I wish I could say that I do all this, but at least it's something to aim for. And I wish I had the infinite patience to hyperlink all of these, but I don't, so take it on faith that I've thought about and written about them before.
I need to be mindful of what I am doing all the time, so that things get done and I don't just wander off into cyberspace. (Cyberspace, remember that, data gloves and VRML and the metaverse and all that? Yeah. There.)
There are two fundamental issues in time tracking for me: accurately logging the start and stop of each task, and determining which bucket of pre-assigned tasks it goes into (or determining that a new bucket needs to be allocated to describe that task).
There is a great interview of Caterina Fake by Tod Maffin on CBC Radio, back when Flickr was in Vancouver BC and new and hip and was Canadian content, and Caterina talked about Flickr's use of tags in this way:
"The way that most systems had worked prior to this sort of tagging system is that you would in advance of knowing what you were going to categorize had to put together a category list and that involves a lot of cognitive overhead that you really don't want to engage in at the time uploading photographs and labeling them makes tagging so successful add tags on the spot you know beach sunset fire sand enter"
it's a rough transcript, but I've listened to this piece dozens of times and the phrase "cognitive overhead" sticks in my brain. I don't know where that piece is online, but it should be....
so, slimtimer. "beach sunset fire sand" then start the timer. never mind that you hadn't planned in advance to go to the beach, you'll account for that later.
I wrote a few years back about a mini-kanban that John Hritz had put together to remember to refill washer fluid. There are a lot of colorful sticky notes around my workplace these days, so I thought I'd read up on how kanban-inspired systems are being used for process management in the software development and other non-manufacturing worlds.
Some inspiring examples (with post-its to illustrate):
A perfect state of flow may be very difficult, or at least uneconomical, to achieve in a robust product development process. But we can get pretty close with a well-tuned kanban pull system. We have managed to combine most of the flexibility of craft production with most of the control of a pipeline. Work-in-process is limited, and cycle time can be managed. Most importantly, it is a highly transparent and repeatable process with all of the right conditions for continuous improvement.
Corey Ladas - Corey has been a proponent of iterative and evolutionary design methods since the early 1990’s, and was an early practitioner and vocal promoter of Agile methods at Microsoft. Corey began collaborating with David Anderson at Microsoft in 2004, united by a common interest in the application of Lean, Theory of Constraints, and Statistical Process Control methods to software development. In 2007, Corey joined David at Corbis to implement kanban systems for the development of enterprise IT projects.
If you wait long enough, it won't be novel, and thus it won't be worthwhile to pay attention to. Thus by incorporating a delay loop into your news consumption you'll miss a bunch of transient spikes of things that are no longer newsworthy.
Information Dynamics Laboratory, HewlettPackard Laboratories, Palo
Alto, CA 94304
Edited by Harry L. Swinney, University of Texas, Austin, TX, and
approved September 14, 2007 (received for review May 25, 2007)
The subject of collective attention is central to an information age
where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus
of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and
eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the
dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an
interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news
stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model
characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate
that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law,
suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention
fades.
oh, so that's what I look like from the net (via metro mode media)
Ed Vielmetti is Ann Arbor's pied piper of Web 2.0 new urbanist geek culture and all round swell guy. A relentless networker and vital strand in the social and high tech spiderweb of A2 start ups and up starts, his blog is really more of a free-for-all of interesting links and informational tidbits. For short attention spans and expansive minds.
The difficult part of this for me is the "short attention span", because I feel like I have a long attention span (measured in years) though it might not have a long time in any particular day. for instance:
The first half is a series of anecdotes about how the world has gone mad with fragmented attention spans, so that people have environmentally-induced ADD. The second half is self-help on coping with that world, and a few really neat exercises to improve your concentration.
Describe your thought process. For example, what inspired the image with the dog ("Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in")?
My very poor attention span allows me to jump from thing to thing with childish abandon. I chose the sentences only on the basis of what I liked. But once I narrowed down my choices, I wanted to be literal and true to the sentence. So, for instance, for the phrase "The temple of Isis" [see image, far left] I found images of the actual temple, which is on a small island on the Nile and rendered it with some characters sprinkled in. I tried to do this as often as possible. A reasoned madness.
This would be a great book to take out from the library and browse through hunting for ideas about the fast pace of modern life. If you have a short attention span you can even pick up a page, snag something quotable or at least interesting, and put it down again. But buy it to read it straight through...can't recommend it for that.
and from a quote file:
Turnaucka's Law: The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord.
I have a Macbook, it's partially broken right now.
There is a stripe of pixels top to bottom on the screen, about 1/8 of the screen, running top to bottom that is flickering. It's not what Apple calls a "pixel anomaly", since it's not a single isolated spot; rather, it's a big stripe. It starts at the middle of the screen, and goes to the right from there.
I have Applecare (whew).
I ran TechTools Deluxe, their self-help diagnostic CD; all of the hardware that it tests checks out OK, including the video ram.
I double-checked the video issue at multiple screen resolutions, and it appears that the same screen stripe is fubar independent of resolution, which suggests that it's a problem with the screen itself and not the circuitry driving it. The external monitor looks fine.
@bdimcheff on Twitter noted that he had a similar problem which was "the bottom set of input circuitry on my LCD was falling off".
On hold to Apple Support right now (1030am EST), estimated wait 15min plus. I can still work. "Please continue to hold for the next representative".
I'm not going to fix it myself (did I mention Applecare)? But here are some people who did replace a Mac laptop screen:
A client of mine sent me a MacBook with a broken screen. It was his daughter’s computer, and she had accidentally broken the screen. I told him I couldn’t help him repair the screen, and he should look to Apple to make the repair for him. I turns out that the repair is 90% of the cost of the computer itself.
"Clear to me right now that it's a hardware issue; don't have to worry about it because it's a hardware issue. Need to send this one to our Apple Depot and have it fixed; the turnaround time is 5-7 business days. Genius bar doesn't have the parts to be sure and have it in stock, but you can ask them. Box delivered by DHL, just the computer into it; they will deliver it back to us; call them if it's ready for pickup. Box valid for 30 business days; always back up the files."
(sigh)
The next problem is to figure out a transitional period where I get a laptop for 5-7 days to work while my system is in the shop, and enough data and code on that laptop to make it work. Without going into an exhaustive search for rentals, it appears that the value of a machine for one week as a rental is in the $250 range.
Voila: no more navigating when you need to search for something on a project you're working on, just drop down a menu, select your Basecamp as your search engine, and type in your query. Most of the time, you'll get back an answer.
Construction of the Empire State Building: 7 million human-hours. The Panama Canal: 20 million human-hours. Estimated number of human-hours spent playing computer solitaire around the world in one year: billions. A problem with today's computer society? No, an opportunity.
What if this time and energy could be channeled into useful work? What if people could play computer games and accomplish work without even realizing it? What if billions of people collaborated to solve important problems for humanity or generate training data for computers? My work aims at a general paradigm for doing exactly that: utilizing human processing power to solve computational problems in a distributed manner. In particular, I focus on harnessing human time and energy for addressing problems that computers cannot yet solve. Although computers have advanced dramatically in many respects over the last 50 years, they still do not possess the basic conceptual intelligence or perceptual capabilities that most humans take for granted. By leveraging human skills and abilities in a novel way, I want to solve large-scale computational problems and/or collect training data to teach computers many of these human talents. To this end, I treat human brains as processors in a distributed system, each performing a small part of a massive computation. Unlike computer processors, however, humans require an incentive in order to become part of a collective computation. Among other things, I use online games as a means to encourage participation in the process. In this talk, I will describe my work in the area of Human Computation.
Seminar Speaker Bio:
Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and was named one of Popular Science Magazine's "Brilliant 10" scientists of 2006. His research interests include encouraging people to do work for free, as well as catching and thwarting cheaters in online environments.
Time for back to school! Here's a roundup of the best posts I've found.
Our school year has started well, and we're adjusting to new routines. I went to the first day of school with Saul at Burns Park, met a bunch of parents at the PTO coffee, and am eagerly awaiting the new school directory so we can know who our new neighbors and schoolmates are. Days have changed, wake up time has changed, pretty much everything says school and not summer.
I went through a bunch of back-to-school stuff on the net - mostly not the back-to-school shopping things, but the first week of school stuff - and pulled out a bunch of highlights relevant to this year.
When you’re putting together the perfect family schedule, you have to do more than just tack up a Puppy Of The Month calendar on the wall.
The Regular Schedule
Book clubs. Soccer practices. Or, if you’re like us, physical therapy appointments. Some appointments are regularly scheduled, and the times don’t change week-to-week, but rather month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter. Rather than write down the same information every week, have one whiteboard or poster board with everybody’s regular schedule Mon – Sun.
Deb and I maintain our calendars two different ways - hers is paper, mine is mostly electronic - and there are enough standing dates on the calendar that this sounds like a great idea.
Top 10 Back to School Tools, #9: Perfect your note-taking skills this semester—get a primer on how to take study-worthy lecture notes using the Cornell method, and customize and print Cornell templates to get started.
I've written about Cornell Notes before, but somehow missed Ryan Stewart's Cornell-Notes.com. The template is nifty. Another nifty thing I've found recently in the print-your-own-pages world is Page Packer for making pocket-sized books from PDF files.
3. Cool Mom Picks Back to School Guide 2007 is a shopping guide. Saul ended up with a new used bike (garage sale plus brake work rehab at Ann Arbor Cyclery) and new backpack from Land's End. Cool Mom Picks found this source for book plates to put in your books from One Good Bumblebee:
Library card bookplates are so so cool, and help insure that the books your kids brings to school come home with them too.
4. Parent Dish's Angie Felton notes that here in Michigan schools start after Labor Day (to make sure that tourist dollars flow freely) and unearths this fun MasterCard commercial on the backpack theme:
Lisa Wever Koski, a Miami-Dade teacher, is surprised that more people don't use this simple tool -- a monthly calendar. She prints hers from the computer, attaches a magnetic strip and hangs it on the refrigerator where everyone will look at it several times a day. She puts all family members' activities, meetings, appointments and birthdays on it. ``I see that kids do not consult their parents about their schedules. They will sign up for an activity, pay the fee, then back out because they didn't know it was their grandmother's birthday.''
Starting in 1st grade, schools with computer labs allow children to spend time creating pictures on computers. In second grade students start to do research for projects using the school computer lab. Before third grade they are allowed to store files on the school's hard drive related to the work they are doing in a computer lab. In 4th grade, the school tech office creates private (password protected) folders for students to store their work. I have heard some students using word processing or spreadsheet software for school projects as early as 3rd grade but defintely by 4th.
Saul, who is starting 2d grade, has been using a computer for a while now - some of his drawings of Ann Arbor Fairy Doors are up on Flickr.
It's that time of year again. Back to school. Some Moms are thrilled. Some Moms unsure. Some are just in a state of shock over the hit the wallet takes. One thing consistent about it all: there are moans from kids heard around the country that their summer is ending. But the Moms? Ahhhh, the Moms have other ideas.
Personally, I always get a bit freaked out as if it was my first day of school when they start up. But that probably has more to do with the fact that they have not yet instituted a "start at noon" school day with our public school system. Now that would rock my socks off! Alas, my cries to let my kids (and when I say my kids, I of course mean me) sleep in late and then go to school.
DO plan a get together with other families before school starts. Get a class contact list from the school and invite the parents and kids over for a play date. My friend, Laurie, invited new classmates to her daughter's birthday party (which happened to fall two weeks before the first day of school) -- it presented the perfect opportunity for the parents to get to know one another and for the kids to get to know each other before the big day.
The Burns Park PTO organized a picnic at the playground for each of the incoming classes, and we all had a great time talking to the other 2d grade parents. I'm organizing our Math / Science Night this year - and the PTO has an event calendar that it looks like you can subscribe to with iCal.
I'm selling a bunch of Pokemon cards. Why? Because my kids sneaked them into my shopping cart while at the grocery store and I ended up buying them because I didn't notice they were there until we got home. How could I have possibly not noticed they were in my cart, you ask? Let me explain.
The winning bid was $142.51 (with 53 bids), which just goes to show you how much writing well can help you.
