Aldoblog

I found myself unable to resist the draw of the cool. I had to go and upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

It started innocently enough. Rochelle’s mother very generously offered to buy us a new stove, after we complained about our current oven during Thanksgiving. And, if we could have just done that, it would have been a great kitchen improvement that would have cost us almost nothing.

I wrote before that I’ve been reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and it’s already clear that I like his system. I’ve also been reading a few different web sites where different people write about their experiences using the GTD system. One post in particular talked about the necessity, and the joy, of having lots of file folders on hand, for immediate use as soon as you need to group things together. I was, to say the least, a little skeptical.

2004 was a decent year for us, and as always (at least since I started this blog), I like to take a few moments to reflect on some of the important things that happened.

I enjoyed the (fairly long) article Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask). The author works in the Seven Deadly Sins, the 2004 presidential election, and Chernobyl, among other things, with current scientific research and understanding of sleep. There’s also some really good hints on how to optimize your sleeping patterns.

In the three or four years I’ve been fighting unwanted e-mail messages with better tools than the Delete key I’ve tried almost a dozen different tools. This is a quick survey of the ones I’ve used, and why I don’t (or do) still use them.

Rochelle and I were quoted in the New York Times again, this time in the Sunday magazine, in a travel article about people who base their vacations around food, so-called “gastronauts.”

I was introduced a couple months ago to the work of productivity guru David Allen, finding a glowing review and an overview of his organization system on the 43 Folders weblog. But buying the book has had unintended consequences.

I wrote before about “downgrading” to a slower hard disk, just because it made less noise than the fast disk it replaced. I also spent a lot of time researching parts and putting together two PCs from nearly silent components, just to replace my old server and Rochelle’s aging — and incredibly noisy — PC.

After doing all of that, the noisiest item in the office was once again my Mac, which lost the title when I took out the noisy hard disk, but had a couple of fans that were quite a bit louder than the now-very-quiet fans in the two PCs.

I’ve been dicking around with WordPress on my test system long enough. LTFP.