My Version of “Get Things Done” aka JFDI!

For a while now I’ve been using my own version of Get Things Done (GTD) and it seems to work for me so I thought I’d sahre my experiences and thoughts so far.

I got into GTD because lots was going on around me but I was loosing track of what I needed to do, or kept loosing any notes I’d made about important stuff.  While I thought I was an organised person, this wasn’t really the case.  So I done what most people do these days, I turned to the web for help.

There’s certainly plenty of websites out there to help you track ToDos with Remember The Milk (RTM) and Google Tasks being two of the popular ones I’ve tried.  And then there’s also loads of ways of keeping notes, such as a simple text document or wiki’s or Google Notepad or Evernote, all of which I’ve also tried.  And then there’s various GTD methodologies that I’ve dabbled in.  However the majority of these need time to plan in front of a computer so you can organise yourself, and then you need to commit to some ritual that you slavishly need to stick to (you can tell my thooughts on these ).  I’m trying to spend less time in front of the computer, not more! – although I have recently received my nice new Dell laptop, now with Win7 Ultimate on it!

A while back however I stumbled across Moleskin notebooks at one of my favourite sites Lifehacker.  From here I found various articles about how people have used Moleskin norebooks to help them organise themselves.  Going back to ‘analogue’ sounded interesting so I decided to try pen and paper!  I carry my personal Moleskin (large lined) most places with me, and I have one for work as well.

While I’ve had many notebooks in the past there’s something about the quality of Moleskins that make the experience different.  However what also helped was some organisation.  Now at the start of every notebook I have the following:

* Index

* To Do list

Each page is then numbered for easy reference.  The initial pages are marked with a couple of sticky labels to make it easier to find them.  And I’ve managed to attach a pen to my Moleskins with some Duct tape.  I keep opposite pages blank, this is in case I remember something later, or if I need to highlight something – or in my work one where I highlight my actions.

I find Moleskin brings a number of advantages over other notebooks:

* There’s a handy puch at the back for storing train tickets, business cards etc

* They’ve got an elestic band to help keep them closed when you stuff them with paper

* Better quality notebook – while a bit intangible it works for me

So now I jot down my notes in my Moleskin and index it at the front, with a simple ToDo list at the front as well, and that’s just about it!

It has proved really effective for me.  I don’t deny it would be a hassle if I lost one of my notebooks, there’s no ‘backup’, but maybe that just makes me more careful.

I do however ’still’ use eletronic notes.  I use the ToDo list on my mobile phone for when I need reminded to do something by a certain time/date (often!).  And I do still use Google Tasks on occassion.  I am also really trying to use Evernote as so many people rave about, I still though find it too onerous.  Maybe it’ll just click one day and I’ll live it, haven’t got there yet.

A final FYI, I wrote all this on my Moleskin while sitting on the train, with no internet (free) access.  For me a lot of the GTD theories seem to spend to much time planning and not doing!  Just like at school/Uni when I spent more time writing my study plan tha actually studying.  So I’ve nick-named my direct approach as Just Do It (JFDI)!  If you need to do something, write it down on your list, if you need to remember something, write it down and index it – SIMPLE!

Another Glasgow Pic

I’ve just linked my WordPress and Twitter accounts to I want to see what happens when I post to WordPress.  Following on though from my last post, and trying something else new on WordPress (for me anyway), I’m posting another photo of Glasgow.

Railway Bridge Over River CLyde in Glasgow

Photo Down the Clyde

Took this photo a while back.  It’s sunset down the River Clyde in Glasgow.  Can’t deny that I done a bit of Photoshop to emphasis the colours…

Photo Hosting Sites

I’m coming up for renewal again of my photo hosting sites and I’d thought I’d write down my thoughts which should help me decide what to do. At the moment I’m using the following sites:

• SmugMug – Paid for (http://halesy.smugmug.com/)
• Flickr – Paid for (http://www.flickr.com/photos/halesy/)
• Picasa – Free (http://picasaweb.google.com/halesy)

Each has it’s own advantages but none of them has all the features I’d like.  So here’s a quick comparison…

Smugmug - Great looking site (ignoring my photos ).  There’s plenty of opportunity to customise your home page that the rest of the world sees.  It’s also relatively quick and the album views are well organised.  My paid for version gives me unlimited space.  The downside for me that there’s not a big community feel around Smugmug.  I’m sure SmugMugers might disagree but I’ve not found it very interactive, although maybe I’m not active enough myself.  And while there’s a number of print options available, they’re all US based services (I’m in the UK).

Flickr - Interface just is not as good as Smugmug as there’s little customisation available.  While there’s some neat features there (I like the Collections approach), you can’t create a custom home page for others to see (apart from selecting between pictures, sets and collections).  I’d like it if I could put my tags and Collections on the front page, and select which pictures are shown first – all of which I can do on Smugmug.  However where Flickr does win out is the community aspects, I’ve had random (nice) posts about my pictures which is good.  This is helped by the fact I know more people who use Flickr.    I’ve also got unlimited storage with Flickr

Picasa - Well Google isn’t the best at everything!  While Picasa is free it misses out on the best features discussed above.  The home page is not readily customisable and there’s not much of a community to it either.  The Picasa software however is good, although I don’t actually use it (still on PSE5).  The Picasa software does however provide online sync’ing which is useful (still working on this though).  The free account has 2G storage and you buy more, but I won’t.

So ideally I’d have the Smugmug interface with the Flickr community!

One of the issues I have though is keeping my photos in sync.  These sites don’t really provide FTP access which is my preferred option, easier to keep things in sync.  So instead I use Fireuploader which is a really useful Firefox extension.  With more than a few hundred pictures uploaded it would be great for these sites to support some type of sync’ing, Picasa being the best option.

A final point of this though is about Photobox, if you’re in the UK and want to print photos I can highly recommend them.  I have to admit though that I also use them for hosting my pics, which I’m probably not meant to really do.  I think you’re space is limited based on the number of orders you’ve placed, but as I’ve been with them for years that not a major for me.  The interface for Photobox is pretty nice, although a bit slow in comparison to the others here.  You don’t get the same community either, although they do use Facebook (which I haven’t really bought into myself).  They are pretty active on Twitter as well which is a good way of keeping up to date.  Of course the other advantage of Photobox is that you can sell your photos online, for a suitable margin .

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

MS Word Annoyances

One of my biggest annoyances with MS Word is how it tries to be helpful, and subsequently ends up reformatting your whole document. This happens to me, for example, when I try change one word from normal case to bold case, then everything else changes to bold, then I need to do Cntl-Z to get it back. Now I’ve found out why it’s doing I’m writing it down so I can remember for future…

It turns out the option is actually stored against the style you’re using so you need to change this in the Format menu. First find out which Styles this is happening, for me it was ‘Normal’ so in the Format menu go to Styles & Formatting, then right click on the ‘Normal’ style. Then select ‘Modify…’ and if ‘Autoamtically update’ is selected then that’s your problem! I unselected this and things went back to normal. Remember though to select ‘Add to template’ or you’ll lose it.

While I’m on the subject of annoyances, I’ve also found out how to get rid of another one. You know how MS Word ‘personalises’ your menu’s, I also find this annoying. To fix this go to Tools – Customise – Options and check the box ‘Always show full menus’.

From Photoshop Elements to GIMP…

I’ve been using Photoshop Elements 5 for some time now but there’s a few things it won’t do.  I’m particularly interested in trying Tilt and Shift techniques but PE5 doesn’t seem to have the facilities to do this.  I’ve always been interested in trying out GIMP but never spent any real time trying to make it work for me, so I’ve given up on it a few times.  However now I’m going to make a concerted effort and I’m going to do by learning the features that I commonly use.

So to kick off I’ll be doing the following:

1. Install GIMP – easy enough, just follow the installer, I’ll not explain that

2. Get GIMP to read Canon RAW.  I take all my pics in RAW these days but GIMP doesn’t recognise RAW “out the box”

3. Crop

4. Brightness/Contrast

5. Levels

6. Convert to Black & White

1. Installing GIMP

As mentioned I’m not covering installing GIMP, that’s easy enough to do.  Instead I’ll tackle getting GIMP to read Canon RAW. 

2. Canon RAW

It seems there’s a program/plugin called UFRaw that reads RAW files on behalf of GIMP.  Follow the link and download the appropriate version (Windows for me) and install – it’s that easy.  Now that I’ve got UFRaw installed I used it to open my pics, and it works fine.

3. Cropping

Simple crops are easy enough, just find the Crop button in your Toolbox and select the appropriate area. 

However PE5 allows you to do photographic crops e.g. 6×4, 7×5 etc which is handy for getting images ready to print, and it turns out so does GIMP, again quite easily.  I found out how from this link, but basically in the Toolbox, once you’ve selected the crop tool an option will appear for Fixed: Aspect ratio.  In the box below you enter your desired aspect ratio e.g. 3:2 or 2:3 if you want portrait.

GIMP also provides a useful feature here known as guides, where you view your Crop with the “rule of thirds”.

4. Brightness/Contrast & 5. Levels

Quite easy this one as well.  Select the ‘Colours’ menu at the top and then Brightness/Contrast.  You can use simple sliders if you want but you also get the option to use Levels which have more flexibility.  If you select Levels then you even get the option to do Curves (still got to learn them though!). 

Obviously under this same menu you can adjust colour balance etc as well and you have access to some auto functions as well.

6. Convert to Black & White

There seems to be a few ways of doing this… 

Desaturate

The first I found was to desaturate the image by going to the Colours Menu and select Desaturate.  Here you have a choice of three options, Lightness, Luminsoity and Average, you can try each of them and see what happens if you have Preview checked.

Greyscale

To do get Greyscale go to the Image Menu, select Mode, then Greyscale

And there’s even more options listed here, too many for me to go through.  Really I think you need to experiment with the options available, look at the link and decide what’s best for you.

Useful Resources

In writing this blog post I used the following resources:

Gimpguru.org – http://www.gimpguru.org/ – Used this resource most, got a lot of useful tutorials.

GIMP manual – http://docs.gimp.org/en/ – OK but I didn’t find it as useful as GIMPguru

More advice on plugins can be found here and some other GIMP tutorial stuff.

So I’ve quickly and easily found the tools I normally use in Photoshop, so no reason not be using GIMP.  After a bit of practice with GIMP I’ll look at doing Tilt and Shift stuff.

Measuring Bandwidth Using Jperf

I’m surprised I’ve not heard more about Jperf in the various network management forums I surf.  It’s a surprisingly easy tool to use and quite useful, maybe to easy…  Jperf is just the GUI front end for Iperf.

Let’s start off with the interesting stuff, here’s an image of a bandwidth trace I done from home to a server in the office.  Basically it’s showing I’m getting about 0.5M and that it varies a bit.

The measurement is done between the two end points, my PC @ home and the server in the office.  Jperf (or Iperf) needs to be installed at both locations, although that only takes a couple of minutes.  Once installed you need to setup one location as the client and one as the server, in this case the far end (the office server) is acting as the server.  Then you enter the far end address and “Run Iperf!” – that’s it!

So why would you use it?  Well I had the situation where users were complaining about network performance in a remote office, by getting this installed on a device at that location I get to see how the link between my device and that location is working.  So if you’re able to get this installed at key locations in your network you’ll get to see performance between those locations.  For example you could install Iperf near your Exchange servers (maybe even on it!), and run tests to it from your office locations to get an indication of network performance.

As you’ll see from the image you also get a number of options that you can configure, including UDP instead of TCP.  In reading stuff on the web you can use these options to help understand how the network works in different scenario’s, although I’ve not investigated that yet.

So it’s a simple but useful tool, well worth looking at.

As this tool can be run from the command line (Iperf) it’s probably possible to script it and automate, but that’s for another day…  And so is looking at Cisco IP SLA.

Wedding Photography

So just done my second there at the weekend and a few more lessons learned that I need to note for future. Firstly the things I done right…

• Got well organised in advance and agreed the wedding pics with the bride (and groom). Put all the required shots on a spreadsheet and included camera settings/lens for those shots, as well as timings. This was useful
• Back up lens, batteries and memory were all ready, but not required
• Arrived early and scoped out the venue
• Talk to venue staff, introduce myself, find out who’s in charge and get suggestions for shots from them
• Reportage type shots worked well. The first wedding I done I didn’t get the bride/groom well enough in shot, this time I had a good zoom and I clearly selected the subject…

Shot from 2nd wedding

Shot from 1st wedding

• When doing the official shots I need to pay more attention to how people are lined up. I went too quickly and the shots didn’t look as good as they could. So I need to figure out what to do with groups of people in these shots, where do the toes point??? Where does everyone stand?
• Backing up to external source – When I had a few minutes I wanted to backup my memory, just in case… However I was running a 4G memory card and it takes ages to backup. I didn’t really have the right tools for backup – need to look at this.
• Done a few shots of the bride and groom away from everybody else, but quickly ran out of ideas for shots. I need to be a bit more imaginative.
• I’m still having problems with the sun. While the brides have been lucky with the weather at the two weddings I’ve done, I can’t seem to get the lighting right for the group shots.
• When taking Reportage shots, they work better if the person is facing towards the camera.  Back of their head is not so interesting!
• Should I have used a reflector as suggested by Manesh?

So I think I need to spend a bit of time looking at the following:

1. How to setup groups to make them look good
2. Get some ideas for bride/groom shots
3. Need more practice with lighting.

I have however learned and if I can these bits right I’ll be doing well.

Balanced Scorecards

This is some useful info for my MBA thesis that I’ll refer to over the next few days.  Basically the reason I’ve got to Balanced Scorecard is because there’s a difficulty in showing the business benefit of IT.  All too often IT is seen purely as a cost to the business and the benefits of IT are not seen.  However, in order for IT to truly be of business benefit it needs to be aligned to the business strategy, and in this way IT can help deliver business benefits.  It’s taken me a few thousand words and a lot of references to get to this stage, but that’s all in my thesis, as well as a lot more.

The assumption I’ve got to therefore is that business and IT are aligned, but we’re still left the problem is measuring the business benefit of IT.  A number of authors talk about Executive perceptions of IT but these are intangible and can be biased based in people’s experiences.  What is required is a more objective measure for the business benefit of IT.  While doing some reading on the subject the techrepublic site had a few useful references and white papers on business and IT alignment (references will be added when I get the time).  A couple of the references referred to the Balanced Scorecard as a means for measuring the benefit of IT.

Now I remembered the Balanced Scorecard from my strategy classes and the idea was developed by Kaplan, R. & Norton, D. “The balanced scorecard: measures that drive performance”, Harvard Business Review, vol.70, no. 1, (1992), pp 71-79, and followed up in “Having trouble with your strategy?  Then map it”, Harvard Business Review, vol. 78, no. 5, (2000) pp 167-176.  I don’t have these references to hand, but I do have my Uni text book that talks about the Balanced Scorecard, so the following notes come from Johnson, G., Scholes, K. & Whittington, R. “Exploring Corporate Strategy”, Prentice Hall, 7th Edition (2005).

Balanced scorecards combine both qualitative and quantitative measures for assessing performance of a chosen strategy, it is not IT specific.  It helps managers gain a broader view of performance when traditional measures only give a partial view.  The Balanced scorecard acknowledges that there can be different stakeholders and tries to represent their interests through use of a range of measures.  Performance is linked not only to short term outcomes but longer term considerations are also present.

It terms of IT this means that instead of relying on figures for number of calls answered on the helpdesk, or up time of the WAN, the balanced scorecard would provide indicators that are more relevant to the business.  This for example could mean that instead of % calls answered within x secs, we would represent this as number of calls resolved first time.  Or instead of WAN performance the % availability of critical business apps is recorded.

When the Balanced scorecard for IT is related back to business objectives then it’s possible to start to see what impact IT is actually having.  This then hopefully moves away from seeing IT as purely a cost to the business!