If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:
16 yr working, 15 yr InterWebs/email, 7 yr smartphone, 5 yr RSS, 3 yr social networks – finally have info mgmt system that works for me.
First, some context. On average, I:
Read and react to more than a thousand emails a week
Send more than 300 emails a week
Subscribe to a couple hundred RSS feeds, for around 400 posts per day
Last week, the hard drive on my MacBook Pro died. (Don’t blame Apple — it was a POS third-party drive I bought in a misergreedy bid for more space.)
I got a new drive — actually switched computers to a newer Macbook. But what amazed me in the process was that a dead computer just isn’t a big deal anymore. Sure, I had my Time Machine restore on a backup drive, but I couldn’t use it in its pure state– There was a corruption.
But anything I really cared about was in “the cloud.” My email? All backed up in my Google IMAP account. Important docs? On Google Docs and on MobileMe (which I’m testing but soon to drop). App reinstall was done via the web with serials in my Gmail archive.
The only thing that really causes me to want/need a hard drive anymore is my music library. If someone found a good, secure, cheap solution to that — one that seamlessly handled 30k+ tracks, the drive would be superfluous.
If anything, changing computers allowed me to weed out a lot of plugins and apps that I’d collected like weeds because I constantly test and discard new stuff. Maybe I need to erase my computer every six months just for spring cleaning. Certainly ’tisn’t a hardship anymore.
When I first made my return to the land of Mac n’ honey a couple years back I installed Adium as my chat client. We use Gtalk in our outfit more often than we vocalize, and Apple’s iChat couldn’t handle the underlying protocol (Jabber).
When iChat became Gtalk compatible, I gravitated to it because of its video chat capabilities. April and I thought we’d use it a lot, but it was so unreliable, it just wasn’t worth it.
In the past couple days, a new version of Adium came out with support for Facebook chat. I’ve been using FB a lot more lately, because of the iPhone app as well as the fact that the service seems to have hit the hundredth monkey stage — reconnecting me with lots of old friends in just the last month. (That’s a topic for another post.)
So I switched back to Adium today. It wasn’t until it was installed that I realized how much I had missed it. Let me count the ways:
Customization: Themes, icons, etc
Better Growl support
Better integration of disparate accounts. iChat puts them in separate windows; Adium goes for one window with sections.
Secure, OTR chat
Did I say customization?
I was also impressed with the thoughtfulness of the install: Seamlessly imported my iChat transcript archives.
This is my personal bastion of blather unrelated to my business, including but not limited to: family pictures, cool gadgets, music, pop culture and moderate media punditry unrelated to Dallas / Fort Worth. If I haven't posted lately, it means I'm busy on the day job. You can follow me more frequently on Twitter. More details and contact info here.
How the hell can a person go to work in the morning and come home in the evening and have nothing to say? — John Prine
Best of…
Banjo, The Best Dog Ever™
There’s an old saying that “I wish I could be half the man my dog thinks I am.” That’s a good one. But someday, I also hope to become half the man my dog was.
The Wedding Toast I encounter far too many people in this world who are dead behind the eyes — Houston isn’t one of them. He is a real man in the greatest sense, and his powers of perception and his constant search for what is real and genuine in a fast-food world will continue to enrich both your lives.
Why I think the economy is even scarier than I thought Pegasus News: "Square Pegs" 10/9/08 Peter is at the door. He's broke and pissed and Paul is off on one last exotic resort junket before he goes into court-ordered rehab.
Search, data and the responsibilities of news orgs Pegasus News: "Square Pegs" 6/16/08 Technology is allowing us do things that seemed a pipedream three years ago. Along the way, we need to reflect on the downsides of the upside.
Why I love local Pegasus News: "Square Pegs" 1/27/08 ...if local is a sentence, lock me up and throw away the key
The State of Journalism Duke Magazine 9/10/07
[Kevin] Sack might be surprised to see our database of every candidate, official, and contributor in our region-something the newspaper does not provide. He might be appalled to learn that mere citizens reported on elections in towns that journalists eschew. When we cover mundane things, we get hundreds of responses and thousands of eyeballs-partly because of technologies Sack fears, delivering unique and wanted information to each individual.
Mud starts flying in Dallas District 9 Council race Pegasus News 4/21/07
When we put up our political database, we certainly hoped to generate thoughtful discussion and debate about local elections. We didn't expect to become a battlefield of leaked information, mis-information and confusing whodunits.
Lessons from the launchOnline Journalism Review 1/17/07
...we launched a prototype entertainment site; won an EPpy award; nearly fell to pieces; and made more mistakes than we can count -- But we’ve learned some invaluable lessons about local digital media along the way. Here’s a sampling of some of the things that we think we know now.
If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:
