Poojan (Wagh) Blog

It’s an amazing song, but honestly, get the whole album.

I just read New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets – Conversation Starter – HarvardBusiness.org.

A few things strike me about the results:

1. It meets the 80/20 90/10 rule.
2. Twitter is basically a broadcast service–not a one-on-one messaging tool.

#2 strikes me because I’ve always seen myself as an outsider. I’ve always felt that there must be a large contingent of twitter users that use twitter to tell their friends where they’re meeting for drinks tonight.

I’ve told friends that the only thing they’ll get from me on twitter is spam. (That’s a bit facetious: I’d like to think that my blog posts have intellectual value that informing people that they can proffer money in exchange for retail products advertisements do not.) If I were a corporation, they’d be filled with tons of marketing.

I suspected that I’m not getting this utility out of twitter because my friends aren’t on there, sharing in dialog.

What I realize now is that there’s a sort of myth behind twitter: it’s generally being used as a broadcast medium. In that respect, it seems less useful for my socializing: I don’t really care what most of my friends are doing each night in Chicago. I’m not in Chicago most nights. If I have a night available to meet up with friends, I’ve already pre-arranged it.

Incidently, I learned about this post from http://twitter.com/HarvardBiz/status/1995340326

I recently detailed the high-level setup of my latest GTD roll out. This follow-up post has a high “geek factor” and contains the details of how I do this using computer automation (Python scripts).

Read the rest of this entry »

Listen to Song #9: For the Win.

I’ve been thinking about switching from DreamHost to BlueHost. My main reason is price: I’m paying around $10/$9/$8 per month (1/2/3 year term respectively). However, I’ve come across a coupon that causes BlueHost to charge me $5/$4/$4 per month (1/2/3 year term respectively). My DreamHost term expires in June, so I’ll need to either pay month-to-month or sign up for another year.

My difficulty with BlueHost is that you need to pay up-front: there’s no free trial term. I want to lock in this cheap hosting for as long as I can (3 years preferably), and BlueHost will reimburse you if you quit early. But I want to make sure I don’t regret the time I spend switching hosts—and I definitely don’t want to have to undo all my changes sometime in the future. If anyone has any experience with both DreamHost and BlueHost, let me know (in the comments for this post).

Here’s a comparison with the services I’d be interested in:

The “SORT OF” entry under Mail Filtering isn’t merely a pun: I just mean that both hosts provide mail filtering, but they don’t (for example) do custom sieve scripts.

Between DreamHost and BlueHost, the main difference is in off-site backups. BlueHost does not provide them, so I’d have to continue paying Amazon. (I use Jungle Disk’s interface to Amazon S3.) This isn’t so bad: Jungle Disk’s solution is set-and-forget, with very little intervention required. If I decided to use the FTP space that DreamHost provides, I’d probably go with manent. I haven’t tried it in a while, but it looks really good, and they’ve just added a Windows installer.

For SSL, BlueHost is better since they offer a shared SSL site and they offer unique IP’s (required for SSL) for cheaper than DreamHost. I don’t know if BlueHost provides SSH tunnelling. However, if I can use SSL, I don’t need it (I use SSH tunnelling to secure my HTTP traffic.)

I’ll probably stick with DreamHost for now. But, I’ll continue to obsess over BlueHost. If anyone has any information to tip me in either direction, I’d be relieved to hear it.

In this post, I’ll present what I’ve been using for the last month or so to facilitate GTD. My conclusion is that GTD is meant to be customizable, and it’s sometimes better to develop your own (fully custom) solution than trying to adapt someone else’s to your values.

I recently posted about both what I was doing wrong in my previous GTD systems and what I learned from a recent David Allen seminar and promised this description.

I do use a computer for this system. This post doesn’t contain the technical details: that isn’t for everyone and I’ll detail that in a follow-up post.

I finally bit the bullet and came up with a system that’s computer-based. I didn’t use any pre-packaged software to do it. I wrote my own “computer program” (a very short and simple python script). The important lesson—that took me a couple years to realize—is that GTD is meant to be customized.

That’s why all the pre-packaged software solutions I tried didn’t work: there’d always be something that bothered me that I wanted to fix. I’d spend lots of time trying to fit a square in a circle hole and it wouldn’t work. The ones that were customizable ended up being time-consuming, because modifying them to do what I want still took a lot of time.

In short, there are things about GTD that you care about that I don’t. Adopting something that emphasizes someone else’s values can prove more laborious that developing your own.

Anyway, here’s the high-level of how I collect and process:

First, the buckets:

• A metal mesh “inbox” at home
• A small eco greenroom notebook that I picked up at Target (and then ran through the washer/dryer) spiral-bound pocket notebook from Wal-Mart (~$1). I also really like the Pilot G2 Mini pens. (Also available at Walgreens at ~$1 apiece.) These pens write smoother than just about anything else out there, in addition to being very portable.
• I maintain an “Inbox” bookmark folder in Firefox, I use the SyncPlaces Firefox extension to synchronize my bookmarks across all computers (country and western work and home).
• Work and home email accounts.
• When I’m driving, I use Jott (and the free alternative, reQall) so that I can call a number and have a transcribed message sent to my email address. I could carry around a voice recorder (or use the one built into my phone), but I know I won’t be disciplined about reviewing my voice recordings—and I don’t need to since there is a functional alternative.

In addition to these inboxes, I realized I need some “Action-Support” collections for stuff that’s immediately relevant to my next-actions:

• A mesh orange plastic bag that I got from the David Allen seminar (for my at-home action support)
• “Follow-Up” folders in my work (W-FU) and personal (P-FU) email accounts
• Follow up bookmark folders in Firefox (FF-FU).

My latest setup is based on text files: One master set of text files handles the tasks and project lists. A second set (derived through computer automation from the first) merely organizes these tasks by context. I’ll detail it further in my next post.

Over at CNN: “Microsoft’s Zune HD to debut this fall” – SciTechBlog, John D. Sutter asks why anyone would chose the iPod Touch over the iPhone. I’ll tell you exactly why I bought my wife an iPod touch rather than an iPhone:

1. Monthly fee: The $70/month the AT&T bill for the iPhone is steep. It’d be worth it if she needed that connectivity…
2. Tethered mobility: … however, she doesn’t really want connectivity when she’s not around the house. She’s cool with checking email when she gets home.
3. I’ve heard the iPhone is great device, but not a great phone. Yeah: it’d be more convenient to have the all-in-one portable device platform and phone together. However, I’ve heard from numerous people (none of whom are allegiant to Motorola) that the iPhone isn’t terribly good as a phone. In truth, I never really found out why: call quality, user interface, etc. However, the suboptimality of the phone stuck in my head.
4. It pretty much runs everything the iPhone does: the iPod touch pretty much runs every app that the iPhone runs, so she’s really not giving up anything.

In fact, I wonder if people tend to by the iPhone because they don’t know how capable the iPod touch is.

[mp3 keywords=”Arcade Fire Wake Up” title=”Wake Up”]

… as featured in the trailers for Where the Wild Things Are.

I’ve heard more news of layoffs at Motorola (specifically, Motorola Labs—or what was left of it). These days, layoffs are nothing new. Pretty much every tech company seems to be on a layoff spree. In this post, I question whether the layoffs are a trend or an anomaly.

Caveats

To be clear, I am focusing on Motorola’s handset business. However, that seems to be what fuels Motorola’s rapid growth (when Motorola has it). I don’t worry about the public safety business. That business (as far as I know) has been on a steady growth trend for decades. One final caveat: I know absolutely nothing about stocks. This is not investment advice.

My mind goes back to the tech bust of 2001. Back then, people (at Motorola) said it was the worst they’ve ever seen it. I saw several people get laid off. Realize that this recession ocurred a little after I entered the workforce: it (partially) formed the basis of what I considered a normal market. I was in college during the go-go 90’s, where thousands of employers would show up on campus, looking to hire engineers. However, that was all I saw: I never really experienced any first-hand excess.

There were two points of view:

1. The tech market would return to “normal” and we’d get on with our engineering lives.
2. The tech market in the US was on a downward trend. Engineering careers would never return to what the used to be.

The optimistic view (#1) was confirmed in the interim period (2004-2007) when Motorola recovered. Motorola was buoyed by its success with the RAZR. Incidentally, this was when I returned to Motorola (2006). I didn’t have much of an opinion at the time. I thought it was good that Motorola came back with a hit. The question did come up about whether they’d need to do make a blockbuster every year, or if the market was just generally better and it didn’t matter. Honestly, I didn’t think much about it. I was just glad to be back.

Immediately after I returned, talk of downsizing returned. With our 2006 glasses, the 2001+ downturn was the anomaly. However, in 2008, it seemed to be the trend. In fact, the RAZR phenomenon of 2006 (then dubbed a trend) was now (in 2008) an anomaly.

I see an analogy with the US car industry: the large-car SUV craze now seems to be an anomaly. The trend now seems to be a decline in US car manufacturers.

So, where does that leave us today? I’d like to hear your comments: Is Motorola on a downward trend, interrupted by upward anomalies? Or is Motorola on an upward trend and two periods of this decade will be considered anomalies? Why?

I’m training not so much so that I can improve my run time, but to realize my intent in signing up for the race: to get in shape. I figure I need to do more to get in shape, and signing up for the race motivates me to run regularly.

For the past three weeks, I’ve run 3.5 4 miles every Monday, Wednesday,and Friday. I’ve heard that you have to excercise for a month before you can see results. Hopefully, I’ll keep it up for a week or two more.

Not sure if it was the right thing to do, but I ran this morning (Wednesday) and the race is tomorrow (Thursday) night. Hopefully, that gives my body enough time to recover.

I tend not to wear headphones while I run. I never thought about it before, but the quiet time is really nice. No, I’m not always looking around, absorbing the natural surrounding. In fact, I find myself thinking a lot. Which is good: I realized that I’m always listening to a podcast or something. I don’t give my brain enough time to just drift.