I’ve found myself reaching for my iPhone and my twitter client, which I’ve deleted. It’s like reaching for smokes all the time. Oh well. It’ll pass. Now I need start getting projects in order.
So, I’m breaking up with twitter. But not just twitter. I’m reorging my tech heavy life to try and get focus and control back.
My focus and time management are trashed and with ADD, a very delicate thing to begin with. So I’m pulling a Star Trek reboot on how I do things and the tools I use to interact with others on the net.
I’ll be rolling back to my blog as my outlet for ideas and tips and what not. I mean, the sub caption is “Rev’s Thought Dump”. For chatting feel free to email me or even IM if you’re so inclined. Could even call!
Yeah, it’s just time for me to finish projects and work on myself for a change.
It was cool meeting everyone on twitter. And it’s been my primary social outlet. But I get nothing done with it in my life. Not just twitter, but that’s the most notable outward change.
To email and chat I can tell you I have a Gmail account and it’s rev(dot)fry.
Hope to keep chatting with everyone from twitter. It’s not you, it’s them. =)
(go go power iPhone wordpress app)
“I’m Philbert and I approve of this message.”
Had a conversation with my coworker about customer service asking for passwords on the phone. It devolved into us taking turns in creating the fictitious one side phone support call transcribed below. At the time we laughed our asses off.
Excuse me sir i’ll need the social and cc numbers for you and your extended family in order to fix that site problem…. in fact just mail a check to this po box.
Do you have a daughter? Uh huh? Is she cute? uh huh… 16? Yeah… yeah, I was afraid of that sir. Yeah she made need to fly out here and stay with me for a few weeks while we get this fixed.
no the blank checkis just for identity validation purposes…. yes you must sign it
Noooo…. if you write VOID on it then it’s VOID and I can’t….. erm…. use it to fix the problem.
Are you trying to void your identity sir …. i beleive that may be illegal…
Something tells me, you’re the kind of sick terrorist bastard type that rips the tag off their matress. Am I right, sir? AM I RIGHT?! I’m sorry sir, but to continue working with you despite my moral judgement I’m going to need you to send me a $150 star bucks card. yes, yeah, that’s right sir. Just send it along with your daughter.
I’m going to need you to make several deposits to this account in order to establish a “Freedom of Information Transaction Channel” – no don’t worry the money will never really l;eave your account – it wil;l just appear that way for a little while…
We are sorry for the increased security sir – unfortnately these measures have become nessacary in the post 9/11 world…
Of course, sir, everyone in the know will deny all knowledge. The is triple top secret stuff, you understand.
you are very lucky to have been selected for this special patriot plus program.
To decline our offer would surely indicate terrorist ties and you WOULD be subject to a full body cavity search as well as complete IRS audit.
Ahh, bein’ nutty is fun. I <3 imagination.
You know, as good an idea as that sounds, I think by definition it wouldn’t work. It’s like the apocryphal “Anarchists meeting”
And really, isn’t every personal tech blog out there a journal of tech and ADD, for the most part?
So we sat down last night and decided to stream some tv to ourly newly hobbled together “media center”. We watch some house flipping on TLC and eventually found our way to Extreme Make Over: Home Editon. Which, as far as I know, is now the ONLY edition having realized that there are just some wrecks you CAN’T save.
We used to watch this show way back in the first season or two. Back when it was a glamourised ‘This Old House’. They’d find some people whose home was just trashed for one reason or another and they’d come in and fix it up. It was always full of technical detail and discussions about the design of the house and rooms. Interesting stuff.
What I saw last night (three episodes worth) was terrible. It’s gone from the entertaining show we once knew to this publicity engine for sponsers. Sears, Ford, etc etc all getting their plugs in and intermingled with that are emotinal bombs of truly news center proportins.
For example, they’re going to build a house for a family whose husband is deployed. Lot’s of emotion there. They bring him back for the week while they build the house. Okay. During the prebuild interview with the wife they drop this nice emoti-bomb.
Host: “oh, it’s going to be fabulous. We’ll fix it all up and we’ll finally finish this house your family always wanted.”
Wife: (smiling and nodding): “Yes, it’ll be wonderful. A great releif of stress….”
Host: (suddenly serious) : “But, you know your husband won’t be able to stay, will he?”
(dead air with the camera pointed at the wife for what seems minutes until she finally gets it and breaks down into a crying fit and let’s the guy console her. )
WTF?! That was pretty pointless. Here’s another good one.
Brother fire fighters are getting their house in New Orleans rebuilt after the tragedy. At one point one of the brothers is talking about serving the community and then breaks down and leaves the room. The cameras are of course waiting in the hall to capture it. When Ty asks what’s up his brother tells him it’s been really bad lately. Bad calls and recently there was a fire where they couldn’t rescue the people inside and Ty whips out this heartfelt one liner: “Oh, and he like had to she the babies burn?”
WTF is that?!
It’s so not abut the construction anymore either. The houses in all three shows were built in a 45 second music montoge in the last 15 minutes of the show. Just a quick “zip” and it’s built.
It used to be that the carpenters would take on a special project and you’d see how it was done and a special reveal to the family. Now the things they work on are hardly even mentioned. Almost under the breath. Sad.
I think it started to head south when it appeared the powers that be were starting to notice the show. I recall tuning in to find that they tacked an additional hour on to the show for a special “behind” the scenes. A show which might be cool if it focused on the people and the projects. But that actually talked about how the show was made from a production stand point. Things like highlighting how much showmanship goes into it all. The filming and refilming their approach to the “unsuspecting” family’s house. And how the people are alerted well in advance.
I’d rather they were a little more genuine rather than so over the top and disgustingly emotional.
It really has become the offspring of marrying the evening news with this old house and reality tv. Very sad.
(posted from iPhone)
So here we are at day two. More late rising and coming to work to find vista pooping itself. I had to just complain to the walls rather than twitter. I finally just IM’d some from twitter and let them know vista is full of crunchy fail.
I got the idea to do my own Mojave experiment and setup a cam to record all the problems I encounter with vista. But, I’m really good at that, coming up with new projects to not finish. If anyone else picks that up and runs with it let me know.
Opened OmniFocus a total of once today. Created a folder for work repeated tasks and that was it. They talk about people with ADD suffering from being unable to remember or know things that aren’t in the immediate moment. I completely understand that. I’ve been reminded three times this week that we’re supposed to have a garage sale this weekend. =\
Was talking the other day about how effective ADD folks could be if they came from money or just managed to hire an assistant. If I was riding on daddy’s money I’d start a company and hire people to follow through on all the ideas I have. And my assistant would remind me of the things I was supposed to be doing, besides zoning out.
Total change in direction I’m in the Seattle XCoder’s meeting. Listening to someone talk [insert name]. Funny he’s admitting he hadn’t really used a Mac before he wrote a 2000 page book on it. Interesting, I get that feeling about a lot of tech books.
In google in Fremont listening. He’s talking about getting his first Mac in 2003. This is turning out to be pretty interesting, but this is supposed to be blog and not a series of twitter posts. I’ll save the review for another post.
This is where I’m supposed to blog about my first day without using twitter to spout off every 2 minutes. And so I shall.
Today “seemed” productive. Of course I got into work just after 9 and everyone else was out having been up all night with the server move. Though the whole ride in on the bus I was chomping at the bit to tweet this guy and celebrate his first day of school, as witnessed by the tag still attached to his new dockers. Weee! Fought the urge to snatch it off as he walked by.
Look, ma! New pants!
Played with OmniFocus more as I filled out tasks for projects I’d created but never elaborated on. I like the concept of GTD but I sense it’s not for people with ADD. You have to remember and be motivated to check your list all the time. I’m bad at both. But, I think I can give it a shot with OmniFocus’ location awareness on the iPhone. If I can set it up properly hopefully I can remember to bring it up when I get home, to work, to the store, etc..
iTunes 8 is looking pretty snazy. Got a PowerBook from a friend and finally setup the media center I wanted so we can relax on the couch in the front room and watch movies and listen to music. Sat on the couch last night doodling with the computer and listening to music with the new iTunes 8 visualizer running on the screen.
Hooked up some old speakers I had and shoved the sub woofer in the back of the piano – which the whole center sits on. Now the whole piano acts to resonate the bass. Whoa. Had to turn it down a lot.
I should post this before I throw it in drafts again and forget about it. Most of this post was written in the WordPress iPhone app while on the bus – I’ll save how fucked up the Seattle bus system is for another post.
Later.
I’ve been having issues with Vista, of course. It can get into a state where SOMETHING on the system freaks out and I can’t even pull task manager up. I can see it’s icon in the dock going all crazy, but I can’t bring up the task list window and try and fix problems.
What I really wanted was top for windows. But I couldn’t find that, sometimes being all graphical is a bad thing. But I did manage to find something close enough to what i was looking for: taskkill. Use it thusly,
taskkill /IM taskmgr.exe
This should kill off that pesky process/app gone mad. As it was I ran it on task manager and my system returned to normal. So next time you need to kill something like firefox and task manager just won’t come up – how likely is that, really? – try taskkill.
P.S. I have a Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0Ghz system with 2 Gigs of RAM and my experience “Rating” is 3.4.
I loath you, Vista.
I’ve been trying to remember to blog I’ve got a number of good fixes to document including wp-hascash error corrections and getting wifi to work properly in Ubuntu with an Atheros chipset. But I’m just so overwhelmed with work and life. Oh well. Soon.
So, there I am getting my lunch at a chain eatery. I have their stupid little club card and decide to cash it in and pay for some of my meal with it. After much sliding of cards and punching of touch screens the clerk finally tells me I’ll owe .54 cents. So I make to hand him my debit card and he looks at me like I’ve just shit in my hand and I’m now trying to hand it to him.
“No. No mang. We canna do that. 54 cents no. You got cash?”
“No, I don’t have cash. Just my card. Just run it.” I hand it again.
“No, not 54 cent. We take charge for that. Not 54 cent.” he continues to stare at me like I’m hiding money in my pocket, and just won’t give it to him.
“Not my problem. Just run it.”
“You no want sandwich then?”
“*sighs* just keep the chips.” I give in.
“There you take your free sandwich.” he sneers at me and goes back to making sandwiches.
Oh, my free sandwich? Yeah, we have an agreement. You’re offering me these silly points if I’ll eat at your place and fill your system with my sales statistics. So let’s not act like you, joe sandwich slinger, have just bent over backwards and given me food from your kids mouths.
But, that attitude isn’t really my complaint. I’m annoyed that companies will always have this Atlas’ burden take on the surcharge for purchase below certain amounts or for using debit for gas. Buck the hell up. It’s not my problem. Don’t put your operating expenses off on me, in my face.
I don’t come in to work and tell my boss, “I had a crappy time getting out of bed this morning and had a flat tire on the way in. You’re gonna need to give me $50 out of pocket for today.”
Noooo I have that kind of thing wrapped up in what I make. Maybe I get a cost if living raise once a year. That’s how it works. And if I can’t swing it on what I’m making I change jobs to raise my salary. I don’t flipping nit pick my boss everytime I see him.
It’s your business. Don’t throw the fact that it costs you more to run sub $5 charges in my face. Structure your pricing to deal with it. And stop complaining about taking my money. Jeez. Pisses me off.
I don’t know how many times I’ve stared down gas station attendents over crap like this. Your problem. Not mine. Run your business or don’t.
And don’t get me started on places that only take cash. OMG! Catch up with the world, people.
And then there are stores that close before I even get off work. So you WANT to fail? All these businesses so don’t want my money!
*heaving chest and smashed keyboard*
Okay, got that off my chest. Have a nice day.
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