Category: Uncategorized

When your shoelace snaps, that’s entropy, a tiny fragment of universal decay that drips onto your back from an obscure and lingering extra-dimensional cloud. If you are prepared for this kind of sporadic unraveling, you go find your extra shoelaces in the top drawer of your dresser, whistle a happy tune, re-lace your shoe and away you go. The entropy has drained away, for now anyway, and you can continue living in merry denial of the second law of thermodynamics.

But sometimes, either through lack of planning, laziness, or both (mea culpa), these desultory drip-drops can turn into a regular downpour of fraying entropy. This week my watchband broke, then my computer started to fail, then my web host account stopped working, and then the rattle in my car (just off warranty) turned out to require $1200 worth of repair thereby failing its overdue inspection.

I don’t mention these things to claim that my troubles are severe, but you do get the feeling, when you get caught in an entropy storm, that something is going terribly wrong, and it’s going wronger faster than you can fix it. It’s as if there’s an accelerating feedback loop. The entropy drainpipes are clogged and you can see it pooling up around you like a dark corrosive tide. At times like this, you just have to concentrate on one thing at a time. The zen of Getting Things Done can rescue you by insisting that you pick one thing and fix it. I was amazed how much better I felt just dropping off my watch at the watch repair store. That cleared the drain enough for me to change web hosts and make an appointment for my suffering car. Tomorrow I re-install Windows to clean the gremlins off this machine… wish me luck! The cloud has backed off momentarily, and I can pretend it doesn’t exist again. In my memories it never does. And where does all that entropy drain to anyway? Best not to think about it.

Which reminds me: What did Mr. Death say after he stopped by for a drink?

“See you later!”

To what extent is your life just a sequence of tricks, shortcuts, and workarounds that you’ve learned over time?

The term “life hacks” is being used these days to describe discrete techniques and heuristics that can make you more productive and (sometimes) happier. As the author of an upcoming book entitled Life Hacks, Danny O’Brien, says, “Hacks are often a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, nonobvious fix.” Here’s a favorite of mine that I use fairly often. If you’re afraid you might forget to take some important thing to work tomorrow, put your car keys underneath it.

Various blogs are devoted to this topic. One is even called Lifehacker. I read Lifehacker regularly, and I regularly find something useful to try. The Danny O’Brien quote above comes from an interview on that site (here’s another good interview with O’Brien’s co-author Merlin Mann). Still, I find myself wondering, what is it really that makes some people particularly productive? A pack of clever tricks and what else? O’Brien himself puts it well: “If I’m honest … most of this capability doesn’t come from habits. It just comes from being born insufferably talented.” In other words, super-talented people have learned some useful tricks, and these tricks take them from being merely 8.6 times more effective than you are to 8.95 times more effective. Think of all the people who try to play music more beautifully by buying the most expensive instrument. It only gets you so far.

What I’d really like to see is a blog called LifeDiaries, or something like that, dedicated to how productive people manage large chunks of their time. What is it that you do with discipline day after day? I bet super-productive people are not only more talented than you… they also work much much harder. It’s nice to know things like that. When you’re so obviously outclassed, it becomes easier to relax, drink a beer, and concentrate on something you really enjoy.

Finally, here’s my life hack contribution to you, free of charge: first, have a brilliant idea. Then do a really good job making it happen.

I oughta write a book.

Give a meme a name and it just might take off. By way of Jon Udell, I discovered that Dave Winer has given a name to my preferred feed reading technique: river of news. The basic idea is this. If you’re going to look at a bunch of little text items like RSS feed snippets, you can go visit them one by one, or you can glue them all together and scan through the whole thing at one go. If you like the one by one approach, your favorite interface will probably be a three-paned affair like a typical newsreader. I hate this. I want to read something that feels like a newspaper column. The first feed aggregator I really went for was called Aggie, and it just mashed everything into one giant HTML page. Dirt simple, but it worked like a charm. Aggie is defunct, but not to worry, because the mighty Bloglines picked up where Aggie left off. Bloglines doesn’t make you clicky-click click on everything to read it. And now I have a name for it.

I am fairly certain this is the kind of thing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act frowns upon. If the War on Terrorism has got you down, here’s a way to let your furry friends keep you up-to-date without freaking you out. The guy behind geek and proud has created a dandy Terror Alert Level indicator that you can paste directly into a web page.

Today’s Terror Alert Level is

Remember: If you see Elmo, it’s time to duck and cover (just as soon as you put those toys away and give Elmo a big hug).

I have never seen the aurora borealis, but I want to.

I live in Boston, which is far enough north for this not to be a crazy goal, but still, you have to be looking in the right place at the right time (often at an outrageous time of night) to be rewarded with a view of the famous Northern Lights. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could arrange for someone to let me know exactly when to wake up and run outside?

One thing I know about auroras is that they’re associated with solar flares, and so when I read on Space.com that there was some massive solar flares activity, I knew I might have a chance to catch my aurora. Still, when exactly would necessary geomagnetic storm occur on Earth? When you want to know about space weather (like flares and solar wind proton flux density), the place to go is SpaceWeather.com, and these guys actually offer a phone service called SpaceWeatherPhone. They’ll call you and tell you when to wake up, but it’ll cost you.
I’m too cheap to pay someone to wake me up in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t hard to hunt down a free service called Aurora Chasers, which relies on email instead of the phone. I signed up right away.

Now I wait by my Gmail account, painting my fingernails, and waiting for a note from the Northern Lights. But I have my doubts about this free service. The storm is over now, and although I never heard from Aurora Chasers, the folks over at SpaceWeatherPhone have some beautiful pictures to show.

Maybe next time…

Several years ago I visited the website for a company called Experts Exchange, a company that brokers information exchange between computer system specialists. As I typed in the URL, I realized something that must have been plaguing their marketing department right about then: one look at the URL http://www.expertsexchange.com, and your brain fishes out the conspicuous “sex” in the middle and completes the sentence. Presto! ExpertSexChange.com. You can almost hear the ad jingle: “Put your gender in a blender at Expert Sex Change.” Not surprisingly, they changed their domain name to experts-exchange.com.

But it does show how surprisingly easy it is to make a big goof. A site called Domain Rookie just published a funny piece entitled Domain Name Mispronouncings. He leads with ExpertsExchange, but he’s got some other good ones too. Some are more credible than others. TherapistFinder (TheRapistFinder) seems real, but I don’t for one second believe there is a real pen company called Pen Island. The domain name for that last one will be left as an exercise for the reader.

When I lived in San Francisco, my car (a sleek white 1979 Chevette) got broken into twice. The second time it happened, all they really got was my overnight bag with all my clothes in it. I was lucky that’s all there was to it, but even so, aside from the nasty sense of violation at being robbed, I was intensely irritated that the thief stole something of no possible value to them (underwear, toothbrush, socks) but which was nevertheless lost to me forever. I remember thinking, as I shopped for new underwear, that I would have gladly paid money to see a video of the thief doing the deed, even if it wouldn’t have identified the criminal. I just wanted the sense of closure at seeing the bastard work. I suppose I would’ve thought to myself: so that’s what it looked like…

My friend Roy recently sent me a link along these lines about Johannesburg, a town that knows a thing or two about car-related theft. The link points to an interview with a former (so we are told) car thief/hijacker in which the interviewee reveals some of the secrets to his erstwhile trade. It provides some of the answers to questions that are generally so damnably difficult to uncover: How do you steal cars? What is your day like? How do you choose your victims? Here for example is a useful tip: “If I was having difficulty with a particular car, sometimes I’d dress up nicely and go to a dealer posing as a customer. I’d ask the salesman how good the anti-theft system was on that car and he would give me all the details.” Good to know. Here’s another moderately reassuring Q and A.

Q. In a hijacking did you normally go for soft targets like women?

A: No, I could take on anyone. I was a professional. I’d stick my gun right in their faces and they wouldn’t give me any trouble. That’s why I never shot or hurt anyone; I was against that. A friend of mine sometimes shot people he hijacked and he used to wake up with nightmares.

Like I said, it’s only moderately reassuring.

It’s certainly an overstatement to say Katrina is “our tsunami,” but there is a grim resemblance to the before and after satellite pictures of both scenes of devastation.

DigitalGlobe is the company that supplies the imagery for Google Earth and other products like it. They have accelerated their normal imaging process to create this Hurricane Katrina Media Gallery. It’s a well made package of information.

No sooner do people have the ability to put pictures on the web then they want to tell stories about them. To serve this need, there are a number of nifty make-your-own-comic-strip sites out there. Recently I came across the Flash-based Strip Generator from Third Frame Studios. The fun thing about Strip Generator is that it’s bilingual in English and Slovenian, so you can use it to learn words like smetnjak (trashcan), knjiga (something you might put in your kouček), and ključavnica (difficult to translate, but means roughly “help, I’ve jammed my fingers in the keyboard again!”). Inexplicably, I found a surprisingly good Garfield comic generator on the National Institutes of Health website. With this tool, it may actually be possible to make a funny Garfield comic. By contrast, I wasn’t very impressed with the UI for the more generic StripCreator. It’s a decidedly non-Flash non-sexy web-1.0 old-school dropdown-menu-spinnin’ form-heavy way to make comics.

But these are all iconic, cartoony comics. Suppose you want to make a comic-like page of your own pictures? That’s where ComicLife comes in, and although it’s only available on the Mac, it seems to be the pick of the litter. I heard about ComicLife while listening to a podcast of an
interview conducted using Skype between Australia and the US. It was a very 2005 kind of moment. ComicLife was created by the guys at plasq.com, and it lets you create story panels with your pictures. They host a gallery to give you an idea of what you can do. It looks pretty slick. It’s taken off as a meme, and like all modern memes, it has its own Flickr tag (comiclife). Someone has even published an entire ComicLife-based graphic novel on Flickr. Say what you like about the result, the rapid and unanticipated fusion of all these online media is pretty remarkable.