A few folks were somehow inspired by Tantek’s [What to do with

things to do](//tantek.com/log/2003/04.html#L20030421t1700) post. One of them was me. Successfully managing my time

eternally eludes me. Bryan

accurately noted today that I spend more time on systems to manage my

time than I do actually doing things. I’ve got software, pencil and

paper and a dusty iPaq–yet I continue to be about half as productive

as I could be. The goal is to spend roughly the same amount of time

actually doing stuff, but get more done. So Alex, show us the

categories…

• Grow

• Restore

• Maintain

• Prune

• Pull

I’ll be taking my list of projects, interests and whatnot and putting

each into one of those categories. I’ll start with Pull. Here’s one to

get me started…

Video Games. Gone. I never play, yet I buy every console that comes out.

I spend hours on Rotten Tomatoes researching what’s fun, and never do

anything with the information. No more.

There, what’s next?…

“All money from your purchases is split 50/50 with our artists.

No major label connections.

We are not evil.”

Not much music there yet, but it seems like a neat idea. http://www.magnatune.com/

Ran into Branden Hall’s [Flash

remoting tester](//www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=E79F1303C1E096ED) on the amfphp list. Now if I can just find time to

test the PHP remoting stuff, I might be able to use it.

Mary just reminded me that if it had been up to online dating services,

we would never have met. We were both experimenting with Match.com at

the same time (yes, it’s true), but were never recommended to each other

by the site’s “recommendation engine”. Sure seems like we should’ve

been. Oh well, thankfully mutual friends use a better algorithm.

Not a lot of information yet on the new Macromedia tool, Royale. I’ve seen it described as a Flash development environment designed for programmers. How’s this and Laszlo going to coexist?

I’ve had Cygwin installed on my

laptop for a couple months now, but I’ve only recently begun using it.

It all started with discovering that rxvt can be used as a terminal,

replacing the god-awful DOS-like window that is the default. I’m now

running VIM, rsync, mutt, SSH and more right here on my Windows machine.

It’s cool, and it helps alleviate some of the TiBook envy I’ve been

experiencing ever since Steve and

Bryan got their shiny new

machines running OS X.

Can a person’s gag reflex be surgically removed? I’d need that to happen before I could do this

Do me a favor, when replying to an email or forum post or whatever,

don’t begin the response with “Um…”

It’s the most effective way to adopt a condescending tone in an

electronic message and it’s horribly annoying. Thanks.

The Web is dying.

I remember, it was sometime in 1996, when every single thing I did on or for the Web was cool, new, and different. I was learning to program for web servers. Hooking them up to databases even before it was popular. I never slept - fearing I would miss something. Front row seats at the Revolution. Friends and coworkers were learning to create beauty within the confines of a browser. And out there, all voices could now be heard. It was never about money. Of course people paid us to do what we were doing, which kept us awash in software and servers. Saving the world was the agenda of the day and we were all over it.

Not anymore. The web has become a great resource for research, a convenient tool for commerce, and yet another medium for Really Big Business, but noone really gives a shit about it anymore. My daughter (12) reads email and instant messages. I’ve offered to make a nice web site for her (or blog even). She’s not interested. Why should she be, none of her friends use the web much. Even I don’t spend time just browsing these days. I’ve got my 8 or 9 sites that I read regularly, plus the few oddball research spots. Other than that, I sometimes think I’ve found everything I need, so why bother.

We are still creating great things for the web. Cool things. Useful things. Why doesn’t anyone care?

According to a terrifically complicated mathematical formula, the sexiest sentence alive is “My breast flipped inside out so my nipple touched my heart.”

Not bad, but some of the other submissions are a lot of fun also.

I have two favorites…

“…For an hour we wake and doze, and slowly I know that though we are sated, though we are hardly touching, this is the coming the other brought us to the edge of – we are entering, deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze, this place beyond the other places, beyond the body itself…”

…and…

“Sometimes, you must fight the urge to whipe the sweat from your brow, and let it run down your face and sting your eyes.”