How to Snap Out of a Major Rut

For the past week I've been coasting by, completing just the bare minimum amount of work I could get away with. That leaves me today with a mountain of tasks that seems impossible to finish by their deadlines. All of my usual techniques have failed me, I've been avoiding my calendar that lists the dates I would like to have each task completed by, my laziness has led to many failed attempts to work from home instead of trying to get things done in the lab, and of course the huge mistake of telling my future self that I can just do it tomorrow. I could go on and on with the excuses, but if I'm going to get through this without getting fired, or failing a class, I need to get back to the basics fast. So what am I going to do?

Set Goals! - The first thing I should start with is writing down my goals. As stated in Trent's book, “The Simple Dollar,” - “Simply writing down the goals resulted in a 42% increase in achieved goals, and written progress reports resulted in a 78% increase in achieved goals.” But writing down what I need to get done isn't enough. I need to break down each task into smaller specific tasks that I can start on right now. “finish my masters project by monday” is not a good goal. It is too vague, and will just lead to me getting frustrated and overwhelmed as soon as I sit down and think about everything involved in completing that project. “customize view templates for 2 hours” is much better. I know exactly what to get started on when I sit down, and I know I can complete this task today. I am going to write down the top 3 tasks I want to complete today, ordered by priority, and then get started.

Eliminate Distractions! – My biggest weakness is that I'm easily distracted. A single call from a friend can lead to hours of time spent chatting on the phone, checking my email leads to clicking through to my Hulu, or YouTube subscriptions wasting an entire day. My favorite place to buckle down and get work done is the Engineering lab on my school's campus. They have tons of other students there doing homework and setting a good example for me, the computers have all the tools I need to get my work done, without any of the junk that can easily get me off track, and I can easily step outside for a quick break. No Television, no bed, no guitar, no junk food to lure me away from getting back to work. I can just take a little walk around, stretch out my legs, get a little sun, and my mind is clear and ready for the next task.

Make it a Habit – During the school year, I have a great routine and can usually stick to it. The summer however, is a different story. I've been slowly falling off track, almost without even knowing it, until I've lost almost every good work habit that carried me through the school year. I need to transform myself back into the well oiled task completing machine of Fall and Spring semester. I'm a strong believer that the best way to do this is to ease back into it. If I make too many drastic changes at once, I'll quickly burn out and take another step backwards. The key is to focus on one or two small changes I can make today, repeat it until it becomes the norm, and then go on to the next change. So I am going to focus on setting my 3 goals everyday, and going to the lab to eliminate distractions and complete them. If I can string a few weeks of doing this everyday and make it a habit, I can focus on my next step towards a more productive day.

Computer Science Job Search Tips

I currently have a little over a month left of school before I graduate, and move to Washington. Although my job search is in full motion, I've had little luck. I feel that I'm a decent candidate for any entry level position in my field (computer science), so I recently paid a visit to the School of Engineering and Computer Science director of recruitment to see if she had any insight to why this may be. I came away with a lot of little pointers I thought might be helpful for other students out there in my position so I will pass them on to you here:

Where to look – I've been using popular job search sites like monster.com or careerbuilder.com, but I've found that these sites don't have a lot of entry level listings. Other sites you may want to try out are indeed.com or cybercoders.com. Both are aimed more towards the tech industry with a bit more entry level positions. Another good place to start are large companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Intel, or many others. These companies usually have a specific place for new graduates to apply to, and may be a better bet for someone like me with little real world experience.

Get your resume seen – It is important to include the job title and ID number in the objective statement of your resume. The common hiring process includes large bulletin boards for each open position at a company. The hiring committee will post resumes on the board with the matching job title and ID. For a company that receives hundreds of resumes for each position, your resume may not even make it to the board if they can't quickly identify which opening you're applying to. Don't forget to bold applicable skills and languages so they are easily spotted when hiring teams are glancing over their boards.

Applying through official channels gives you a 20 percent chance of getting hired. This number jumps to 40 percent when you can find a way to get your resume in the direct hands of the hiring manager, and jumps to over 50 percent when you can get it to him from someone he knows. use your family, friends, professors, and career resource center to get your resume in the right hands through both official and unofficial paths.

Got an interview? Study! Study! Study! - your grades, diplomas, awards, and certificates don't mean much in the interview. They will find out if you know your stuff. Use a book like, “Programming Interviews Exposed,” to aid in studying for the technical portion of the interview. You won't be able to memorize solutions to the hundreds of different exercise problems, but the important lesson is to build a good process for breaking problems down, solving them, and explaining them in a clear way. You can search for company specific questions on a site like glassdoor.com. These types of sites are in message board form with users posting questions and topics they covered categorized by company and job listing. Sometimes users will post there solutions, just be aware that you can probably come up with a more efficient one yourself if you put in the time.

Are extended warranties / insurance worth the price?

Deciding whether or not I should recommend purchasing an extended warranty on a new tech toy is something I've struggled with in the past. I've never payed for one myself, but my reason for doing so is less of a concrete logical reason, and more of a vague belief that I'll be able to handle whatever disaster comes my way for the best price possible.

In his book, “The 1-2-3 Money Plan,” Gregory Karp transforms my cloudy thoughts on this subject into a clear road to reason. “Keep things simple and don’t outsmart yourself. There’s a lot of junk insurance out there that is way too expensive for the risk it covers. Does anybody really think a $40 extended warranty on a $200 camera is a good deal?”

“but it paid off for Bob when his camera broke!” - Sure, there are many examples of the extra protection paying off. There are also plenty of examples of people winning the lottery, or hitting it big in Vegas. These examples are just not as common as you would think, and there are far better ways to spend your hard earned money.

“what should I do instead?” - Self insure! Take that money you would have spent on the extended warranty, and put it away in a savings account. You'll find this savings account quickly outgrowing the cost of any repairs you might need in the long run, and soon able to pay for a complete replacement item.

“don't forget common sense” - This is less of a hard and fast rule, and more of a rule of thumb. It's a good starting point if you're unsure, and works for most products, but don't blindly follow this advice. Make sure you do your research, take care of your new products, and don't forget to use common sense!

Book Review: The Simple Dollar: How One Man Wiped Out His Debts and Achieved the Life of His Dreams

"The Simple Dollar: How One Man Wiped Out His Debts and Achieved the Life of His Dreams" was written by one of my favorite bloggers, Trent Hamn from The Simple Dollar. I really like this book because it explains how each concept fits into the grand scheme of living a happy life. In addition to explaining why each concept is important, He gives you specific actions to effectively complete each step of the book.

Chapter 1: Prison Made of Plastic – The opening chapter starts the book off by addressing some key points when beginning to plan your escape from debt. This includes explaining why it isn't a good idea to borrow money from friends and family, even to pay off high interest debt. “Do you love the businesses you owe money to? Do you enjoy the bills they send you, requesting money? Is that a dynamic you want to add to your relationship with your friend or loved one?”

Chapter 2: Whats Missing? - Happiness does not revolve around financial success. One way to start figuring out what really makes you happy is by starting a happiness journal. Keep a notebook with you and jot down any moments throughout the day where you feel truly happy. After a few weeks, you'll begin to piece together what really matters to you, the first step towards the overall goal of this book. Creating a way for you to live your ideal lifestyle.

Chapter 3: A Visit From the Black Swan – It's surprising how much of an impact building an emergency fund can have on non financial aspects of your life. Having enough savings allows you to be more confident and adventurous in the workplace without the fear of losing your job. This same emergency fund takes all the risk out of any opportunities that may come your way, until you eventually find yourself doing exactly what you want in life.

Chapter 4: The Power of Goals in a Random World – A study by Dr. Gail Mathews compared the goal completion rate of people who write down goals to people who don't. He found that simply writing down your goals leads to an increase of 42% in achieved goals compared to people who don't. This number jumps to 72% when written progress reports are used on a regular basis.

Chapter 5: Running to Stand Still – A common problem people have is running in place. For all the effort you might put in everyday, you aren't making any progress towards the life we really want. You get a second job for your children, but aren't there to spend time with them. You'll work overtime to afford a spacious house, but aren't home to enjoy it. These are all more reasons it's so important to spend on what you really appreciate, skip on the rest to build that emergency fund, and take advantage of that dream opportunity when it comes along.

Chapter 6: With or Without You – Staying involved and creating long lasting relationships is one of the most effective uses of your time. The community you build around yourself will return far more that the amount of effort you put in. The important thing to remember here is that you need to help others as much as you can, and connect people with others who can help them, rather than trying to keep them to yourself.

Chapter 7: Minding the Gap – The gap is just the difference between your income and amount needed for necessities such as housing, transportation, and food. Minding the gap just means that this gap is your key to reaching your core values and goals you've found back in chapter 3. So use it as a path to the things on the top of your happiness list, rather than things that didn't even make the cut.

Chapter 8: Frugality as a Framework – Cheap people focus on retaining as much money for themselves as possible. Frugal people are happy to spend money on something that is inline with their core values, but try to minimize spending on anything else. “Frugality is an exchange: You’re trading the things you don’t value for things that you do value.”

Chapter 9: Cultivating People and Opportunities – Do your friends put down others and feel better about themselves when others fail, or do they encourage others, and improve the people around them. You'll want to minimize negative relationships in your life, and increase the amount of positive ones.

Chapter 10: The New Career Rules – In previous generations, your loyalty stood with the company you worked for. With Today's economic trouble and quick employee turnover, it is much more beneficial to build trust and loyalty with your peers. Participate in forums where you can share ideas and opportunities, advise new co-workers on how to fit in and get ahead, and help your peers to reach their goals. Thanks to your participation, this community will be there for you when you need it most.

Chapter 11: Life Design, Building Something New - “buying an expensive home that pushes what you can afford, constantly striving to keep up with the affluence of others, working a job that you can’t even consider leaving because the pay is just too good.” Use goals to pull yourself out of this broken cycle.

Chapter 12: Managing the Gap – Use your gap to build up a savings that can eventually fund your dream job. These savings should be enough to pay the difference between what you can make following your passion, and your living expenses.

Chapter 13: The Personal, Financial Boundary – Prevent financial mistakes from hurting your personal relationships. If someone you care about owes you money, forgive this debt right now before it can do any more damage, If you want to help a friend by lending them money, make it a one time gift, have no expectation of being paid back. Never borrow from friends or family yourself. These are good tips from keeping that lender-borrower relationship, along with all the negativity that goes with it, out of your personal life.

Chapter 14: Recasting Retirement – Retirement no longer means sitting at home with nothing to do. People nearing retirement age have a lot of experience and skills built up over the years that they can offer. Use your retirement savings as a vehicle to do something that is personally fulfilling, but may not be financially lucrative.

Chapter 15: The New Path to Adulthood – The traditional path to a good career involved excellent grades in high school with loads of AP courses and extra curricular activities. Then a great SAT score to get into a great University leading up to a great job. Today however, the world requires a much wider skill set than can be found in a classroom setting alone.

Chapter 16: The Power of Giving - “You can start by simply encouraging others. Give positive feedback when people contribute to the community. Speak up when a positive voice is really needed. Act energetic and enthusiastic about the things you care about. Your positive attitude can spur others on to actions beyond what you could ever provide to the community, and that is a truly powerful gift, indeed.”

Chapter 17: Holding You Back – Stop making grand pronouncements about all the great things you are going to accomplish, only to find yourself overwhelmed and defeated before you even start. Instead, focus on small behaviors you can change today. Chain together enough days of doing this and it becomes normal. You'll have accomplished your goal piece by piece without all the grand fuss and hoopla.

Chapter 18: Original of the Species - “Money is nothing more than a tool with which you can create the life you truly want.” The hard part is identifying what you truly want, and making the change to get there. You won't get different results from repeating the same experiment, and you can't get any closer to your dream life if you're too scared to to make a change.

Chapter 19: 11 O'Clock Tick Tock – Review: The most important thing about personal finance is knowing yourself, the second most important thing is setting concrete goals, the world is a random place, the most valuable thing in the world is time, the more supportive people you have in your life, the better, the fewer unsupportive people in your life, the better, blaming others for your problems is a dead end, improve and educate yourself, karma always comes around, there are very few aspects of your life that can't be changed.  

New to The Thrifty Techie?

The Thrifty Techie is a place for me to share my thoughts on topics too geeky to discuss in my day to day life.  As a result, the random content I do share on this blog covers such a wide range of topics that it can be hard for new visitors to pinpoint exactly what they can expect to find here in the future.  I'm not 100% sure of what to expect either, but I created this little guide for newcomers to help users ease into the current direction of the blog.  Even if you're a regular reader, it may be worth a quick check as I'll try to update it with links to my favorite posts as often as I can.

I've also made couple other small changes you may not have noticed.  I have a link to the RSS feed you can use to subscribe to this blog at the bottom of the page.  And I've also started tagging my posts by category such as tutorial, book review, or editorial.  You can view and sort posts by these tags by using the labels on the right hand side of this page.  That's it for all the new changes. Hope you enjoy!

P2P Redesign

I've already written about P2P.org as one of my favorite places for free classes earlier this year, but a major site re-design along with some new features deserves a second mention here.

As you can see, the new home page makes it much easier to get started and start signing up for classes. Navigation throughout the site is just as simple and intuitive as the homepage.

In addition to the new layout, there are two major changes you'll see right away. The first tweak you'll notice is how much more social P2P feels. As a signed in user you are taken to your profile page where you can post comments that all of your followers can see. You can also find and follow and friends, regardless of whether they are in the same class as you or not. Another feature I really like is that you can follow a class without being an active participant. This is useful if you want to check out what a class is like before taking the plunge.

The second thing I noticed was that classes are now organized as groups. Groups are a place where group members cooperate to create tasks. Each task is like a new wiki page where any member can contribute to the page. The purpose of these pages look pretty open ended. I've seen it used as a place to post homework, describe course objectives, or hold an online discussions.

That's it for the major changes. They have a bunch of new classes open for registration. Obviously a lot of it is going to be tech related, but they also have a School of Social Innovation, and a School of the Mathematical Future. I'm keeping my eye on a beginners blogging course myself.

Here is the full listing of all available courses.

What is Cloud Computing

I hear the term, "cloud computing" used in a lot of different ways. I think at this point, cloud computing is just a broad marketing term or buzz word that different tech services can throw around to mean whatever they want. It's really similar to how the term 4G doesn't have to follow any technical specification anymore. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile can create whatever technology they want and brand it as 4G. Just like any company can create any service and call it cloud computing.  I don't have any problem with these terms being thrown around like this except that it can sometimes be confusing. Check out these Windows 7 commercials to see what I mean:

Family Photo To The Cloud - Windows 7

Airport To The Cloud - Windows 7

Boxmas To The Cloud - Windows 7

To me, commercials like these talk about these neat features while saying the word, “cloud,” but don't really pinpoint the connection between the feature, and what cloud computing is. So here is my attempt at a basic definition.

Cloud computing can be categorized into three basic functions. It can probably be further split into more specialized uses but I don't think the differences beyond these categories are important.

Infrastucture as a Service (IaaS) – The first category is IaaS. In the Academic world, many professions need the power of massive super computers to analyze large sets of data, or run complex simulations. In the past, this meant that every researcher had to solve this problem individually.

For example, say I had a company that was interested in researching tornado path prediction methods. One of my employees wants to look at every single recorded tornado in the U.S. And check if there are any correlations between tornado path, temperature, ground slope, wind speeds, humidity, and hundreds of other variables. The only way I can run through the millions of possibilities and check for patterns is with the help of a super computer.

In the past, a company like this may not have the money to purchase expensive super computers, and hire technical staff to maintain and troubleshoot any problems that occur. However IaaS means that a cloud provider already has this equipment and wants to rent it out as a service to people like me. IaaS is renting computing time on high quality hardware so you don't have to buy and maintain it yourself. One such service is Amazon's EC2 service allowing you to rent its computing power by clock speed, bandwith, or time. This means I no longer need to worry about purchasing, installing and maintaining new equipment, or sinking money into something I may not need a month from now. All I have to do is pass the simulation and data to my new army of rented super computers and wait for the results.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) – Platform as a Service is a way of giving the developer somewhere to host his software. Time for another example. Lets say I'm starting a new online gaming company. I'll have to buy some servers and networking equipment to host my software on the internet where customers can find and play the games I create.

The problem I've encountered is I have no way of knowing how much traffic I'm going to receive, which in turn gives me no clue as to how much servers I'll need to start off with. Overestimating my traffic could leave my company in debt with no way to pay off the huge server farm I just built. Underestimating the amount of traffic would be even worse. My games wouldn't be able to reach anyone at all if my equipment is overwhelmed. Even if I somehow do manage to guess the correct amount of equipment to buy at first, I'll need to throw it out and move to larger and more powerful equipment once my company starts to grow. PaaS allows me to just give my software to a provider, and pay for the actual traffic I receive with no guesswork or upgrading involved. Just pay as you go.

Software as a Service (SaaS) – This one is the category that most consumers are concerned with. All this means is that someone somewhere has built a service and can offer you any amount of features through some type of data connection. For example, dropbox gives me access to my files anywhere I have a data connection, the Amazon music locker gives me access to my music from any internet connected device, or I can collaborate on a document from remote locations on something like google wave.   

Beginners Guide to Dropbox

Dropbox is a service I would recommend to anyone who had the time to listen. Unfortunately, not many people enjoy discussing favorite software and services so I'll just have to settle for posting my thoughts right here.

So what is dropbox? - I originally installed dropbox as a solution for keeping my school documents synced across multiple computers. But after being a loyal user for a few years now, I realize the powers of dropbox reach far beyond this. Dropbox is the single most easy, robust, and most importantly free back up service I know of. It mirrors your files online so that if anything happens to your computer, your files are still safe in the cloud.

How does it work? - This is by far my favorite thing about dropbox. All you do is install dropbox, and designate which folders you want it to watch. And thats it! Any files created, altered, copied or dragged into your designated dropbox folders are now instantly backed up online. You now have instant, hassle free back up.

What else can I do? - The bread and butter of dropbox is the cloud syncing. But now that your files are online, you've got access to some really nice features.

recover previous versions of any file – dropbox keeps track of every version of every file that gets synced (up to 30 days in the free version). This means that you can roll back any school paper or photoshop file to any previous version you want.

share photos – any folder created within the default photo folder of dropbox creates a new photo gallery. Just drop your photos in here and anyone can view your new gallery just by sharing the public link with them.

share any other file – just like the default photo folder, any file in your shared folder gets a public link you can share as well. This feature has saved me more than once with files to large, or code snippets that aren't accepted as email attachments.

Easy Ways to Get More Free Space – the free account for dropbox comes with only 2 gigabytes of online storage. But you can easily get up to about 13 gigabytes for free by completing some simple tasks, and referring some friends.

1.  Once you sign up for your free account, just click on the getting started tab and complete some easy tasks like taking the tour for up to 250 MB of free space.

2.  The next stop is dropbox.com/free where you can score up to 1.25 GB for completing tasks like following dropbox on twitter or facebook. 

3.  Although things get a little tougher at this point the rewards are well worth it. You get 250 MB for each friend you refer and sign up to dropbox, and 500 MB for each referal using a .edu address.

4.  About once a year, dropbox holds a dropquest, a online scavenger hunt that awards everyone with up to 1 GB just for participating.

5.  And last but not least, yes there are easter eggs. Through the year dropbox will give out various amounts of free space on different holidays or special events so keep an eye out for these.

So thats it for the basics of Dropbox. If you're an advanced user, you can try out some of these creative and interesting hacks to get some additional use out of dropbox. Maximum PC has a nice list of 15 dropbox hacks, Lifehacker has it's own list of clever ways to use dropbox, and Ars Technica has a specialty list for dropbox users on a Mac.

Why Nobody Wants My Advice

Not too long ago, I asked my parents for my first keyboard as a graduation present. I've always wanted to learn the piano but don't know anything about shopping for a keyboard. I had been trying to research this topic online the night before but was quickly overwhelmed with all the online advice I found. This incident quickly reminded me of how my own advice giving technique has evolved over the years.

When people come to me for tech advice, the answer I have in my head is usually a combination of complex algorithms and calculations. This is because my advice is usually about something I'm very enthusiastic about. For example, people in my family often come to me for advice when looking for a new computer. The problem is that I'm aware of so many different brands, models, pros and cons of different spec combinations, special features, advantages offered from all the different distributors, return policies and protection plans, or even options for upgrading current hardware. I could write an entire Thesis about all the available options. But no one wants to hear any of this, they would be overwhelmed and frustrated just like I was when shopping around for my keyboard.

Today my approach is much simpler. I still have the same thoughts swirling around in my head, but I now try to limit myself to only two questions. What is the budget, and what will it be used for. I make assumptions about all the rest and give only one or two choices for them to choose from.

Lesson Learned: Some people, including myself, just don't want to hear all the options. They would much rather have a clear specific action that they can take. Even now, I remember how relieved I felt when I got to the first local music shop and told the salesman that I was just a beginner looking for a first keyboard to learn on. He new exactly what to recommend and it made everything much easier than I had made it out to be. Lesson learned!

Fantasy Box Office

In my junior year of college, a bunch of friends and I started a fantasy football league together. We've all had so much fun in this league that we've continued it every year since. The only downside to this league is that it excludes all of my friends who don't follow football on a level that allows them to compete in the league. This is why I was so excited when my favorite fantasy podcast started describing a game that would bring all the fantasy goodness to a more general audience. The game is called Fantasy Box Office.

The basic goal of Fantasy Box Office is to draft a list of 10 movies that will out earn all of your competitors lists in total box office earnings. Here are the official rules I've played around with and settled on after listening to some different ideas from the podcast:

1. Decide on the length of the season – I'm going to go with Independence Day (July 4) to Labor Day (September 5) since this time block holds a lot of great Summer releases. But you can shorten or extend the season to suit your needs.

2. Draft your roster – Use a site like comingsoon.net to help you create a list of 10 movies you think will make the most money during your season. To make things more interesting, you can enforce a rule excluding all sequels and prequels, eliminating easy choices like X-Men, Harry Potter, or Transformers.

3. Put your list in order – Put your list in order by what you think will be the biggest earners to the smallest earners. At the end of the season, you get a 5 Million Dollar bonus for any movie that you put in the correct order.

4. Track the results – Have the biggest geek of your group gather everyone's movie list and post them on the internet where everyone can see. Then once a week or so, use a site like boxofficemojo.com to track and update the box office earnings of everyone's list.

5. Crown the winner – At the end of your season, add up the total box office earnings of your list including any bonuses. The roster with the highest earnings is declared the winner!

So that's it for the basic “easy” version of the game. If you're a big movie buff, you can increase the difficulty by replacing your movie list with an auction style draft, or introducing additional point systems such as durability, and rankings. Rules for this style can be found here.

Travel Spending Do's and Don'ts

This nice gadget shopping guide over at The Technium inspired these rules of thumb for household purchases at The Simple Dollar. Since I'm still fresh off my trip, here is my list of vacation spending tips:

Do pay for location – One of our best decisions of the entire trip was deciding to pay a little extra to stay in downtown during our time in Chicago. We had originally planned to stay outside the city and just catch the bus into downtown until one of our friends who lived in the area convinced us that it was worth the extra cash to stay downtown. Being in the middle of all the action allowed us to easily catch a little breather back at the hotel between our day activities and night life. We didn't have to worry about catching the last bus out of town, and it was nice to be able to walk outside and find something to eat at any time of the day or night.

Don't pay for tours – This doesn't include specialty tours like say a tour of a baseball park where they bring you on the field, in the press and luxury boxes, and even in the club house. When I say don't pay for tours, I mean don't pay for someone to take you around to see the Empire State Building, Central Park, and Statue of Liberty while you're in New York. You can research all the hotspots of your destination before hand and check it out yourself. You will find time and time again that you're spending unexpected amounts of time at places you wouldn't have thought were that interesting. Something you don't have the freedom to do on a scheduled tour. One of my experiences with this was an impromptu rock skipping contest a friend sucked me into while checking out the Mississippi River (I won two orange juices).

Don't pay for a travel guide – We ended up throwing out the travel guide when we followed some bad advice it gave us in Harlem. Instead we relied on yelp for our dining choices, which has a much wider range of places to choose from anyway, and we relied on our previous research of the city to find things to do during the day. For the second time in this post, the value of great planning and researching your destinations is priceless.

Do bring plenty of cash – The most annoying repeating charge I ran into was ATM fees. I brought about $150 in cash thinking that would be plenty for a three week road trip. Many of the restaurants we stopped by during long driving stretches were in the middle of nowhere and accepted cash only. The restaurants that did accept credit card would often put our entire table on one tab, forcing us to split it using cash. Add in the public transportation cost, parking, and hotel tips in the bigger cities and we were all out of cash within the first week

Do risk it all – risking it all became our motto on this trip. It didn't always work. We ended up wasting money and time trying to get into the Jimmy Fallon Show, and ball park tour in D.C. But most times it was well worth it. In Boston we risked buying front row seats for a Red Sox game that had an extremely high chance of raining out again just like the night before. It turned out to be a great game, we got a ball from one of the home team players, and it turned out to be one of the best experiences of the trip. As a rule of thumb, I would say if you have a chance at a lifetime experience, it's worth the small risk of some wasted time or money.   

Stack Exchange (staying in touch)

I was listening to the Baseball Today podcast from ESPN when Eric Karabell described what he called a stack exchange.  The basic idea is that Eric will keep a stack of his favorite articles he uncovers throughout the week.  This stack of articles contains mostly interesting takes on player performance and comparisons, with maybe a bold prediction or two thrown in.  At the end of the week, he'll send this stack of articles to his buddy, and his buddy will send his own stack of articles back to Eric.  They'll both read each others articles and have something to talk about whenever they run into each other on the road.  I thought this was very cool, and after expanding on the idea a bit, I'm ready to start my very own stack exchange.

The purpose of having a stack exchange:

1.  The biggest reason pushing me to start a stack exchange is wanting to stay in touch with friends.  This is my 6th year in college now, most of my friends have graduated and scattered around the West Coast.  I love to hear about all the new adventures everyone is up to these days, but it's a little different not having those shared experiences and inside jokes like we used to.  Getting to read some of what everyone else is reading may allow me to feel a little more present in there lives. 

2.  I don't read Glamour Magazine, but I do enjoy an occasional article demystifying body language of the dating world, or an interesting poll breaking down the most popular places to meet people in my age group.  Having a stack exchange might be a convenient way to expose myself to some new and interesting worlds out there without having to do all the exploring on my own.

3.  My last reason for wanting to try this is that it's just so simple and so little effort compared to the amount of enjoyment I think I'll get out of it.  The only real two steps for doing a stack exchange are:

  -Create a mailing list with everyone who is participating in your stack exchange.

  -Every week, everyone in the exchange will forward 1-3 articles they find interesting.

Some fun suggestions to try out:

1. Number each stack exchange you make so that you can celebrate mini anniversaries.  For example you can have a group video chat on your 100th stack exchange and talk about what your favorite articles have been so far, or maybe have a little gift exchange for the 1000th.

2. Start conversation threads within your exchange.  After the first person sends out his articles, everyone else should send their own articles by replying to the first e-mail sent.  This keeps all the articles nicely organized by week which makes it easier to send comments and feedback articles.

3. Request articles! Maybe you heard something on the news about the new iPhone 5 but you don't know much about it.  You can just request your tech buddy to drop an article describing some cool new features or maybe a timetable for availability.

4.  Have a standard format for emails.  I'm going to try article title, followed by short description or note, followed by a link to the article.

And that's about it.  I'm starting my first stack exchange this weekend.  I'll try some of my own suggestions and experiment a little.  I'll try to update this post with any success or failure stories along with any tips I find useful.

Google Reader Reading Flow

After returning from vacation last week, one of my first priorities was emptying out my Google Reader. catching up on the 1000+ posts that built up over the past month would be intimidating without solid Google Reader technique, so I thought this would be a perfect time to share my best tips and tricks for speeding up the Reader process.

First step is to jump into your settings and organize your feeds into folders. I keep a folder for each category of blogs I follow including tech, productivity, sports, personal finance, forums I participate in, and a folder for my favorite blogs which I've named “Stars.”

Change a feeds folder with the 'Add to a folder' drop down menu

The next step in my system is to change the Google Readers default view to something a little more practical. Switching to list view displays the blog name, date, and article name on a single line, instead of the entire article shown in the expanded view.

Change to list view by clicking 'list' in the top right corner

Combining the list view with my favorite Google Reader keyboard shortcuts cut out extra minutes out of my reader time that can really add up.

Shift + P and Shift + N – use this shortcut to navigate between previous and next subscription feeds in your reader.

Shift + X – open and close folders with this shortcut.

Shift + O – once you've landed on the correct feed use this shortcut to open and view all posts from that feed.

P and N – use the 'p' and 'n' keys to navigate between articles in a post.

O – use the 'o' key to open the article into expanded mode so you can read the entire article. Press 'o' again to send the article back into list view.

M – if you navigate to an article that doesn't look interesting, use the 'm' key to mark that article as read.

V – use the 'v' key to open an article from the original blog it came from in a new browser tab.

CTRL + W – close the new browser tab and return to your reader with this shortcut.

S – use 's' to star an item for later reading.

G then S – hit 'g' then 's' to view all your starred items

These are all the shortcuts I need in my daily routine, but here is a link to the full set of keyboard shortcuts if you want to explore. And that's about it! It may not seem like much but I would estimate it shaves a full 10 minutes per day compared to scrolling through expanded posts with my mouse. One final tip for anyone stuck in a situation like mine. If you have thousands of posts to get through, I find it useful just going through all of it and starring items you want to check out instead of reading them. After emptying out your entire Reader this way, you can go back to your starred items with the 'g then s' shortcut.   

Vacation

First off, sorry for the lack of preparation leading to the long hiatus of this blog, but here are some pictures from my nice long vacation!

Fenway Park

casting our shadows on the Lincoln Memorial

the Mississippi River

our road trip route

Times Square

The Bean

St. Louis Arch

pit stop in the snow

largest complete T-Rex fossil in the world

DIY: How to setup GTD gmail

This is a tutorial on how to setup your gmail inbox to better match your GTD workflow.  you can find my previous post on GTD if you're not sure what I'm talking about right now.  Otherwise here is an example of what you'll be able to do with your new GTD inbox:

As you can see, you'll have sections to place your 'Action Required' and 'Scheduled' items.  These sections will sound familiar to you if you're a GTD fan, otherwise I will explain there uses  further as we get to them in this tutorial.


Importing Email: 

We first need to create a master gmail account.  This will be the account where you will be able to check the mail from all other gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Live or .edu email accounts you may own.  To do this, we need to make sure that mail from all of your accounts get imported here. If you only use one email account you can skip this section.

1.  Click on the settings icon in the top right corner of gmail. Then click on settings. This will bring you to your general mail settings.

2. Click on the ‘Accounts and Import’ tab, scroll down and click on ‘Add POP3 account.’

3. A new window asking for your email address will pop up.  Enter the email address of the account you want to import to your master gmail account and click ‘Next.'

4.  Now fill out the username and password for the account being imported.  Select the correct POP Server and Port number from the drop down menu.  If you are importing a school or work email account, you may need to ask your IT department which Server and Port to use.

5. Check the box ‘label incoming messages:’ , this means that any message imported from this account will be labeled with the email address that it was imported from. Click ‘Add Acount.’

6. The next window will ask if you would like to be able to send mail from this new account.  Make sure ‘Yes’ is checked so that you are able to send mail as this imported account, without having to leave your master gmail account. Click ‘Next Step.’ 

7. On the next window, enter the name you want to appear in the ‘from: ‘ field when you send email.  Click ‘Next Step.’

8. On the next window, Click ‘Send Verification.’ Then check the inbox of the account you just set up import for and look for the confirmation email. Click on the confirmation link to complete imort setup.

9. repeat steps 1-8 for any other email accounts you would like to import into your master gmail account.

Setting Up Labels:

1.  Click on the settings icon in the top right corner of gmail. Then click on settings. This will bring you to your general mail settings.

2. Click on the ‘Labels’ tab, scroll down and click on ‘Create a new Label.’

3. Type in ‘1GTD’, click on ‘Create’

4. repeat step 3 and create tags for ‘1GTD/Action-Required’ and ‘1GTD/Scheduled’

Setting Up Multiple Inboxes:

1.  Click on the settings icon in the top right corner of gmail. Then click on settings. This will bring you to your general mail settings.

2. Click on the ‘Labs’ tab, scroll down and check the box to enable ‘Multiple Inboxes.’ There should now be a tab for ‘Multiple inboxes’ in your email settings.

3. Click on Multiple inboxes in your email settings.  Copy and paste the following search query into the text box labeled ‘Pane 0: ‘

Copy this: is:1GTD/Scheduled

4. Enter the title, ‘Scheduled’ into the Panel title for Pane 0.

5. Copy and paste the following search query into the text box labeled ‘Pane 1: ‘

Copy this: is:1GTD/Action-Required

6. Enter the title, ‘Action Required’ into the Panel title for Pane 1.

7. On the bottom of the ‘Multiple inboxes’ settings page, there is a setting labeled, ‘Extra panels positioning: ‘. Select the option that says, ‘Above the inbox.’

Using the System:

1.  The purpose of this system is to be able to process any email that comes in so that your inbox doesn’t grow out of control.  Your goal is to keep your inbox at zero messages.  I still can’t quite keep my inbox at zero, but here are the steps I use to get as close as I can.

2. When you open any email, you don’t want to close it until you are done dealing with it.  If a friend sends you a message asking for a good recommendation for a great blog on personal finance, do Not close the email thinking you’ll get back to it later.  Go ahead and search for a good blog, and reply with a link right then and there.  When you are done you can archive the email to be done with it.

3. Many times you will get a email that you just can’t deal with at the moment.  For example, I just got an email from Best Buy asking me to spend a gift certificate I’ve won.  But I want to wait until the item I want from Best Buy goes on sale before I pick it up.  Since it’s impossible to complete this email at this time,  I can click on ‘move to’ at the top of the email, and then select ‘1GTD Action Required.’

This email is now moved out of my default inbox, and into my separate inbox labeled, ‘Action Required’.  This new inbox is where I keep all the emails I can’t quite complete just yet.  When the item I want finally does go on sale and I make the purchase with my gift card, I can remove the ‘Action Required’ Label and it will automatically be archived.  


4. Another type of mail I frequently receive is a message regarding an event I’ve commited to.  I’ve already recorded the event in my calendar, but I don’t want to get rid of the message quite yet because it has all the event info such as time, place, descriptions and other reminders.  So I’ll again click on ‘move to’, and select ‘1GTD Scheduled’. 

This email is now moved out of my default inbox, and into my separate inbox labeled, ‘Scheduled’.  This new inbox is where I keep all the emails regarding events already listed in my calendar. And that's all there is to it! Here's another picture of what your inbox would look like now: