27 December 2008

Living in the Future - Best Books of 2008

I read three books in 2008 that had an enormous impact on me. Each taken separately is an excellent book, but the combination of reading the three together, almost back to back, has revolutionized my outlook on work, productivity, and life.

The first was called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferris. Ferris introduced me to the concept of Lifestyle Design, which in my mind boils down to a simple maxim: there comes a time when you have to stop sacrificing for the future and start living in the future. Otherwise, there is no future, just an empty dream. Ferris showed, using his own adventurous life as and example, that it is possible to start living the life that you want much sooner than you think, if you focus and think outside the box.

Of course the life I want is not the one portrayed in the book, but that’s part of the point. Ferris recommends sitting down with pen in hand and really figuring out what you want, and what it would really take to get it. Then make a plan, and focus until you achieve it. It sounds obvious, but the book was truly inspirational to me. It’s a fun, frolicking read with amusing anecdotes, and the author’s “no BS” attitude is both an ingredient in the writing and a primary lesson of the book.

The second book was less beach shorts and t-shirts, rather more suit and tie, but it touched on similar topics and gave even more excellent advice. That book is The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, possibly the most respected management consultant of the 20th century and often referred to as the “father of modern management”. Despite its provenance, The Effective Executive is not a giant business school tome, but a thin, accessible volume with the subtitle “the definitive guide to getting the right things done”. Lest you think the book applies only to fat old men whose job titles begin with “Chief” and end with “Officer”, Drucker defines an executive, to paraphrase, as anyone whose job is making decisions. In this information economy, that’s most of us.

Where Ferris was high-energy and from-the-gut, Drucker is all analysis and calm deliberation. Many of the principles of The 4-Hour Workweek are validated by Drucker and explored in greater depth. Drucker explains in detail and illustrates through anecdotes of 20th century business how effectiveness, synonymous with success, can be learned and exercised to produce far more with the limited resources we have. Whereas most of us in search of success focus our attention on doing things right, Drucker demonstrates that to be truly effective, we need to be doing the right things. Success, he tells us, depends more on what we decide not to do than on what we get done, an attitude echoed by Ferris.

If you only read one of the three books, read The Effective Executive. It is short and contains the essence of the lessons of all three.

Finally, where The Effective Executive makes some recommendations about how to organize your time and your work to be effective, David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity takes that ball and runs with it, documenting a precise, all-encompassing system for tracking your tasks and time. GTD, as it is broadly known, has many adherents who write voluminously in their blogs about productivity, so I won’t give any details here.

What I will say is that the real value of this book to me was not the detailed system itself, but the understanding of the psychology of stress relating to work. Circling back to Drucker and Ferris, to be successful you must be focused on the right things, but the psychological focus buster is that nagging feeling in the back of your mind that there is something else you should be doing. Creating a reliable system to catch and sort all those things, and then relying on that system, allows you to let go of all those worries and truly focus on what is important. Allen even touches on the idea that you should regularly review your tasks and projects to make sure you are doing the right things, but by far the bigger part of his message is about the system itself. To really understand the idea of choosing the right things to do, and the right things not to do, you need to read Drucker, or at least Ferris.

Taken together, these three books have created a revolution in my life and completely changed my attitude toward work and the life it enables. I have been less stressed and more productive this year, and I have defined and taken large steps toward the life I really want to be living. A big 2008 THANK YOU to these authors.

18 August 2008

Girls with Guitars and Glasses



I mean, really, could there be anything more attractive to a Vince than a young woman matching that description? And it's good music too! It fits into an excellent place, just energetic enough to be good coding music, but soothing enough to also be good napping music, and vocals that are lovely but not distracting, so it is even good reading music. Ingrid is all-purpose listening, and she is now in high rotation on ye olde iPod.

I'm too lazy to look up the links, just google her, or click the fancy widget for a nice preview from Amazon, where I bought the MP3s.

04 July 2008

Cool Teaser Trailer - The Day The Earth Stood Still

Oh yes!...

Have been hearing rumors of a remake of the classic, Robert Wise directed, The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) for years, but always figured it to just be wishful thinking. Then this trailer came out, and I realized somebody had finally pulled it off.

I am a little curious though. Since the original played with our early cold war paranoia, I wonder if they will try to make some sort of similar political statement with this one? Terrorist paranoia? Economic frailty? Or how about just some good old fashioned thrills and chills. Whatever; as long as the screenplay is hitting the right marks, this should be a good one.

Check it out here.
The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)




18 June 2008

R.I.P. Stan Winston

Special-Effects Wizard Winston Dies At 62


Stan Winston, the special-effects wizard, whose work was seen in such films as The Terminator, Jurassic Park, Aliens, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, and, most recently, Iron Man, died Sunday of multiple myeloma at age 62 at his home in Malibu, Ca, his company, Stan Winston Studio, said Monday. In a statement, Steven Spielberg said, "My world would not have been the same without Stan. What I will miss most is his easy laugh every time he said to me, 'Nothing is impossible.'"

28 May 2008

Vince's New Muse


Kate Voegele has a straight-on rock sound, but with just a tinge of "Southern" (a-la Skynyrd, perhaps). Lyrics range from sassy to heart-felt, and her complex vocal rhythms will have you struggling to sing along. It's hard to pick favorites with so many fantastic tracks, but I think "I get it" has the best combination of rhythm, energy, and story. I have pretty much the whole album on my daily play list.

Check out Kate's site, then get the album Don't Look Away via Amazon or
Kate Voegele - Don't Look Away.

24 May 2008

Eagle Eye

Speaking of trailers...

Came across this very short, very cool trailer that could be quite promising. The story is from Steven Spielberg, with a screenplay written by a bunch of other people. Last time Spielberg handed off his story ideas to other writers we were given the Twilight Zoneish styled Amazing Stories. Good enough for me.

Also, it is directed by D.J. Caruso who, after the success of last year's Disturbia could prove himself to be on a bit of a roll. We'll see.

Eagleeyemovie.com

22 May 2008

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Ok, for months I've been reading about The Clone Wars without much interest. I didn't pay attention to any of it because I figured it would just be cheap crud...

Then this morning I downloaded the hi-def trailer from Apple.com, and my mind was changed. While I don't expect it to be awesome, the trailer is cool, and it appears that it will be worth the price of admission. Check out the trailer for yourself on the following link.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

21 May 2008

TV Schedule Announced for 2008 - 2009 Season

The networks recently announced their line-ups for next season, and upon checking them out, I found myself getting a little excited. Since I don't have TV service at my house, and I only watch the shows I like on DVD, my excitement may have been a little premature. Chances are, I probably won't have the patience to wait 'till next year, and will end up downloading them for whatever price itunes is offering.

Here's to hoping another strange union strike won't throw a wrench into the middle of everything again.

Check out the following link to see if your favorites are listed.

Variety.com

01 February 2008

AppleTV: Still lame (but cheaper)

Remember when I wrote about how lame the AppleTV gizmo is? The recent upgrade didn't do much to change my mind. And here is a video pro who agrees.

Come on, Apple. Bueller. Anyone. Give us what we really want! Real hi-def, downloadable to whatever device I want to watch it on, at a reasonable price. How hard can that be? My money is waiting...

01 January 2008

PodcastReady: Not Ready

Like many people, I work with more than one computer on a daily basis. In my case, I have a Mac desktop at home, and a MacBook laptop that is my primary work computer. I also have an iPod. This makes for a hugely annoying combination, because iPods are very monogamous. Since my music collection is too big to fit on my laptop, I have to sync my iPod with my desktop. This means that when I'm away from my desktop, I cannot get new podcasts into my iPod through iTunes (or any other new content for that matter).

Someone recommended PodcastReady as a solution. Well, it is not.

PodcastReady is a web site and tool set for managing podcasts with "social" features (share podcasts with "friends", etc). One key feature is that it allows you to manage podcasts from any computer, not just the one you are synced with, hence my interest. It does this by allowing you to install its client application, myPodder, directly onto your portable media device. (It doesn't run on the device, just uses it for hard drive storage. You still need to run it from your computer.) Now the complaints.

First, the web site is whizzy "Web 2.0" in the most annoying way. DHTML ballons pop-up over virtually every link, covering the actual page content. Sometimes the balloons contain useful content, sometimes not. More than once one got stuck and could not be dismissed forcing me to reload the page to get rid of it.

Speaking of reloading, the site features one of the worst uses of AJAX technology I have ever seen. A tool in the profile application allows you to select your favorite categories from a hierarchical list. Clicking on a top level category uses AJAX, but not to load only a list of subcategories for that category. No it makes a background request to reload the entire content well! (Also, the universal "plus sign" symbol that, in every other application, expands the hidden content in a hierarchy, on this web site will add the entire category to your list. At PodcastReady, you must click the name, not the plus sign, to expand.)

But the myPodder application, the linchpin of the whole system, is where things get really annoying.

When you download the application from the website as a logged-in user, the download is pre-configured with your identity, which is a very nice feature. Or it would be, if it were used properly. When I open the application, the first thing it does is prompt me to create a new account. Even though it already knows my account information. And not just the first time, mind you. It prompts me to create a new account every time I open the application unless I explicitly tick the box telling it to stop asking. On what planet is this useful?

The preferences screen for myPodder contains instructional text that does not fit in the alloted space. There is plenty of space remaining to display more text, but no, we can't use it. The potentially helpful text instead just disappears. Also, the preference tool gives me the completely useless ability to create a new account here, but provides no way to configure myPodder to use a different account. (If I did accept this foolishly repeated invitation to create a new account, how would I make myPodder use it? Download a new copy?)

There's a handy link to "go to podcastready.com website" at the bottom of the application's preferences screen. When I clicked it, it did indeed take me to the web site -- and it closed the myPodder application. Argh!

Once on the web site, PodcastReady allowed me to subscribe to podcasts from its directory. With a little poking around, I found how to subscribe to specific URLs not found in the directory, which worked okay. Unfortunately, it also let me "subscribe" to random URLs that were not podcasts or even RSS feeds. It created a new "channel" from a plain old web page I gave it, without noticing that it was not a valid feed. The channel showed up in myPodder, and generated a download error when it attempted to download the podcasts from the broken channel. The error did not say the feed was invalid, just that the download failed.

Oh but wait, I haven't told you about my favorite feature yet. (Can you hear the sarcasm there?) When running from my iPod, myPodder was nice enough to add the podcasts it had downloaded to the iPod's database, so I could actually play them without starting iTunes. That's a handy feature. Except that it corrupted my iPod's database, and now every time I open iTunes, it locks up behind a beach ball and refuses to do anything. And since the iPod restore utility lives inside iTunes, there is also no obvious way to fix the problem. Thank you, PodcastReady, for screwing up my iPod in such an annoyingly painful way. To fix this problem, I had to go into the terminal, locate the hidden iPod_Control folder on my iPod, and delete it. Then I could eject it, force quit iTunes, plug the iPod back in, and restore the now "blank" iPod via iTunes. (With a bit more effort I probably could have located the corrupted file and deleted just that, but I'm not sure what iTunes would think about that, and I was losing patience.)

The worst part is, even if all these problems were fixed, I still don't think I would like PodcastReady. Having it installed on my iPod means I can update podcasts from any computer. But it also means that no computer can download my podcasts unless my iPod is plugged into it. The old process was "plug in iPod, wait 30 seconds for sync, unplug and go". The new process is "plug in iPod, start myPodder, click the explicit download button, wait 30 minutes for it to download, unplug and go". This is not an improvement.

Secondly, since I subscribe to a lot of podcasts, I have an iTunes "smart playlist" that combines all my podcast episodes sorted by date. The myPodder application doesn't update my smart playlists, so it forces me to navigate through them by title instead, which is not what I want. To update the smart playlists, I would have to start iTunes anyway, so what good is myPodder?

And thirdly, whose idea was this "private channel" feature? It's a channel where my "friends" can stick things that they want me to listen to. Isn't that sort of the inverse of "private"? And doesn't that open me to a DOS attack when somebody decides to stuff the entire Internet in there? If I want to get recommendations from friends, why can't I just subscribe to their "recommended" feed? (Maybe I could if I had any "friends", but I never got that far. Too busy restoring my iPod.)

So the summary is, if you have an iPod, stay far, far away from PodcastReady. If you have some cheapo mp3 player that comes with crappy software, myPodder might be less crappy than what you have, but I wouldn't bet on it. PodcastReady is a good idea, designed badly, and executed very poorly.