The Task Manager of my Dreams (and how I get tasks done)
I've got a task management problem. It might be a bit different from most people's, which may be why I've looked at everything from OmniFocus to Things to TaskPaper and I can't find something that meets my needs.
What I need — and what I can't figure out to do in any of these other applications in a reasonable fashion — is a daily log of what I've accomplished, from which I can cherry-pick and summarize into monthly reports, and then again into annual reports.
I can do this in my current system, which has worked pretty well for three years now. I rely on VoodooPad to keep my to-do list. Every day I assemble tomorrow's to-do list on a page named with the next day's date. This consists of both uncompleted items from that day's to-do list, as well as scheduled calendar appointments.
Dinner Tonight: Thai-ish Yellow Curry with Pork and Kale
Tonight for dinner, I made a Thai-influenced yellow curry with pork and kale. The method is inspired by Mark Bittman, the flavors from several different recipes — and also what I had on hand. The results were scrumptious, and made four relatively modest servings.
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons peanut oil
- 2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
- 1 lb pork, cut into thin bite-sized strips
- 1 dried hot pepper, slit partly open but not cut into pieces
- 1 yellow onion, sliced into bite-sized strips
- 1 tablespoon garam masala
- 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
- 1 bunch dinosaur kale, cut into 2" x 2" squares
- 1 13.5 oz can light coconut milk
- 2 tablespoons fish sauce
- salt and pepper
Procedure
- Heat half the oil in a dutch oven over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add half the ginger. Stir briefly, a minute or two, until it starts to darken slightly.
- Add the pork, and maybe a pinch of salt. Raise the heat to high. Cook, stirring only occasionally, until the pork
is a bit brown. Remove the pork from the pot with a slotted spoon and set aside. - Turn the heat down to medium and add the other half of the oil to the pan. (You can add less if some oil remains.) When it's hot, add the rest of the ginger, and the hot pepper, to the oil. Cook a minute or two, as before.
- Add the onion to the pan, along with the garam masala and turmeric. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion starts to soften, four or five minutes.
- Add the kale to the pan. Cook for a minute or two, tossing and mixing it in. Add the coconut milk, the fish sauce, and a pinch of salt. Cover and cook for three to five minutes, until the kale is intensely green and somewhat lower in volume, and the coconut milk is bubbling.
- Stir the pork back in. When the liquid starts boiling, reduce heat to medium-low and leave partially uncovered until the kale is tender and the sauce is somewhat thickened, about ten minutes. Taste, and adjust salt and pepper as required. Serve over rice.
If I had to do it over again, I might have added a little garlic to the ginger. Or maybe not. And I might have used curry powder instead of garam masala and turmeric, but I didn't have any on hand so that wasn't an option. Also, I used white pepper and for the rice used ruby red jasmine rice, which was delicious and a little bit nutty but still very tender. About as good a weeknight meal as I could imagine.
If you watch a pot, will it actually boil?
I've always thought I have known what "a watched pot never boils" means.
Like many others, I presumed that a pot only seems to boil more slowly when you pay attention to it, and that the best way to make a pot boil "faster" is to distract yourself with another task or thought.
But, while making lamb stew tonight, it occurred to me that I might be incorrect in my understanding. After all, you can make a pot of water boil faster by putting the lid on it, to conserve heat. Maybe it's because I'm presently enjoying Wolf Hall, but it occurred to me that there was a time in the not-too-distant past when cooking required wood, and that wood might be scarce or expensive, at least for some people.
If you're conserving wood or coal, I thought, your cooking fire might keep cool, in a relative sense, by remaining small compared to the pot you were cooking in. It might be that, like a stove on low, the pot's contents might just barely reach a boil with the lid on. And taking the lid off, to check on it, might lower the temperature below boiling.
Thus, I realized, if you constantly watched this pot, leaving it lidless, it would not boil at all!
Does anyone know more about the origin of the idiom, giving the power to confirm or deny this understanding?
Video Chat is a Breaching Experiment
For a while now, I've hated video chat. I've got a policy of more or less refusing or ignoring video chat calls. Now, watching the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, I understand why.
Because, just as Facebook's enforcement of unified identity is a breaching experiment, video chat is a breaching experiment too.
Now, video chat works acceptably in two situations: extremely intimate personal calls (i.e., spouse-to-spouse, or possibly grandparent-to-grandchild) — calls where the absence of staging and the creation of intimacy is itself part of the message — and videoconferencing for business, where each side of the call establishes a stage set, and people are prepared in advance to be on video. (I do think work videoconferencing misses subtle cues of great importance, but that's a separate issue.)
In other cases, however, video chat forces us to be who we are, for whoever is calling, whenever they call. If for example my mom tries to video chat me at 11:30 am, but I've just fallen out of bed and over to my computer, she won't see the me I want to present: active and engaged with the world, neatly groomed, and so on. Or maybe I'm at work, and a buddy from my D&D game calls. Do I really want to present myself to him in jacket and tie, surrounded by corporate beige?
Too bad that soon enough we'll all have the technology on hand that makes it more and more difficult to resist video chat. (Then again, I've kept off of Facebook thus far.) All of us seem to be engaged in that same giant breaching experiment, only without much of a control group.
[Update 12:21 pm PDT: Warren Ellis puts this more succinctly on his twitter: Videocalling deletes the most culturally adopted aspect of a telephone: its ability to facilitate lying.]
Have you seen this article?
Years ago, perhaps as long as a decade ago, I recall reading an article about the British Empire's control of the subcontinent.
Because the British could not actually control India, the article asserted, they collected statistical data about India instead. This statistical picture helped provide the illusion of mastery.
This has stuck in my head, and I use it all the time as a way of describing certain behaviors. But I'd like to point the article out to people, and I can't find it.
My memory is that I would have encountered it sometime between 1998 and 2000, possibly in either Lingua Franca or the Atlantic, but I read widely enough that those may be little more than guesses.
Can anyone help me out with this? So far I've failed with Google, and with an online periodical search on the SPL's web site.
Ubuntu Lucid upgrade report
Friday I upgraded my workstation to Ubuntu's 10.04 release, Lucid Lynx.
First, it wouldn't boot at all: it would hang while mounting USB filesystems.
Then I had to take extra steps to get VMWare server 2.0.2 to run.
Then my Konsole rendered colored and bold fonts incorrectly, which I'm working around by always using bold fonts.
But, overall, it works. It's polished — for a Linux distribution. If my Mac could drive the 30" monitor, though, I'd be using that as my primary workstation.
iPad interface quirk: scrolling frames lack scrollbars
The other day, my friend Geoff reported an iPad fail: an inability to scroll within a frame for a hotel login page, and similarly an inability to scroll in a Google Reader frame.
Geoff's as expert as they come, with computers in general and with Apple products too. He waited in line to get his iPad. But he couldn't figure out how to scroll these frames: scrolling by dragging a finger just scrolled the overall page, not the frame.
The solution is simple: scroll with two fingers in parallel, within the frame.
This is actually documented in the iPad user guide, which is bookmarked in Safari on iPad. One of the perils of a device this easy to use is that nobody reads the manual!
The interface is still quirky: no visible scroll bars even suggest that content overflows the frame. This does save screen real estate, precious on a 9.7" screen. But it can definitely lead to overlooking content, if you don't know that there even is anything to scroll.
Wanted: Serial console for iPad
The one thing I might still need my laptop for, on even a short business trip, would be to use it as a serial console for a headless system. I do that with some frequency, still, and a surprising number of sites just don't have a handy serial terminal.
I'd pay good money for the ability to use my iPad as a serial console, via a null modem and a terminal app as good as iSSH.
iPad: first few days with my fluffy computer
Despite its sleek shape and glossy screen, I can't help but think of my iPad as a "fluffy computer."
Fluffy as in lots of chrome. UI effects that go beyond the necessary. A slick, packaged experience as comfortable and unnecessary as a pillow-top bed in a top-end hotel.
Fluffy as in distracting. I long for the day when iPads, or other tablets, are commonplace. That way I can get work done instead of discussing how I might or might not get work done with the iPad.
Fluffy as in what can I do with this thing? It's obviously the greatest computer in the world for reading the Internet while on the couch, and an excellent if pricey replacement for both portable DVD players and eBooks like the Kindle. But it's not clear to me, yet, what I can do with an iPad that I can't do with anything else.
Like others, I've begun to notice that my iPhone now feels like a miniaturized light-on-features iPad rather than the pad feeling like an overgrown iPhone. That's a good sign. But if replacing portable DVD players and eBooks, and replacing laptops for light business trips is the sum total of its use, it's not going to be more than a niche player. I'm going to prefer it to laptops for short business trips, but if I'm on the road long enough I'll probably need to bring a "real" computer with me.
Most of all, though, the iPad is fluffy as in clouds. All of my contact and calendar data comes over the Internet, from Mobile Me and my work's Exchange server. The mail lives at Google and on Exchange, too. It's a great platform for blogging to WordPress, but saving local drafts doesn't count for a whole lot. Evernote works well, though I wish that there was a way to use and sync VoodooPad from the iPad.
GoodReader, 1Password, WebEx, YouTube, Maps — everything on the pad relies on, or at least syncs via, the cloud.
I'm not yet sure what the real "killer app" for the iPad will be, but I'm pretty sure it too will rely on network services.
iPad Killer App: Library Books part 2
After my experience reading OverDrive ePub books on an iPad, I got a little more aggressive: what about the Mobipocket books that I could check out of the library?