All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

This morning, my mom wanted to move some more stuff to Public Storage. I went into the room only to see her opening a box for some new system that changes the pH level in our water system to 8.5. (I have no idea, don’t ask.) She looked outside and expressed unhappily that it’s going to rain. Then, she looked at our faucet and concluded that it’d be too old for the expensive system she bought. By this time, I finally left for the library (not because of her - I already planned to).

Where does she go wrong? A lot of times, she ties herself into knots because she thinks over all the things she has to do. But it doesn’t help at all, right? You waste 3 minutes here, 2 minutes there, all because you’re worrying about things you’ll get done eventually.

When you find your mind wandering onto something else you need to get done, take a deep breath.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get [insert offending task] done later. Focus on this now.”

At work, my co-workers use Outlook to retrieve emails, and view their calendar/tasks. However, when I’m called to work on one of their computers, it’s difficult to work on them when 20+ alarms pop up. Then it’s a quick game of clicking “Snooze” on all the small windows before I can continue my task.

The problem: People have so many alarms that the lesser important tasks inevitably mix with the highly important tasks. Before you know it, you’re overlooking everything on your lists and just becoming reactive to the most critical tasks that grab your attention.

My suggestion: Don’t use alarms! If you’re not paying attention to them anyway, it’s pointless. Instead, print out all your tasks. When you feel the need to look at them, glance at your sheet then adjust yourself accordingly.

Remember, only place date-sensitive tasks on your calendar if it absolutely needs to get completed. If it’s not time- or date-sensitive, keep it off your calendar.

Sidenote: Personally, with Palm Desktop, my Tungsten E, and Datebk5, all my tasks are undated except for the ones I’ll absolutely need to have done on a specific day. Datebk5 also helps because I have special views setup so I don’t see the tasks that aren’t in context to where I am (i.e. I won’t see @Home tasks @Work).

I briefly wrote about 30 Boxes right when it first came out early February. I played around with it for a few days, and I liked it quite a bit.

The reason I stopped using it was because my main calendaring tool is my PDA, specifically, my Tungsten E. That’s my right tool for the job. Barely any of my friends have a calendar of some sort, leaving the task only to their minds (at least, from what I’ve seen). This, my friends, is a post dedicated to them and anyone else that’s in a similar situation to me.

Why would I use 30 Boxes?

Easy tracking from other sites, especially with RSS feeds. Keep tabs on other people important to you. Print view looks simple, yet effective. Entering new items is a breeze with the One Box entry. Tags, map links, add colors, and SMS alerts. They have a vision: Track, organize, and share. Sounds good to me.

Real world use: Write things down during the day, then add the appointments to your calendar. Print out your calendar for offline use for the current and following day. Use that sheet throughout your day for adding stuff to your calendar. For more efficient entries when physically writing stuff on paper, use Todoque.

Why wouldn’t I use 30 Boxes?

I’m not always online, and it doesn’t have all the features like other more complete applications. I don’t like learning new things, especially having to sign up for it. I already bought DateBk5 that adds more functionality to my Palm PDA.

Respect the company for aiming at a specific audience

I can understand that you can’t please everyone. If you make that point clear, then people can’t blame them for not implementing certain features. If you tried to please everyone, then the whole application would become bloated, right? So, when using this service, keep this in mind before you complain to the developers.

Conclusion

I believe anyone without some sort of calendar should look into using 30 Boxes. If you have a bunch of calendars spread out all over the place, you might consider this service to consolidate the chaos.

Some of these maybe be old and/or outdated, but I still think they’re worth looking into. These posts won’t be as length since I’ve accumulated a lot of these over a period of a few weeks.

• The Complete Guide to Backing Up iPod & iTunes Music
• Using iTunes to backup your music
• Firefox Search Bar Hacks - An alternative to this is adding Smart Keywords, it all depends if you can remember those keywords; otherwise, use add engines to your search bar
• Life Without Mouse Tips & Tricks - Just learn a little bit at a time, then it’ll become second nature and you’ll see an increase in productivity
• Create a torrent feed to keep up with your shows - this also falls under GTD, because for those without TiVo or a PVR, you don’t need to tie yourself to the network’s time slots
• FindRun Robot - No need to use your mouse to sift through the Start Menu. Just press the hotkey, type in a few letters, then select the program you want to run.
• Get your PC custom-made - Other than the fear of getting over a small business or individual support your computer, these are a great way to go. I haven’t had too many complaints about the systems I’ve made. (Building custom PCs is my side job.)
• Using the correct image formats
• PureText - Strip formatting from text and paste with one hotkey; no need to copy into notepad, paste, copy, then paste into Word. Yes, I know about the “Paste Special > As Unformatted Text” item in Microsoft Word.
• Burn to the Brim
• Fix Stubborn Windows Install Errors
• Ten Wikipedia Hacks
• 10 Ways to Please Us, the Customers
• Are You Infected by Sony-BMG’s Rootkit?
• How-To Download music videos from Yahoo with LyFOX & VLC

On Sunday, I had a brilliant idea. I was going to CPK on Sunday with Pete and some other friends, and knowing I’d use my ATM card, I decided that I didn’t want to worry the waiter about how much money goes with what card. So, I stuck a Post-it on the card, folded it over, and stuck it in my wallet. When it came time to pay, I just wrote the amount on the Post-it and handed it over.

This’ll definitely come in handy when you’re with a big group of people and you’re not the only one using a card.

I haven’t been myself lately, so that’s why I’m lacking recent quality posts.

I’ve installed two WordPress plugins yesterday that I think deserves your consideration:

• WP-Print
• Flickr Post Bar

WP-Print is great because it “displays a printable version of your WordPress weblog post”. It removes all formatting except for the most relevant content: post title, post content, and the full URLs contained in the post, kind of like the ones in SitePoint plaintext newsletters (example). It’s great when links displayed like this for print because normal links on printed paper mean nothing.

Lately, I’ve been printing articles to read later (or maybe things my mom or friends might find interesting). If blogs would use this plugin, it would be much easier to follow up on the links.

As for Flickr Post Bar, it’s much easier not having to navigate through Flickr to get the code for a post. You can insert the latest photos from your photostream, or search tags - all within the post page.

It’s finding gems like these that make me wonder if I should just stick to just blogging here rather than splitting myself also at Bryan Off Topic…

I was catching up with Justin earlier this morning because he commented in my post “Utilizing tagging with iTunes“. I haven’t talked to him in a long time, just because we’re both pretty busy. Basically, he gave me a couple good links I haven’t seen before:

• Pear Budget - “a FREE budgeting program, written in Excel. It can be used by almost any [spreadsheet] program (Excel, Word, OpenOffice, etc.). Setting it up is a snap, and it takes less than half an hour a month to maintain it and see how you’re doing. (And—did we mention?—it’s free!)”
• SmartPlaylists.com - a resource for creating, sharing, and chatting about iTunes Smart Playlists (I’ve heard of this one before, but it’s a good one to mention anyway)
• Apple Store Student discount - you don’t have to be a full-time student to get this, either

Also, he wanted to know how to merge multiple feeds into a single one. So, I searched and found FeedShake and FeedJumbler.

For me, Pear Budget will be huge once I implement it into my life.

On a side note, I just have to say that it was awesome to catch up with him. It was a 48-minute conversation, and we both got something out of it. We might’ve talked even longer, but I had to get back to work.

Why don’t you do the same? You’ll definitely gain something, even if it’s just the experience. (Thanks Justin!)

I’m not getting a reply in my post in the WordPress.org forums, so I’m bumping it by posting here as well.

When I try to delete empty categories, Firefox [1.5.0.1] will hang for a few seconds before displaying a warning:

“A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.”

I’m running WordPress 2.0.2.

Thanks!

I had class last night, which I basically look forward to every week. (For the most part, he’s a good professor.) Anyway, for the first 30 minutes of class, things were fine. Then, one guy came in that tends to ask too many irrelevant questions. He rubbed off on a few people, so they weren’t hindered from doing the same thing. I think in the course of the evening, 30 minutes of the 2 1/2 hours in class was solid material.

Being annoyed, I took my homework out and worked on problems relevant to the course. I was able to get some of it done, so at least I accomplished something in class.

During our break, I heard from the more talkatve people in the class that they love how they can talk about whatever and he’ll answer them. This definitely doesn’t help the classmates that can care less about discussing random stuff, but rather the material from the book. So, do any of you have suggestions how to keep class moving more smoothly? I’m feeling timid to say anything in class, and I’d hate to offend the professor.

I feel compelled to post a link to our band’s Myspace. We’re not called Marshburn anymore. We’re Phantom Scream. (The first person I told that to gave me a weird look.)

http://myspace.com/phantomscream

You’ll rarely get this type of posting, but I figured that now we’ve recorded at least 3 of our songs and uploaded them to Myspace, I should try to get people to check us out. We’re hoping to play somewhere locally, if anyone wants to know. Please comment here, add us if you like us in Myspace, or email one of us (probably me right now).

Thanks in advance for checking it out!