Category: Services & Products

Getting things done, again

According to the productivity guru David Allen, we shall re-read his book Getting Things Done every three to six months – to see if we can learn something new. But after reading his book two times in the past already, it is not easy to pick up the book again. So this time I tried the audiobook version of the book, narrated by David himself. With only 3 CDs in this audiobook, it is really easy to finish it. And here are the three main points of GTD again, for your pleasure:

  1. Keep everything out of your head;
  2. Regular review and update the complete inventory of open loops of your life and work;
  3. Decide actions and outcomes when things first emerge on your radar, instead of later.

Plain and simple, isn’t it ? Unfortunately, It takes a long time to master it …


In plain English

Really wanted to find a solution to take GTD with me even outside office and with no access to computer. The solution shall be the stuff that carry with me or I can easily access to – i.e. PDA / smartphone / phone and its software, notepad, stack of index cards, or remote voice mailbox etc. etc. … something that I can jot down the actions as efficient as possible.

One service I am evaluating closely for the moment is Twitter. The idea is to send an SMS with my phone to one Twitter account and then I can “follow” the tweets back in office. What is Twitter, you may ask ? Understand that some of you are living in another planet, so here is Twitter … in plain English, by Common Craft.

Telephone line

One of the mobile operators in town recently introduced a new service – “Wireless fixed-line service”. What that marketing gimic exactly do is beyond me, but it gonnna be a mix of wireless and internet based telephone services. I am sure one day this kind of service will replace our usual fixed-line phone and by then, the term “telephone line” will go down the drain of history. Before then, a song from Electric Light Orchestra, 32 years ago.

Hello. How are you?
Have you been alright, through all those lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely nights
That’s what I’d say. I’d tell you everything
If you’d pick up that telephone yeah yeah yeah

…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpPlzeK7RM

Upgrade to WordPress 2.5

WordPress released the latest version 2.5 for two weeks now. So I decided to give it try, after skipping 1 or 2 upgrades in the past few months. The upgrade process was simple as usual.

  • Deactivate all the plugins
  • Backup the database
  • Download the latest codebase, unzip and transfer to the server
  • Run the upgrade.php
  • Activate back the plugins

There are something I like / dislike / puzzle about this version:

  • The plugin upgrade is now almost painless, very useful
  • Not all plugins can work with this version, however
  • The new administrator dashboard is fresh-looking, but need sometime to get used to. For example, I don’t like the categories section in New Post screen is now underneath the text box, but not on the right hand side
  • Somehow, two files were mixed up – plugins.php and post-new.php. Click the plugins function links to the New Post page and vise versa (!). I have to re-download the files, not sure what went wrong
  • The new engine is super slow !!

Yes, Wii can do it …

Do you know your Wii remote can be hacked to create an interactive whiteboard, a multi-touch surface and even a Virtual Reality display head tracking device ? All these great ideas are from the brilliant graduate student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University – Johnny Lee.

I think we will soon see the Minority Report hand-waving device very very soon, won’t we ?

http://static.videoegg.com/ted2/flash/loader.swf