maggied’s blag

I managed to survive my week of four tests. My impression of the exams was that they all went reasonably well, particularly given the amount of time I actually had to study for each individual exam.

After the week ended, I decided I was getting cranky with the status of my inbox and completely reworked everything using The Trusted Trio (don’t hate on Lifehacker, folks). With additional hosage comes poorer organization, so I also took time to step back and make Remember the Milk happy again. In the process of browsing software I found Joe’s Goals, which a neat online app that lets you keep track of if you’ve been good or bad.  It’s useful for keeping track of habits and running logs. I’m using it to keep track of when I get to sleep…Positive and negative reinforcement for the win.

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It has been about a week since the doctor gave me the “okay” to go back to work. I had the follow up appointment last Monday and all the doctor said to me was “Be sure to wash your hands.” Great, I’ll be sure to wash my hands. The visit was not particularly useful, but they had me sign up for PatientOnline, which doesn’t seem completely retarded.

I went back to work Tuesday, and worked pretty much as usual through Friday. During the week I played more Chrono Trigger, and watched Futurama. Nothing too exciting, as exercise still makes me exhausted. I’m close to the end of Chrono Trigger now, so it will be fun to wrap that up later in the week.

Rush is getting closer. As I realized Saturday morning, there is only one more weekend before all the freshmen arrive, and many even start arriving on the 15th. Our new GRT Harold has already started moving in. I’m excited about term and new freshmen, but I’m also a little sad that the summer is almost over.

On an unrelated note, I found this Firefox extension called PermaTabs on the interwubs after I saw Sarah Hopp using it. I think it’s pretty neat, and a feature that I find particularly useful as I tend to use only one Firefox window, and like to keep certain sites open at all times.

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A few days I found an awesome article over at Lifehacker that introduced some new neat features to do with Launchy. It uses curl, which is a neat program that interacts with applications on the web. Basically, you can set up a short batch script that uses curl to communicate with the twitter server. If you’ve added the different services as “friends” on twitter, this will act as sending a direct message to the service via twitter. As it turns out, I’ve mentioned the lovely integration of these different services — Remember the Milk and Google Calendar with Twitter, in the past. If you want to set any of this stuff up, feel free to ask me and I can help you it. It was fairly straightforward, although the actual Twitter interface is not as easy to interact with as it would seem.

The fact that you can do so much with Launchy is really awesome and exciting. There’s a link at the end of the article for even more things that you can use it for, although this application seemed the most useful for my personal purposes. Being able to abstract away from the web interface at whatever level a user desires, be it the command line in Launchy, SMS text messages, or Instant Messaging, is very neat, and something that more sites are starting to offer. In my opinion, this is starting to redefine ways in which people can manage their lives and productivity.

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*NIX users out there may have heard of rsync. Rsync is somewhat similar to rcp or scp, but is, in my humble and completely unbiased opinion, way better. The “big deal” about rsync is the fact that, unlike other forms of copying, rsync only transfers the differences found between the source and target files and/or directories. This makes it ideal when one needs to backup files, or when one is working with files on more than one computer. The first time you run rsync, it copies all the files to the target location. The next time you run it, though, it just copies the differences. Pretty sweet.

Personally, I use rsync when I’m transferring files between the servers at MGH, and the Mac at the lab. Although I ultimately only edit a file or two, it’s preferable to have the subject’s full folder (about 1GB or so) on the hard drive. Rsync makes this a real piece of cake.

Rsync, like lots of other powerful and useful programs, would be all over the place, if only it were extremely intuitive. I don’t think it is that bad (I just use rsync -a source target), but IBM has a really great article about rsync for those who want a better feel for it than that. The article can be found here.

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I first blogged about Remember the Milk a little while ago when I was talking about My Quest. Very recently, RTM added a function that lets you sync your tasks via Twitter. Basically, you can now access RTM via IM, SMS, the Twitter web page, or other Twitter applications. I tried it out, and although the Twitter interface itself is a little confusing, the results were pretty satisfying.

Ever find yourself without a standard medium to record a quick note? This new interface between Twitter and RTM will allow you to text message a reminder to yourself. I know for me at least, I have my cell phone with me pretty much all the time, so this is pretty convenient.

For example, I was walking back from EC towards Stata, when I remembered that I forgot to change the sign on my door. I text messaged myself with a reminder, and now when I go home I’ll see the reminder in RTM. There have been countless times when I’ve been en route somewhere, realize something, can’t do anything about it, and then forget to remind myself the next time I’m at a computer. This pretty much eliminates that possibility, which is awesome.

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Over the past month or so, I’ve become reliant upon RSS feeds for my news. I really disliked browsing bloated news websites, so RSS feeds bring the news right to me, so to speak. Google Reader is probably my favorite RSS reader that I’ve come across. Liferea for linux is also nice, though.

The main reason I have been using Google Reader is because this way I can check my feeds where ever I am by logging into my gmail account. Because I use lots of different computers, this is most convenient. However, I think there are some really good offline clients out there that do a great job (maybe even better).

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I found a neat keystroke application launcher for Windows called Launchy. It’s a little, lightweight application that appears when you hit a hotkey (the default is alt + SPACE). You begin typing in the application, document, or other file that you would like to “launch.” Launchy will search through the folders and file types that you have specified, and present you with the best match, followed by a series of other matches if the first one isn’t what you want. Launchy’s search process is intelligent, in that if you the same application all the time, it will come up after you type only one, or maybe two letters. For example “pu” brings up “putty”, “f” brings up “filezilla”, and “t” brings up “putty”, “ultravnc viewer”, and “thunderbird”.

I really like Launchy because I find it a gigantic pain to sort through all the Application entries in the Start Menu when I’m using a Windows computer with a lot of applications. Given the fact that the “All Programs” tab is typically really disorganized, I really like this alternative. Launchy is extremely efficient. I just hit the hotkey and within 2 seconds I’ve launched the application I wanted to. I don’t have to minimize my windows, or search through the start menu. It takes me about the same amount of time to open the start menu and navigate to the applications window as it does for me to launch pretty much every application.

For Ubuntu users, a similar launch like application appears when you hit “alt + F2.” I don’t really know much about Macs, but I think the Quicksilver application provides similar capabilities, although there might also be a default launch manager that I’m unaware of.

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Remember that post I made a little while ago about “My Quest”? Well, despite my criticisms of a lot of the software out there, I think I’ve found a client that I really like, and it integrates well with decent stuff out there. It’s called Remember The Milk (funny name, I know). What brought RTM to my attention was the fact that it created a great Google Gears application to integrate with Google Calendar. So, all that ranting I had about good integration with a calendar client is pretty much down the drain.

Some awesome things about Remember the Milk: the shortcuts (if you get the hang of them), let you add, tag, and move events really quickly, so it’s almost like entering them in at the command line, which is a feature I would have liked. The way that it organizes tasks is nice. You can give tasks a due date, postpone that due date, tag items, etc. Tasks are organized by list, but you can also sort tasks based on the tags you give them. You also have the ability to work off-line, and then sync your data later.

Google Calendar does actually have a “quick add” function, which is pretty neat, although I have not needed to use it too much. It was particularly useful for adding in birthdays rapidly. Of all the calendar applications I’ve tried out, Google Calendar (who would’ve guessed it), certainly wins as far as the whole integration thing goes. Google simply tends to make it easier to integrate things with, so having my to-do list in with calendars, the weather, all accessible over the internet sounds like a big win to me.

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In the midst of all this Web 2.0 crap out there, I find myself constantly frustrated at being able to find a nice and simple interface for managing notes, to-do lists, and a calendar. A lot of different solutions pop up on Lifehacker, but few of them seem to possess the nice integration of all the features that I’m looking for.

Something that I would really love would be a software application/web interface that supported the following:

• Quick, easy notetaking. Good for just “jotting down” things that come to mind.
• A todo-list manager that allows one to:
• add items quickly and efficiently
• include due dates, notes, tags, etc.
• integrate with a calendar (preferably built-in)
• A calendar that:
• has quick, easy to add “command line”-like arguments
• Nice UI, easy to move around

Now, in and of themselves, it’s pretty easy to get a nice note-taking application, a nice to-do list manager, and a great calendar application. However, it’s the integration that is always where many of the great applications I’ve encountered seem to have failed me. I’ve cycled through a LOT of different applications to solve this issue. Ironically, I probably spend more time searching for a nice productivity setup that I spend less time actually being productive. But I’m sure it’ll all be worth it in the end.

Over the course of a week or so, I’ll introduce and comment on the different applications I’ve used/am using, talk about what I thought, and identify if they might be something useful. While many people have rolled their eyes at me when I’ve shouted at them to just “use 30boxes already,” I really feel like keeping track of things, particularly on the Internet, or another remote solution, is a great way to just “do more” with your life. Keep reading for my first such review.

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