Simpler and Simplerer

After using the Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage all of my to do items for months, I ultimately had to set it aside. I’m just not up to the task of maintaining the system anymore; not that it was particularly difficult, but it did, on occasion, ‘hiccup’ on me, and to do items and projects would fall out of sync with one another. I just don’t think I have the energy in life right now to troubleshoot things like that that just shouldn’t need troubleshooting.

(This is really the fault of the whole damn concept of synchronization, which, at this stage in the maturity of software, is unbelievably anemic. But that’s another discussion entirely.)

Instead, I’m turning to Mori, a simple note-keeper application from Jesse Grossjean’s Hog Bay Software. Mori is a descendant of Hog Bay Notebook that adds some nifty new features like robust Spotlight support and, er, some others that I don’t really use. Mostly, I turn to Mori because it does what Hog Bay Notebook did so very well: conveniently bundle together what are essentially RTF-based TextEdit files into a hierarchical file system. Put more simply, it takes a bunch of not particularly fancy text documents and allows you to edit and manage them in a single window. There’s no context lists, no project hierarchies, no synchronization or database — none of the things that kGTD does. It’s dead simple.

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Housebreaking an iMac

iMacThere’s a witch hunt going on inside my new iMac; last night I made the resolution that I would excise from my hard drive as many applications as possible that rely on Apple’s Rosetta. That’s the supposedly invisible translation layer that Apple provides on its Intel-based Macintoshes in order that users may run programs originally written for the platform’s previous motherboard tenant, the PowerPC chip.

The reason is that, after several weeks of usage, I’m sufficiently fed up with the slow application switch times, the spinning beach balls and the unfortunately frequent crashes that I encounter using this Intel-based machine. I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to blame Rosetta (I suppose it could be the relatively paltry 1 Gigabyte of RAM that I have installed, but if that’s a more accurate cause of my troubles, I’ll also say it’s an unreasonable one) but forgoing as much ‘dynamic translation’ as possible seems like as good a tactic as any for increasing the responsiveness of my machine.

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Selling Jeffrey Zeldman on Selling

Jeffrey Zeldman for AIGA NY Small TalksHere I was thinking how clever I am. I came up with this idea to conduct a brief interview with Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman to build up a little advance buzz for his Small Talks appearance next Tue 17 Oct for AIGA New York.

Since the Small Talks series is a forum for design leaders to discuss subjects close to their hearts (and not necessarily expansive career overviews) in relatively intimate surroundings (only about a hundred seats are available for each event), I figured it would be a good opportunity for Jeffrey to preview some of the things he’d be talking about, sort of whet everyone’s appetites. And, wanting to make this event as much of a success as it can be, I also thought it would be a great way to help sell some tickets, too.

I don’t know what I was thinking, because Jeffrey Zeldman, clearly, needs no additional salesmanship. Before I even had the opportunity to publish the interview I’m running here today, and just one business day after the event’s promotional poster even went out in the mail to AIGA members, the event has sold out. All the seats are filled. I should’ve known better.

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