It’s meme Friday, which I’m bringing back from.. never doing it. And it isn’t Friday.
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You scored as Hoban ‘Wash’ Washburne, The Pilot. You are a leaf on the wind, see how you soar. You have a good job, and a stunning wife who loves you (and can kill people). Life is good, which is why you can’t help smiling. Now if you can just get people to actually listen to your opinion things would be perfect.
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Earlier this year I blogged about using the twitter bot for Remember the Milk. I still use it fairly well, even though the SMS messages from the RTM come late a bit. It’s working for me in order to get a good chain going for the thesis proposal. There are a couple other bots that I’m using which are on twitter as well.
The first bot that I use is the bot at timer. The timer bot will let you set a timer (surprisingly). You only need to send it a direct message with the amount of minutes as well as a reminder for you about what it was set for. For example, if you want to remember to plug the meter before it runs out in 40 minutes, just twitter ‘d timer 38 plug the meter’ to timer and in 38 minutes it will inform you that your timer is up. You can have multiple timers running at once, which is useful if you are perhaps having tea at a coffee shop while you are parked on the street.
Another bot I use is the gcal. Gcal is a connection to your google calendar through twitter. You can set up new appointments by messaging the gcal bot with something like ‘d gcal Pick up joe at 7pm’ or ‘d gcal set up web application for judy tomorrow’ and it will add it to your calendar. I use it in the morning to track my weight. I just pull out my phone while I am at the scale and SMS ‘d gcal my weight is XXX’, and it adds the event as a day event on the day it was sent.
The last bot I will go over today is the mymm bot. It is slightly more complicated but still useful. When you’re at the pump, you can direct message mymm a little info and get back the MPG that you have done since the last fillup. It helps me keep a tab on how good or bad I’m driving, which is a good thing. The car we drive usually gets about 24 MPG, but I learned through this that when I’m carrying a bunch of crap in the back, the MPG drops 3-4, so it’s better for me to have an empty trunk.
I’m sure there are a bunch of other useful bots out there (ququoo is one, which I may cover in another post), but these are the most useful that I’ve found so far. Twitter is turning out to be much more useful than just random status updates.
I’ve spent the last week on editing the past week for a major paper, and I realized that I am horrible at editing. I can’t edit myself worth a damn - I miss every mistake that I’ve written, and I am horrible at cutting pieces of text. Wishing that I could have a good method for editing like I do for debugging. I suppose it’s probably because I do debugging more than I do editing. It may also be because editing doesn’t really have a defined end - when you’re debugging, when it passes all the tests, it’s done.
This one had a defined end date set by a deadline, and beings me to a point. I believe that it is the reason that I tend to put writing projects off until later in the process, almost too late. I end up writing up to the point where I need to ask someone else to do the proofing and editing for me. When I am set by a deadline, I tend to get the writing done even if it’s a crunch. It’s not the same with coding projects, which will be short-cutted and work worse when I let them go to the last minute. The coding style that I’ve developed allows for progress in short chunks, a little at a time, incrementally improving. Editing, I understand, should happen the same way, but it is something that I don’t really have enough practice about.
This week I start on my progress on my thesis proposal, on the writing part. The writing part is the easy part for me at least. For the next couple months I’ll be slowly writing the proposal and then the hard part will occur in the editing. Hopefully a bit of hard work and more time than I usually have for editing will make it work.
Lately I have been tasked with a lot of writing to do. I’m writing a chapter for a book on the field that my research is in, which is a good thing for me to get done, but I started it quite late. I had to finish a 9,000-12,000 word chapter in 2 weeks. Here’s how I set it up:
The first half of the schedule was easier than I thought it would be. In general, writing in my field doesn’t usually happen that fast, but the subject is something I’m pretty versed in, so it was not too hard to get 2,000 words out. I had a clear defined goal for each day that once I met, I could feel okay about not working on the project for the rest of the day. I also only had to write 6 days, and I was able to take the seventh day off. Both of these combined made it a lot easier to not feel guilty about being behind.
Editing is a bit more abstract and ongoing than the writing part, so it’s hard to tell how well it’s really going. There are some easy parts like fixing grammar and proofreading to make sure you don’t repeat yourself, but there are also a good portion of hard parts as well, like which sections to cut a bunch of words in, and which word choice should be made in a particular spot. I’m at the point where some things NEED to be cut because the document is too long, so I have to make some hard choices.
I also met with my advisor last week and we discussed my progress toward finishing my Ph. D. I had been thinking about this problem for a while now and was glad that it was also on his mind as well. We agreed that I would set the goal for having my orals done by the end of this year (christmas). I am thinking I will use a similar tactic to the chapter that I am writing, but on a much slower schedule, so next week I will start writing 500 words a day, and do that for a couple months. This will leave me with 30,000 words that I will then edit down by quite a bit, reducing it by almost half. Hopefully this will make the process easier as it has for the chapter.
If writing my thesis proposal works well this way, I hope I can use a chunk of it for the final thesis, which I want to finish one year after my orals, putting me on track for graduating at the end of 2009. I’m looking forward to that.
AMC Southdale 16 8/11/2007 Score: 7
We were actually hoping to see Stardust when we went to the movie theater. It was about 2 hours after we showed up, so we decided to see Hairspray instead. I think we still would have rather seen Stardust. Hairspray is a classic musical movie, similar to Grease or West Side Story in some ways. People are singing with somewhat no reason, and others don’t notice. That is the way of musicals however, and this one is pretty good.
Tracy Turnblad is a high school student (because really, what musical isn’t set in high school?) who wants to be a dancer on the Corny Collins show in Baltimore. Her dad runs a comedy shop while her mother, played by John Travolta, runs a laundry service. Auditions end up being soon enough, and she tries out and fails miserably. That’s okay though, because at a school dance she gets spotted by a star who overrules the producer of the show somehow and gets her on. She’s a hit with everyone in the town and very popular, much to the chagrin of the other girls on the show and the producer who didn’t think she had the talent.
The show evolves from there into a story about the desegregation of the show, which Tracy is all about. She’s had a friendship with some of them since she’s in detention all of the time with them. They are planning a march because even the one segregated day of the show has been cancelled. They end up doing it and things develop from there.
Nikki Blonsky has a good showing here as Tracy, and for the time she is on screen, she pulls it off wonderfully. James Marsden as Corny Collins is also very good. Travolta plays the part well, but it feels like a gimmick in order to get another star on screen. Allison Janey also has a small part which is just hilarious as a ultra-christian mother, whose daughter is a little crazy. Overall the acting is pretty great, and the feel of the film is perfect for all of the small parts of people you recognize to show up and not be jarring at all. However, my favorite role has to be Christopher Walken as Wilbur, Tracy’s father.
There is one particular scene with Walken and Travolta which is very strange to watch, but enjoyable just the same. The songs are just about the right length apart, and are catchy enough that you’ll be humming at least one on the way out. Hairspray has a good number of jokes and laughs too, and the ending just wraps it all up nice and neat. Hairspray holds up with a 7.
A little bit ago I blogged about how I was using Remember The Milk in order to get some things done around the house and to remind me about stuff that I want to do. Things have been going pretty well on that account, I have been using it to great effect for basically everything that I need to do outside of things that I need to get done at Honeywell (I keep a separate todo list for there). However, when using it these past weeks, I have noticed a few things that I wish it would have or things that could be improved upon, I think in a big way.
I think the twitter interface should have some enhancements. For example, it is impossible currently to mark off an item that repeats through twitter, because you always have more than one of them on your list. I would love to do this with daily tasks so that I can mark them off as soon as I finish them with a few button presses on my cell phone. Also it would be nice to be able to add things to lists and not just the INBOX through twitter. Possibly another command starting with ‘!’ that takes a keyword.
Remember the milk has as a major component the map of locations that items in a list can be placed at. There are a couple improvements that I would like in this area. The first is to have multiple locations that are all just as valid in order to complete the task. Remembering the Milk (the actual task) is a great example. There are literally hundreds of places that I could get milk, and two or three of them that I use regularly, depending on which one I am driving by at the moment. If you could place these three markets in a group of some sort, then they could all be associated with the item and you could see it on your mobile or however you’re viewing the map.
The other map improvement is fairly simple - offer to give me directions from one place to another. I don’t know how to drive to a random location I’ve just put in because it is where I need to drop my car or pick someone up or whatever, and a small link to a google maps directions would be nice. Even just a link to google maps (where I could then click on the “directions from…” link) would be a big improvement.
The last improvement that would be nice is to be able to click on the URL or visit the site in the URL field for tasks in some way. Currently the URL field is pretty useless as a URL, because there is no way to click it and actually visit the site. If I click on it, the editing field pops up and I have to do all the hard work myself of cutting and pasting the URL into the location field. It’s also a mis-cue because the URL looks like a link before I click it, just like I could click on it as I want to. A keyboard shortcut for visiting the site would be nice as well since I do use the keyboard interface quite a bit.
These improvements I think would make a big difference to RTM users. The map improvements alone would be a big upgrade in my opinion. As for now, I will continue to use RTM whether these are implemented or not - it’s a good way to keep an online list in any case. It’s kept me writing blog posts at the rate of about once every two days. Not sure if that’s a good thing or not yet..
For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to participate in Project 365. For those that don’t know about it, it is the idea of taking one picture a day in order to accomplish.. something. I’m mainly just doing it for fun, and in order to improve my picture-taking skills with my camera phone. I have it walking around everywhere basically, so when I see something interesting, I try to have my phone at the ready. Some times I just take pictures of random stuff, but others are more interesting.
I’ve found that it’s pretty useful for me. If you see the set, you can almost notice a perceptible increase in quality of the photos. It may just be because I’m taking 2-3 photos per day and choosing the best one, or I may be actually improving in my photo-taking abilities. Hopefully by the end of the year, the set of mine will actually have more than 300 photos in it.
The idea of taking a picture a day is quite interesting to me, if only because if you asked me what I was doing last year this time, I would probably give you a general idea because my life is basically boring - I work in an office, even when I’m at school. This way I might have some idea or get reminded.
I do have a couple of kinks that I would like to work out when I’m doing it though - when I download my photos through Bluetooth using my phone, it sets all of the creation dates to the time that I transfer the photos instead of the time that I took the photos. This means that I need to fiddle with the “taken on” date when I finish uploading the pictures - there’s no way to use the Flickr Uploadr to set the date. This, and the horrible VGA camera that I have in the phone make it tempting for me to buy a new phone with a better camera and tools for transferring. Also, some days I just stay in, and don’t do anything interesting, so I don’t have anything interesting or different to take a picture of. I’m thinking of just taking a self-portrait on those days, but I’m not sure that it would be interesting enough.
Riverview Theater 8/9/2007 Score: 3
When I finished watching Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, I was really mad. I thought it was such a cheat to have so many story arcs open when the movie ended. It was obviously leading into the third movie, but I still thought it was cheating the viewer out of a good movie. There were not enough arcs closed in the second part. Unfortunately, the third installment was a huge let down.
The same old cast of characters is back in what is thankfully the last in the Caribbean trilogy. Unfortunately, the first half hour of the movie is focused on just reintroducing all the situations that the characters were in at the end of the last movie. Jack Sparrow is dead, and he needs to be rescued. Somehow the Black Pearl is in the other world as well, but it’s stuck on an island. The rest of the crew procures a vessel from a random “master of the sea”, and they head off to get him. The way there is peppered with some interesting one liners.
After they get to the land of the dead, they need to use a random map in order to get back, and of course Jack figures it out the riddle, right after they see it. Crazyness ensues and they return to the land of the living. The rest of the plot revolves around getting together captains from around the world in order to complete a random strange quest that Barbossa decided they needed to be on.
I had some high hopes for the plot when they introduced a goddess and played up the story. Unfortunately the huge buildup is just playing with you - it has no resolution, which doesn’t make any sense because it was the main goal of the entire first half of the movie. The second half is just a ride that you need to watch yourself through. Flashy fight here, one-liner joke there. The special effects are played up far too much, and the acting just gets worse and worse as the movie gets closer to the end.
At least this movie closes all of the story arcs that were opened by the second part of the trilogy. It at least counts as a guilty pleasure. The small in-jokes are littered throughout the movie and give you a chuckle or a groan every couple of minutes, even when the special effects budget is showing. It doesn’t make up for the not-so-great acting and completely predictable ending to many of the stories, and the complete lack of resolution of the most interesting story line that fizzles out and the completely boring last half hour that made me happy when I was at this movie’s end. It gets a 3.
Recently I’ve been using Remember the Milk to remind me to do stuff. In the past I had used the service briefly on my search for an online GTD tool. I discarded it because it was too hard then to add new lists, which I had planned to use for each project. I also was turned off by it because I wasn’t keen on requiring the Internet to work.
A couple of events has recently made this decision change. The first thing that happened was my addition of messaging to my cell phone plan. I did it mainly to interact with Twitter while I was on the road. It’s something I never saw myself using before, but now that I am, it is really nifty and I can see why people use it from their phones.
However, with their recent introduction of a Twitter bot, it is now much more useful. The bot lets me add things to my Inbox list from anywhere, unchaining me from the Internet. All I have to do is text ‘d rtm whatever’ to twitter and it automatically adds a item to my inbox, which is where I keep everything I need to do. I have it setup as a template in my phone, so that I can even avoid typing the ‘d rtm ’ part. Remember The Milk also has notification settings for phones, so at the beginning of the day it will message me with the things due that day. Having it turned on reminds me to do most things, because I check my phone quite often, even though I don’t get any calls.
I’ve stopped trying to use the lists for separate projects. I now use the Inbox as a main list, not caring how long it gets. I also have separate lists for categories of things that I’d like to do, but I don’t care what order or when they get done. For example, I have a list for the pizza places that Diana and I might go to on our pizza place tour of the cities. I also have a list of cheaper and more expensive restaurants that we haven’t been to, so when we want to go out to eat somewhere but can’t decide where, we can just grab one off of the list. Remember the milk is particularly decent for lists like the two described because you can associate a geographical location with any element on a list, so I can see where the restaurants are instead of having to look them up.
There is one special list that I keep which isn’t of the two types above - the projects list. This is the list of projects that I have committed myself to. It has one entry for each project, with a note on each entry explaining the past-tense result of the project. It is used in my weekly review, in order to populate the list if I have for some reason marked off a part of the project and not added a task for the next action in the project. I find that it keeps me honest because I can’t mark off something from here until the past-tense description has actually come true.
Generally my workflow now goes like this. I add the task to my Inbox list either from the road or from the web interface. Then it gets moved to a special list if it is of a special class like the “Eating out” or “Pizza Places” lists. If it has more than three or four steps, I will put it on the project list instead and create a new task on the Inbox list that is doable and is the logical next action for the list. When I do something, it gets crossed off the list and then I go on to the next item. I know that if I don’t have anything left to do on that day in remember the milk, I can just do random stuff from farther down on the list without a due date.
I’ve been doing this for a couple weeks now and its working out just fine. I was happy to have everything work out together so that I could use Twitter and Remember the milk, and I am being more productive than any other system that I’ve tried. This may just be an example of Using What Works. I thought I would share just in case it can help someone else find their workflow to get things done.
Riverview Theater 8/7/07 Score: 8
When I first saw the trailer for this movie, with it’s boasting of being based on a short story by Stephen King, I was skeptical about having a good time. It was, although, quite a coup-de-force for John Cusack, with good acting and some twists and turns that were hard to spot in advance.
1408 starts in a hotel that is definitely not the hotel whose room is the namesake of the movie - it is much too small to have 13 floors. Mike Enslin (Cusack) is a paranormal writer who goes around to hotels that claim paranormal activity and sits up in them reviewing, checking out their creepiness factor (“4 skulls”, on a sliding scale of course). He is a skeptic about the paranormal, as the standard character is. Adding to the list of check-off qualities is divorcee and devoid of purpose in life. He returns to his home in California somewhere and picks up his mail to receive a postcard with the words “Don’t enter 1408” on it.
1408 adds up to 13, and also resides on the 13th floor of any hotel, as they skip the 13th floor for superstitious and sales reasons. As it is part of his job and is piqued to his interest, he tries to call the manager (played by Samuel L. Jackson) and is turned down. Suffice to say he finally gets in the room after quite the ordeal.
Now up to this point, the movie is typical horror movie schtick setup. Oooo, scary room. But soon after the room starts turning on our protaganist is when this movie takes a turn for the better. Cusack is absolutely perfect cast in this role and he plays the part quite well, and considering he is the only one actually shot on the film of this set for a very long portion of this movie, it is quite the feat and shows a lot of his range.
1408 sets up with what would seem like a cookie-cutter horror movie, and has some predictable twists, but has some surprises up its sleeve that are completely unexpected and had me jumping in my seat. The room effortlessly destroys itself trying to kill Enslin, to the point that you ask yourself how much longer can it go without losing any semblance of a room. Top it all off with a brilliant performance by Cusack and this movie gets a solid 8 on my scale.