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I get distracted when I get home from work.  I’m easily amused and have the “Ooooooooooooooooooooohhh Shiny” mentality type of distraction.  I don’t deny it.   I don’t exactly revel in it either.   By the time I actually get around to doing some of the things I need to get done, it’s late, I’m tired and cranky.   If I put things off until the weekend we end up doing stuff and getting involved (“Is that a shiny over there?”) and so things once again get overlooked.   I’m not sure I would actually sleep if I didn’t know for certainty that it helps save my job and my marriage.   So what can I do about it?

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Things I have tried with little or no success:

• Wall Calenders
• Sticky Notes
• Todo Tasks in Outlook
• Todo Tasks on Google
• GTD sites
• Web Calenders

Nothing so far seems to work for me – I’m mundane blind.  When there is a shiny I don’t even notice the mundane.

Like many geeks, corporate types, etc.   I live and die by e-mail.   This is something I greatly increased in focus when I was a consultant.   Now I can handle literally hundreds of e-mails a day, and I can’t stand a cluttered mail box.  I normally use Gmail‘s interface just through a browser, but I’ve been known to dabble in POP3 and IMAP access (the insanity!!).  Mostly though I just use the web browser.  It’s the same at work, home, and on the go.   The one thing I hate most about my mail box, is when it get’s full.   I hate a cluttered inbox, I hate coming back and seeing more then one page of e-mail waiting for me (which does happen if there is some strange reason I don’t check my email for two days).

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So I stumble on the idea of combining these two things, hatred of e-mail clutter and a need to get motivated and GTD, so now I’m email my tasks to myself (and now Xie has joined into the game).  The first thing when I went down this road is to send myself a daily list of tasks to do, well I tried that once in the past and that doesn’t seem to help.  Neither do reminder services, since I easily dismiss them.

The format I use when I mail myself is TODO (task) – this forces me to stare at it every time I look at my e-mail.   I’m hoping it will succesfully burn the task into my brain.   When I actually complete the task it get’s archived, thereby saving me space in my inbox.   Too many tasks and it will roll over to a second page, I would be highly annoyed if that happened.   So essentially I’m going to be GTD by annoying myself.

Meh.

But it may work.

Chicago, IL (MDW)

New York, NY (LGA)

Atlanta, GA (ATL)

Philadelphia, PA (PHL)

New York, NY (JFK)

Newark, NJ (EWR)

Chicago, IL (ORD)

So for all the rest of you that have been stranded out there waiting for your flight to take off, I take great sympathy for you.

The kids were all heroic — all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric. Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn’t like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do. Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in. He was the one thing I really didn’t like about the show.

So why, you may wonder, did I leave him in there? Answer: I had to.

As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of children’s’ television. We call them “parents groups,” although many are not composed of parents, or at least not of folks whose primary interest is as parents. Study them and you’ll find a wide array of agenda at work…and I suspect that, sometimes, their stated goals are far from their real goals.

Nevertheless, they all seek to make kidvid more enriching and redeeming, at least by their definitions, and when they had enough clout to cause the networks to yield. Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain “pro-social” morals in our shows. At the time, the dominant “pro-social” morals was as follows: The group is always right…the complainer is always wrong.

This was the message of way too many eighties’ cartoon shows. If all your friends want to go get pizza and you want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority and go get pizza with them. There was even a show for one season on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which was dedicated unabashedly to this principle. Each week, whichever member of the gang didn’t get along with the gang learned the error of his or her ways.

We were forced to insert this “lesson” in D & D, which is why Eric was always saying, “I don’t want to do that” and paying for his social recalcitrance. I thought it was forced and repetitive, but I especially objected to the lesson. I don’t believe you should always go along with the group. What about thinking for yourself? What about developing your own personality and viewpoint? What about doing things because you decide they’re the right thing to do, not because the majority ruled and you got outvoted?

We weren’t allowed to teach any of that. We had to teach kids to join gangs. And then to do whatever the rest of the gang wanted to do.

What a stupid thing to teach children.

Now, I won’t make the leap to charge that gang activity, of the Crips and Bloods variety, increased on account of these programs. That influential, I don’t believe a cartoon show could ever be. I just think that “pro-social” message was bogus and ill-conceived. End of confession.

A cowboy was herding his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure. Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot
that the image has been processed and the data stored.

He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry, and after a fewminutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,”says the cowboy. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the
trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says,”Okay, why not?”

“You’re a consultant.” says the cowboy.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required,” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew; to a question I never asked; and you
don’t know anything about my business.”

“Now give me back my DOG.”

Decisions decisions.

I kept meaning to get to this but it was a low priority for the most part – and the moments when it was a high priority I had no internet connection I could get on via another device to troubleshoot and fix it.

Theoretically the way I had done should have worked according to documentation online. However since this is kind of niche use the documentation may not be up to date and some people may have already known the work around.

Since fighting this issue and making it a PITA to track down and troubleshoot I wanted to post the answer so some other hapless sould doesn’t have to endure the pain of fixing it.

I managed to get the following information from this site:

Connection Name: tzones

Data bearer: Packet data

Access point name: wap.voicestream.com

User name: N/A

Password: N/A

Authentication: Normal

Homepage: http://wap.myvoicestream.com

Advanced Settings (Handsets not equiped with WAP 2.0 may skip this section)

Proxy serv address: 216.155.165.050

Proxy port number: 8080

So I enter the proxy server into my PDA’s browser and it now works. Like I said according to the next article for straight through non-wap traffic this shouldn’t be required – so more work possible getting the laptop to connect (haven’t tried that either but will tonight….maybe).

Another thing I’m going to track down since I can’t host my own server is seeing if I can set up my PDA to use another proxy other than t-mobiles (curse Verizon for not allowing servers – btw they balked at me because I wanted a business class DSL so I could host and I gave up after trying to explain it for 3 hours – the loss of being able to VPN home is not worth the pain of enduring idiot questions like “why would you have a business class connection at a residential address”.

On a side note to show how much I use my cell phone for calls these days now that I’m no longer a consultant, my cell phone had been missing for a week. I had checked online and there was no unusual activity so I hadn’t left it in public or had it stolen. So every now again over the last week I was tearing up cushions and putting them back – only to repeat the routine a day or two later. Crawling on the floor to search the nooks and crannies of couches and cars. Finally last night out the corner of my eye I saw it – it had stayed hidden for a week under a receipt on the coffee table.

AARRRGGGG