Category Archive for: ‘Online Life’

In response to a blog post that I’d shared in Google Reader, Jez emailed me to ask:

Do you use RTM? It’s always been one of those web apps that seem really useful, but I’ve never made the leap to actually using it in anger. I suppose you need to adopt it in tandem with the five-point GTD philosophy to get real benefit?

My response:

Yes, I do use RTM, and I love it. I’ve been looking for a decent way of managing my to-do lists effectively for years, and RTM really scratches that itch! I now have the web app permanently open in a Firefox tab, and use "MilkSync" to synchronize with my Pocket PC every half hour.

I’m not sure that you need to adopt a particular task-management philosophy in order to get benefit – RTM is flexible enough to allow you to work the way you want to. I started off pretty basic, with just three lists, one each for personal, business, and current client tasks. But recently (having read that article and re-read the relevant bits of GTD), I have begun using tags and locations and using these to get the benefit of some smart lists. So, I’m currently on the train to work, and I can look at my "@Train" list and see at a glance the stuff tagged with "na" (for "next actions") and a location of @Train – i.e the stuff that I can and should be doing from here!

The RTM website is clean, slick, and easy to use (especially if you make the effort to memorise the keyboard shortcuts), which means there is little friction involved in maintaining your tasks during the day, which of course is vital to making any system work.
One of the other sites that I’m logged into all day long is Gmail, and there’s a really good Firefox extension (3.0-compatible) which integrates RTM into Gmail brilliantly – RTM can even automatically create a task when you star a mail.

What else?  Did I mention the API, Blackberry support, Offline access (via Google Gears), iGoogle widget, Google Calendar integration, Atom feeds, Twitter integration, Google Maps integration…..?  The list goes on – if you can think of a neat feature that you’d like to have in a web app circa 2008, chances are that RTM has it.

Give it a go, but don’t blame me if you become dependent upon it!

For the record, I have no connections with Remember The Milk other than being a very happy user of their product. And thanks to Colin for originally bringing RTM to my attention.

Hey!  It’s fifteen years today since Mosaic 1.0 was released!

I watched that globe spin and spin and spin for hours during my first year at university…!

OK then.  Scotts Watermasysk and Hanselman have convinced me to give Twitter another try.

My rationale goes something like this:

• I often find myself with pithy things to share that are unworthy of a blog post. Currently, either I don’t share them at all, or I email/IM then to a select few friends. I figure it would be much better to Twitter them, so that anybody who may be interested can pick up on them in the method of their choosing.
• My favourite aspect of the Facebook phenomenon is the status update functionality, which is essentially what Twitter is, so I should embrace that. Anybody know how to get my Twitter updates to automatically synch’ across to my FB status? Updated: Thanks to Gus Perez for letting me know about TwitterSync – just the job!
• Since my first tentative foray into Twittering, it has come on leaps and bounds, with the @username protocol for sending replies, hashtags, and a wealth of clients. I’m loving twhirl, and the integration with Google Talk.
• I can even add yet more task to Remember The Milk by sending a direct Tweet.  How cool is that?

Now all I need is the customary legion of followers…   You’ll find my tweets at http://twitter.com//ianfnelson

Hmm, this wasn’t quite what I expected to find when searching Amazon for a book on SSIS.

Still, might as well add it to my DVD rental list…

I’m not entirely convinced that this site will take off, but should you want to see (or even subscribe to) a composite feed of my online activities, you can now do so at:

http://friendfeed.com/ianfnelson

I think I’ll take this opportunity to de-splice my del.icio.us links from my blog feed (which should come as a relief to those of you who have no interest in the multitude of recruitment agency websites that I’ve been bookmarking recently!)

Some of the retailers that have emailed me, and their suggested gifts for my valentine:

• Burberry – fragrance
• Laithwaites – wine
• Sainsbury’s (three times) – flowers
• Nectar – all manner of treats
• iPodWorld.co.uk – an iPod charger
• Laterooms.com – a weekend away
• Apple – 32Gb iPod Touch
• Lastminute.com (twice) – Valentine’s Spa Breaks, etc.

…and the award for most tenuous tie-in goes to…

• Hewlett-Packard – an inkjet printer (“print out those cherished memories..”)

Scott Hanselman has a good post on the best websites for use with mobile browsers.

One curious omission? Google Reader! This site formats itself beautifully on Windows Mobile 5 and 6, and I find myself merrily reading through my feeds at all those times and places where I don’t have access to a PC. In fact, that’s how I read Scott’s post.

As a software guy, I’m naturally amazed and bemused by pretty much anything hardware-related. The one aspect of the relentless march of technology which most boggles my mind is the rapid increase in storage capacity which we have seen in recent years, combined with a proportionate decrease in the physical space it occupies.

This morning I’ve taken delivery of a 2 Gb Micro SD card for my new mobile phone. That’s about enough to hold 500 MP3s or a couple of thousand decent-sized photographs, although I’ll be using half of it to hold street-level maps of the whole of Western Europe. What’s remarkable to me is that this comes in a form factor the size of my little fingernail, contains no moving parts, and arrived with a free SD adapter to make it more manageable for use in card readers.

Am I the only person who finds this utterly incredible? Maybe I should try not to think about it too much, because doing so always seems to paralyse me into inactivity while I reminisce about the various storage media I’ve encountered in my short journey through the world of IT.

Two gigabytes in something the size of my fingernail, costing around a fiver!  When I bought my first PC just over a decade ago, that was the average size of a computer hard drive, and cost about £100.

Just a few years before that, in the early nineties, I worked all summer to save up to buy a A590 hard drive for my Amiga. That cost around £400, and had a capacity of just 20 Mb, i.e. one hundredth the capacity of the fingernail-sized miracle which fell through my letterbox today. We’ve come a long long way in less than a couple of decades.

Incidentally, the new mobile phone I got (HTC TyTN II, branded as Vodafone 1615) is also quite awesome, and is as far removed from the first mobile phone I bought a decade ago as a Roman chariot is from the space shuttle! It has processor power and RAM equivalent to turn-of-the-century PCs, integrated GPS, two cameras, touch screen, and every communications protocol known to humanity (probably). Who needs an iPhone?!