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08.07.07 Let's all take a moment of pause to mark the passing of our beloved friend, the "Apple" key. You may have been long dead to the operating system, but you'll always have a place in my heart. link | 1 comments 08.06.07 An opinion piece in the IHT talks about the sensibility of the local food movement, looking at it in the context of enviromentalism: It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator. Instead of measuring a product's carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other energy-consuming aspects of production - what economists call "factor inputs and externalities" - like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.
link | 0 comments Welcome to readers of 43 Folders. Thanks for dropping by to see my vaguely thought through ramblings. I think my Mom was the only person reading this before today. link | 1 comments 08.05.07 I don't post much here about productivity stuff from the web. Or at least I don't post enough about it here for you to understand what a complete and utter productivity geek I really am. Merlin Mann, from the life-changing productivity site 43 Folders, gave a talk at Google (which is available to watch here) about the concept of "inbox zero" which is to say having an empty inbox every day. It's about how to develop a system (note that the key word is develop; it's not a defined prescription) for processing and responding to email, extracting the value (information and actions) from your inbox and getting it out of there, getting it onto your task lists, into more "actionable" forms and for God's sake, just getting it done. Personally, I love this shit, and have used many (not all) of the basic, common sense principles to save myself from the overwhelming (between 100 and 300) pile of inbox cruft that I used to live under (admittedly, when I right out of college and had never dealt with a real workplace surge of email). Anyway, one of the things Merlin talks about in this lecture is how we (royal we) are slowly starting to turn around and think about the manners of email. And that strikes me as necessary, and at the same time shocking that we haven't done it yet. When I was growing up, we had a set of encyclopedias that my mother had gotten from her parents. They were old, maybe from the 50's or 60's. (At the time I thought they must still be perfectly relevant, because we only learned more about the world, and once a fact made it into the encyclopedia, it was a fact and thus impervious to change. Oh wikipedia, how you've saved us.) Anyway, in the section of the T book that discussed the telephone, there was a curious subsection dealing with the etiquette of the telephone. The encyclopedia told you how to answer the phone. Not how to pick it up and dial or how the phone switching system worked, but what to say. It even had illustrations (little Susie picking up the phone, announcing her residence, listening attentively, etc.). Anyway, the point is, nobody ever set the ground rules for email. Nobody ever said, this is what the subject line should cover, this is how many sentences an email ought to be, this is how long you should reasonably expect a person to wait to reply, etc. They just threw it at us and let everyone make up their own rules. Of course, everyone will make up their own rules anyway, and that encyclopedia sure did a helluva lot of good with our phone manners, didn't it? But still, the idea that we have never, ever, worked out a set of rules or mores for email is kind of incredible. Maybe Miss Manners will do it for us. link | 0 comments 08.04.07 I just spent thirty minutes looking for this article from the New York Times Magazine. It's all about smashed and flattened foods. Somebody get my meat pounder. Tasty! link | 0 comments « July 2007 | archive index | September 2007 » built with movabletype |
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