Archive for July, 2006

Access everything, everywhere!

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

The goal

What I want is a system for accessing emails, calendar, tasks and notes on any of the computers I use on a regular basis (both Macs and Windows PCs), in an idiot-proof a way as possible. This should include both work and personal data. Ideally also accessible on the web when at someone else’s computer. This week I bought a new MacBook, and after installing Windows XP on it (twice – in both a virtual machine accessible while running Mac OS X, and on a separate partition so I can run XP natively), I can now reliably use Mac and Windows programs on the same machine.

The locations/equipment

Everywhere

  • Apple MacBook, (recently acquired, my main computer for everything except the day job) running:
    • OS X 10.4 (including Windows XP home, running on virtual machine using Parallels Desktop)
    • Windows XP Home (natively, dual-booting using BootCamp beta)

Work

  • Dell Desktop PC, running Windows 2000
  • Apple PowerMac G4, running OS X 10.3 – used infrequently, so not a priority

Home

  • Apple PowerBook, running OS X 10.3
  • HP Desktop PC, running Windows XP Media Center Edition – also used infrequently, mainly just acts as a media server.

Email

Work

Work email is available directly through Outlook from both work machines (Mac via Citrix, due to problems with Entourage), and available from any other computer using Outlook Web Access. So far, so easy.

Home

Slightly more complicated. I have been using Google Mail as my main personal email account for about a year. Accessed via Internet from any computer.
Before that I used my ISP’s email account which is accessible as webmail and also via POP. This ISP account was my main email address for about eight or nine years, so emails have been downloaded on a variety of machines over that period. Mostly things I don’t need to access, but having recently acquired a new computer, I have discovered how many little utilities I’ve bought online that I need to track down the serial numbers for.
As my ISP’s webmail interface is not that great, I have started using Fastmail to regularly poll my ISP’s account. I access my Fastmail account using IMAP using Apple’s Mail.app on my Macs, Thunderbird in Windows, and via the web for other machines.

Calendar

At the moment I’m using Airset for my calendar. I can access it online from any computer, it sends appointment reminders by email as well as the next day’s schedule every evening. If you’re in the U.S., you can also have it send alerts to your mobile phone. It currently syncs well with Outlook at work (Exchange server) and home PC (local database) with no major problems. I can add/edit/delete entries from work/home/online quite happily. Work and personal appointments are currently all in the same calendar, until I can sort out a sensible way of separating them without breaking the syncing.
For computer-free access, I keep 3 months’ worth of calendars printed out in my organization file, and “sync” regularly.

Tasks

For a few months I’ve been using MyLife Organized (MLO) Pro, which lives on a USB stick I carry around with me. Obviously this means it is losable/forgettable; MLO is set up to take regular backups on the hard drive, so I should never lose any data as long as I have access to those computers. If I forget to take the USB stick with me for some reason, I’d probably only be a day or two out of date, as a worst case scenario. I run it on my work PC, MacBook’s native XP installation, MacBook’s virtual XP machine, and occasionally my home desktop PC. Currently no “computer-free” access, other than printing out reports of relevant information every now and again. I also use Basecamp for some projects, particularly where I am working with other people (or may be in the future). It also syncs with Outlook. Expect a more in-depth post about MLO in the future.

Documents

I’m still experimenting with the best way to organize this. At the moment, a combination of using a USB stick, and my Apple iDisk, which is a WebDAV folder I can access from any computer, with added features if using it from one of my Macs, which both use a working copy and automatically upload/download changed files.

If anyone has any questions, or any suggestions on how I can improve this setup, I’d love to hear them!

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Getting up early

Monday, July 10th, 2006
I’ve been reading Steve Pavlina’s blog on personal effectiveness (amongst other subjects) on and off for a while, and one of the topics I’ve found useful is on getting up early on a regular basis. It’s well worth reading the article and its followups, but in a nutshell, the method suggested is as follows: get up at a fixed time every morning, and at night don’t attempt to get to sleep until you are actually ready to go to sleep.
The reasoning is that if you’re in bed lying awake for more than a few minutes, you’re probably not tired enough. Your body will learn that it has a fixed wake-up time, and therefore you will feel tired at a time when you should be getting the amount of rest you need. You could then be ready for bed at a variety of different times depending on your need for sleep. A yardstick for this time is if you can’t read more than a page or two of a book without your eyes closing involuntarily.
Now I think I tend to go a bit past this stage, possibly due to activities that are too stimulating; sitting at a computer (whether doing something mentally taxing [like writing this post!] or just browsing email/news) seems to keep me awake, whereas if I get into bed and then start reading a book, I will often immediately start feeling tired. So I really ought to start on the dead tree-based reading material earlier.I first tried Steve P’s how to be an early riser technique a few months ago, aiming to get up at 6 a.m. every day, weekends included. I didn’t quite manage it on a regular basis, but I at least got into the habit of getting up at a reasonable time on weekends, very rarely sleeping in past 8, and usually getting up earlier than this.Having recently re-read his posts on this topic, I have attempted to re-commit to getting up early, now aiming for 5 o’clock. It worked for the first couple of days, but I have been gradually slipping back towards 6:30-7 over the course of last week.
I’d really like to get back into it, as whenever I do manage to get up early, after a short period of feeling very tired (maybe 10-15 minutes after getting up), I find I tend to be a lot more productive for the whole day, as well as having an extra hour or two to do things before I leave for work. The problem is, the version of “me” that has to try to get me out of bed is totally oblivious to the upcoming productivity boost, and resists movement of any sort as much as possible.
Referring back to Steve’s website, how does he suggest you overcome this inability to get up at the time you’ve set for yourself? By conditioning yourself to react to the stimuli in question, i.e. “practise” lying in bed in your pyjamas with the room darkened, waiting for the alarm to go off, switch it off, get up, and repeat until it becomes second nature.
It may yet come to this… I’ll see how I get on tomorrow.

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Customer service observations

Monday, July 10th, 2006

Customer service observations from spending Saturday in Oxford:

Oxford Castle : recently opened as a tourist attraction, one thing that struck me as being odd was that neither of the guides who spoke to us as a group introduced themselves by name. And the guy manning the gate to climb the castle mound really gave the impression he didn’t want to be there.

G & D’s (Little Clarendon Street) : We were standing at the counter waiting to be served. There was someone fiddling around with the till (adding or removing change), completely ignoring us. Now bearing in mind they were fairly busy and even if that task was more important than serving 2 customers, the least he could have done was to acknowledge us, and say “sorry, someone will serve you in a moment”, and maybe check someone else had seen us and was coming to help. Not up to usual standards. Nice pecan pie, though.

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