Category: Legacy

Posted on by lhl

AIM 5.5, released last week supports video IM, and of course is compatible with iChat AV. I mentioned when iChat (and it became explicitly clear when iChatAV was released) that this was AOL’s way of skirting around the FCC concession they made during the TW/AOL merger requiring interoperability with competing instant messenger tools. It seems to me that in this sense Apple has become the default Judas of the computer industry (MS: see, we have competition! [here’s some cash and Office]; RIAA: see, we’re offering music! [go sell some iPods]; AOL: see, we’re interoperable!)

(BTW, the mess that is SIMPLE doesn’t bother me so much. XMPP is moving forward, both in IETF-space, and more importantly, in the market: Gush, XIFF, SoapBox, Jive. I’m pretty confident that the next-generation social networks will subsume and make irrelevant proprietary services. In a decade, we’ll hopefully look upon AIM, MSN, and its ilk just as we do with CompuServe and Prodigy mail today)

Posted on by lhl

Ken Hemenway writes about life-style automation in a new O’Reilly article Failing Miserably, If Not Inventively. Definitely interesting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about streamlining my daily routine for better efficiency… some thoughts.

  • I spent a couple hours earlier this week automating my billing. It’s still a little bubble-gum sticky, but it *does* export my hours directly from iCal to our in-house hour tracking system and generate and send out a weekly status report directly. In general, that should save me about 5/min of utter frustration every single day for the rest of the time I’m working at my current position
  • Most of these things aren’t that hard to do, but it just requires getting around to it. There are a couple things over the course of my day that probably could still be streamlined:
    • Email reading
    • Web-reading
    • Blogging/Link-logging
  • While some of this can be gotten around technically: better blogrolling/feed-reader, better mail-list archiving, better blogging tools, a lot of it is also behaviorial and will take a concerted effort to fix. While I’m now averaging only about 1 piece of spam every day or two now (CRM114 is still training, I expect this to improve), I still check my email way too often. I definitely have an info-consumption problem; I’ve been weening myself off bit by bit…
  • Lists are definitely good. What I’ve realized is that because I have way too many projects going on, the best thing to do is to create a linear checklist so that anytime I’m twiddling my thumbs I don’t need to make a decision on what to do, just do it. This is something else can be improved with technology; ie, being able to automatically change priority based on due-date/milestone markers, etc.