he Little Man started kindergarten this week. It meant a new school, and the new school has one of these well-organized systems of picking up your kids at the end of the day. But it can be a bit intimidating the first time. Basically, it works like this: You arrive at the school and pull…
bout a month ago, I automated the process of capturing how much time I spend writing each day, and incorporated that data into my Google Doc Writing Scripts. Here is how this work: I use RescueTime on all of my computers, home and work. RescueTime tracks how much time I spend in various applications, including…
ast summer I retired my voicemail. Voicemail is an antiquated communication mechanism and does not lend itself toward automation or speedy responses. Recently, I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of calls I get from phone numbers that I don’t recognize. About 90% of the time, when I answer these calls, they are solicitations of…
have done a major refactoring of my Google Doc Writing Tracker. Several new features have been added, but the biggest change is that the scripts are not data-driven, making them much easier to setup and configure. If you are using the scripts today, or have been wanting to try them out, you are welcome to…
ne of the most frequent requests I get regarding my Google Writing Tracker is to make my Daily Almanac available as part of those scripts.Ā The wait is over. Today, I pushed out the Daily Almanac the Google Writing Tracker project on GitHub. For those who don’t know, my Google Writing Tracker is a set of…
eginning today, I am doing some alpha testing of the first significant update to my Google Writing Tracker scripts in more than a year. I will be testing these out myself over a period of a week or two before pushing the changes to GitHub. The newest featureĀ is that the writing scripts now track both…
fter my inaugural post forĀ The Daily BeastĀ appeared, I’ve been asked almost daily if the scripts I mentioned in the post are available. TheyĀ are available on GitHub. I put them there last July. I hesitated to mention them in the post on TDB because I didn’t want to come across as promoting my own stuff. But…
get asked from time-to-time about what system I use for my to-do list. I use a plain-text, command-line system developed by Gina Trapani called todo.txt. In concept the system is very simple. There is a text file containing all of my todo items, one item per line. There is another text file containing all of…
have been using the Automatic LinkĀ in my Kia Sorento since December. It is a good little device that plugs into your car’s data port and pulls out all kinds of interesting information about your driving habits. For a while, you needed the iPhone app to browse the data, and the data itself was not extractable…
get questions, every now and then, about the technology ecosystem I use. I figure it’s pretty obvious from my posts, but in order to be perfectly clear, and in order to have a post I can point people to, I’m documenting my technology stack as of today, April 1, 2014. I’ll do this in layers…
esterday, I noticed that my sneakers looked particularly worn out. Moreover, I noticed a significant hole in the left one. I discovered this hole while passing through a puddle. The insides are fairly worn as well, as are the bottoms. I took note of this mostly because it felt like I’d just purchased these shoes.…