Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Wii Substitute?

Maybe I was spoiled as a child, but I don't think I would have been a happy camper if I wanted a Wii for my 12th birthday and got a "Zone 60" instead.

It does have a Brave Heart game though, that's timely.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Trying out a text message post to blogger. Feel free to ignore as no poignant content will be provided.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Always Doin' it the Hard Way

About a month and a half ago I started working on putting my resume online at www.paulmichelotti.com.  Nuff said.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Online To Do List

To do lists have never been my forte.  Looking back on my various attempts to maintain one, the primary downfall has been my inability to remember to take the list with me.  At work I'd make up a fantastic to do list and then ... leave it at work.  Since I work from home at least two days a week, having the to do list at work does not help me much.  Once I realize I've left my to do list behind, if I'm feeling particularly organized, which is rare, I start up a new to do list, placing on it what I can remember from the work list, plus any new items.  Inevitably this new list meets the same fate as my work list.

And keeping a personal list has never worked, simply, because I'm never going to be carrying a pad of paper with me everywhere.

In episode 61 of webcomics weekly, the webcomic gurus were talking about productivity applications, one of which was an application called "Things" for Apple platforms.  Revisiting this episode I realized that while I could not use 'Things" directly due to my lack of an Apple computer and iPhone, I could benefit from a similar product if I could find one.

This morning I Googled "to do list" hoping to find some online to do list applications.  And to do list applications I found.

After looking at two applications for about 15 seconds each, I settled on an application called "Remember The Milk" largely, because the name made me chuckle.  Luckily, the application thus far seems to provide the majority of the functionality I'm looking for.

Paul's Functionality Wish List

  • Online interface to manage tasks
  • Categorization / tagging of tasks
  • Due dates for tasks
  • Time commitment estimates for tasks
  • Quick add functionality
  • Incorporation into iGoogle
  • Incorporation into GMail
  • Incorporation into Google Calendars
  • Able to create new tasks via SMS from my phone (can not be done with the application directly, but you can hook your application to Twitter so that direct messages sent to Twitter in a certain format are made into tasks and you can hook Twitter to SMS)
I'll be playing with this for a few weeks before I'm completely sold on it (not that I have to pay for it), but initial impressions are favorable. 

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Reorganizing

Laura and I are notoriously unorganized, and in an effort to reduce general stress and increase overall sanity, we went through an organizational effort today (an effort which largely involved a lot of work being dumped on me...).

One task of interest was trying to get our physical files in some semblance of order.  Shortly after moving to Springfield I had sent to us a four drawer high filing cabinet.  Said cabinet had a number of files haphazardly tossed into it, and was left in this state for a number of months.  After that, an effort was undertaken to categorize the files, however the categorization turned out to be less than optimal, most likely since we did not know at that point what categories we would need.  Today I recategorized some of the folders again to meet some of our immediate needs (taxes, house hunting, etc).  

In moving files around I realized a major problem was the fact that I wanted to categorize some of the files under multiple headings.  Since they were physical documents and since I did not want to waste my time copying documents simply to put them in two folders, I started looking into document scanners.  

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300, IE, the document scanner I will probably be buying tonight


Ideally I would be able to scan a document, move it to an application like Google Docs, tag it with whatever categories I think are pertinent to describe the document, and also associate with it some information concerning the current physical location of the file if the physical file were to persist.  Of course, I don't really know if the software that comes bundled with whatever scanner I get will actually let me do this, but I have to imagine it would let me do something similar.  

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Re-purposing the Blog

In order to provide myself with a little web space to post general household updates for the Glenview contingent of the Michelotti's, I am re-purposing this wedding blog.