Daily Movement

I’ve been meaning to publish this technique for compactly tracking periodic tasks, both their completion and upcoming schedule on paper. There are also a couple of glyph techniques for using the limited area to best ability for tracking planned tasks, completed tasks and multiple tasks per week.

I use a 3×5 sheet organized as a spreadsheet with starting day of week (for me it’s Sunday) as the column heading (vertically written to save space — remember this is only 3 inches wide) and particular periodic tasks grouped into their contexts as row headings. Once every couple of months when I’m about to run out of space on the sheet, I shift the dates over with a little overlap, print out the sheet again, copy over the markings for the last couple of week so that I have a visual history of tasks so I can continue the trend, and put the sheet back in my Circa notebook.

The width of the week columns is such that i can place a small paper clip vertically as a marker of the current week.

An example of my categories and tasks are:

• @financial
  tasks involving paying bills and people, periodically checking financial accounts
• @errand
  getting haircut, picking up prescription medicine
• @health
  working out, various health tests
• @home
  things involving the car such as washing it, oil change, checking tire pressure, etc.

Only the @errand category really corresponds to a context that I actually use. The others are just to group together the entries.

About the image, I place a filled in circle in box when the task was done for that week. This means the task can only be tracked for being done at most once a week. The tasks that are done every few weeks can be measured and scheduled by counting out the boxes and drawing an empty circle for the week the task should be done.

The difference between a circle versus a triangle in corner is the circle tasks are best effort and can be forgotten, but the triangle ones must be done, e.g. they are bills or people that need to be paid.

For tracking a task that is done more than once a week, i fill in the entire area in increasing pattern. If it’s three times a week, as in my exercise goal, the first time, i fill in the triangle, 50% of the area. The second time, i fill in another triangle covering 75% of area, leaving a triangle at bottom. Third time, i fill in the last 25%. It’s hard to cut a square/rectangle in thirds.

Update for 10/30/2007:
An easier to see image:

And here’s a Word doc that you can use to produce your own: periodic-tasks-sample.doc

As I sit in the Starbucks in Mountain View, with 19% signal strength of Google’s Wi-Fi compared to 65% signal strength of T-Mobile, it’s clear you get what you pay for. I doubt they’re serious about actually getting wide coverage - rather just enough coverage to be useful some fraction of time and to get press interest. They are not yet at the level of Verizon (”can you hear me now?”) or any other hotspot service provider.

Soon Starbucks will be offering Wi-Fi for free, so what me worry? Looks like the actual cost of Wi-Fi is actually going to approach the marginal cost of Wi-Fi. Maybe the next phone I get will run VoIP to take advantage of the Starbucks internet.

Clean restaurants are all alike; Every dirty restaurant is dirty in its own way.

My wife gave me a project of making a workout music mix for her new iPod Nano for her birthday.

First off, I’m using Mac OSX and iTunes, so keep in mind that a solution using Windows will involve different software, but maybe with same overall limitations.

I tried beaTunes 1.2.1 but found the BPM analysis wasn’t accurate for some songs.

Then I came across Potion Factory’s Tangerine listed on this page. I double checked the results with a free javascript manual-tapping-based BPM analyzer and they were accurate. Sometimes Tangerine picked a twice as fast BPM but I think unfortunately, the numbers will always need to be tweaked before they are used to put together a smooth playlist.

I’m still deciding what to do. I still haven’t shelled out any money for either of these programs yet.

After a long time, Albertson’s is finally Lucky’s again. But neither is really the original Lucky’s , instead it’s a cloaked version of Save Mart. Well, here’s the history according to Wikipedia, if you’re interested.

Myself, I still find myself drawn to Safeway — although Safeway has a sordid past too. Just goes to show, when it comes to business and sausage, don’t ask how it all works or is made.

I tried using Ecto v2 on osx — actually purchased it — but the RTF editor has issues such as:

• not being able to get numbered lists to be generated correctly,
• when I switch to HTML mode, the new text i’ve added to the list doesn’t show up,
• when I edit the HTML in an external editor, e.g. textmate, and go back to ecto, the HTML has been rewritten incorrectly.

So, i’m going to have to discontinue my use of this and just use wordpress’s native editor. Hopefully things are improved with Ecto v3.

I used to have a roommate back in the post-college years. This taught me the risk of having a friend as a roommate is that it damages the friendship. However it wasn’t as bad as this situation.

Technorati Tags: crazy, enemy, friend, history, roommate

One good shortcut is a Spotlight enhancement:

• Google Importer spotlight plugin

What’s next on Google’s buyout radar? Lots of people discuss this stuff. I don’t follow the discussions at all, but one idea stands out as a an interesting proposition.

Wikipedia

There’s some discussion here in particular (that supports my argument):

“Google’s offered before, and Wikipedia has refused, and will continue to.” [blog.outer-court.com]

Read the rest of this entry »

for the longest time, the 250GB drive was the cheapest per gigabyte at 25 or 26 cents per gigabyte, but in the last week, the 500GB SATA drives dropped to the lowest cost place at 23 cents per gigabyte. I’m still going with the 750GB drives (not shown) at 43 cents per gigabyte for my needs though.