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Getting to ‘Done’

During the last few months starting over New Years I’ve been on a wild productivity kick unlike anything anyone has seen in the world of Michael Marotta. This has been made possible by David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, which I’ll talk about later.

But today I was just thinking about this urgency I’ve had to get stuff done. I keep thinking that one of these days, I will be ‘DONE’. The point of GTD (Getting Things Done) is to clear your mind of the tasks that weight down your mind, but there’s still always that looming sense of some tasks that have been on your to do lists for way too long and you start to feel guilty.

So what the heck is this magical day I’m working towards? Well, my goal in this dash of productivity is to clear off the items that have been looming over me since I graduated last May. Since my working life started at a crazy internet startup, I’ve put aside almost all my side activities (ie had no life). The problem is that these looming tasks always make me feel like any time spent just for myself is procrastination and could be used productively. GTD is finally helping me to burn through these old tasks. My hope is that I get to a point where I cross off those last few looming things and I sit there and think, “Hmm, I can’t think of anything to do, I’m going to go do something completely fun and unproductive.”

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Door gym

So we just got the wicked cool Door Gym in our apartment. This has got to have one of the highest cool-to-complexity ratios ever (ie very cool and so simple). You literally just put it through your door frame and once in position you can hang your whole weight from it. The device just stays there on its own weight and it’s shape. I’ve been slacking off on the physical activity side lately, but I think having this thing right on my door will be great motivation.

Oh yea, it also is great for pushups and situps when you put it on the floor.

Door gym

GotVoice?

Have you ever had an awesome voicemail you’ve wanted to download? Or maybe you just wished you could keep better track of your messages from multiple phones all in one place. Well, those were both me and I found an amazing free service called GotVoice. You basically enter you phone’s information, and automagically the site checks for messages up to 3 times a day, downloads the messages into mp3s, and e-mails you with any messages you’ve gotten.

This solves the three problems above very well. 1) You can download any of those “keeper messages” to your hard drive 2) If you have an organized e-mail system, you can simply treat your voice messages as part of your inbox and track them like you do your e-mails 3) If you have multiple phones, you no longer need to keep checking multiple phones.

The service is ad supported. They do ask for some marketing info and they include an ad in the e-mail (pretty smart) they send as well as put ads on the site. They also have premium service levels if you want them to check your messages more times per day and get some other cool features.

I’m excited. One of the most useful sites I’ve found in a while.

GotVoice

What does it mean to ‘support the troops’

We’ve heard the words “Support the troops” almost everyday since the war started. One of the main contexts in which you hear this powerful little phrase is in response to criticism of the war and plans to get troops home. This is probably the most irresponsible and harmful possible use of this phrase. When we say this, we are not saying it in support of troops at all but rather the continuation of the war. To truly support the troops, we need to first make the judgment about whether they are being necessarily put in harm’s way.

If you had a child that went into a war due to some false premises or bad intelligence, then you are in a situation where you must make this distinction about what “supporting” them means.  Do you support them by a) doing whatever you can do to get them out of harms way sooner or b) blindly keep them there and tell anyone who is criticizing plans to get troops out that they are not ‘supporting’ your kids.
Unfortunately, option B is what you are doing if you use the phrase “Support the troops” to discourage criticism of the war. Let’s support the troops by helping them get out of harms way as soon as we can rather than trying to make ourselves look patriotic by shutting down discussions that can really help.
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New York Bans Transfat

I’m so glad to see New York City looking out for their citizens and cutting out transfat from restaurant foods. Transfat is a terribly unhealthy substance used as a cheap substitute for natural saturated fat sources, and a large part of the cause for the unhealthy image saturated fats have gotten.
Some argue that banning transfat is going too far and is really paternalistic. I believe this move is more clearly warranted than antismoking bills due to the relatively undetectable nature of transfat. While smoking does harm the health of others around the smoker, at least they are aware and can make the choice to move. When restaurants sneak transfat substitutes into food, it hurts everyone in the restaurant (unfortunately there’s no ‘transfat free’ seating area in most restaurants) and it is difficult for the consumers to avoid the substance short of not eating out.

This is a case that I think it is good to have the government intervention. Free market competition is forcing restauranteurs to use the cheapest health harming substances to compete.
The consumer side of the market is unable to demand transfat free food through their eating choices and purchasing decisions because they are unable to discern who is using transfat substitutes. The government’s action here is good to provide protection of consumer health where the consumer market is not able to do so effectively.

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The price of safety

I’m tired of hearing claims that the Bush administration’s war has been victorious in keeping us safe because we haven’t had a single death in the US since 9/11. To me, this is just insulting to the Americans in Iraq. We’re celebrating the fact that we haven’t had any deaths on American soil when in fact we’ve let almost as many American’s die on the terrorist’s own land.

It’s really sad what we mean by ‘safety’ in this context for those of us on American soil. ‘Safety’ is really just knowing that others (not you) will die to reduce the already very remote chance that you’ll ever get hit by an attack. And even that reduction in risk is questionable. By sending troops there, we’ve basically just relocated the target of attacks off our own soil.

How staunch supporters of the war can call the thousands of 9/11 deaths a tragedy and the thousands of troop deaths (plus tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths) a victory is beyond me. It’s amazing what we’ll convince ourselves of so that we can feel ‘safe’.

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Acrobat Reader 8 as fast as Preview

Just downloaded the new Acrobat Reader 8.  I always opened PDFs with Preview on my mac because it was so much faster, but the new Acrobat Reader opens just as fast now.  Looks like Adobe finally got their PDF load time issue figured out.

Moved server, intial GoDaddy impressions

Just moved my site and blog over to a new server.  I took the plunge and got some hosting at GoDaddy.com for pretty darn cheap.  It seems like it meets most of my needs so far like php support which is needed for this blog and decent storage and speed.  Their e-mail forwarding is great, too.  I had been running my e-mail through zone edit before which gave my forwarded e-mails a roughly 30 minute delay.  Godaddy’s e-mail forwarding is very snappy.

I’ve only noticed one issue with running wordpress on GoDaddy which is I can’t seem to be able to use pretty urls for my post addresses.  The other thing is support for Ruby isn’t included until the next higher purchase level (I got the economy hosting), which I was looking at learning eventually.  Besides that I’m quite pleased with the hosting so far and from past experience, their service has been quite good.

Data visualization reading

I ordered a bunch of books recently. I really need to get on reading all these books instead of buying more. Here’s one I just got today. I’ve been working on a new health tool at work and need to revamp its data visualization. I’ve been looking at this book for a while but decided this was a fine occasion to make this purchase.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Edward Tufte is a data visualizations god. He takes real solid human factors and psychological research and turns data visualization into a hard science. His books are exceptional in content as well as actual print and materials quality. The images he packs in his books are nothing but aggregations of data and concepts, but the result is beautiful works of art. This is his first legendary book attacking the raw mechanics of graphing. I have his next two books, Envisioing Information and Visual Explanations, as well.

On a related note, check out Junk Charts, an information visualizations blog. They take dava visualizations and redo them much nicer and is a great way to see some data visualization transformations in action.

WordPress doesn’t do Google Ads

Just found out I can’t put Google Ads on my WordPress blog. I found that to be pretty dissappointing now that I’ve gotten my blog up and running here. Their reasoning is that they don’t tolerate Spam Blogs that are often created to drive traffic to each other and generating money. After learning more about Google’s Adsense program from reading The Google Story, it’s really an admirable system. It’s a win-win system where you put Google ads on your page and you split the revenue. It gives the little guy a way to make a little cash through advertising, which would never have been possible without a system like this. It’s a great incentive to make a really great blog and get some return for your hard work. I was thinking of moving over to Google’s Blogger before I get to entrentched in WordPress, but the WordPress interface, look and feel, import/export options, all seemed so much nicer than Blogger, so I think I’ll stick with WordPress for now.

PS. It’s not like I’m going to be making big bucks with this blog anytime soon, but I just think it’d be freakin cool to get a check for just writing in my blog, even if it’s a few pennies.

My Epi-LASIK Journal pt 14: Epi-LASIK Video

I watched this video before my Epi-LASIK procedure. It’s a closeup view of the actual procedure in all it’s glory. You can now see Exactly what I went through. I can’t speak for how you will respond to it, but I think watching it helped me get a little more comfortable with the procedure. Believe me, I was squirming massively while watching this video (don’t say I didn’t warn you). But by the second viewing I was a bit more comfortable (just a bit). But my philosophy is the more information you have the better. Hard to beat an actual video of the operation. Good luck getting through the video if you decide to hit play…

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8871545201613720731

Note: In this Epi-LASIK video, you’ll see that the surgeon cuts an epithelial flap and then replaces it afterwards. According to my surgeon, this is being phased out in the Epi-LASIK procedure. The consensus among leading surgeons is that recovery is actually better if the flap is not put back. So the surgery is actually completed significantly faster than seen in this video. That’s good news for you!

Refined grain should be labeled as Junk Food

It’s no secret that I am not a fan of recommendations for people to eat large of amounts of “Healthy” or “Clean Burning” grains in their diet. These recommendations come more from economic forces than anything as the huge US grain industry pushed lots of research and for it’s insanely high contribution to the original USDA Food Pyramid (you’ll notice the recommended grain consumption on the new pyramid has dropped greatly in the new version).

However, attacking grains as a whole is for another day, but I think the latest health findings are coming to agreement that refined grains (white rice, white bread, most pasta) are not good for you. But I don’t think the message is really getting out. A visit to any grocery store will still reveal that whole grain products are a very small minority. This is really unfortunate as refined grains have been linked to a whole host of health issues from obesity to cancer. I think that effecting change in people’s eating habits is a matter of how we present this food to the public. Refined grain should be called what it is, Junk Food.

Refined grain is grain that has had its outer bran shell removed, as well as the germ. The bran has certain vitamins and fiber contributing that “heaviness” to the grain, both in weight and that feeling of satiety after eating a smaller amount. The germ contains some protein and good fats and other good nutrients. What you have left after removing these are nutrient void calorie bombs that do not fill you up (low satiety). What other food can you think of that can be described as nutrient-void-calorie-bombs -that-never-seem-to-fill-you-up? Junk food. Chips, popcorn, cookies, and other processed unholiness. Besides the extra toxic chemicals in traditional junk foods (coloring, preservatives), both foods offer you a boat load of easy-eating calories with little nutritional return. The worst part is the lack of satiety. Just think about how much white rice or white bread you could potentially pack away before achieving that same fullness of a few bites of chicken breast or beans. That and the refined grain will make you hungry again much sooner because your body digests refined carbs just about as fast as pure sugar, another similarity to junk foods. We often make the differentiation between “fattening sugar” and “healthy carbs”. However, when you really look at these two, it’s all just Junk Food.

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