2011, the year of distractions

I didn’t (and usually don’t) do end of year posts, however something I read recently got me thinking a lot about 2011’s positives and negatives. One of the definite negatives of last year was that it really felt like a year filled with distractions.

The reading that got me thinking was Happy and quiet on Ned Batchelder’s blog. I started following Ned’s blog a very long time ago simply because he used to be involved in Lotus Domino, and I used to be a Lotus person (sssh). I don’t do Lotus Notes/Domino anymore, and neither does Ned, however I still read his blog as it’s full of interesting and insightful nuggets (plus loads of python, if that’s your thing).

The post above has a lot of interesting quotes in it, but the one that caught my attention was:

We have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating.

This quote will ring true to so many of us – but you might be surprised to find that it was written in 1854. The constant stream of email (the writing and reading of which is ‘work’, however my main purpose in work isn’t ‘to write email’!), tweets, Facebook (which in itself is making us miserable), Google+, and so on, can make it really hard to focus on what’s actually important, and makes us feel incredibly busy and overloaded without actually being productive.

Ironically, I tweeted that quote, which went through to Facebook, where it got some likes and comments.

So, what to do about it? I don’t know if I have the answer, but I do have some ideas.

Last year I sandboxed my access to Facebook, which I think worked very well in reducing its ability to distract me. I’m going to take this a bit further by removing it from one or more of my iOS devices, and also by possibly removing the flow of my tweets through to Facebook. Why the last bit? Simply because I get quite a lot of responses to tweets on Facebook, plus the tweets make it look like I’m a lot more active on Facebook than I am – this is an illusion I’d like to remove, and hopefully it’ll help me engage with friends via actual communication channels. I really wish Facebook would add an auto responder feature to their Inbox – if I could have a message auto sent to anyone who mails me telling them to contact me via other means I’d be much happier about ignoring it a lot more.

However my main distraction is, and probably always will be, email. I have a terrible habit of wanting to keep my inbox as tidy as possible. Whenever I see people who somehow survive with “1622 unread messages!” flashing at them I cringe. I couldn’t do it – and that’s fine, however what’s not fine is letting incoming mail distract through processes and work flows, simply because my mind goes “Oooh well I can reply to that quickly right now and get it out of the way!”. So like many other people I’m going to start scheduling times for my email, and making a real point to shut down my mail client outside of those times. 2 real things to make that challenging will be the fact that I largely work from home, and that our main client is in a time zone that’s either 10 or 12 hours behind us.

I’ve also made the split between my personal and work email a bit more defined – that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when it’s your company you can let its identity define you if you’re not careful, and you don’t have that big brother feeling of someone snooping on you checking who you’re talking to “on company time”. When it comes to personal email I’ve got some pretty aggressive filtering going on which puts all the lists and newsletters I subscribe to in a special folder so they never hit my inbox, which means I can go through them at my leisure when I have spare time, without offending my inbox zero OCD.

Finally on email one of the major changes I did a few months back was disabling the new email notification on my iPhone. That little “ding” coming and going was such a distraction, even if I didn’t realise it. Turning off the notification gave me an instant boost to my productivity and to my sanity – I cannot recommend doing that highly enough.

There’s a few other small things, some that I started in 2011, but that I aim to pay more attention to in 2012:

• Having a clear split of my work and personal todo lists
• Improve the systems I use here to give me cross device access – mainly because right now my todo lists are editable on my PCs and Macs, and are readable but not editable on my iOS devices. This leads me to use the iOS notes app, and that split of having one extra thing to check is quite a large distraction in itself.
• Having a ‘someday maybe’ list, to give me a place to store things that I want to do someday, but that are utterly low priority (adding them to a proper todo list just makes you feel guilty when you look at it, or daunts you as it looks so incredibly long)
• Organising and pruning my RSS feeds – in my reader I have a ‘Daily Reads’, a ‘Weekly Reads’, and then everything else is filed according to topic/interest. Work can be reading too, as well as fun, but knowing that I only need to keep up with my daily and weekly reading can make the unread count of following a large number of feeds a lot easier to manage.

So there are my thoughts on a more productive and less distracted 2012. I know there’s a lot of reading out there on this sort of thing, and to be honest I’ve not read any of it! So if you have, or if you haven’t, and you have any suggestions or comments then I’d love to hear them.

Tags: GTD

posted @ Wednesday, January 18, 2012 6:07 PM | Feedback (0)

Struggling to get used to the new Google Analytics interface

While the old interface is still available, I’ve been trying to use the new one as much as possible to get used to it. It’s obvious that there’s some great functionality included in the new version, however there’s a couple of things I really can’t get used to;

• I miss the old home page, which listed all your accounts and gave a quick aggregated +/- % change from that screen. I can’t find any equivalent in the new version
• The multiple levels of hierarchy that the new version adds would obviously make sense for heavy users, but for my setup it seems really redundant and just adds extra clicks.

Anyway – in order to focus on the positive, you should read 10 New Google Analytics Features You Need to Start Using, as it will probably show you a couple of new features that you’ve yet to discover.

Plus there’s a hidden gem in the comments – one of the things I was concerned about is the fact that the PDF export option was missing. I was worried this meant they were removing that feature, but it’s coming “in a few weeks”. Given the additional complication introduced with customisable dashboards that makes sense – happy to wait for it, I’m just glad it’s not being removed.

posted @ Sunday, January 15, 2012 10:29 AM | Feedback (0)

MCE Optibay and the joys of ripping open a Macbook Pro

Towards the end of last year I ripped open my Macbook Pro and installed an MCE Optibay mod along with a 2.5” drive to replace the MBP’s internal superdrive. My MBP had a 128gb SSD, and running Windows via Bootcamp or a VM combined with one or two disk hungry OSX applications meant that it simply wasn’t enough space anymore.

I looked at the price of a large replacement SSD, and simply couldn’t justify it for a laptop that was slightly over a year old, so the MCE mod made good financial sense.

Installing the MCE Optibay was pretty straight forward, but it was interesting how “wrong” it felt ripping the thing open and unplugging stuff. Maybe I’m simply not cut out to be a genius. With the second drive installed, I fired up the Mac and started enjoying the new disk space.. and noticing a couple of other things.

I quickly noticed the change in power usage. This was to be expected, and the MBP still gets good battery life, however for some reason it feels like the difference in power consumption is pretty large. When I glance at the battery meter sometimes it feels like I can watch it dropping right in front of me. Luckily battery life isn’t a big priority for me, but I was still surprised at how much quicker the battery “feels” like it drops now.

The second thing is something that took me a long time to notice. A long, frustrating time. Apparently it seems that the MCE mod causes VMware Fusion to have intermittent performance issues. I’m not talking about the VM being slightly sluggish here – it becomes completely unusable. It’s still alive, but with massive delays to keystrokes and mouse commands and basically everything. However sometimes it’ll boot up with no issues at all. For me, the VM was fine for the first few runs and so it took a while to realise that the performance had something to do with the MCE Optibay. A few searches later and it seems there are a few other people on the VMware forums having similar issues.

I started a thread on the forums, which shows that the folks at VMware are aware of the issue, and that they’re pretty keen to sort it out: VMware Fusion and MCE Optibay

One of the replies suggested to uninstall and reinstall VMware tools on the guest OS, and for now this seems to have addressed the issue for me. I still have more testing to do, but I’ve restarted the VM and the host many times over the past few weeks and have yet to experience the speed issues since the reinstall.

So, the MCE Optibay is a great modification – it’s easy to install, does exactly what you’d expect, and the fact that it comes with an external USB enclosure for your removed superdrive is a great touch. However, I have to say that in future I’d probably burn the extra cash and go for a single larger drive.

Tags: OSX, Apple

posted @ Monday, January 02, 2012 8:05 PM | Feedback (2)

Google+ isn't Google's Facebook

As vowe says, Google+ isn't Google's Facebook. I think a lot of people have struggled with the fact that Google+ didn’t meet their expectations as being a direct competitor with Facebook – including me.

It’s taken a while, but with the recent addition of direct integration with Google Reader, and now with the new YouTube design, it’s all starting to make a lot more sense. As vowe says: “Google+ isn't Google's Facebook. It's the Google fabric. It's everywhere and pulls it all together”.

Tags: Google Plus

posted @ Friday, December 09, 2011 2:24 PM | Feedback (0)

Facebook’s new timeline is fairly shiny, but I wonder..

New Zealand got early access to Facebook’s new timeline feature this week. It looks shiny, however I’m wondering if it’s got potential to have an unintended side effect.

The timeline is a pretty strong reminder that Facebook likes to store anything and everything you post, or that anyone posts to you. Most technical people realise this already, however the timeline is going to make that fact really obvious to a whole group of people who’ve probably never thought or cared about this before. Could be interesting.

posted @ Friday, December 09, 2011 11:55 AM | Feedback (0)

Windows Azure beats Amazon EC2, Google App Engine in cloud speed test

Windows Azure beats Amazon EC2, Google App Engine in cloud speed test – looks like it’s definitely time to investigate Azure in more detail.

Tags: Microsoft

posted @ Friday, December 02, 2011 7:54 AM | Feedback (0)

Cloudberry promotion–running until December 1st

I mentioned some Cloudberry products in my previous post on Cloud backups. They’re currently having a sale on Backup Server and Backup Desktop until 1st of December, so if you liked what you read in my other post you should head over and take advantage of the promotion.

Tags: Cloudberry

posted @ Friday, November 25, 2011 9:20 AM | Feedback (0)

Getting started with cloud backups

Everyone needs backups, and for a long time this has meant dealing with backup drives, tapes, software, rotations, and all those fun things. But with the ever increasing popularity and reducing costs of cloud storage and cloud services in general, the cloud is becoming a great alternative destination to tapes and drives.

Recently more and more of my backups (personal and work related) have been migrated to the cloud, so I thought I’d write a little bit about the services and products that I’m using.

Firstly, why the cloud? Well there are a couple of compelling reasons:

• No need to buy tape drives and tapes  - reducing your infrastructure costs, especially if you have a multiple site environment
• Your backups are automatically offsite – no need to worry about having your backup tapes stolen along with your server.
• It’s quick and easy to get up and running – remember with backups, any backup solution is (usually) better than no backup solution.

However there are risks you need to consider:

• Make sure you’re comfortable with cloud concepts and cloud security
• Choose a trustworthy provider
• Be aware that backup/restore times can take a little longer (depending on the speed of your Internet connection)

So, how do you started? Simple. Pick a cloud provider, grab some software, and you’re underway.

Cloud Providers

There’s many to choose from, but in my mind the main 2 players are Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure. They’re both companies who have been in this space for a while, and both services have a good track record and a good level of reliability.

Currently a lot of my backups are located on Amazon S3, but I’ve got plans to take a serious look at Microsoft Azure over the next couple of months. Both services have pricing calculators you can use to get a rough idea of their costs, so do a bit of research and see what’s going to work best for you – however chances are either will do the job.

Software

The software you choose is going to have a big affect on your experiences with cloud backups and cloud storage in general, and if you want to get up and running quickly and easily then I highly recommend the range of products from Cloudberry Lab. I’m using Cloudberry S3 Backup for Windows Server on a few of our servers, and have had nothing but good experiences with it.

You can read the full set of product information on the website, however a few of the feature highlights that are important to me are:

• Supports a wide range of cloud providers – Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure are two of the big ones, but there’s a huge range of other cloud providers they support.
• Allows you to store data in a format that means it can be accessed by other software – there are some backup providers who will only allow you to store data in one of their custom formats. While Cloudberry also offers a custom format (offering features such as compression and encryption), you have the option of backing things up in a simple format that’s compatible with everything should you have the need.
• It just works. Install the software, run the wizard, done.

The backup products support most types of Windows Servers, including Windows Home Server (v1 and 2011).

Cloudberry also offer a Freeware product called Cloudberry S3 Explorer which is great for accessing your data from other machines, or for copying data (one off snapshots or backups) up to the cloud. While I use the Pro version, I have used the free one in the past and it offers a lot of the same features. Explorer also lets you manage a lot of other aspects of your cloud storage (such as security), which is often much more convenient than using the Amazon S3 console. There’s also a load of useful info and how to info on their blog.

I should also mention that if you’re a developer, or someone who likes to tinker, then you might like to look at the Amazon S3 API. At Ignition, Sam has written a quick command line app to zip data and transfer it straight to the cloud using the API, which is very handy for scripted backups and commands. This sort of option isn’t going to be useful for everyone, but if you’re a developer then the S3 API is well worth a look.

Tags: Amazon S3, Cloudberry, Microsoft

posted @ Monday, November 21, 2011 12:23 PM | Feedback (0)

jQuery Mobile 1.0 Final

In my defence I noticed the release of RC3 a little late! Now 1.0 Final is out – time to skip past RC3 and get upgrading.

That’s right, version 1.0 is out! After more than a year of refinements, we now have a rock solid release.

 

When we first launched this site back in the summer of 2010, we had a few concept sketches and some very ambitions goals: to create an elegant HTML5-based user interface library for the jQuery community designed to work on all popular mobile platforms. We are built on the strengths of jQuery core and jQuery UI and strive to make mobile development efficient, accessible and maybe even a bit fun.

If you’re interested in the full progression timeline, then it’s in the posting I mention above, and copied here:

• RC3 – November 13, 2011
• RC2 - October 19, 2011
• RC1 - August 29, 2011
• Beta 3 - September 8, 2011
• Beta 2 - August 3, 2011
• Beta 1 - June 20, 2011
• Alpha 4.1 - April 7, 2011
• Alpha 4 - March 31, 2011
• Alpha 3 - February 4, 2011
• Alpha 2 - November 21, 2010
• Alpha 1 - October 16, 2010

I’m not quite sure how it is that Beta 3 comes after RC1, but apparently it did!

Reading the ‘Word of Thanks’ paragraph is interesting. It’s no surprise that there’s a long list of contributors who helped out, but the list of corporate sponsors is a little surprising. Especially the one ‘premier sponsor’ – Adobe. Given recent announcements that’s kind of interesting.

Tags: jQuery Mobile

posted @ Friday, November 18, 2011 6:00 PM | Feedback (0)

jQuery Mobile RC3

jQuery Mobile RC3 is out. Go grab it if you’re a jQuery mobile type person. It’s getting very close to release 1.0, and it looks like there’s a big drive for improved performance going on:

Sure, we know we said we were going straight to 1.0 when RC2 came out, but we’ve been making a ton of performance enhancements and we just want to make sure 1.0 goes off without a hitch. Unless a regression crops up, this is the exact code that will be released as 1.0 final later this week so consider this an early preview.

I’m looking forward to getting some time to check this out properly – performance was one of my major/only concerns when I first gave this a test run in the beta phase, so if they make decent inroads with this RC or with the 1.0 release then the future should be looking good.

Tags: jQuery Mobile

posted @ Thursday, November 17, 2011 10:37 PM | Feedback (0)