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- February 13, 2014
Revisiting the Emergent Task Timer (ETT)
February 13, 2014Read moreLast year I started to work on an update to the Emergent Task Timer, the “Where Does My Time Go?” form that pre-dates the Emergent Task Planner (ETP). Unlike the ETP’s focus on tasks and blocking out the day, the ETT by comparison records what you’re doing with 15-minute granularity, and gives you time awareness. It happens to also be good for time tracking.
I think the ETT will be the next printed product, the first for 2014! However, I am thinking of giving it a different name to help distinguish it from the Emergent Task Planner, since people get the names confused all the time. If you would like to read about the new form and provide additional feedback, I would be very grateful.
I’m also curious how long it will take me to get this produced, packaged, and available for sale. My guess is two months, but I am pulling that number out of my butt. Project tracking begins now!
- February 11, 2014
I’m on Systematic Episode 83
February 11, 2014Read moreI am very happy to be on episode 83 of Brett Terpstra‘s excellent podcast Systematic, where he talks to creative types of all stripes about the difficult business of walking the walk and doing the work. Interestingly, Brett started from Design and moved to Development (you may know his Markdown editor Marked and fork of Notational Velocity nvAlt). I, by comparison, started in Engineering and moved toward Design! We’re both eager to build our creative empires on our own terms.
Check out Episode 83.
- February 11, 2014
Third Places for Thinking
February 11, 2014Read moreAs I’ve been practicing first steps and being comfortable with partial progress this week, I’m starting to have more projects to keep moving. I’m not flipping out about the number of them yet, as I’m also actively putting negative speculative thoughts out of my mind as categorically unhelpful. Still, I find myself craving a solution where I can keep all my threads of project progress and life status in one place. This might be a new form, maybe spending time on software, or even an existing product. I basically want to track everything easily…and by “everything” I mean:
Yes yes, I know about Evernote, but it just hasn’t grabbed me. So in the meantime, I figure I can keep track of everything on my own blog, fragment by fragment. At least it is accessible from everywhere.
First thoughts follow (more…)
- February 11, 2014
Planning Website Improvements for 2014
February 11, 2014Read moreIt’s that time when I start thinking of making updates to the davidseah.com website! The last time I made significant changes was last March, when I added a new front page with a new overall design. This year, I need to make some functional layout changes so I can add advertising links from BuySellAds, a service I’ve been intending to try for quite some time. However, there’s a problem: I don’t have a suitably-sized area to fit the ads without breaking the layout. Grrr!
There’s also a few other changes I’d like to make:
- Responsive Design!
- Clean up the code and CSS!
- Get away from the “I am a blog with a sidebar” look. Was fine in 2004. Not so much in 2014.
- Add some fancy “custom page” support built on fancy web frameworks and nodeJS.
- Move some plugin functionality into the core theme files.
- Take a pass at simplifying the front page.
- Switch source control to Git, which is growing on me over Mercurial.
The primary goal, though, is to widen the sidebar by about a hundred pixels. It might be nice to use a framework like Twitter Bootstrap, which provides a lot of the responsive stuff built-in, and it would be a nice basis for the “fancy custom page” support I’m thinking.
I’m thinking that the best approach is to identify and modularize the special functions I’ve added to my WordPress theme, then back-fit them into a new Twitter Bootstrap theme. It would be quite educational, I think.
- February 10, 2014
The Roost Laptop Stand
February 10, 2014Read more
UPDATE 2016: I got a V2 of the Roost Stand, and have retired the model shown here. Here’s a review of the new Roost Stand V2
I am a huge fan of having my screens at the proper height so I don’t get neck strain. While I use monitor stands from Ergotron for all my desktop monitors, I had never found anything equivalent for modern laptops…until now! Enter the Roost Stand, an ultra-portable American-made laptop stand that was designed just for that reason!
