Collect Capture everything that you need to track or remember or act on in what Allen calls a ‘bucket’: either a physical inbox, email inbox, tape recorder, notebook, or any combination of these. Get everything out of your head and into your collection device, ready for processing. All buckets should be processed to empty at least once per…
Archives for November 2006
No More Clichés
Cliches are like assholes, everyone thinks theirs has a silver lining, but they’re really just full of shit. A while back while in a writing improvement phase a friend of mine gave me some excellent advice. Stop using clichés. The reason clichés are undesired is because they don’t stimulate people the same way “regular language” does. I initially…
The Future: Personal Assistants (Companions)
As technology continues to be come more compact and more powerful, I think one of the biggest consumer/business breakthroughs is going to come in the form of a personal assistance application with pseudo/quasi AI capabilities. Imagine an application that spends 24 hours a day optimizing your life. It will probably run from some sort of hosted provider in…
Linux: Get Realtime Bandwidth Statistics Using Stock Commands
Have you ever been in Linux and wanted to watch how much bandwidth was going in and out of your box? Most have, and here’s a very simply way to do it without a GUI or installing anything extra: # watch -n1 “ifconfig eth0 | grep Mb” RX bytes:105209490 (100.3 Mb) TX bytes:448524558 (427.7 Mb) What you end…
More On Incentives
In my last post I spoke about how tracking incentives can lead to the answers for why the world is in such bad shape. If you take that a bit further you can see that the role of a parent, a school, or a society should be to create good incentive systems in our children. That made me…
My First 2600 Meeting
Last Friday I went to my first 2600 meeting. It was, of course, here in New York City — home of the original meetings. The group started small and grew to around 40, which the regulars said was a weak showing. We pushed through the awkwardness (which wasn’t helped by our being dressed in business attire) and were…