Potato I have

Another welcome reminder that words are our friends, this time applied to the dogged, never as simple as it ought to be widgetification of stuff. Eighteen months into GTD, and still so much room for improvement. This simple verb chart is now at the top of my actions file, and on a post-it on the wall. By itself it looks useful; as I add my own language it will only get better. Déclic.

All these years of badgering developers to use the right words in their code, and I forget to apply it in my own pursuits.

Note that this is from some nearly lost GTD materials that look to be worth the search.

If you’re into GTD and you somehow haven’t come across 43folders, check it out now. Merlin gives geek cred to something I probably would have otherwise dismissed, and that would have been more than unfortunate. Getting this from a geek who is living and breathing the stuff makes a huge difference.

I missed reading Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford this past June, but it showed up on digg a few days ago and I found it pretty good. Here’s a text transcript and a youtube video (14:33). Being a confirmed story addict, I like his “just three stories” format.

I’m setting off in a new, uncertain direction myself, and so I especially appreciate this:

you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

And I share his “death is your friend” sentiment as well — is that morbid?

The NY Times has a good portrait of another industry fighting innovation; this time, it’s real estate.

In February, [Redfin] introduced a Web site that automates the bidding process — and the commission rebates. The sale of a $500,000 house, for example, typically yields a 3 percent commission of $15,000 for the buyer’s agent. A Redfin customer would get $10,000 back.

“At that point we became a true pariah to the industry,” said Rob McGarty, Redfin’s director of West Coast operations.

Read the rest of this entry »

From the Economist’s obituary of Naguib Mahfouz:

He was a perfect gentleman: self-effacing, tolerant to a fault, and a consummate listener. Into his 70s he prowled far across the city on solitary early-morning walks, typically ending up in one of the many cafés where he was greeted as a returning son of the quartier. Into his 90s he rarely missed his weekly gathering of intimates at some public watering hole. There he soaked up the endless tales of woe, the political gossip and wicked jokes that provide the spice of Egyptian life.

I don’t read many novels lately, but his Cairo Trilogy is back on my shortlist.

Simon Phipps has an excellent post on open data formats. Looking for a connection between a lot of new desktop tools, he notes:

all of these tools have worked out that lock-in is the new lock-out

And later:

injecting the network into society removes the commercial benefits previously achieved by closed behaviour […]. Truly open formats are creating the new market, and those who attempt to subvert the trend with pseudo-openness will fail.

While my sensitivity is not nearly as evolved as Mark Pilgrim’s outrage, Apple’s mostly closed data models are a doggedly nagging annoyance in my otherwise pleasant Dive Into Mac one year ago. I know where I want to go, and over time I’ll migrate my digital life into apps and formats that make me feel like the stuff is actually mine. It would be just ideal if Apple would move in this direction faster than I do, because I am so not in a place where I want to spend time doing what Fowler did here.

But how many people understand or care about open data? Far from enough to nudge Apple in a different direction I suspect.

(via t.bray)

I’ve been listening to this music for twenty years, but like a lot of us I wasn’t able to watch Coltrane or Evans or Wes Montgomery. Now I see YouTube starts to have some old concerts and TV shows.

I particularly like this one of Coltrane’s Quartet playing Naima somewhere in Europe (on Arte!) in 1965. Grainy B&W, very good camera work, and Elvin Jones is literally steaming – how great is that?

What do you make of Cecil Taylor’s facial expressions after he finishes playing here?

Someone in one of the comment threads laments the extreme paucity of recorded video of this amazing era; at the moment, I’m mighty happy to have stumbled on to some of it here.

Nature is not afraid to experiment with a core process — peer review — that they believe is working well, to see what the internet might bring: they are piloting one variation of an open peer review process, and have initiated a web debate (good supporting content from those links). Here’s an organization fully engaged with the question of what the web does.

From the comments on the oreilly post, a reminder that Nature was also behind the Britannica-vs-Wikipedia study last December that found W close to B in accuracy.

(via oreilly radar)

I’m much more visual than aural, but podcasts are proving a really good channel for me, somewhat to my surprise. Here’s one where Cory Doctorow discusses DRM and related stuff in “Europe’s Coming Broadcast Flag” (thanks again IT Conversations), recorded at last year’s European Open Source convention. Cory is an excellent presenter, and these are important topics. To paraphrase one part of the talk:

• security systems have sender(s), recipient(s), and attacker(s)
• DRM is a security system that considers the user(s) — who own the content — as the attacker(s)!
• users can therefore not be allowed to modify the system (so, no open source solutions)
• we can’t know if a system is secure if it is not “published” (=open source)

Lots of other interesting viewpoints on copyright, innovation, etc in the digital world.

Cory has also accepted a Fulbright at USC to work on DRM.

In a comment on another post, Barry points me to TiddlyWiki. This is an interesting implementation: it’s very ajaxy and opens entries in the current page, in the context of the other entries you’ve already opened. Furthermore, all the data and code lives in a single html file that you access directly with your browser: there is no server or other software, so this is a very convenient PersonalWiki approach. Put it on a key for mobility. And here’s a clever feature: edit functionality is present when browsing via file:// but degrades to view-only with http://.

Barry also points out GTD TiddlyWiki, which is an excellent illustration of wiki-as-framework. This can serve as an easy entry into GTD, as it is a basic, illustrating implementation that can then be further modified to suit. It’s open source, and clear text on disk using basic, standard web technologies; very geek-friendly. It’s very light entry — if you’re at all interested, I encourage you to save either wiki file and start playing with it. Or save both, and look how the one was used to make the other — whether or not you call this 2.0 mashup, it’s a compelling approach to making apps.

Finally, Barry has documented something he calls PocketGTD, which gives PocketMod-like printouts of GTD TiddlyWiki. I haven’t tried it, but having GTD actions printed out in a nice, fold-up pocket booklet sounds really excellent, covering a real-world gap for those of us with nearly entirely digital GTD implementations. At first glance these things don’t fit well with my current GTD, PersonalWiki and MultipleDesktop implementations, but some of these features are compelling enough that I’m looking for how to integrate them.

I found this interesting: there is a project to add semantics to MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia and lots of other wikis. The goals page is clear and concise, and here’s a sample of the kind of stuff they want to enable. There is a background page touching on RDF/RDFS and OWL, and how semantic wiki is different from semantic web.

There’s a ton of information buried in wikis; semantic annotation would make it explicit and more directly usable. One challenge is doing this in a way that doesn’t cause usability problems — hopefully anyone who can handle wiki syntax can also handle the annotations.

(via rw)