GTD

I’ve been on a real Getting Things Done (GTD) kick the last few weeks. It all started about 6 months ago when I printed out one of those work-flow diagrams showing the rough GTD steps for my desk at work, then 3 months ago I added Lifehacker to my RSS Reader. Then about 1 month ago I purchased this book from a closing down bookstore called “Work Smarter, Not Harder”.

So how does my GTD method work? Well it changes over time - but my rough model is a free Backpack account which I use for my larger “todos”. I chose Backpack because it was easy to setup and it’s easy to access from anywhere I have a computer. Also the “developer” in me started to day-dream about the API and programming a small app for my work PDA - so my backpack would always be synched with me. The truth is though the PDA is so bulky I don’t always have it with me.

Secondly, at work, I carry my Moleskin with me at all times and a pen. On days where I don’t start with my feet running I’ll try and jot down a days worth of todos.

Of course - If you’re a true GTDer (is there even such a thing?) you’ll notice that neither of these are directly related to the ideas of Collecting, Processing, Organising, Reviewing and Doing. I have to start somewhere though.

My problem in the past with these sorts of tricks/strategies is I usually give up after a while. Hopefully this one will stick with me

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books, Computers, GTD, Profession No Comments » 20 April 2006

Kurzweil - The Age of Spiritual Machines

Ray Kurzweil - The Age of Spiritual Machines

URL: Amazon

Why: I think this was an x-mas present from my cousin (x-mas ‘03) - but i only just had time to read it.

Thoughts: What did this book do for me?

I’m not entirely sure what i thought about this book. It felt like quite an ego boost for not only the author but his products. It’s interesting to read the book in retrospect, as his predictions in 1999 seem to be way off, even 5 years later - example: direct retinal displays, that were meant to go commercial in 1999.. where was I when this happened?

The book stinks of transhumanism, not that i’m against it - just sometimes scared of it. A close friend of mine once told me that for millenia people had to rely on themselves for survival, they couldn’t just go down to the “quick-e-mart” and purchase food, they had to scavange or hunt for survival, and even though i was aware of this situation - and of it’s current incarnation in certain environments, i’d never really thought about it. He finished in saying that to these people the wilderness was home - it wasn’t considered the “Wilderness”, it was just their environment, so when people now-days go out *bush*, so to speak, they are entering an environment that used to be completely comfortable to the majority of the population.

So what if we’ve practically reduced the principle of “only the strong survive”, is that so bad? So what if we’re overpopulating the planet, at least we’re giving more people a chance to make *some* sort of difference to the world - good on us. My old economics teacher once told me that a great sign of a civilisation was how they treat their elderly - and i think with our ever-extending lifetimes and research and resilience to current problems our civilisation is starting to look fairly great. (well, at least from my bias)

Do i think that in 100 years there will be no distinction between the human mind and artificially created personalities? Some parts of me are hoping yes, but other parts just dismiss this as fantasy. Kurzweil would like to think so, and also claims to have correctly predicted many of the things that we take for granted - i just don’t know.

As a comp-sci student, i must admit that most of this text felt fairly dry - and ended on a pretty disappointing note - the three paradigms for creating an intelligent machine? I mean come-on - i don’t think it’s as simple as creating a machine that combines evolutionary algorithms, artificial neural-nets and recursive algorithms - there is still some mystery left.

Oh - and end-text footnotes *shudder*.

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books No Comments » 23 September 2004

Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver

Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver

URL: Amazon

Why:
As mentioned in my last novel write-up i’m a stephenson fan, so it wasn’t like i wasn’t going to read it.

Thoughts:
HUGE. This book has got to be one of the more difficult books i’ve read in aggeees. No joke, this book took me reading on and off probably over half a year! Not to say it wasn’t good, because overall it was good, unfortunately - a lot of it went quite high-over my head. Specially trying to follow the multiple titles(names) of the endless-list of characters/sub-characters/chameo’s/etc .. and their ranks and formal-titles and relationships to each other - serves me right for not paying much (if any) attention to 1600-1700 history!

The parts that really captured me included the tales of Jack, the king of the vagabonds, and a lot of the gory(but great) tales of the Natural Philosophers, following the interesting tale of early/pioneering scientists.

Apart from being quite a melt-down of a book overall i enjoyed. I’m slightly apprehensive of the sequel, specially because it’s just as large - but i can’t NOT read it.. i mean really, i’m a sucker for punishment.

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books No Comments » 22 August 2004

Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

URL: Amazon Link

Blurb: In Reality, the Burbclaves are miniature nation states, MetaCops take major credit cards and the CosaNostra controls the pizza franchise. Freelance hacker and delivery boy Hiro Protagonist shares a U-Stor-It in LA with his two swords and a Ukrainian grunge metal guitarist. On the Street he’s one of the elite who wrote the protocols of the Metaverse, where custom avatars strut and advertising space sells by the pixel. The street is much sharper than reality and less dangerous - until an out-of-focus lowlife starts handing out free samples of Snow Crash…

Why: Huge stephenson fan. Loved cryptonimicon, so bought this ages ago before knowing about it. This is the 2nd time i’ve read it.. still love it.

Thoughts: To say this is simply a sci-fi or a cyber-punk novel just isn’t enough. There’s so much gloriious stuff that happens in here that it spins your head. Being the 2nd time i’ve read it, i’ve found it’s sort of strange because i don’t really recall much of the deeper issues in the novel, like the Tower of Babel, Asherah , the Me and other various almost non-fiction entity sub-plots.. but having now consumed this novel for the 2nd time these sub-story-issues are still swimming around in my brain, and boy is this stuff cool! An ancient universal language that every human has deeply embedded in their brain, mega-corporations, a GREAT main-character (a ninja-sword carrying hacker .. ) , Fanatic religious issues, crazy-assed harpoon carrying skateboarders! It’s amazing. This book is 100% guaranteed to please you if you like any William Gibson stuff.. so if you have not read this, do it now. My only issue i found was that in the end the future of the protagonist is left very open-ended, and I felt this lack of conclusion was pretty sucky.. but I suppose you can’t have it all. 6 stars.

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books Comments Off 1 November 2003

Harry Potter V

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Blurb: Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. ‘It is time,’ he said, ‘for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.’ Harry Potter is due to start his fifth year at Hogwards School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He is desperate to get back to school and find out why his friends Ron and Hermione have been so secretive all summer. However, what Harry is about to discover in his new year at Hogwarts will turn his world upside down..

Why: Because i’ve read the previous 4

Thoughts: Most of this book i just couldn’t get over how freakin’ annoying harry is. All the way through to the end he’s a whiny lil bitch, and it wasn’t until afterwards when whinging to mum about how whiny harry is that she mentioned that she thought it was great. “I mean, how else do you portrey an adolescent?” .. hahah .. I mean she’s right, but it still can’t cause me to shake this feeling of death that constantly feeling towards the annoying-ness that is harry. On the up-side, i thought this book was one of the better ones, i didn’t quite understand why the novel had to be so much bigger than the previous ones, considering not-much more really happened. I did like the unrolling of voldemort-style events, though like every other book they are based upon a really boring/repetitive structure ie: harry doesn’t have fun @ his uncles place, harry has fun at uni, harry has fall-out with one of his 2 best mates, the mate who he hasn’t fallen out with somehow gets them through it all, harry doesn’t really do anything (cept whine), harry then comes to face the evil that is voldemort (always riiight at the end too), harry somehow doesn’t die.

It’s a sort of shame because obviously he can’t die in the next novel, but u know in all likliness he probably should. I mean, what is it it.. the 4th/5th time that harry has faced voldemort and not died (because like the really really stereotypical bad-guy, he has to do so much god-damn talking and explaining, filling in not only harry but the reader on all the plot-holes) .. so after 4-5 fuckups, the first thing you’d do the 6th time u see harry is fucking kill him. Now talking. No thinking. No pondering or explaining or laughing or trying to capture him. You’d fucking put a cap-in-his-fucking ass.

really, it’d be v cool if rowling did end the book after 6 instead of 7. But, as things are, you and i can predict the fact that she will finish them all. AND THEN (no shit) she’ll most likely continue to make some spin-off book (trying to chuck-a-tolkien).. already she has more money then i could imagine. Maybe she should start writing harrypotter in space.

god.. can u feel the bitterness

despite all of this, i still thought it was fairly interesting. Some bits (more than others) really kept me turning the pages, and now that i think about it it’s sort of odd that the most hated character of the book is umbridge (not voldemort) .. because rowling really knows how to write an annoying-as-shit character. Another theme that i really enjoyed (old x-files memories) was the conspiracy thing. The idea of knowing something terrible, but it being so terrible the gov’t won’t believe ya (sorta thing)

anyway..

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books 2 Comments » 6 October 2003

Forsyth - The Negotiator

Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0552134759/104-6329443-2627162

Blurb: The kidnapping of a young man on a country road in Oxfordshire is but the first brutal step in a ruthless plan to force the President of the United States out of office. If it succeeds, he will be psychologically and emotionally destroyed. Only one man can stop it - Quinn, the world’s foremost Negotiator, who must bargain for the life of an innocent man, unaware that ransom was never the kidnapper’s real objective…

Why: I needed something to read, and had previously enjoyed Forsyth’s novels so this was a no-brainer. (Even though the book turned out to be quite a large one to tackle)

Thoughts: Great book. Obviously it was sort of funny, being unable to sit properly in the context of the novel (the 80’s) .. with so much of the story revolving around how by this time (2003) most of the worlds oil production would be diminished. Anyway, this book starts off being very political (gameplaying) then ends up in the hands of Quinn, the trusty, intelligent, pseudo-supercharacter negotiator .. Then, just like in a Tarantino flick, the book goes upside down. From around the middle of the text, the plot takes a spin and all of a sudden is no longer a political, kidnapper-vs-law enforcement book, but a detective-novel. Sometimes i felt lost being dragged around the earth by Quinn but in the end the goodies win (yay).. so i suppose it wasn’t all in vain.

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books Comments Off 5 October 2003

Pattern Recognition

William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

URL: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/

Blurb: The world is moving in dangerous new directions. And Cayce, wearied by flight fear and mirror-world angst, finds herself alone, with too many unanswered questions.
Who is downloading pornography on her computer? Why is she being followed? Can her partner, the charismatic Boone Chu, be trusted? What is the true value of the footage? And will her discovery of the most brilliant marketing ploy of this very new century lead Cayce any closer to finding her father, former Cold War security expert Win Pollard, a man so thoroughly and quietly missing that it might be impossible to prove him dead?

Why: Because it’s a Gibson novel, no way I was going to pass this one up. Besides that, it’s the first time I’ve read one of his novels real-time, in that he only finished it recently. The others (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona-lisa Overdrive, etc etc) were all read many a year after they were printed. Gibson is one (if not the only one) of my favourite authors. Come on, the guy coined the term Cyberspace! (before it’s inception as we see it today!)

Thoughts: Wow. Excellent novel. Most thrilling aspect is the fact that modern times are now so futuristic that he didn’t have to write about the future, we’re living it now. All events that take place in the novel are so almost believable, and the style he slides into for the emails that zip to-and-fro between the characters just make this book so interesting, and so up my-alley. (In the things i’m interested in sense, not the sexual inuendo way) The way that he discusses and explains this so called “Footage”, and the flash-community that has grown internet-based to disect and puzzle over these fragments of movies make me want to scour the current internet for such items! Naturally it wouldn’t be Gibson without the use of huge super-organisations, so immense in power that money is nothing to these people, and once again he manages to create such super-powers (so much for governments these days right?)..

Great novel!.. 6 stars ;P

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books Comments Off 28 July 2003

Tolkien - Fellowship

JRR Tolkient - Lord Of The Rings The Fellowship Of The Rings

URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618002227/qid=1056121938/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-2017031-6540840

Blurb: –no blurb– this book is one of the 1976 copies.. it’s all paper.. is smells of old.. and is ratty.

Why: We’ve had the books for ever, well before i was born and i suppose i just couldn’t put it off any more. I’ve read the hobbit once when i was younger, and attempted it in later years.. and didn’t like it. I suppose that’s why getting myself to reading this was quite hard.. but i enjoy the movies so much i just had to check these out.. and lo and behold.. i quite enjoyed myself.

Thoughts: It’s a classic. In retrospect it’s quite strange to see how much they changed the story for the screen. It is to be expected, but I wasn’t expecting them to go so all out on the changes. Quite a lot in the dvd-extras they talk about how they all love and respect the book yada yada.. yet they added SO much at the end!

But i still liked it.. looking forward to reading the tt.. but gotta read some pattern recognition first :)

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books Comments Off 20 June 2003

Easterman - The Seventh Sanctuary

Daniel Easterman - The Seventh Sanctuary

URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385198140/qid=1050051960/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/102-9706160-8524957?v=glance&s=books

Blurb: “Murder shatters the sleepy calm of a Cambridge cloister. On the other side of the world, archaeologist and Mossad agent, David Rosen is attacked, and his Arab assistant brutally slaughtered. In Israel two elderly people are disintergrated in a bomb blast.
Soon the connection between these seemingly disparate deaths plunges David into a labyrinth of intrigue as challenging as the ruins of the city he excavates. His search for the killers leads him to the Sinai desert, to the Palestinian Leyla and to the lost city of Imram, a city as old as Babylon, a city that someone wanted to stay lost for ever the seventh sanctuary is where the forces that want to unleash a new holocaust in the Middle East are gathering. Only David Rosen has the chance to stop them. And it’s a chance that gets slimmer with each second that slips away…”

Why: Found it in the library/study/spare-room .. needed something to read.. This title also jumped out at me because of the swastika bird on the front (having just read a fairly war-esque novel)

Thoughts: Great book. Plenty of interesting stuff, it’s one of those, “secret nazi-driven pure society that has been thriving in isolation until modern times when it’s ready to spill out and destroy humanity” books. But all in all quite an adventure, especially when u stumble into this great lost city, the book surprises you and continues onto more hidden deeply political espionage-style story. Great read.. the end’s slightly ominous though (which does make it pretty good :) )

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books Comments Off 11 April 2003

Remarque - All Quiet On The Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet On The Western Front

URL: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author=Remarque%2C%20Erich%20Maria/104-6010549-8833503

Blurb: “Our life alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown accustomed to it; War is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentry. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.”

Why: Em told me to.

Thoughts so far: Eeek. It was alright as far as a semi-auto-biographical work goes. All that really stuck to me about it was how gory it was. There were many times during this novel that i seriously had to stop, and then re-read a passage to try and swallow the immensity of it’s sickness. A writer of fiction to have written some of these scenes would have been thought of as imaginary, because this author would have seen these things.. it really made me cringe, and my stomach do somersaults. Books like this make me fear any sort of war even more. Even though some may argue that war is just a thing that happens, and that it’s not actually that bad, that even though hundreds of possibly millions of ppl die, there are still just as many living homeless on the street. Even if this fact is so. Pointless and utterly disgusting death is just… very much not up my alley. The thought of a world without war almost seems comical to us now. But let me ask you… would u rather be living the large-life as a comic.. not even becoming great through something as powerful as a war. Or would u rather be remembered FOREVER as the great president who led his people into battle… that stripped so many people of their innocence, and of their lives. .. i don’t even feel a president should be able to make that decision.

Posted by Christian Posted in: Books Comments Off 5 February 2003

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