Writes Code, Fiction
I’ve never been a huge fan of Kiplinger’s, but they do provide solid advice sometimes. I haven’t been needing as much financial advice (at least not the Hot Stock Top kind the magazines use to fill in around the stuff that’s the same every month) since I finally got most of my stuff automated (and invested in a single general mutual fund). But in the February issue, they’re really pushing it…
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Cause they’re near-sighted!
Get it? Get it?
Anyway, if you hadn’t heard (I first spotted it at my non-blood relative with the same last name’s blog), Warner Brothers and Netflix have reached a deal whereby Netflix won’t let people get new release DVDs (or Blu-Ray discs) from them until 28 days after the release of the DVD/BRD.
Netflix gets some sort of discount on the physical discs and also will supposedly get to stream some additional movies that they might not have gotten otherwise.
Conclusion: Netflix smart. WB stupid.
That said, the terms of the deal don’t actually affect me. I mean, the last “new release” that I got from Netflix was Wolverine, and that was about 6 months after it came out (so, definitely outside any sort of 28 day waiting period).
If WB was the smart one here, they would have done the opposite of what they actually did and told Netflix, release our DVDs whenever the hell you want, but give us a bigger slice of the old (or new, I guess) streaming pie. I mean, do the execs at WB not think that streaming video is the future of the business? Or are they so pompous as to think that they’ll just renegotiate another sweet deal once streaming video becomes mainstream (pun intended)?
Initially it made me want to boycott Netflix for kowtowing to the studio, and to somehow try to demonstrate that I disapproved of the deal, but then I realized that as long as Netflix can continue to increase their power in the streaming space, then it’s a good deal. That, and my wife and still have 2 seasons of How I Met Your Mother to marathon, and the third and fourth seasons are more expensive to buy outright than the first two.
From TechCrunch
PoketyPoke is a new service that calls you when you have a conference call and connects you automatically. Why it took someone that long to think of and implement this is beyond me. This is like GTD times 80 bazillion. If implemented correctly, you’d never have to remember a conference call again (which could be a problem, I suppose if you’re supposed to give a presentation or something).
If you were me, you’d never have to worry about the timing of your meeting reminders (although I’ve got a pretty effective system down at this point).
I suppose the only downside is that is probably won’t be able to use Skype to call in for free. But, I think you can get a SkypeIn number for somewhere around $5 per month, so if that’s less than you’re paying for your normal phone or mobile because of conference calls sucking up all your plan minutes, then it might be worth it. Especially worth it if it means you never miss a meeting again.
From Read/Write Web.
I just still feel like I’m missing something. I can’t get past the fact that Twitter is not a feed reader, yet people insist on using it as one. I mean, if I were following all the people whose feeds I read on Twitter instead of using Google Reader, I don’t feel like I would see even half the posts that I do now. Granted, I skip over half of them anyway, but at least I know that I’m consciously skipping things I don’t want to see instead of just losing them to a Devil’s Kettle whirlpool of information.
Here’s the Top 5 Reasons I Still Use An RSS Reader:
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When October/November rolls around, (aka Meteorological Winter) I go into full Hot Chocolate/Mocha mode. I’m talking about at least one a day. Sometimes as many as three. Now, of course, if I was paying retail rates for that, I’d be broke by the time Spring came again. But, lucky for me, I’ve trained my taste buds to accept my own special mix, which is not only super cheap, but also good for you, and fast to make.
You’ll need:
14-16 ounces of hot water
1 packet of Wild Harvest Organic Rich Hot Cocoa Mix
2 Nescafe® Premium Coffee Sticks, Decaf
Mix first three ingredients.
Done.
110 calories.
I tried making this into a Facebook Status Update but it kept trying to expand itself into something more. So, here we are.
The beginning goes: Do I lose geek points because I don’t like real-time communication?
Of course, my friends on Facebook would need some explanation because most of them aren’t anywhere close to as geeky as I am… and I didn’t feel like trying to cram it all in to the Facebook character count. And even if I did post it on Facebook, well, how many people are going to see it? And there in lies the first crux of the post. The second crux is that I don’t like (and I’m sure many people can relate to this) the Information Overload that comes with real time communications.
First Crux
When you have something like Facebook that currently shows either a) everything all your friends have posted, or b) an algorithmically selected subset of the firehose, well, most people are going to opt for the second because trying to look at everything is pretty much impossible (especially without an RSS feed – even if most people still don’t know what RSS actually is).
Second Crux
Have you ever tried to follow your Facebook feed (or Twitter Stream) in real-time? It’s like watching a TV show that you really want to be good, but is mostly just crap punctuated by a good moment every once in a while. Me, I don’t watch TV shows like that. I want ones that are good all the time. Or, I want to be able to speed through the parts that suck, to read (and respond to) the parts that are actually funny/fascinating. Maybe it’s fun to watch, say, on Christmas or New Year’s Eve when all your friends are updating with what they’re doing. But then, guess what? Your status update becomes: I’m watching my real-time Facebook feed, because you guys are doing cool stuff and I’m sitting in front of my computer. Awesome.
No, not an ad for Facebook (like they really need that?)
This one is for EZTrader, who evidently makes options trading easy…
As tempting as the %75 return per hour sounds, it’s really the strange punctuation and capitalization that made me question the quality of this company. Okay, no. It was the %75 return per hour.
I don’t think I’ll be opening an account with them any time soon.
According to MacDailyNews:
“Apple Inc. acquired online music company Lala Media Inc., possibly signaling an expansion of the computer giant’s music strategy,” Ethan Smith and Yukari Iwatani Kane report for The Wall Street Journal.
Terms of the deal were not available, but there’s this:
“One person with knowledge of the deal, but who was not authorized to discuss it, said that the negotiations originated when Lala executives concluded that their prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim and initiated discussions with Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president in charge of iTunes,” Brad Stone reports for the New York Times. “This person said Apple would primarily be buying Lala’s engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services.“
(Emphasis mine)
Great.
This Could Be Good If
1) Apple uses it to start their own cloud-based music streaming service complete with iPhone app and allows Lala.com users (like me) to transfer all their purchases to the new service. This scenario seems most likely if Apple is indeed basically just buying Lala’s engineers. Of course, the “be good” part of this hinges on Apple letting people move their purchases to the new service. Of course, people who don’t already use Lala won’t give a shit, and Apply might not care enough about the current users of Lala (who are probably a tiny minority of music listeners) to make this sort of transfer available.
2) Apple starts adding their branding muscle to Lala.com, and adds integration with Lala to iTunes. I mean, the service is already set up and seems to be working pretty well. The music syncing app could use some work, but that seems like something that Apply could do pretty well. Then they could add their Genius power to Lala to make it even awesomer (and get people to buy even more music, since the web songs are only 10 cents).
3) Apple does anything as good as Lala without Effing it up. I’m sure there are other possible roadmaps that my feeble mind has yet to conjure into being. As long as Apple doesn’t rip the still beating heart from Lala and stomp on it (as Google has done with Oh So Many Startups), then, it should be okay.
During the live Mindsweeping event on Twitter (@GTDSpecialEvent) I was basically writing down all my “mindsweep material” in a plain text document because when I put Next Actions into Remember The Milk, I like to tag them, put them in a context list, and prioritize them right away.*
Of course, after reviewing the items in that text document, I realized that most of them were either Next Actions or Projects that I needed to then copy and paste into RTM.
So, I kind of “redid” the Mindsweep by putting everything into the Inbox list in RTM and didn’t really eliminate a lot of the things that I’d swept out of my mind because, as I said, they had already sprung from my forehead in the form of Next Actions and Projects.
After filling up my RTM Inbox in this way, I was able to essentially conduct the Mindsweep using RTM and eliminated the step of putting the contents of the sweep somewhere else in the mean time. In the future, this will save me the step of transferring items from the “Mindsweep Dustbin” to RTM, and allow me to Organize those items at my leisure. I think that’s an important part of the Mindsweep because it means that I can sweep away everything so that my mind can detach from those items and focus on things I should be doing, while at the same time, I don’t have to spend the time organizing them unless I want to do it at that time (and if I have the time to do it). As Kelly Forrister tweeted during the Mindsweep:
I don’t think I’ve ever looked back after a GTD mindsweep and said, “Damn, I wish I didn’t do that.” It’s always valuable to me.
When I did the first Mindsweep into the text file, I almost did say “Damn, I wish I didn’t do that” because I realized I’d have to copy and paste a whole bunch of stuff that should really have already been in RTM. Now that I have gone back through and realized how easy it is to let RTM be unstructured, I can do sweep my mind more frequently without worrying that it’s going to hurt my productivity (I don’t ever consider Organizing to be unproductive because it always makes me feel good to clarify things).
To finish things off, here is a post from Kelly Forrister about clearing your mind with a Mindsweep.
* This may sound like I’m trying to capture, process, and organize all in one step. Not the case, I say. If it’s going to one of my RTM lists, then it’s already essentially been captured and processed because it has to have passed through one of my inboxen, and I’ve already decided on a Next Action or I wouldn’t be putting it on the list. So, arriving at the point where it’s been captured and I’ve got a Next Action ready means that it is time for organization. Of course, the whole point of this post is that I want to start using RTM as a capture tool in addition to an organization and review tool.
Nels Wadycki 