A Few Notes For A Thursday

Just a brief mind-dump to clear out some clutter before I move on to other tasks:

1. I have been listened to the soundtrack to all 3 of the Lord of the Rings movies this morning. I tried listening to them while reading Lord of the Rings but I can’t listen to music and read fiction at the same time. So I’ve been doing it this morning. It’s pretty good music to work to.
2. I’m 72 pages into said Lord of the Rings. It’s slow going for three reasons: (a) I’m savoring it this time around; (b) I’m taking a lot of notes for a post or two that will follow my reading; (c) my time is somewhat limited to read. But I’ve been amazed how Tolkien can pull you so deeply into another world that you can actually see it, smell it, feel it as if you were there. This, despite having seen the movies.
3. No new progress on NaNoWriMo. I’m still regrouping, but should wrap that up today. That will give me 15 days to finish the draft of my novella, which I still expect to come in around 25,000 words. I’m not totally stressed about this because I’m starting to see the pieces come together as they should.
4. Evernote has released version 5.0 for the Mac desktop. It is a complete redesign and is pretty amazing. I’ve been using the beta for some time now and they’ve made tons of useful improvements, so if you use it on a Mac, I’d recommend you check it out.
5. Yesterday was Wednesday and that meant another edition of Lifehacker’s “How I Work” series. There, I learned about Asana, a very light-weight, web-based task management tool. It’s got a decent API as well. I’ve been using todotxt, but I am now experimenting with Asana and seeing if I can use the API to get the tasks I’ve completed into Evernote the way I do with todotxt. Stay tuned on this.
6. Today is Thursday and that means the next installment of Grady Hendrix excellent “The Great Stephen King Reread.” Last night I finally got around to reading his installment on The Shining: The Movie which was both remarkably funny, well-written, and made me want to see the movie. (Yes, I’ve read the book, but no I haven’t see this movie. Remember this?)
7. Came across this post about “When Is The Best Time To Blog” courtesy of a friend. Interesting post, but I also discovered this blog by Jenn Shurkus, which I thought was cool.
8. I generally don’t watch TV, but I was reading while Kelly was watching last night’s episode of The Neighbors and I found I couldn’t help listening in. It was hilarious. If I did watch TV, I’d watch that show. I’m just afraid that the humor will be too far over a wide audiences head. But it was side-splitting funny to me.
9. I rarely use cash anymore. It’s easier just to swipe my card. But I had some cash today and figured I might as well use it when paying for something at Rite Aid. I handed over my $10 bill and discovered that they were out of $1 bills. I had to wait around for change. This would not have happened if I’d swiped my card and it has soured me on using cash.

Rather than try to force a #10 in, I’m calling it quits. Those are my notes for Thursday. What does everyone else have going on today?