Tomorrow night my ADSL bandwidth usage stats resets. Phew, I’ll have another 30 days of cake to eat.
Metered DSL is something I’ve slowly gotten used to living in Australia. It IS downright medieval, but the people suffer and pay, and just live with it (unlike those lucky Yanks).
Today I’m trying something new. I’m blogging from Windows.
From Windows Live Writer to be precise. This is inspired by a blog I read on readwriteweb on how to lose all your distractions and just focus. The recommendation was to use WriteRoom or Windows Live Writer. I’d played with Live Writer before, but didn’t realise it’s simple design. It is simple.
Something else. For me I have to run it in my virtualised Windows box. So I’m cut off from the wonderfully rich and wonderful distracting Mac interface. I’m in the Windows bucket. With not much else going on in here. Lovely. I can focus.
If I were you, I’d go onto writer.live.com and give it a try. It’s so nice and clear. And simple. Lovely.
Bookshops are wonderful places. Whenever I visit a new city, one of the places I always end up in is the local bookshops. In the past couple of years, I’ve made it to Kinokuniya Tokyo, in Shinjuku, Kinokuniya and Asia Books in Bangkok, and Borders and Barnes & Noble in NYC.
I love bookshops.
I’m in London next month, and so I’ll be visiting the local bookshops there. One that I’ve never been to in London is Foyles, which was once the largest bookstore in the world.
A $1,000 filter to remove employees who wish they weren’t there.
I’m loving Livestation. I can watch both BBC News (nice Western British bias), and Al Jazeera (for the rest of the world), depending on the mood.
Windows-only for now - install VMWare Fusion if you must.
Livestation viewers have already spent seven years watching live news on their PCs.
[From Livestation hits seven years of viewing]
Ecto has a nice little bookmarklet function that opens up a new Blog post window in Ecto.
After installing the bookmarklet, you can create weblog entries from any webpage you are visiting. When viewing a page that you want to write about, select some text you want to quote, and then choose or click the “ectoize” item from the browser’s Bookmarks Bar. This will open a new draft window in ecto with text from and details about the current webpage.
[From bookmarklet for ecto]
The former editor of the Times of London, Robert Thomson, spoke to students on Trends in Journalism, in August 2007, when on vacation in his home city of Melbourne Australia. He had some insightful advice on 4 types of successful blog.
In setting up your blog, he suggests you visualise what the opportunity is - the best source of this visualisation is looking within
The lecture can be viewed online at this address: Video - RMIT
RMIT Melbourne
Tim Ferris:
Here are a few questions that can help you put on the productivity blinders and put things in perspective. Even when you’re not traveling the world, develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things, whether important tasks or true peak experiences. If you do force the time but puncture it with distractions, you won’t have the attention to appreciate it.-What is the one goal, if completed, that could change everything?
-What is the most urgent thing right now that you feel you “must” or “should” do?
-Can you let the urgent “fail” — even for a day — to get to the next milestone with your potential lifechanging tasks?
-What’s been on your “to-do” list the longest? Start it first thing in the morning and don’t allow interruptions or lunch until you finish.
Upgrading my Evernote Mac client to Version 1.1.1 Beta 31506 tonight gave me a hint as to what’s to come with Evernote, and how the premium pricing may work. I’ll be happy to pay for an Evernote account, I’m just using it this Beta so much, and have great comfort from having my data backed up into the cloud.
Evernote Mac client now has a bar at the top displaying your “Current Monthly Usage”.
Double-clicking through into the bar gives this breakdown. Looks like they’re going for the Flickr model, where you have a monthly upload quota. 40MB is the free amount. So Evernote Free should be enough if you’re just uploading text notes and the occasional photo.
But wait … look at the other side … “Approximate Notes Remaining” ?? What could that be, there could be a limit on the Free Evernote?
Clicking on Upgrade Account, the service isn’t quite available yet.
How’s this for a stupid error message I got today.
I was copying over about 20 vCard files from Microsoft Outlook, over to my Lotus Notes email system. Stupid-me forgot that Lotus Notes is old school, I’m so used to drag and drop from being a Mac User.
Lotus Notes told me off in no uncertain terms, that I should be dragging over those vCards one at a time. Shame on me!