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- December 13, 2005
My Separate Management Space: Early Impressions
December 13, 2005Read moreLast Sunday I instituted a separate space for my planning, based on a rambling analysis I did on my production workspace. I can summarize the main points as follows:
- I am working inefficiently because my workspace tends to get cluttered.
- My workspace is cluttered because too many tasks (and cats) compete for the same space.
- There are three types of tasks that overlap: management (big picture), production (detail), and personal (food, magazines, etc).
- The places where things get done are the computer screen and the desk space closest to my keyboards.
- These surfaces are very dynamic, with new content switching in and out constantly. When either space is unable to simultaneously display all the pieces needed to complete a task, efficiency suffers because I have to root around to find what I was using, and this also burdens my limited short term memory (very quickly overloaded, leading to frustration).
- Walls and other vertical surfaces can provide secondary information of a static nature.
- Filing cabinets, shelves, and floor space provide useful secondary storage if the task doesn’t need them just at a particular moment. They are still relatively easy to retrieve and use, but you must clear your desk off first.
- All this reminded me of designing an efficient memory system in computer architecture, so therefore the optimization strategies from this field could have analogies in the real world.
A second insight is that big picture tasks (management of all kinds for business, production, and personal) tend to be more stable, and it is useful to be able to see it all at once. That’s because it’s a map to what’s going on in your life. I hate having to fold and unfold maps…I’d rather have it nice and big on a wall, with a nice you are here pin showing where you are relative to your goals. And to me, that implies an area that doesn’t get overriden by short-term tasks, one that stands on its own and maintains its continuity separately.
- December 12, 2005
PowerPoint Powerup: Ovation
December 12, 2005Read moreI recently had the realization that PowerPoint is possibly the standard graphics tool of the modern office, at least for non-graphics professionals. So, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for interesting uses of it; it could be a great selling point to be able to tell prospective clients, “yep, I can make all that cool flashy stuff, and it will work with PowerPoint”. On the other hand, the prospect of using PowerPoint makes me a little ill.
There’s a new product in particular that promises to take some of the “ick” out of of PowerPoint, Ovation from Serious Magic. They’re known for making another cool product called DVRack, which allows you to use a PC laptop as a high-quality video monitor for your DV camcorder, “replacing $10,000 of studio gear” with a piece of software. You could call it the video equivalent of Reason, the kick-ass virtual music production studio. But I digress.
From what I could tell from the video demo, Ovation takes your boring PowerPoint files as input, parses them, and then enables you to apply motion graphics effects and video backgrounds in real-time. It comes with pre-built templates, but they actually look pretty cool. Visually, they reminded me of slick DVD menus.
Ovation does more than convert your PPT, it actually includes a presentation system that turns your laptop into a teleprompter. The program sends your presentation full-screen out through the secondary video port, and the laptop screen is used as your prompter. Very cool! You can download the beta at the Serious Magic website. I haven’t had a chance to install it yet, but it sounded cool enough to try.
On a side note, I like the way Serious Magic integrates their videos into their website. It’s nice to see video that actually shows and communicates the value of a product.
Serious Magic seem to have a lot of other cool products, like Ultra (a video keying program) and Visual Communicator (some kind of non-technical video presentation creator). I like what they seem to be doing, but the software experience may be something else altogether. Will it have the robust yet refined feel of Google’s Picasa 2, or will it be cursed with the same confusion and sluggishness that plagues Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 3? I’m very curious.
- December 10, 2005
A Planning Workspace of My Own
December 10, 2005Read moreOver the past two weeks I’ve been working on a couple of projects, and all my physical workspace organization has gone out the window. While I like my general workstation setup a lot, it gets cluttered with useful notes and books that are specific to what I’m making. Right now, I’ve got some new software manuals spread open, some sketchbooks, and a lot of empty mugs and loose pieces of paper floating around. Compounding the problem is that the entire surface is cat-accessible; when they want attention, they have no problem knocking things down and putting themselves in my way.
So yeah, everything’s a mess.
I went to B&N to try to pick up (finally) David Allen’s Get Things Done book. It’s about time I’ve read it, and I thought maybe he’d have some insight into the problem. Unfortunately they didn’t have any copies on hand, but as I was walking by the Cafe Coffee Station, I realized that perhaps I just needed to compartmentalize my workspace a little further. This would allow for more simultaneous processes to execute while keeping the management process in a separate space.
- December 9, 2005
Bad Behavior vs WP-Hashcash
December 9, 2005Read moreA visitor reported that he was seeing PHP errors on my Contact Form page, and was good enough to forward what he saw. It was caused by my anti-spam plugin, so I’m trying a different one. Eye-glazingly geeky notes follow, so beware!
- December 8, 2005
Thinking Negative
December 8, 2005Read more
It’s easy to be productive when I’m feeling happy and focused, but right now I ain’t: I’m downright grouchy, thinking about bbq that I can’t have and I can’t feel my toes. In other words, it’s the perfect time to think about motivation from a negative perspective.
I’ve been having a kind of blah week, which may be related to the strict diet low-carb diet I’m enduring. Then my file server crashed (needed a shiny new power supply, see pic). And the weather is, as my cousin Ben once succinctly put it, “stupidly cold.” I’m feeling pretty damn unproductive and unmotivated.
Ordinarily I’d cook something yummy like my favorite curry or ribs dishes and pig out to cheer myself up, but I’m on a diet that, damn it, is actually working, so stuffing my face is not an option. Crap crap crap. Maybe I’ll take a nap.
I was surprised to see a ghostly form hovering over my desk. I thought it might have been a smudge on my glasses, but then it SPOKE.
