Technology ramblings from a dilettante of all things digital

Katie and I just got back from Key West a few days ago and this is my first chance to sit down and recap it all.  We flew down Wednesday, 5/27/2009, from BWI to Fort Lauderdale.  Then we immediately grabbed a rental and hoofed it on down to Miami.  Getting the rental car was pretty neat.  We used Alamo since we had a coupon, but I suspect they're all like this here.  We just checked in at a computer kiosk and then were led out to a parking garage with the key stuck in the driver side door and they just said "pick any midsize".  Maybe that's the norm, but it was new to me and kinda neat. 

We booked The Palms Hotel and Spa at Miami Beach.  I didn't realize there's a Miami and a Miami Beach.  They're two separate locations separated by nice little chunk of water.  I guess that just goes to show how ignorant and untraveled I am.  When we got down to Miami Beach, we went straight to the hotel.  It was like this weird mix of posh and projects.  The hotel itself looked very nice, but when we pulled up the parking situation was a bit of a mess.  The valet didn't speak any English, which wasn't surprising, so I had to whip out my "5 year equivalent" Spanish.  So after a while I found out that you could pay $27 a day to have them park in this crappy little lot or you could park on the street and feed the meter from 8am-6pm.  I parked on the street and was glad that we were only staying there one night if only for that reason.

The hotel itself was really nice and I did get a pretty good deal for it on Priceline.  I did think it was weird though when someone came up to the front desk asking about booking a room and he said that they're all booked up, but she should find a computer and check on Orbitz or Travelocity.  Apparently they block off x number of rooms for the travel sites and the hotel signs some agreement to not give the room them away themselves.

Anyway, as soon as we got settled in we took a cab to get some dinner.  There was a little confusion with the cabbie over where to go.  The bell hop said we should go to Lincoln St, but the cabbie said Ocean drive was better.  We went with Lincoln.  Basically Lincoln is a really wide street with shops and nice outdoor restaurants.  It runs east/west.  Ocean Drive is about 10 blocks south and runs north/south.  It has the ocean on one side and all the fancy clubs and a few restaurants on the other side.  After we ate dinner at a nice Italian restaurant, we took a taxi down to Ocean Drive just to check it out and say we were there.

After a quick cab ride back to the hotel, we made it an early night for the long drive down to Key West. 

We got up around 9am and left shortly thereafter.  We had one quick stop to try some native cuisine at the Southernmost Cracker Barrel in Florida City, FL.  The rest of the ride was pretty uneventful.  There are a TON of key islands like Grassy Key, Duck Key, etc.  I learned that the Keys have their own species of deer that can even swim between the islands.  I thought that was pretty cool.  Maybe I could hook some up to a boat and have them carry me around. 

The hotel we stayed at was amazing.  It was called The Reach Resort Waldorf Astoria Collection.  It had its own private beach right next to the pool and their indoor/outdoor restaurant, The Strip House.  This hotel was on Simonton Street, which is on the south side one block east of Duvall Street, which is where all the happening stuff is. 

So after settling in and switch rooms to one with a better "ocean view".  We set out on foot down Duvall Street.  There's no open container law in Key West, as you can clearly see in this picture and this one too.  We checked out a couple of different shops including one where they make their own really nice sandals.  I meant to buy one on our way back, but forgot to stop by.  A little while later we signed up for a Fury boat cruise that we would take the next day. 

The boat trip was a lot of fun.  They took us out 6 miles on a big Catamaran to the reef out there and let us snorkel for about an hour.  Aside from some chafing and every wave filling my snorkel with water, this was quite fun.  Although I must say, whoever invented the snorkel, Robert F. Snorkel or whoever, or at least the person that thought that using a short snorkel in open water was a good idea, I'd like to have a few words with them.

Later they took us to their hangout area.  They docked the ship with this little floating barge and and then we took off on parasailing, then jetskiing and inbetween they have some inflatable structures we could swim out to and climb on, like the inflatable 20 foot tall mountain.  Jetskiing is harder than it looks.  Our trainer seemed like he was annoyed he wasn't back at the bar killing his liver, as noticed by his smart remark after he almost ran me over with a jetski.  They also didn't train us beyond the gas lever.  I know now that you need to stand up when you go fast to cushion the blow and you have to lean the other way just a bit any time your jet ski starts to capsize.  The first time we felt it was capsizing we jumped out, then climbed back on and I let Katie drive, then 100 yards later I realized I lost my Maui Jim sunglasses.  Bummer.  Overall the staff was really nice though, and as soon as the jetski fiasco was over, they started serving beer and wine. 

When everyone had done their main activities, they took us back around 4pm.  We went back to the hotel to rest us and nurse our nice new sunburns.  We just hung around the hotel a bit, played some Bag-O and sipped on our alcoholic beverages.  When we finally worked up an apetite we tried out the hotel restaurant, The Strip House.  The decor was rather, um, "interesting".  It was pretty nice decor done up in a 1930's dark burgundy theme, with lots of framed photographs of 1930s nude female models.  So it might not be a place to take the children unless you're a tasteless white trash family, in which case you couldn't afford the dinner prices...or the hotel.  Anywho, that was pretty much our evening that night.  The boat trip really takes the energy out of you.

The next day we rented bikes and cruised around town a bit.  We checked out some local shops, got some nice touristy souvenirs and ate some Conch Fritters (pretty tasty).  Between the writing on a coffee mug and talking to a local merchant, I learned that Key West seceded from the US for about a month over the extra four hour delay from the border patrol illegal immigrant (drug) checkpoints.  Oh, and a plastic wrapped brick of drugs that washes on shore from a drug dealer dumping their load is called a "Square Grouper".  After some more biking, we went back to the hotel to lounge some more, then headed out for our sunset cruise.  Then we went back and wandered around Duvall Street a bit.  We checked out Sloppy Joe's where Pete and Wayne, some local band/comedy act was playing.  They were pretty good, but the only seats we could get weren't being served food and we were pretty hungry, so we checked out another local outdoor restaurant, Willie T's I think.  We stayed out a bit longer, then called it a night.  The next morning, we had to get up early and head straight back for our flight leaving out of Fort Lauderdale at 3:40. 

All in all it was a really cool trip!  It also didn't hurt to have a really great company, too!    Check out all the photos.

7 months later and I feel a lot more in control of my life, thanks to GTD and a little motivation.  I just finished David Allen's follow up GTD book, Making it all work.  I have to say that I highly recommend this book, even to those that have read Getting Things Done.  He doesn't modify the process at all, it's not about that.  Maybe I didn't pay enough attention when I first read (and by 'read' I mean I listened to the audiobooks 17 minutes at a pop during my commute), but this new book seemed to put it all into a better perspective.  The 6 horizons of focus (the name might seem a little froo-frooey, but they are very important) finally sunk in, from runway to 50,000 feet.  Although not a true GTD tool, I have adapted Remember The Milk (aka RTM) to the engine behind my GTD system.  I looked at the GTD contenders and have played around with most of them.

• Outlook I have to use for work and I believe it could be a great GTDish tool, but I don't really use it as such, so I just use the mail and calendar out of necessity for my job.  Don't get me wrong, I don't mind using it.  I use the Plaxo toolbar to sync all my outlook calendar items to my google calendar.
• Thinking Rock looks very cool and one of the new complete GTD systems, but it doesn't quite fit my lifestyle as it is a desktop app and I use multiple computers during the day, not to mention when I am on the go.
• Omnifocus looks cool.  It seems to also follow GTD very well from what I am told and has an iphone app, so its mobile, but the desktop app is for Mac and there's no web interface, so that one's out.
• Pen and Paper works, but I am too gadgety for that, although I do keep a pocketmod in my wallet in case of a planetwide EMP or zombie apocolypse (you never know).
• As I just mentioned above, Remember the Milk is how I roll for personal task management.  I was using todoist.com for projects.  I liked how you could reorder stuff easily, and then I would copy and paste from todoist over to RTM, but then I realized how crazy that was.  So just recently I took a commenter's suggestion and used RTM properly.  I have a few main lists:
  @action
  @blog (i may not keep this, I'm not sure yet)
  @someday
  @waitingFor
  Then each project becomes a list and tags are used for contexts.  I only have 3 contexts right now, because it should be as simple as possible:
  @home (i need to be home for this)
  @lunch (something I've deemed that I can knock out quickly over my lunch break and may require to be done during business hours (ie. doctor's appointment))
  @driving (something I have to drive to)
  @katieshouse (girlfriend honeydo list   )
  I made smartlists for @home and @lunch contexts since I use those all the time.
• For work, I use something called Abstractspoon Todolist for a couple of reasons:
  very fast with no lag time since its a simple desktop app
  easy note annotation with each task.
  each task can instantly turn into a project and get subtasks.  Sometimes I like to break down development efforts like this, so I can separate the planning and the doing.
  I can copy and paste a range from it into outlook, so I can do my weekly status reports with zero effort.
  it has tons of properties and filtering and sorting.  My big thing right now is at the end of the day, I categorize tasks as @today, so I can line up what I expect to accomplish the following day.  I find this is very helpful in staying organized and motivated me to get those tasks done by COB.  I've read that there's some mental commitment that happens when we put an item on a list and flag it with a due date, even if its self imposed.  There's a greater feeling of accomplishment when it gets done and a feeling of being jipped(sp?) when we don't get it done on time.  For my personal tasks, I only set deadline when something absolutely HAS TO get done by that date.  I've missed due dates for quite a while in RTM before I realized I set too many.  So now I just have my @action list filled and everything tagged by context.  Whenever I have some free time, I just go to the appropriate context and attack.  That way, I can be productive wherever I am and I never (reads: "rarely ever") feel jipped.

That's all I've got for now.  I feel pretty comfortable in my GTD setup.  I may streamline it a little over time.  Now I just need to get a little bit more motivated find some people to actually read my blog.

In today's world of missed deadlines, project cost overruns, missed new year's resolutions, pounds of fat not coming off and so on, it sometimes seems like the most truly awe inspiring a human being can experience or witness is someone actually meeting a goal or deadline.

I'm sure that's a rather unrealistically negative viewpoint, but that's how I feel sometimes.  I know I take on too much or set my schedules or deadlines too aggressive and so I suffer the consequences of missing it, and then in my mind its a failure, even if I did my best and actually was very heroic in my efforts to achieve what I was striving for.  When the finish line is way out of reach, its disheartening to know you can't reach it.  Conversely, if you set it too low, its actually better because you're more motivated since the end is in sight, you're much more likely to hit the goal and then you get that mental high of achieving the goal you set out for.

Anywho, that is what I'm focusing on more, lately.  My organizational system, using GTD is working well.  I just need to apply another spoonful of reality when setting schedules.  I tried this out recently when I fleshed out my 5 year plan.  We've all had that question in an interview: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?".

Well I sat down and tried to answer that.  I busted out a trusty Google spreadsheet, making a row for each goal.  A goal can be specific "Conquer Canada" or vague "get more better in shape".  Vague is fine here because we'll flesh out the milestones in a sec.  I then made columns for every month from 1-6, then every year from 1-5.  In each cell I set a specific goal for the 5 year mark, then filled out every cell before it starting at 1 month.  I went over them again and again until it looked like I had a REASONABLE set of milestone stepping stones to reach the lofty 5 year milestone.  Then I took the 1 month goals and either made them projects on my GTD projects list or put them straight on my Remember The Milk to do list.  I don't know about everyone else, but I feel like I have to constantly be improving myself, even if its just a little bit.  So every day I wake up, I've bettered myself from the day before.  Its like level grinding in real life, which was actually one of my favorite parts of Diablo 2.  (Sidenote:  I can't wait for Diablo3 and Starcraft2!  I think I may take a week of vacation time just to play them right release)

Most people can remember a time in their childhood when one kid out of a group would disagree with how the others were playing and so they'd stomp their feet, yell NO and take the ball and go stand in the corner or just shoot free throws on one end.  Or maybe they'd take their ball and go home.  Maybe it wasn't basketball, but some other sport or game.  "Doesn't play well with others" would be the phrase I suppose.  Well that is how Microsoft is with the internet.  I wanted to take a look at the latest training certifications on Microsoft's website at microsoft.com/learning and what do I encounter:

A message informing me that I have no choice but to install silverlight.  There's no "html version" or anything like that.  Microsoft forces you to use their proprietary plugin.  <sigh>  This is ActiveX all over again.  You're required to use their latest proprietary crappy software, when you hadn't entirely recovered from their previous proprietary crappy software.

Think about the Java Applet.  It was a plugin actually done right.  It was on most platforms and for most browsers and everyone was happy.  Then Microsoft tried to break Java Applets by impregnating them with Microsoft proprietary crap.  Sun rightfully b*$#-slapped them back in their place and so Microsoft took their ball and went home.  They stopped including java support in their browsers.

Anywho, I wasn't planning on posting today, but this particularly irked me.

Weekly updates are probably the second most important part of GTD.  Which makes it less than or equal to good that I suck so horribly at it.  The hardest parts for me are probably A) getting around to it (kind of ironic, no?) and 2) taking too long to do it  (although I may be wrong on that count).

The biggest part of my weekly review right now is maintaining a spreadsheet listing out all my current projects and the steps for each, in order.  I then take the next step from each project and put it onto Remember the Milk.  It seems to work well.  It definitely helps keeping the spreadsheet because you really don't know all the steps for even a medium or small sized project until you sit down and list them out.  One of the crucial things for Getting Things Done (or GTD) is that everything on the actual tasklist is something you can do.  That was a big pitfall for me in the past.  I would have something like "achieve world peace" on my tasklist.  I'd take one look at it and go "ugh" and never get started on it.  Or I would want to do it, but I'd sit and ponder for a while thinking what the next step toward that monster project would be and I'd either A) not remember, 2) think of the step 2 steps ahead or C) waste too much time figuring out something I'd figured out last week.  The weekly review is Cyberdyne (and maybe an ad-hoc review here and there), but during the majority of the week, I am simply a task terminator.

Next I plan to play around with Mind Mapping, figure out why its better than using my whiteboard or Evernote and whether or not I really want to step up to THAT level of geekiness.

I'd like to take one final second to give a shout out to my favorite lunchtime web series, Man In the Box Show.

Well its been 3 months since I last posted about my desire to join the GTD world.  First I'd like to apologize to my readers, both of you, for my lack of posts.  So how's it all working out? 

Remember the Milk has been awesome!  Visiting its website is my main place for modifying my tasks.  I can easily see the whole list on each tab and reorg them with keyboard shortcuts.  For a daily summary, I prefer to use the plugin for the iGoogle page or the one for gmail.  And being able to add from my HTC Mogul phone is great too, although I mainly use it to review what I need to do when I"m out and about.  Its invaluable for grocery lists when I'm at the store and I know it has everything on the list since I can manage it from anywhere.

I've been experimenting with using RTM for work as well.  Having one list is optimum.   Plus I get a mental "aahhhhhh" from completing all my tasks for the day.  I'm still grappling with a few issues though.  I like my work task manager for its richer gui interface, more fields, easier ability to add notes and the ability to add subtasks.  I've noticed that I'm now motivated to do tasks I'd normally put off, if nothing else than to get my list cleared off.  It sounds a little goofy, but it works rather well.

Evernote is working out great.  It stores everything I throw at it and I've had no issues with its syncing so far.  My only gripe, and its a small one, is that I wish the new evernote firefox addin that lets me copy to evernote is missing the ability to include a link to the original webpage when it gets pasted into Evernote.  I also wish it were easier to funnel it into different notepads, but its easy to move a note to another notepad once its in evernote.

I think my weakest link right now is the weekly reviews of my tasks and projects.  Sometimes I miss them or don't do them right or rush through them.  I need to work on that.  I'll keep y'all posted.

Okay, so my memory is probably better than the average person as far as being able to recall things manually.  My internal alarm clock and internal todo list is HORRIBLE.  So to complement that (the todo list), I'm trying to embrace GTD, by David Allen and I'm a premium paying member of Remember the Milk.  That's working out well, except for the fact that I'm pretty bad about the weekly cleanup of my tasklist.  I think this habit is definitely a keeper and I will be able to refine it with time.  For my job, I use this ToDoList. 

Now, to address my normal memory.  Remembering all the details of something, like researching a big purchase, is impossible.  So for that I am trying out Evernote.  So far it seems like it a keeper.  Its still in beta, but its ability to sync between computers combined with its ability to capture things WELL from almost any source (computer clipboard, cell phone picture message that gets OCRed, etc) is awesome!  I'll keep you posted on how it goes as it progresses.  FYI, if you need an invite to the beta, post in the comments here and I'll get one to you.

After reading this post I decided its time to get started on my habit changing activities.  I posted my answer in the comments on that site and I'll post it here as well

1. The habit:  not following my normal workout schedule
2. The why:  I need to get in shape to be more competitive for outdoor volleyball season, to prep for indoor volleyball season, to make myself more attractive to my girlfriend and to improve my self confidence.
3. The difference: The deadline.  Its not the most enjoyable, but I work well with deadlines and pressure.  I'm going to find a volleyball tournament just over 30 days from now, sign up for it at one or two levels higher than I normally play.  For me to have a prayer of doing respectably, I need to definitely be in better shape than I am now.

Update:  Here's the tournament I think I'll put as my deadline:

http://www.mavolleyball.org/t06.html

I've probably lost all of my loyal readers (both of them) from my severe lack of posting anything on here.  Anywho, I just wanted to state for the record that I will start publishing frequently on here again.  Expect to see several posts over the next couple of days, as I boldly pretend to try to bring my pet projects and interests to fruition here at work.

I recently got this error mucking with SQL.  It wouldn't connect worth a darn.  So I managed to find this simple concise blog entry that fixed it and so I feel I should mention it here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/sql_protocols/archive/2007/05/13/sql-network-interfaces-error-26-error-locating-server-instance-specified.aspx

For me, I just has to start the sql browser service.  Woooo.....