Poojan (Wagh) Blog

From Four Years | 43 Folders.

One particularly gifted arrival on the productivity and self-help scene authored some of the most profoundly useful advice I’d ever heard about attention management — but, then followed it up by showing how those extra cycles could be used to game the system so efficiently that you can sit in a hammock for 164 hours a week while people in India write birthday cards to your friends. That one became a runaway bestseller and, perhaps unintentionally, formed the new template for how to market productivity as an extreme lifestyle. I also have to imagine that it singlehandedly revived our nation’s sagging hammock industry.

I’m rather illiterate in this field, so if there’s someone else this describes, I wouldn’t know. My apologies ahead of time to both Merlin Mann and Tim Ferris if I’ve got this all wrong.

P.S. I did enjoy Tim Ferris’ book, which details several techniques of productivity–even if the whole month-long getaway isn’t my bag.

I’ve been listening to Manager Tools Podcast for a couple years now. I really enjoy it, because the direction is specific, yet one can generalize the specifics to form concrete principles.

The podcast presents everything in very basic steps. If the topic is hosting a meeting, they tell you (in a dozen or so steps) exactly what to do. I mean exactly.

It occurred to me a week or so ago that I’m an unlikely fan since I’m not in a role to execute any of their detailed steps.

I realized early this week why I like it so much: by being presented with these basic steps so often, one can generalize on them and gain very insightful principles.

For example, while detailing a discussion about feedback, they tell the story of Shamu–and how Shamu only gets positive feedback yet learns to jump over a rope suspended above the water.

I realized immediately that I don’t give enough positive feedback to my peers nor my children (nor do I receive enough from my bosses). After realizing this deficiency, it became very easy to compensate for it–both at home and at work.

I stumbled on this great tool this morning:
Website Grader checks your web site for keywords, Google Pagerank, Yahoo directory, Alexa. and gives you a score for SEO.

The neat thing about the tool is that it gives you all this information in one place, which lets you verify and debug if Google and Yahoo are crawling your web site.

Update 2008-09-21

I just realized that Amazon S3 is 15 cents/GB/month, not 10 cents/GB/month. So, Dreamhost (which charges 10 cents/GB/month only for space above 50 GB) is even more attractive!

In the latest DreamHost newsletter (Newsletter v10.8 August 2008):

Now, you know how we give out a LOT of disk space with our hosting? Well
technically that space is only supposed to be used for your _actual_ web
site (and email / database stuff) .. not as an online backup for your
music, pictures, videos, other servers, etc!

Well, just like every other web host does, we’ve been sort of cracking
down on that some lately, and it seems to catch some people by surprise!
Nobody likes being surprised, especially in the shower, which is where
we typically brought it up, and so now we offer a solution:

You CAN use 50GB of your disk space for backups now! The only caveat is,
it’s a separate ftp (or sftp) user on a separate server and it can’t
serve any web pages. There are also NO BACKUPS kept of THESE backups
(they should already BE your backups, not your only copy), and if you go
over 50GB, extra space is only 10 cents a GB a month (a.k.a. cheap)!

I’ve been thinking about this for months: I pay about $10/month and get 250 GB of storage (or maybe it’s double that). At the same time, I’m paying Amazon S3 (& Jugledisk Plus) to backup my files. Why can’t I use my DH space for that?

I realized the reason is that if DH allocated 250 GB per user and kept it available, they couldn’t support the $10/month price. It’s basically the law of averages. Not everyone is going to use the 250 GB, but the few that will are covered. As stated, they’ve had to crack down on people getting a little nuts and using it for personal backup.

However, it is great that they realize that there’s some leeway here. I figure that at 10 cents/GB from Amazon S3, I am saving $5/month through amazon. Plus they don’t talk about charging per GB for bandwidth (which S3 does). In addition, if I go over the 50 GB, I pay 10 cents per GB/month–which is exactly what S3 charges. (Maybe they’re using S3 for storage?).

Anyway, awesome job, Dreamhost. I clearly made the right choice in hosting provider.

P.S. Anyone know of good incremental backup software that supports FTP/SFTP?

Just for kicks, I’ve been brainstorming whether I can replace FireFox with Google Chrome.

The answer is no, but more accurately, almost. I’ve made a list of FireFox extensions that I live by. Namely: Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t see anything here about it: ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging, but looks like there’s a new version of ScribeFire out. Can’t find a changelog nor any blog entries.

I was quite excited to adopt Google Chrome as my primary browser. Immediately, I missed the “Read it Later” extension. I looked into whether an extension communicty had sprung up yet. (Who knows; there are apparently themes available already.) Unfortunately, I found the following in the Chromium (the open-source group formed to develop Chrome) FAQ:

FAQ Chromium Developer Documentation:

Q. How can I develop extensions for Chromium like in Firefox?

A. Chromium doesn’t have an extension system yet. This is something we’re interested in adding in a future version. Note that Chromium does support NPAPI-style “plugins”, such as Adobe Flash and Apple QuickTime.

Unfortunately, this is a deal-breaker for me (and likely for a lot of people). Guess I’ll have to be patient.

From Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Details:

Runs Intel Atom N270 & Intel GMA 950.

$350 for Ubuntu 8.04 w/ 4 GB SSD.

$400 for XP Home w/ 8 GB SSD

$450 for XP Home w/ 16 GB SSD

I said in a previous post that I didn’t dislike the Gates/Seinfeld Churro Ad. That (and the recent TWiT discussion about it and cloud computing) got me thinking about what Microsoft could do to resuscitate themselves.

It seems to me that Apple presents itself as the creative platform. Microsoft, on the other hand seems to be the business platform. What do business users care about? Productivity. Read the rest of this entry »

I actually liked the Gates/Seinfeld (Windows?) Churro Ad. Not too many people did. The thing I liked about it was that it didn’t try to attack Apple. It didn’t even try to sell windows (at least not that hard). It basically presented Bill Gates in a conversational style.

Read the rest of this entry »