shahine.com/omar/

Over the past 7 or so months, since getting the Samsung Blackjack, I have been using my phone for a lot more GTD task management. The keyboard on the device makes it practical for doing so.

I've evaluated a few applications to manage my tasks, and ultimately settled on using OneNote Mobile and SmarterTasks. For a long time I was using Oxios Todo, as it has an amazing amount of flexibility. However, what I found was I was tweaking it to get to a point where it was like SmarterTasks out of the box. I also have a few complaints about SmarterTasks, but they have all been rectified in the latest release, 1.1.

IMHO you won't find a better task application. It removes all the unnecessary clutter UX from a task, and just focuses on the core features. It lets you enter a subject, priority, category and project. New to 1.1 is the fact that Projects are persisted using the increasingly common format:

[Project Name]

Where the name of the project is surrounded by brackets. This method is employed by ClearContext and Jello.GTD.

A recent GTD hack I started when I was on parental leave and had errands to run every day was to create a task in the @Errands category with the name of the store I was going to. Then in the notes field I would list all the individual items I needed such as:

@Errands

    @Whole Foods

        - milk

        - new york strip

and so on. When I got something on the list I just changed the dash to a plus sign. When everything was purchased I just marked the errand task as complete.

Yahoo has an excellent and short primer on 13 performance tips for web developers.

The only bug is that for Tip #13 they recommend disabling ETags because if you use more than one box to serve graphics requests, the ETags won't match from machine to machine.

Well we use ETags just fine with Hotmail because IIS allows you to synchronize ETags across boxes.

Either way, this is good stuff.

Another Win32 application is set aside in favor of a web application. Yesterday I stopped using FeedDemon to consume my RSS feeds. Don't get me wrong, FeedDemon is a sweet application and I used it faithfully for a few years. However, Google Reader FREAKING ROCKS.

The Google Reader web application is simply the most efficient way to move through unread news items quickly. As you read items it scrolls them down one at a time and marks them unread (all using the space bar). It's a very well done AJAX application.

Google Reader also boots in under 5 seconds from any computer with a web browser. FeedDemon is only running on two of my PCees and with all my feeds and a big fat cache of posts it takes substantially longer to bet to be usable. On Vista I even have to endure the whole "Not Responding" nonsense for a few seconds... finally after Launching FeedDemon I must wait for it to talk to all the RSS feeds and download content... contrast to Google Reader where when I login I can immediately start reading feeds without waiting on second.

However, the clincher is this. Google Reader Mobile is AWESOME. I read a lot of RSS feeds on my Blackjack. It's the perfect way to kill time when I'm bored. NewsGator mobile has not been updated in years and lacks some critical functionality. Here is what Google Reader Mobile does better:

1. Shows you one post at a time
2. Allows you to mark a post as unread or flagged before moving on to the next post
3. Shows you a preview of what the next post you are about to read is
4. Shortcut keys for all actions (awesome when you have a keyboard)

A picture is worth a thousand words as illustrated below. There is just the right amount of contextual information about the next post, as well as shortcuts and actions I can take on the current post.

#2 is absolutely critical. I would often find myself reading a feed in NewsGator mobile and keeping every item unread because there was one item I wanted to review on my PC later on. There was simply no way to flag a post or to leave it unread. All it has is a "Mark all posts read" option.

Since I use a Blackjack I had tried the native version of the Windows Mobile reader of NewsGator and that was 100x more painful then the problems of using a Win32 RSS reader. It's much slower and inefficient and the sync of read/unread state simply doesn't work.

As I continue using Google Reader I'm looking forward to seeing my reading behaviors and stats and I'm looking forward to them adding features such as ratings and other social type features to improve my experience consuming feeds in the least amount of time possible.

Bottom line, the web is faster than traditional client applications for consuming RSS feeds. Further I don't have to worry about downloading or launching anything other than a web browser.

How many client applications have you replaced with their respective web enabled versions? So far I've replaced:

1. Microsoft Streets & Trips with Windows Live Maps and Google Maps
2. FeedDemon with
Google Reader
3. IMAP email with Windows Live Hotmail
4. Crappy Family Tree program with Geni.

and I'm considering replacing Microsoft Money with Wesabe.

Once again, OMAR outperforms MSFT 2 years in a row.I may never get my birthday wish... is 1$ a year in growth too much to ask for? Apparently...

Anyway, I have a nice 1991 Silver Oak Cab and a 1997 Mondavi Reserve Cabernet to keep me distracted tonight.

At dinner tonight with the family I saw something I've only seen once, a family walking their cat on a leash. No ordinary cat, this was an Asian Leopard Cat. It was the most striking and well behaved cat I have ever seen. I want one. These cat are hybrid cats.

Here is what they look like:

[photo by Bill Dow]

In other news, it appears that OMAR will once again outperform MSFT 2 years in a row.

With the second big recall announced (1 million toys by Fisher-Price) I think it would be a foolish to trust any toy that carries a Made in China label (for now). Most of Sarah's toys are wood, with vegetable paint dye, but for those that aren't, I'll probably throw them out. I mean, Lead Paint!!!

"Sadly, this is the most recent in a series of disturbing recalls of children's toys. While the toys may be different, they have one thing in common -- they were manufactured in China," he said. "With the current tools and resources the Consumer Product Safety Commission has, it cannot adequately protect American consumers."

This is just crazy:

"A ConsumerAffairs.com investigation also revealed that 96 percent of the recalled toys in 2007 were imported from China."

We love Haba wood toys. Moolka is a great store to get them from.

Not sure if I should laugh or cry.

I was excited to read about all the fixes in the upcoming Vista Performance and Reliability Pack and the Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack. However, part way into reading the list of fixes I started to get worried:

• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

WTF? You mean the software I'm running can corrupt various files that I actively use via features in the OS?

Man, maybe next time I will wait for SP1. I'm especially concerned about the "synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted." since I use offline files to cache my Pictures on 2 different computers.

I'm also delighted for these specific items:

• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.

These issues above cause me daily pain.

Like Ed Bott, my nVidia card is disconnected and lying on a shelf. I got fed up with it, and the driver mess. Not to mention that the process of upgrading their drivers is PITA.

I'm now using the onboard Intel Graphics with my Media Center and things are much more stable.

I subscribe to a handful of tech news feeds. A few years ago you'd find a few posts a day max on these feeds. While I found some of the news wasn't interesting to me, that was not a big deal since there weren't many posts to wade through.

Now many of these sites have full time staff. It's not like there is more interesting news out there, but they are generating more posts than ever. Why? Advertising. Blogging is big business now, just look at Federated Media Publishing. Most of the blogs they manage advertising for are pumping out hundreds of posts a week. Many of these sites are probably bring in tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in ad revenue.

The problem here is that no one is helping me find stuff I want to read. I have to manually do this myself. Even with old school newspapers and magazines, thought was given to what was important and what was not. This determined placement.

With RSS it's all just reverse chronological. Like time is the only attribute that matters.

No thanks. I don't have time to give any more. I unsubscribed from every blog that has "staff". This includes longtime favorites like LifeHacker. Seriously, most of the stuff there has nothing to do with Life Hacking any more. It's just tech news. Long ago I unsubscribed from Engadget. Don't miss it one bit.

Bottom line is this. If I don't ready my RSS feeds for a week, and there are > 100 posts from you to sift through then you've just lost a reader. The signal to noise ratio these days is terrible. I'm getting off the Web 2.0 Hype Treadmill at the same time and like Jeremy Zawodny says:

"Sooner or later the treadmill is going to tire you out..."

I'm tired of feeling like I have to read all this stuff.

As time in my life becomes a more constrained and valuable resource, I've started to re-evaluate a number of things. This includes TV (I watch less than an hour a day), RSS reading, E-mail, etc. Life is short and I'm not getting any younger. Efficiency and Productivity become even more important to free me from time sucking activities.

Once upon a time I subscribed to a new feed every couple of days. I'm on a path to do the opposite now. There is plenty of good content out there, and most of it isn't overwhelming to peruse every couple of days. Perhaps this will allow me to focus on blogging at least once every few days (which I used to do).

My best friend from high school has been working on a new venture focused on Hotels and Reviews called VibeAgent. I've been looking for a site like this for a while since I like to travel and like to find out places that my friends have stayed that they recommend. Sites like Expedia and TripAdvisor do a pretty bad job at capturing or bubbling any kind of review information for Hotels, let alone finding stuff your friends and friends of friends have reviewed.

Anyway, VibeAgent is in private beta right now, but if you want to play with it send me an email at shahineo at hotmail.com and I'll send you an invite. I only have a few, so first come first serve.

I've already reviewed a number of hotels and it's pretty fun. It's a nice reminder of the fun places I've been in the past. It's even more fun to read the reviews folks have written about the places I've stayed...

Well, it's done. The one remaining feature that I used offline mapping software to do now exists in Google Maps. They have the ability to change the suggested route using drag and drop. I've been awaiting this feature for a long time because often the suggested route by online mappings problems falls short for one reason or another.

Jeff Atwood explains why offline mapping software can't compete with the web.

There's no reason Streets and Trips couldn't adopt the same conventions as Google Maps. But Streets and Trips seems to be completely stuck in the old world mentality of toolbars, menus, and right-clicking. All the innovation in user interface seems to be taking place on the web, and desktop applications just aren't keeping up. Web applications are evolving online at a frenetic pace, while most desktop applications are mired in circa-1999 desktop user interface conventions, plopping out yearly releases with barely noticeable new features.

This should be an unfair comparison. Streets and Trips is free to harness the complete power of the desktop PC, whereas Google Maps is limited to web browser scripting and HTTP calls to the server. Google Maps turns all those browser-based application weaknesses into strengths, by offering a bunch of online-enabled features that Streets and Trips doesn't: satellite view, real-time traffic data, and the new street view. Plus it's always up to date; we're guaranteed to be using the latest version with the newest features. And unlike Streets and Trips, it's free-- or at least ad-subsidized.

The web has won for mapping.

For my offline mapping needs I now use my Samsung Blackjack with Live Maps and my light, small, and sweet Bluetooth GlobalSat BT-359 GPS receiver.

I was going to try and say something original, but Adam Barr said it best.

Today is July 7, 2007, which of course abbreviates nicely as shown in the title. For some reason I like to post blog entries on days like today as proof that I did actually take note of their awesomeness, as I was experiencing it.

I can still remember the time, gosh it must have been about thirty years ago, when my father pointed out to me that it was 7-7-77.

In other news related to this date, it would have been Robert Heinlein's 100th birthday (nice how the slashdot URLs happen to have the date in them in 2-digit format, so they encode "07/07/07" for all stories posted today), which means he was also born on 07-07-07.

And Boeing is planning to introduce their new airplane, the 787, tomorrow, on 07/08/07.

In other news, it looks like I've been blogging for 6 or so years. In that time I used Radio Userland, Blogger, now DasBlog. Does anyone use Radio Userland any more?

Oh, and I'm looking forward to flying the 787 someday. It may displace my favorite aircraft the Airbus A330-200.

I waited a few days so it wouldn't be crazy when I went to the Apple store, but yesterday I placed my grubby fingers on the iPhone and played with it for 10 or so minutes.

Scott Hanselman has a great write up of the experience.

The iPhone reminds me of what it's like to play and experience something I hadn't experienced before. Microsoft Surface gave me the same goose bumps. It reminded me why I am such a gadget freak. Every couple of years something like this comes along that puts a big huge smile on your face every time you use it.

It's the perfect blend of technology and art. It's a completely emotional experience. It's fun.

I did not buy one. I reserve the right to change my mind in the future, but if it did in fact support Exchange ActiveSync I would instead be writing a review rather than a "Wow" post. It's not the e-mail I care so much about, but the calendar, contacts, and tasks sync that is the killer app for me. Knowing that when I update some one's phone number on my phone that all my devices on all my computers get that update is the holy grail.

BTW, other gadgets which made me feel this way:

• TiVo
• Apple AirPort
• Newton MessagePad 100
• Newton MessagePad 130
• Newton MessagePad 2000
• original iPod
• iPod nano
• ipod Shuffle v2
• HiDef
• original Canon PowerShot Digital Elph