100 Words a Day (more or less)

August 29 to 30, 2010:

• TreeTop Adventure at Subic: Getting egged on by 23 other guys to do the Tree Drop ride (a 60 foot fall!) was the highlight of this trip. Trying out all the activities fills up most of your day (I only did the Canopy Ride and the Tree Drop).
• Bataan Nuclear Power Plant: An educational experience. Worth listening to the other side of the story to get a clearer picture of the BNPP situation.
• Pawikan Conservation Center: Long lines at TreeTop Adventure and the resulting delay in our schedule caused us to miss this. Next time (Pawikan Festival is held sometime end-November).
• Las Casas Filipinas de Acusar: Gerry Acusar of New San Jose Builders’ hobby-turned-commercial resort.

Just a quick experiment on a photo taken while we were at Las Casas Filipinas de Acusar, with the “Antique” and “Boost Colors” effects in iPhoto applied and then a tilt-shift effect applied via TiltShiftGen for the desktop.

My most recent purchases:

• Simplenote: A replacement app for the built in Notes app, which I never liked (Marker Felt!!!!) and thus never used. I ended up buying and using several apps all at the same time — DocumentsToGo, Notebook, Shovebox, Momento — but I think Simplenote will be the one app to take the place of all thes previous ones.
• Multifl0w: a jailbreak app which tacks on an Exposé-lke interface to multi tasking; it has two main advantages over the iPhone’s stock multi-tasking operation: you see screenshots rather than just icons, and you can tap the “x” at the corner of each screenshot to close the app — no more tapping and holding and jiggling; $4.99 via Cydia.
• calvetica: A new, $2.99 calendar interface that facilitates navigation and data entry; it lacks several features so it can’t replace the built-in Calendar app just yet, but once once all the planned features are rolled in, it should be a capable (and prettier) replacement app for Calendar.
• Bleep Test: a voluntary fitnessprogram for faculty and staff and a below-average result in my baseline bleep test led me to look this up and make plans to try and improve my performance over the 4-month course of the fitness program.

Trying to keep clutter off my desk is a never-ending (on some days I’m tempted to say ‘hopeless’) battle. I literally have to push aside stuff — piles of paper, unread magazines, my coffee mug, a water glass, computer cables, etc. — to create space for the day’s tasks. And it doesn’t help that I check Unlutterer and Unplugged everyday to look at gorgeous, clean, and clutter-free workspaces. They’re supposed to serve as inspiration, but often just heighten my sense of frustration with my own workspace.

Some weeks ago I finally decided to embark on this big, uncluttering project and started hacking away at the mess on my desk. I‘m three weeks into the project, and about halfway to my ideal set-up. I feel I’ve made enough progress to start posting weekly updates on how this exercise in uncluttering is going.

If you are like me and save about a dozen articles a day in Instapaper, then you know that just the thought of attempting to catch up on three or four days worth of saved articles can be discouraging, simply because the list of articles you have to slog through has gotten so long.

Today I finished one major task early and found myself with an extra hour on my hands, and decided to use it to clean up my Instapaper backlog. Here’s what I did:

Step 1: Delete the least interesting articles.
After a quick survey of the more than 50 articles that I had saved, I deleted the least interesting ones, and cut the list down to around 40.

Step 2: Group similar article into folders
I had a very mixed list: long, nice-to-read pieces (Esquire‘s best stories, New York Times Magazine cover stories); shorter, features and analysis types of articles (NYT pieces, features from Fast Company and WIRED), and lots of other stuff. I created folders and assigned similar articles to specific folders, and left only the short news pieces in my default “Read Later” folder.

Step 3. Download the ePub file of each folder and save them in iBooks
Instapaper has this fantastic feature of putting all the articles in a given folder together in a single ePub file. I just downloaded the ePub files of the “nice-to-read” folders and then loaded them up in iBooks by dragging them into iTunes. I even whipped up nice-looking covers and dropped them into the Artwork window for each one. Now I have them stored on my iPhone, available to read when I have the chance, and they don’t clutter up my Instapaper list anymore.

In the year that has passed since giving up a part-time gig as EIC of a tech freezine, I’ve come to realize that there are only two things (so far) I’m willing to do for the rest of my life: teach, and write. I’m doing a lot of the first one this semester (12 hours a week inside the classroom, and about twice as much time either preparing for lectures and other in-class activities or checking quizzes, exercises and papers), and way too little of the second one. Apart from a few, short tech reviews for GAME magazine and a tech feature for Billionaire magazine, I haven’t written anything else. Here’s to (another) fresh start with this blog.

John Mayer’s Battle Studies is supposed to be good. Not great, but good enough to add to my collection. And the newly-released 4-CD live recording of Ella Fitzgerald at the Crescendo (Twelve Nights in Hollywood) has me drooling.
Neither of the two seem to be available in local stores yet. I know I can snag them off the iTunes Store, but I’d rather get the real CDs, even if I have to wait a while.

After nine months of inactivity, I’ve decided to give blogging another try. I’m semi-retired from Facebook, after a minor but really uncomfortable incident (someone gave me flak after reading far, far too much in a status update), and while Twitter is a great way to stay in touch with a select group of friends, it’s nearly impossible to talk about more substantial stuff in 140 characters. I’m also not writing much these days [no more Mobile Philippines], and have been longing to have another outlet.

No more pretensions about writing regularly [not even 100 words a day] — I’ll just write when I feel like it. I got a nice new theme [Elegant Grunge, by Michael Tyson], updated my WordPress installation to 2.8.2, and will be dusting off my HTML and CSS manuals to try and make this site look more personal in the weeks and months ahead.

I’m looking forward to writing again. Full steam ahead!

 

I was supposed to spend the afternoon grading presentations submitted by my students last week but I got sidetracked by a new book — slide:ology, by Nancy Duarte. I opened it with the idea of just browsing the contents very quickly, but within seconds I got sucked in.

 

After flipping through the book’s pages, I sought out more info and found the author’s blog, where extra resources (mainly sample PowerPoint slides that are featured in the book) were available. I wanted my own copy so I went to the publisher’s site and found out that a DRM-free PDF copy of the book was available for purchase, and within minutes I was $28 poorer. I did a little more surfing and found a collection of videos by Duarte Design over on video-sharing site Vimeo, and started downloading them as well. Before I knew it, nearly three hours had passed, and now I will have to work on a Sunday to be able to send my students their class standing by Monday.

 

That scanned file that was the result of the fortuitous combination of a new MacBook, intense curiosity, and an available x-ray machine multiplied traffic to the old site by a hundredfold and caused my account to exceed the bandwidth cap about a week and a half later. Since my hosting contract was due to expire in another couple of weeks and I had already arranged to move to another hosting service, I just let the deadline lapse.

 

I originally wanted to move everything from the old site to the new one but I quickly realized that I did not have the coding chops required to both recreate the mySQL database and upgrade the WordPress installation from version 2.3 to version 2.7, and ended up deciding to start all over again.

For what it’s worth, the new look (I’m using the Sirup theme) jibes much more with the “simplify everything” mantra that I am trying to follow this year. In short, I hope to do more writing and less design tweaking on the blog this year.