gmail/Google fans are like Apple fans: they swear how great it is and are happy to overlook any deficiencies (like those recent thousands of Gmail accounts that recently disappeared). All online web services have their shortcomings, but to somehow assume that people are inferior because they use one form of email over another is terrible. It’s not the most terrible prejudice in the world, but it is still prejudice.

I am a big user of Todo lists, as well as a big user of todo list tools. I use Remember the Milk, Workflowy, Yahoo! widgets, Lotus Notes todos, Tiddlywikis, Blackberry todos, text files…you name it, I try to use it if it helps.

Recently, though, I have settled on a new way of managing all my todos in one tool: a spreadsheet. I did this for a number of reasons:

1. It was not easy integrating any one tool with all the others.
2. I need to maintain different formats, depending on who I am working for.
3. I need an easy way to focus on specific todos

I found a spreadsheet let me do all those things. Here’s how.

This is a typical worksheet in my todolist spreadsheet. (I keep a separate worksheet for each week.)

• Column A is the priority of the task.
• Column B is an arbitrary flag I use.
• Column C is a category tag. I have three categories of todos: Home, Proj(ect), and Admin. (Column B and C work together. For example, I can group all my  Home related activities related to my kids by putting “Kids” in column B.).
• Column D I will explain later.
• Column E is the actual task itself
• Column F is the day the task will be worked on and completed.
• Column G is the tasks status. I have three: Complete, working on it (WIP = work in progress) or Pending (not yet working on it).
• Column H is for free form comments.

The first thing I can do is sort my tasks. For example, I can change the priorities in column A and then resort the worksheet in order to have all my priority 1s on top, followed by priorities 2 then 3 (like you see above).

Next, each column has a filter on it, so I can drill down on specific items. For example, here are all the todos I have listed concerning my current work project.

I can drill down on more than one column. For example, I could set the filters for all priority 1, project related todos that are due on the day of “F” (Friday) that are “Pending”.  Or I could see all Home todos that are priority 1 that are not complete by setting a custom filter where the status field is not “Complete”. There are all sorts of ways of slicing and dicing the todo list, but what I end up with is one complete todo list, not a bunch of separate ones to manage.  

Not only can I filter out specific todos, but I can filter out whole columns by hiding them. Here is the list of project related todos with just three fields.

Why? Well, for my status report, I need to fill in this table in a Word document, like this:

To fill that out, I just need to copy and paste.

I can also copy and paste into my other tools that I use, too. For example, here is the same three items put into a wiki, in this case, TiddlyWiki

Column D of the spreadsheet is used for the wiki’s markup language, in this case, an asterisk. I copied columns D and E right into the wiki and the wiki formatted it for me.

I then took column E and pasted it into Workflowy, like this:

That way I can look up the list easily via my old Blackberry, my Netbook, or my iPod touch.

I could also email the todolist to RememberTheMilk.com and have my todos updated there, also. Or I could store the spreadsheet in Zoho.com and access it there as well, though I think there filter support is limited.

Regardless, as you can see, I can do alot with this one spreadsheet. I can capture and update all my todos in one list, then copy them into other tools as I need to with little effort.  I am sure people who are much better with these tools than I am could think of even better ways to go about doing this.

I hope you find this helpful.