The Quest for Organization

Brad — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:07:29 +0000

At work, I’m still (even after a year) experimenting with a “perfect setup” to keep track of my tasks, emails and other work-related things. My biggest thing is making sure all of my information is (relatively) easy to access from a command line since from time to time I have to log in from home. Of course, I could go through the trouble of setting up something like FreeNX or the like, but I’d rather not have to deal with that. So right now, I’m playing with the following:

Mutt – email
Remind/Wyrd – reminders / calendar
Todo.txt – Task list

I’m finding this setup is not quite effective as I like. I have to flip between three different terms in a screen session, need to remember keyboard shortcuts for things, and then also hope I have everything in either Remind or my todo.txt file. This setup is working for the most part, but it’s slowing me down a bit. For a while, I was using Thunderbird with the Lightning plugin for tasks and email, but I can’t really access that outside of the office without X forwarding, which I’ve found is painfully slow. There’s always the option of just reconfiguring mutt to point at Thunderbird’s mail directory, but that doesn’t help me much as far as tasks go.

I’m also trying to figure out the best way to organize notes. The setup for that is rather overkill: Mediawiki. I’ve got Apache, PHP and Mysql running on my workstation, and the wiki is installed. The more I think about it, though, the more it seems a little too overkill. I had tried Tiddlywiki, but that wasn’t robust enough for me. I think I’m going to do a bit more research and see if I can find a decent balance, perhaps something not dependent on a database. I’ve got a lot of information, but it’s pretty much tossed in the wiki without too much categorization. I’m thinking something with tagging would work best.

Atlanta Year 1: Complete!

Brad — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:24:15 +0000

So it’s been a year now since I’ve been in the Atlanta area, and it’s been a good year. I’m doing well at work, even if I deal with complete idiots at times. My love life is fantastic and complete, as Bethany and I are now husband and wife. Fatherhood has been great to me, even if it’s been a little stressful at times. All in all, the decision to move was the best decision I’ve ever made. I have some minor social issues I have to work out personally, but otherwise I’m just fine.

At work, gone are the days of me muddling through COBOL and Perl code on Windows. These days, I’m supporting a major application within the company on UNIX/Linux for various clients worldwide. There’s something interesting about dealing with customers from another section of the world, and this job is definitely diverse in that fact. It’s also diverse because I’m not dealing with the same things day in and day out. Sure, I may be working on a particular issue for a few days, but once it’s done I’m on to something completely different. I hardly ever do development, except for maintaining our internal web applications, and I miss it. Not COBOL/Perl, but coding in general. Guess I need to find myself a side project to play with.

Would I do this all over again? Yes, I would in a heartbeat. I’m a southern convert, even if I still have some Yankee blood in me.

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The Quest for Organization

Atlanta Year 1: Complete!