Organising in 3D

This has been kicking around at the back of my subconscious for a while, partly born of frustration with organisation systems like GTD. It’s not that there’s fundamental flaws with them, so much as there are fundamental limitations to how organised I can be. That’s partly why I don’t have a lot of time for 43 Folder-style blogs - the constant striving towards GTD nirvana strikes me as too reminiscent of Catholic attitudes to sin. By any objective standard I seem to be reasonably well-organised, as far as it’s possible to be self-aware of this - but comparison with the true devotees of the One True Way To Organisation just leave me feeling depressed at how slovenly my pile of “stuff to look at” has become.

Then I came across isochrones - geographical maps with a temporal overlay - so they can answer questions such as “how long will it take me to get to point A from point B?” The best examples I’ve seen were produced by MySociety, and were “heatmaps” of travelling time via public transport which you could also overlay housing costs. These enabled you to ask multi-variable questions like “where can I afford to live within an hour of work?”

I started wondering whether there are implied isochrones around daily activities. If you look at someone’s desk - or pretty much any space, for that matter - the more important something is, the closer it’s kept. My iPhone is generally never more than an arm’s length away, because it’s my primary means of communication and access to my email, calendar, contacts, to-do list and the kind of photographs that would in earlier times be kept in a wallet. I might not be able to lay my hands on a pen unless I’m at my desk, because I tend not to physically write anything when I’m not sat down.

And when it comes to work, the same patterns apply. Working materials are directly in front of us, and the more useful the article the more likely that it’ll be within easy reach. That also applies to the tchozkes that we surround ourselves with, too - photos of the kids are usually pinned up in clear view. [I can't find the reference at the moment, but when the UK's Department of Work and Pensions embarked on a pointy-haired programme of "efficiency improvements" by enforcing at HR-driven-disciplinary-point a "clear desk policy", the thing that *really* upset people wasn't the fact that they were being told to keep their pencils in a drawer. Instead, it was the insistence on tidying away the kind of personal items that soften the right angles of work environments - the photos, the monitor pets, the post-it notes with shopping list-type scribbles. Oh, and being told where the right place to keep a banana was.]

Unimportant stuff gets pushed away. If you suddenly need to find something that you’ve not used or thought about in weeks, the chances are it’s going to be *under* something. In fact, if it’s in clear view, the chances are you’re going to overlook it, because we’re almost conditioned to expect finding something lost to be more complicated than it turns out to be. Reference materials are filed, if you’re lucky and organised. But either way, immediate personal space is populated by the important and relevant.

All of which is a (very) roundabout way of wondering if we could take this one stage further, and use proximity as a metaphor for urgency in an organisational tool. What if you could use physical - or virtual - distance as a means of organisation? Imagine a system where tasks existed in a (probably pseudo) three-dimensional, and gradually encroached as the urgency became greater. The larger something loomed, the more important it is - and reprioritisation would be done by “pushing” items away, back into the future as it were.

I suppose that categorisation could probably be overlaid, as well - imagine work tasks raining down from above, while personal stuff sneaked in from left field. Switching context from one to the other could be as simple as moving your head to the side, to bring a new context into view. And if physical location could be tied into this somehow, you’d have a situation where the context of tasks could be directly related to where you were at that moment - so work tasks would only rain down in work, and the list of things you were supposed to pick up from the shops would only appear when some kind of near-field trigger alerted the system to the fact that you were entering the mall.

Would it work? I’m not sure - three-dimensional interfaces haven’t exactly been a roaring success outside of the games industry. And interacting with the physical environment would be dependent on the sensor infrastructure being in place, which seems unlikely any time soon - at least not until Jacqui Smith turns the UK into Minority Report. It would be fun trying, though.

Market Tweets

I’ve been playing around with making things Twitter again, inspired by Tower Bridge and my previous efforts with the Shipping Forecast. The bridge has been very “successful”, at least judged by the off-Twitter attention that it got - I’m not completely happy with the Shipping Forecast though, because I think I’m trying to push too much information into 140 characters.

So my latest attempts are four stock market indexes - the FTSE-100, the DAX-30, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nikkei 225. They tweet every hour while the relevant exchanges are open, so don’t manage your portfolios with them - but I liked the idea of having the doom and despondency of the markets flit past every hour in my peripheral vision.

I also thought it was quite important that they’re twittering in the first person, and have some national characteristics (or should that be stereotypes?) Follow them here (FTSE), here (DAX), here (DJIA) and here (Nikkei).

Gosh, it’s quiet around here…

Unless you count the comment spam, of course. 400 today, and counting. I wouldn’t mind so much if the URLs that they’re trying to Googlejuice actually existed, but leading-flowers.info doesn’t even 404.

The silence is caused by a) job hunting and b) building a bathroom. The two are not related - if they were that would make me a plumber, which would render a) unnecessary.

And it’s dark and cold, which makes everything harder than it should be.

Why I can’t get any work done after 6pm…

Max waiting to be fed

A subtle reminder to get into the kitchen and open a tin, cat-style. Note the juxtaposition ‘twixt me and keyboard…

Current frustrations

1. Having managed to find a PS/2-to-USB converter (no problem the other way around, but there’s obviously few of us out there who need to connect a PS/2 mouse to a USB port) and plugged in my trackball again, it’s now playing up - the pointer speed is fine in everything but Safari, where it’s half the speed.
2. It seemed like a good idea to take a quick look under the horrible lino on the bathroom floor to see if was glued down - as a prelude to ripping it up and tiling the floor. It was glued down - but by mould rather than glue. It turns out that the shower tray has been leaking for a considerable period of time - so the base was rotten and the plasterboard behind the tiling has gone manky. So now we’ve got a large hole where the shower cubicle used to be, and I’m wondering how much of the plasterboard on the two affected walls I’m going to need to pull off so that it’s possible to get the tiling back on and looking half-decent.
3. Authentication on the demo wiki is playing up for no good reason, which is going to make it difficult to demo to a client tomorrow.

So anyone trying to sell me something through a cold call this morning will be in for a shock…

Carpal tunnel

My right wrist is currently aching like hell (stop sniggering at the back), so I want one of these. $249 being a bit steep for a keyboard, I’ve gone homebrew and constructed a stand for the Powerbook made out of the front panel of a drawer that got taken to bits after the desk it belonged to fell to bits during the house move. (It actually looks better than it sounds - stripped pine seems to go with aluminium, at least it does if you’ve decided you can’t afford a iCurve.)

All of which construction means I can now hook up my old Microsoft Natural keyboard, which is forcing me to keep my wrists in the right position - not that it’s doing anything for my typing speed at the moment. And not wanting to use a mouse because it hurts is a powerful incentive to get properly to grips with Quicksilver. Tomorrow’s job is to see if it’s possible to get a dongle that converts from a PS/2 trackball to a USB connection - in which case the trackball is going to be pressed back into action, and hopefully my wrist gets some relief.

Until I started suffering, I would never have believed that crap mouse technique could have such a significant effect on your joints. It was all the fault of a contract job I did a couple of years back, where I spent entire days building screen forms a click-and-drag at a time - ever since when my right wrist joint has felt like it’s filled with carborundum grit…

Q: Why are you sitting typing on a Powerbook instead of being asleep?

Q: Why are you sitting typing on a Powerbook instead of being asleep?

A: Because of the cat.

Q: How so?

A: Because being a feline with a brain the size (and processing power) of a walnut, he disappeared back outside about 10 minutes before we went to bed, despite having just been found, picked up and brought inside. And then reappeared outside the bedroom window at 01:30am, crying to be let back in again because a) we don’t yet have a functional catflap; and b) it was cold out. So your correspondant cat-slave gets up to let him in, upon which he gets a prefunctory greeting from the ungrateful animal before it buries its nose in the foodbowl.

Q: Where is the aforementioned cat now?

A: Asleep on my wife’s feet.

FQ TOPIC: Possession

FQ1: What is your favorite possession made mostly from wood? Metal? Plastic?

Wood: The dresser in the kitchen, which was the first major piece of furniture we bought after we got married

Metal: my wedding ring

Plastic: my Powerbook (although there’s a significant chunk of aluminium as well)

FQ2: What is your favorite possession colored mostly red? Blue? Green?

Red: my bed (because it’s got a reddish duvet on it at the moment)

Blue: not telling
Green: the small green rubber dinosaur found by the offspring that gave this blog it’s name…

FQ3: What is your favorite possession looking mostly soft? Sharp? Fragile?

Soft: my wife
Sharp: my wit, of course…

Fragile: my ego

FQ Net Worth: If your nine prized possessions listed above were stolen, what do you estimate the total cost would be to replace them?

Hmm - difficult, because some of them (see soft etc) are irreplaceable. If my experience of past insurance claims is anything to go by, they’d probably cost about 25% more than the eventual payout…

Of moves and cats and sneezes

It’s been a bit quiet on here of late. This is largely due to having just moved - apparently the second or third most stressful thing you can do with your life according to a Large List Of Stressful Things. Currently my life is full of boxes of stuff that I obviously don’t need because I haven’t unpacked them yet; a loooong list of thing DIY to do; and a cat.

The cat has been fostered by my brother for the past two years while we’ve been gadding around the country, so while it’s nice to have him back (in a “I’ve really missed being affectionately headbutted at 0500 every morning” kind of way), it seems that my immune system has taken advantage of his absence over the last two years to develop a really quite impressive cat allergy. Which is turning into something of a problem, because as cats go, he’s very affectionate - hence the headbutting at 0500. We brought him back up from London by car - initially in a box, but after about 50 miles and some really quite impressively harmonic yowling, on the non-driver’s knee - and by the end of the journey my nose was running like a tap and I was scratching my arms like I’d contracted galloping scabies. Now he’s reverted to his previous habits of climbing onto the desk and sitting ‘twixt owner and keyboard, so I’m typing this through a cloud of feline allergens and attempting not to sneeze.

Hopefully my immune system will calm down again, otherwise I’m faced with a choice of eating Benadryl like Smarties for the forseeable future, or shrink-wrapping the damn creature. And if he reverts to another of his habits and starts perching on my Powerbook, he’s mittens for sure.

House move progress

The building society have processed the mortgage and issued the offer (they say - excuse my rampant scepticism, but we have heard that before), so now the only delay are the solicitors. We’ll be in by Christmas, I know we will…