Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2006-09-30
How to Run a Meeting Like Google.
Some damn good ideas here. I already use some of these in my meetings, and our meetings in general have really improved over the past year. We’ve gone from the typical infrequent but fairly pointless meetings to regular and generally highly productive meetings for the most part, which hasn’t just improved productivity by increasing everyone’s clarity around what we’re trying to do, but has also paradoxically probably decreased the overall need for meetings.
Still, we can always do better, and this article points out some things I know I could adopt right away. In particular, I think I may try and implement the “office hours” and “micro meeting” ideas. As it stands, people have a habit of just “dropping by” my office to discuss things, potentially really disrupting my productivity. These ideas may represent some ways to put some structure around that situation, still allowing people some less formal on-on-one time with me but doing at times when I don’t have an expectation of working on something else.
Some how it appears to have slipped past me, but Cesare Marilungo has officially released his long generative piece Still Trying To Grasp The Zen Mind. I’m listening to it right now…very mellow, ambient music!
There is a significant revision to Google Reader, Google AJAX-powered RSS/Atom reader now available. Like all the Google utilities it has something of a *nix feel, with a number of useful keyboard shortcuts. What I particularly like is how news items in the Expanded View are marked read as you scroll past them; this saves a great deal of clicking or keystrokes when reading a large number of feeds. This revision makes Reader a lot more functional and useful — I’m going to try and use it for a few days to see if I can successfully integrate it into my “do as much via the browser as I can” approach.
I also did some serious feed gardening last night, whacking probably 25% of them. Most I trashed because I found that I was generally skipping over them when they had news items, others because they hadn’t updated in a long while, a few because they more or less duplicated other feeds (Mac news sites being the primary offenders here), and one or two because I just couldn’t stand reading them any more. Having over 500 items to read every night when I come home from work was just getting to be more than I had time to deal with. Reading feeds was starting to seem like a chore and not a pleasure — it was time to dig up the weeds.
Let me join “Alwin”:http://alwinism.org/Archives/2006/September2006/HabeasCorpusisnotaradica.html, “Hal”:http://halrager.org/WordPress/?p=3501, and a host of others in expressing my disgust for the “Detainee Bill”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/washington/29detaincnd.html?_r=1&oref=slogin that the Senate most shamefully passed this evening. This legislation is an affront to our Constitution, to human dignity, and to the very meaning of what it is to be an American.
Unfortunately, 65 Senators felt compelled, some of them even voicing their certainty of the unconstitutionality of the legislation, to vote for it. These 65 should be marked and marked well in the American public eye - every effort should be bent on removing these cowards from office as soon as is possible, because they have betrayed their trust as senators. “Here”:http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00259 is the record of the vote — you can easily tell how your senators voted on this issue. I am disgusted with Senator Richard Lugar on this issue for his “yea” vote, and will write in my dog’s name to oppose his re-election on the November ballot, since he is running unopposed.
The Senate has voted to strip you of your rights and to give the worst President in U.S. history — a President with a proven record of incredibly poor judgement — the sole authority to determine if you can be tortured, up to and including sexual assault. _Habeus Corpus_, a fundamental right of U.S. citizens, has effectively been suspended. Frankly, I want to throw up.
I can only cheer at the outrage and indignation expressed by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann in “this clip.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70wOzCkWN5g&eurl= Unfortunately, the voice of sanity and the voices of the people no longer seem to matter a tinker’s damn in the United States anymore, only the voices of Bush and his pet lap dogs, determined to ass-fuck the entire nation right over the brink of history and into infamy.
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terrorism, homeland+security, bush, senate, lugar
“Scientists & Engineers for America”:http://www.sefora.org/ is a newly-launched political organization that is the enemy of pseudo-science spouting ideologues everywhere:
bq. Today a group of scientists and concerned citizens launch a new organization, Scientists and Engineers for America, dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy.
bq. The principal role of the science and technology community is to advance human understanding. But there are times when this is not enough. Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation%u2019s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.
Bravo.
_More_: The SEFORA “blog.”:http://www.sefora.org/serendipity/
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SEFORA
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2006-09-27
“NewsForge | Open source search technology goes beyond keywords”:http://software.newsforge.com/software/06/09/19/1531258.shtml?tid=130
bq. For several years a group of academic researchers has been quietly working on a new kind of search engine — one that recognizes the semantic meaning of a query instead of only taking input as a keyword to be literally matched. The technology is licensed under the GPL, and a desktop version is imminent.
bq. In its simplest form, semantic indexing can recognize synonyms, or for example a search in an inventory database for “fruit” could turn up documents listing “apples” and “oranges.”
If this works (and that’s a significant ‘if’) it’ll be the most significant development in search technology since Google. If it can be made to work online as well as with local files, then all bets are off in the search engine game. Of course, that’s what “TBL”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim-Berners_Lee has been on about for years now, and we don’t seem to be any closer to a semantic web than we ever have been…
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2006-09-24
As “Alwin”:http://alwinism.org/ likes to remind us, Sunday is a good day to do your backups if you don’t have some automated system that does them more frequently. I now do daily automated backups of “Radamanthus,”:http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Age/dp/B0007UDZ1O/sr=8-1/qid=1159134909/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-8417518-9043204?ie=UTF8&s=books my MacBook Pro, and weekly manual backups of the other systems in the house. This is because Radamanthus is also my work system and has a lot of important stuff on it that changes frequently; weekly backups aren’t enough.
Beyond system backups, though, how many of us remember we need regular backups of our web stuff? In addition to this blog, I keep my GTD stuff in a remote install of “Tracks”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/ and a “Twiki”:http://twiki.org wiki. The information in these applications is vital to me — that’s largely why I have them hosted on a server somewhere, rather than on my notebook — so I can access it anywhere I can get to a browser. Sure, I trust my hosting provider, and they do backups, but accidents happen. I can’t afford to lose access to this information because they make a mistake or suddenly aren’t available for some reason. Even if you only have an occasionally updated blog, are you willing to run the risk of losing it all, perhaps not even through your own actions?
Take the time to back up your information on the web. “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org includes a handy blog backup utility; use it. If you’re savvy enough to have installed a database-backed web application for your own use, you’re savvy enough to learn to use the tools that database offers to back your data up to a file. For files, use WebDav or rsync or even good old http://FTP. Do something though, before you reach for that critical piece of information you stored somewhere online, and find you can’t access it anymore.
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