Original post at XKCD.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

- Peter Drucker

via Jason Fried

I almost feel sorry for her, but if you watch to the end she has a very good sense of humor about the whole thing. It’s really a hoot to watch.

by: not persephone

There’s a problem with life hacks: diminishing returns. There are only so many tweaks you can make that are going to make your life easier. Crossing the line into tweaking for the sake of tweaking is far too easy, and I’ve come to realize that I crossed that line literally years ago.

I used to follow twenty or so different sites that are dedicated in some way or another to life hacks. I now follow one - LifeHacker - and even then only their top articles feed. So I’ve gone from a diet of literally hundreds of life hacks per day, to approximately three or four. And you know what the crazy thing is? I’m no worse off.

So how did I get here? Well, Merlin Mann had a lot to do with it. His recent writing about taking 43 Folders in a new direction has inspired me to take a sober second look at my habits, and my preferences.

I’m getting tired from the firehose of information I have been subscribing to, and I’m starting to wonder just how little of it I can follow and get away with it. In this context, “getting away with it” means to still feel informed about things that matter to me.

This effect isn’t limited to my RSS feeds - it’s also affecting how I work on my computer. Right now I have too many utilities, too many customizations, just, well, too much stuff. It’s time to pare it down, time to delete things with abandon!

This is sort of a declaration of a new direction for me. I’m not really sure how much (if any) outward evidence there will be, but hopefully my brain will feel a little less cluttered, and a little more organized once I’m done.

Wish me luck.

The problem is, this type of functionality is commonly referred to as “reblogging”, and it’s used by blog spammers to steal content from other blogs. Obviously not something we wish to support.

In my case, I was able to use a WordPress plugin called WP-o-Matic to accomplish what I was looking for. By default, WP-o-Matic defaults to reblogging the entire contents of the RSS feed it is reblogging from, but it was quite easy to modify the template to provide a short description of what the post was, and pull in the title of the post being reblogged (with a link back).

So now that explains why you’ll likely be seeing more of that kind of post here than of my actual writing, but at least you can now easily follow my writing online.

What do you think?

But it’s back.

For probably the past month it has been making periodic appearances, but seems to really have taken root over the past week. Based on all of the advice this site receives, I know that it’s not really a surprise.

Lack of sleep? Check.
Not hydrated enough? Check.
Stress? Check. Check. Check.

The good thing is that all of this is actually controllable (at least to a large part), so I’m not too worried. But all of that notwithstanding, I have another theory as to the reason for this twitch.

Allergies.

As a kid I had wicked allergies, most of which have subsided considerably. But I still get hit with bouts of hay fever and occasional migraine headaches.

The thing is, this past week when my twitch has been really going hard, I’ve notice that my eyes feel like they’re burning. Eye drops help a bit, but not as much as I’d hoped.

I think I’m simply reacting to all the pollen that is in the air this time of year.

What do you think? Is there any merit to this theory?

Yes, the twitch is irritating, but I’m not going to let it get to me. Worrying about it only makes it worse in my experience, and I know that it has gone away in the past, and will again. But I can’t shake the thought that it’s all of the triggers I listed above combined with allergies that is really getting me right now.

Now, back when I was a Windows user I would have chalked this type of reaction up to the frothing-at-the-mouth Mac fanboys. And, to be sure, that could have something to do with it.

As well, the article may have been a simple attempt at baiting the Mac fan base. But Computerworld isn’t renowned for its Mac coverage; it’s mostly a PC / Windows oriented rag. So this incredible negative reaction is presumably coming, at least in part, from Windows users.

Yikes.

[Via UneasySilence]

via img297.imageshack.us
(Via David Chartier’s I’ve Tumbled, and I can’t get up!)

(Via A Welsh View.)

From the photographer’s site:

Flying an airplane was one of my earliest dreams. Building and flying all the model planes I could afford, I became intimately familiar with aircraft design, and at the age of 17, I received my pilot’s license.

Heavy metal, as the wide body jets are known, is the ultimate achievement in engineering and design. While aircraft evoke many different feelings, since 9/11, no one can ever again look at a large airliner without the distant but ominous memory of how easily they were turned into weapons by a small band of terrorists. They are a symbol of how vulnerable our highly technological society has become.

In this portfolio I explore a typology of the varied cruciform shapes of jet aircraft flying precisely overhead as if frozen in space. I have decontextualized these highly detailed photographs to express the complexity and beauty of form. That these giant conglomerations of aluminum, can gracefully lift from earth is amazing. That they can return safely some hours later on another part of the globe is even more amazing. My aircraft photograph.

[via LFSTYL] 

Evernote’s claim to fame was that it allowed users to capture notes in a never-ending ribbon of paper paradigm. You could simply scroll back in time endlessly looking at the notes and information that you had captured to your Evernote file. Neat stuff, and really useful.

I’ve never really found a note taking utility on the Mac that was as seamless as Evernote was on Windows. But I’ve also moved a lot of my note taking to online tools like Google Notebook and Backpack. I like being able to get to my notes from my phone or Pocket PC.

Jay Hathaway, one of my fellow bloggers at Download Squad, wrote a post that mentioned that Evernote has a beta version for the Mac coming out, along with a web version and mobile versions. Wow! As excited as I was to hear this, I couldn’t help but think that I’m not sure I want to be tied to an offline software tool for ubiquitous capture of information.

Then I watched the screencast of the new Evernote that is coming out. It blew me away.

Everything you put into your system can be synchronized and is therefore available from the web and mobile devices. Plus, it has built-in character recognition so if you take a photo of something with text on it and put that into your Evernote library, the text in those objects is searchable - even handwritten text!

Of course I signed up for the beta right away. I can’t wait to give this a try. The screencast shows some very mature looking user interfaces, so I suspect the beta will already be a very usable product. This is one product release I’m looking forward to.

I’m bummed to see that Chuck isn’t coming back until next year, but it’s great to see that there will be more episodes of The Office, 30 Rock, Numbers, and How I Met Your Mother.

Since it has no real purpose, I’m going to include a photo of my boys that was taken last fall that I really like. It’s a camera phone shot, so the quality is low, but I like their expressions quite a bit.

You are bidding on a rare chance to traumatize a treasured friend or relative with baffling, mind-numbing, mystery correspondence from abroad.

Here is the arrangement:

I will be spending the Christmas holiday in Poland in a tiny village that has one church with no bell because angry Germans stole it. Aside from vodka, there is not a lot for me to do.

During the course of my holiday I will send three postcards to one person of your choosing.

These postcards will be rant-ravingly insane, yet they will be peppered with unmistakable personal details about the addressee. Details you will provide me.

The postcards will not be coherently signed, leaving your mark confused, guessing wildly, crying out in anguish.

“How do I know this person? And how does he know I had a ferret named Goliath?”

Click the link to check out the rest of the description, and see a photo of the postcards. Priceless!

[Update] Also check out this Craigslist post, titled To the Drunk Hottie who fell off my motorcycle.

Fine, right?

Wrong.

For about a week, my email has been trickling in slowly, up to 12 hours behind when it was actually sent. DreamHost does have a status update referencing this issue (currently with 227 comments on it), but it’s very vague and doesn’t actually describe the true cause for the problem.

I personally submitted a support request about this problem before I was aware of the status update post, and received the following slightly more informative response:

 Hi Jason,

I am terribly sorry that you are running into problems here. This is
actually part of a bigger issue - which was hinted at last week with this
status blog post (and has since been updated):

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/11/17/gmail-forwarding-slowness/

Basically, Gmail is currently greylisting all mail being forwarded to
them by our mail servers. Because of the technology behind greylisting,
this means mails are sometimes delayed for hours before they can get
thru. We are trying to work with Google right now to clear this up - and
hopefully we’ll be able to do so shortly - but in the interim mail
forwarded to Gmail accounts will be delayed. Please accept my most humble
apologies for this mess.

In the interim, the best thing you can do is turn on a standard mailbox
and keeping forwarding intact. That way any mail sent after the mailbox
was turned on should arrive right away and the messages will eventually
show up in Gmail too. Please keep in mind that you won’t find any
messages that were in the process of being forwarded to you as they are
already in the queue attempting to be sent to your Gmail inbox - but you
will see anything sent afterwards show up in that newly formed inbox on
our servers here.

Should you manage to have any other questions, please feel free to let me
know and I’ll make sure that you get the answers which you seek.

Thanks!
Jason

So here we learn that somehow DreamHost has been greylisted by Google. This means that Google has found it necessary to apply a certain level of blocking to the emails that are coming to Google’s mail servers from Dreamhost servers. There are all sorts of reasons this could be the case, but a common one is simply that the volume of email is too high.

This is a real possibility, since there appears to be only fairly weak spam filtering options available, and no spam filtering whatsoever is applied to accounts that are forwarded to other domains.

I did implement the suggestion of using DreamHost’s web mail service for the time being until proper forwarding service was restored. What a mistake. I can’t believe how much spam Gmail is filtering out for me that is just flooding the crappy Squirrel Mail interface that Dreamhost provides. Using it is painful, slow, and feels like a time warp back to 1997.

A recent comment in the Dreamhost Status blog post for this issue copy and pasted the text of their support issue, which contains more information on the subject:

Hello,

Sorry about the mail delays you are experiencing. We are unfortunately
dealing with temporary greylisting from both gmail and verizon. Gmail
being the major cause of the problems with delayed email. These delays
are affecting gmail and verizon forwards, as well as sending messages to
non-customers with gmail or verizon addresses. We are also seeing delays
of all mail sending from our hosting machines. A lot of you have noticed
php mail with regards to the hosting machine delays. Unfortunately mail
from our host machines is also causing non-gmail/verizon messages to be
delayed. We are currently creating a separate relay server to handle the
mail that is getting backed up, this however will only cause non-gmail
accounts to go through without any delays. This relay will help with php
mail and other hosting messages that are going out, and hopefully clear
up delays for non-gmail destined addresses.

This is a serious issue and we are doing our best to contact google for
resolution. We do have some google employees who are customers who are
trying to help us resolve this issue. We have experienced this problem in
the past with aol which caused us to disallow all aol.com forward
addresses, hopefully we can avoid this drastic measure with gmail
forwards. This is a volume block unfortunately, so any forward email
address is contributing to the gmail greylisting. If you are using a
gmail forward we would suggest that you remove it and set your address to
go to a normal mailbox until this is resolved. Sorry about the problems
this has caused you. If we could directly fix this issue it would never
have gone on this long or be ongoing. We do also hope that you can use
your accounts to contact google in order to let them know that they are
affecting their clients with this greylisting. Any contact to google,
their gmail team specifically, will greatly help and will be greatly
appreciated.

Note: The verizon block is a temporary block and should be lifted soon,
it is not the same level of greylisting we are receiving from Gmail.
Please take note that if you are forwarding mail to Gmail and you
complain about it as spam, Gmail will flag our servers as the source,
actions like these lead to our servers getting blocked. It is also
suggested that if you want google to handle your mail you can use google
apps, http://www.google.com/a/ , then use the MX editor to have your mail
handled by Gmail directly without using our servers at all.

Thanks!
DreamHost

So now they are basically stating that there is no resolution in sight, it is unclear if it ever will be resolved, in a previous instance with another domain (aol.com) they simply had to block forwarding to that domain (in other words, they gave up), and at the end of the response they’re suggesting simply setting up a Google Apps account and having Google handle your email entirely, keeping DreamHost out of it.

Does this sound like a company that knows what they are doing with their customer’s data?

But here’s my real problem with all of this. These support cases point out that the problem is far more severe than they are letting on in the public DreamHost Status blog. That’s completely disingenuous, and misleading. The issue is set to Medium priority, when in fact they are practically admitting that there may never be a resolution. That sounds more serious that Medium to me.

Switching web hosts is a huge pain in the rear, and I already recently had to do so to switch to DreamHost. I guess you get what you pay for, and at this point MediaTemple is starting to look mighty good. I especially like how well thought-out MediaTemple’s management tools are.

Sorry Dreamhost. Your “too cool for school” image is fun when you’re delivering your service adequately, but when things fall over it’s too easy to think that you simply don’t take your customer’s data, and money, seriously.

I gave Flock a try back then (well over a year ago), and while I was pleasantly surprised that it was better than I expected, it certainly wasn’t compelling so I promptly forgot all about it.

Recently I’ve heard a lot of people online (particularly ones I trust) talking about how good the Flock 1.0 beta is. While I’ve been trying to avoid the “me too” attitude of having to try every new tool that gets some good comments, I have to admit my attitude about maintaining a browser with all of my preferred extensions is getting a bit cumbersome. If Flock can get it 75% right, it’s good enough for me.

Surprisingly, Flock seems to be getting it right. All of the baked-in functionality works extremely well, and is virtually seamless. While I haven’t yet tried installing some very important add-ins like Greasemonkey, I hear that Flock is compatible with many (but not all) Firefox extensions.

If you’re looking for a browser that integrates with your online life, services like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or del.icio.us, have a hard look at Flock. Like me, you might be surprised at what you see.

Oh, and did I mention it integrates with your blog? This post was written entirely in the built-in blog editor in Flock.

Tags: flock, browser, web, beta

But wait a second, I seem to remember that back when Scoble was extolling the virtues of Facebook, he claimed that part of the reason blog traffic was down was the fact that people are spending their time on social networks like Facebook.

Now, every other post he writes on his blog or Twitter account seems to be for the purpose of bellyaching that he can’t add more than 5,000 “friends” to his Facebook account. This last one states that he agrees with the statement “Facebook sucks” because of this problem. Yeah, yeah, we get it.

Inasmuch as Robert Scoble is an influential web personality who is nothing if not thought provoking, I think the time has come for a large company to stand up for themselves, and not give in to the bitching and moaning of the edge cases. It seems like the Robert Scobles of the world can’t handle it when they can’t simply complain and get their way.

The truth is that Facebook is designed with a 5,000 friend limit for a reason. Nobody truly has more than 5,000 real-life friends, so why bother having to architect a system to handle more? Facebook has a vested interest in ensuring that people use their system in the way that they intended, and get a good experience while doing so. Scoble is abusing the system, then complaining bitterly that it’s not working out for him. In the long run it’s not going to hurt Facebook in the slightest, but it sure is making Scoble look like a spoiled brat.

I wish that it were possible to have my AOL overlords allow API access of some manner so that I could use one unified interface (something like Ecto) to write posts for all of the blogs that I could potentially write for.

If you’re a Mac user and you want to see what I’m talking about, check out this page.

Hat tip to David Chartier.

Anyhow, to give this post some redeeming value, check out this photo essay of 7 amazing holes. Since I work for a company related to the mining industry, I found this list particularly interesting. And I get a kick out of the fact that a “glory hole” is really something quite impressive!

Yes, you may have noticed that Francesca is already writing for DIY Life. Luckily she doesn’t mind me treading on her turf, and it’s definitely her turf; she’s a writing machine, and I have written one whole post there this week. As a not very handy guy, I tend to find writing about technology easier, but I figure if I’m going to have to learn to do stuff around the house I might as well write about it. What’s that old adage about those that can, do… and those that can’t write teach? Something like that, anyway.

Of course, that all implies that I’m actually going to write more. That’s the plan, anyway.

We’ve also recently re-launched Beer League Hockey as a blog - we being me and my friend Glen (time to get your own blog so I can link to you!), who ends up doing most of all of the writing there.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the re-launch of Francesca’s blog. I had nothing to do with it other than running the one-click installer on the web server, but check it out because Fran’s a great writer. (more on that soon…)

[Update] As it turns out, there was a pretty fundamental part of the site that has been broken for awhile now. (I wondered why I wasn’t getting any comments!) Anyhow, I’ve reverted to a very old theme with some out of date info in it, and some missing functionality. It’s only a temporary situation though.

Warning: high nerd-factor humour here:

Wanna hear it?

Here it is: Have a crappy goalie.

I say this because for the past seven years, I’ve played on a mediocre (at best) team, with an exceptionally good goaltender. We’ve had a couple of different starting goalies in this time, but they’ve been pretty consistently good. Better, in fact, than any of our competition.

But here’s the thing. In any sport where there are a lot of teams, they get divided up into divisions based on skill so that the competition can be kept fairly even. The only real way for the league to determine the quality of a given team is to look at their record, particularly wins vs. losses, and goals for vs. goals against.

In hockey, the position of goaltender is key to a team’s success - at least as much so as a quarterback is key to a football team’s success. So if you happen to have a very good goalie, as we have had, you will find yourself in close games with teams that should be beating you handily. This means that you end up playing against teams that have better speed, puck handling, and positional play compared to your team, but you (at least sometimes) have a chance of winning those games when your goalie is able to stop all of their chances, and you capitalize on one of your few chances against their much weaker goalie.

This sounds fine, but the reality of it is that your team ends up controlling the puck much less than the other team, and therefore your offensive hockey skills as a team don’t grow nearly as quickly as they otherwise could. Keep in mind that beer league hockey teams don’t hold practices (at least ours doesn’t).

Now consider the same team, but with a particularly weak goalie. You’d end up in a lower division, playing against teams with much less overall skill, since they’d still be able to get enough goals on your weak goaltender to stay in the games. But overall, your team would control the play far more, get more offensive opportunities, and likely grow offensively much more as a team. You’d probably get better defensively as well, since you’d be compensating for a terrible goalie.

It’s taken me seven years to figure it out, but I think the way to consistently have fun in beer league hockey is to have a relatively poor goalie. Which sucks, since besides being very good, our goalie is also a great guy.

Tags: hockey, beer league, beer league hockey, recreational hockey, goalie, goaltender, playoffs

Here’s the section I contributed to:

Jason Clarke, who works in the technical sales and marketing department at Wenco International Mining Systems Ltd. in Richmond, British Columbia, receives about 100 e-mails daily. He said that on his PC, Outlook 2007 “hangs completely for three to seven seconds typically, and up to 20 seconds in worst cases when new mail is being downloaded.”

Turning off Outlook add-ins that he has installed, such as ClearContext Corp.’s e-mail management software and Caelo Software Inc.’s Nelson Email Organizer, “does improve matters marginally, but not nearly as much as it should,” Clarke said. “The hesitation is still very noticeable — jarring even.”

Clarke, who oversees Wenco’s e-mail system, has posted information about Outlook’s slow performance on his personal blog. He blames the problems on the new e-mail indexing engine that Outlook 2007 shares with Windows Vista.

The indexing allows searches to be done almost instantly in Outlook 2007, a vast improvement over Outlook 2003. However, the process also appears to be CPU-intensive. Microsoft recommends that users put indexing on a regular schedule instead of letting it run constantly in the background.

Now, I just want to point out that I consider ClearContext and Nelson Email Organizer to be essential Outlook add-ins, and made the point in my email to the author, Eric Lai.

Also, between the first time I spoke with him back in November for an article that came out in December, and now, I have a completely new job, albeit at the same company. I can assume some blame for that, though, since there’s no reason to think that within a few months someone would change positions. But I feel weird about it nonetheless.

For what it’s worth, here is the content of my email to Eric. To preface it, Eric linked to a few complaints about Outlook 2007 performance on the web, and asked me whether I thought the complaints were legitimate. Here is my response:

I’m struggling with how to answer your question; I’ve read the links you provided below to some of the user complaints with Outlook 2007, and while I’m certainly frustrated with the product’s performance, I’m not having the same kind of trouble these users are complaining about.

I actually wrote about my frustration with Outlook 2007 about a week ago on my personal blog in a post called Outlook Slowness. My complaint is weak compared to the others you referenced; I’m basically saying Outlook 2007 is mildly better than Outlook 2003, but that I’m using a faster PC so it’s not really a fair fight.

The specific performance issue that I face is that Outlook hangs completely for 3 to 7 seconds typically, and up to 20 seconds in worst cases when new mail is being downloaded. Turning off the Outlook add-ins that I rely on
(ClearContext and Nelson Email Organizer) does improve matters marginally, but not nearly as much as it should; the hesitation is still very noticeable, jarring even.

After testing Microsoft’s desktop search product (the one that Outlook 2007 nags you to install), I came to the conclusion that it is inferior to many of the other similar free products that are available (like those from Google, X1 / Yahoo, and Colibri), and removed it from my system. But it’s worth noting that anyone that is using a desktop search product to index their email for faster searching is likely to see a noticeable performance
hit.

I’m still running Outlook 2007 on a Windows XP system. I should note that when I tested it using the exact same PST file (email catalog) on Windows Vista, I found it to be noticeably snappier. Some of the enhancements that
have been made to Vista allow Outlook to load in a few seconds after a reboot, whereas on XP it can take Outlook up to 30 seconds to become usable on the exact same system. Unfortunately, I haven’t used it enough to comment reliably on the actual email download hesitation problem. In fact, I’m dying to do exactly that and see if I can ease my pain.

For people that are frustrated with Outlook’s performance, Brad Meador at ClearContext posted a fantastic tutorial for ensuring the health of your Outlook mail (PST) file. At one point I was experiencing a significant overall Outlook slowdown, and following Brad’s advice helped matters greatly.

I hope this helps!

One last point I should make. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into Outlook over the years, so it may come as a surprise to some of my readers, but I finally found the ultimate solution for it. A Mac.

That’s right; I had the opportunity to choose a new laptop at work, and decided to get one that would simply help me get things done, rather that having to muck around with every last little thing. For the moment I’m using separate Gmail accounts to manage both my personal and work related email, and finding the experience very enjoyable. Gmail excels at handling very long email threads, which is something that happens in my work email very frequently.

Beyond that, I may give Apple Mail a try as an offline email client. So far I haven’t felt the need to. And it would be disingenuous of me not to admit that although I’m operating most of the time in Mac’s OS X operating system, Intel-based Macs do run Windows fine, and I have a Windows instance available to me whenever I need it. In fact, that’s where I keep my archive of emails from before the point where I decided to switch to Gmail, and it works just fine.

So, I’ve given up on Outlook for day to day work. But if you want to or have to use it, do check out Clear Context and Nelson Email Organizer. They both have the capability to supercharge the way you deal with your email, and both work fine for me under Outlook 2007. And although I do have affiliate links for both of these software packages, you’ll note that I&#