Sparring with bots in a battle of wits. Those with blogs know what I’m talking about.

Now that I’ve drunk the “Getting things Done” kool-aid I have an idea:

Location aware ToDo list sorting. Use the GPS features of cellphones etc to sort your NextActions list by location … so that you can glance down to see what you should be doing in a particular place. You could also set reminders to beep you when you walk past the library (Return book) or post office (post letter).

How did I come to be using the Getting things Done book. Well you see I’m not usually one for the self-help books but I really was sucking at organizing my various projects etc. And I’ve only ever changed one long term thing about myself that I didn’t like: I no longer bite my nails. How? I completely obsessed over them, cutting, filing and buffing on a daily schedule. Whenever I’d go to bite I’d file or buff instead.

Now I figure the only way to get organized is to slavishly follow a system. And after I’d made that decision I was just waiting for a system to offer itself up to me. And GTD was sweeping the blogs at the time so it was such an obvious match ;)

So far so good. But Sam’s club didn’t have one of them auto labelling machines. Bugger. Lots of folders though ;)

Anyway I was putting this on the PhD wiki but it doesn’t process javascript links properly so I needed a place to put the functioning link.

So here is the latest and greatest and reliably working for me link SU Library Lookup. You should be able to drag that up to your link bar and whenever you are on a page with a ISBN in the URL you should be able to check if Bird has it.

No we didn’t abandon the Free trade treaty and so are still stuck with the stupid extension to our copyright laws forced on us by the Mouse’s captors.

But we did wallop the USA at cricket ;) Let’s just say that it took 7.5 overs (of the usual 50) to reel in the USA’s `total’ and leave it at that, eh?

Gloating over thrashing such a minnow is, perhaps, a little pathetic given cricket isn’t a big game in the USA.

But hell, I have to deal with ra-ra-ra USA everyday and it ain’t my fault they decided to go with rounders instead of a real game.

The policy is a great one on paper and now after experiencing a claim with them I can say that it is a great one in practice. For a $50 annual premium I bought $2,000 of cover with a $100 deductible. The policy covers personal effects against damage or theft, and University property in your care, anywhere in the world (The only exclusion is property in your parent’s house).

On paper a great policy and their turnaround can’t be beaten. My bike was stolen from on campus and they turned the entire claim around in two weeks—one week from receiving my notarized statement of claim to me having the cheque in my hands. All that without me having the receipts to the bike (because it was bought ages ago in Australia). And they funded the as-new replacement price.

Can’t ask for more than that. So bravo Haylor, Freyer and Coon they have an online sign-up.

“Politics is really dead, but in a way that is dangerous for Putin. This is the moment of truth for the country. The Duma is afraid to convene an emergency meeting,” she said, referring to the lower house of parliament. “Nobody has made a comment. The president is hiding. The government is hiding. This is the end of politics, when no one wants to take responsibility.”

Missing WMD anyone? Someone fucked up but all the politicians were implicated, Kerry included, because they relied on secrets and “If you knew what I knew” arguments. Politics as usual can’t solve situations where all the participants are implicated.

She was also the reason I was able to eat for the first few months after I arrived in Syracuse. If it wasn’t for her mercy trips to the Supermarket I may well have starved completely!

So, Hala, bon voyage and enjoy Seattle. I’ll be interested to see if that non-coffee drinking thing actually survives ;)

Sweet I thought, I must be able to do the same especially since AT&T has good coverage in the Westcott street area while tmobile has none … but I’d never seen it happen.

A little research reveals that yes AT&T does have a GSM1900 network in Syracuse and so does tmobile. So I call tmobile to see what the story is … and they tell me that I should be able to roam onto at&T at no charge, but that I have to put the phone in manual mode (not automatic, first sign of oddness!)

Anyway I hop in the car and drive to westcott, sure enough tmobile drops out but this time the phone shows 5 green bars of reception and says “Select Network?”. But when I do the menu only says tmobile and when I select it it says “Forbidden.”

I hop back on the phone to tmobile and eventually find my way through to tech support and someone who has some idea. Yes he says, we don’t actually have an agreement to roam onto AT&T in the syracuse area … He played a little surprised that the AT&T customer could roam onto tmobile, went away and came back and said that yes, there was a one-way roaming agreement.

So AT&T customers can use the tmobile network at no extra cost but tmobile customers can’t do the same. What the fuck? We’re renegotiating blah blah. Yes they know that the loose customers because of this … looks like I’ll be switching to AT&T once the contract with tmobile is up. Idiots.

Dave, I reckon AT&T will work fine at your place. Try Ian’s.

“Some people are going to die because of this decision,” said Volker, who is crafting new legislation. “The street people aren’t stupid. When they realize there aren’t going to be any executions, they’ll go out and kill people.”

Thanks for clearing up the question of motivation Dale. Perhaps we should eliminate the streets too—without streets there could be no street people and, presumably, no killings?

Simply wikipedia-bomb your way to riches by quickly editing the wikipedia entry to say what you need it to say. Just-in-time historical revisionism I call it.

(Note for the non-wikipediadics, Wikipedia is a community edited encyclopedia. Inaccuracies get fixed mightly quickly by those people that care about the entry so don’t expect your stuff to stay there long at all. Just long enough to win the bet though!)

I’m back from jaunting around Europe and now down in DC at the Webshop , which is a week long Symposium for PhD students in Internet Studies. So far we’ve done a lot about the web-based stats program whose dissemination is funding this shin-ding, but today we’re getting into Online Communities with Jenny Preece which is more up my alley.

There are five of us here from Syracuse which is by far the largest contingent! I blame Rebecca, Christina and the late night drinks on Monday for this:

Every bug report or moment of user frustration is a business opportunity

I feel a manifesto coming on. Instead of charging large amounts up-front for software that simply cannot anticipate all its uses and ‘requirements’ there needs to be a shift to continuous collaborative design which is one thing that the open source community does well.

Feedback built into the software that allows the developers to see how their users are using it and what bugs and frustrations they experience. Now we have talkback and “Report this XP fuckup to microsoft” but no one uses them. On the other hand in the open source community the bug-tracking systems get pretty high usage. The motivation issue is clear: people don’t “report bugs” (ie provide design input) when they have paid for the software, instead the “report bug” feature just pisses them off. People will also provide reports when they are linked to the feedback and the process of solving the bug/adding the feature, tweaking the design.

So low upfront costs combined with continuous design is a lesson for all software development from the open source community. When you `requirements engineer’ and sell at high-upfront costs—-you lie to your users by pretending you are omniscient and have predicted all uses and potential problems. Any problems they experience are your fault. When you start slowly and develop rapidly in tune with user input you frame every problem as an opportunity for your business.

This is something that translates easily to proprietary development. The Launchbar developer is working like this with his public betas.

Here’s the PDF for ya. Lots of pretty pictures.

Here’s the abstract as it stands:

This paper considers the deceptively simple question: Why can’t downloaded academic papers be managed in the simple and effective manner in which digital music files are managed? We make the case that the answer is different treatments of metadata. Two key differences are identified: Firstly, digital music metadata is standardized and moves with the content file, while academic metadata is not and does not. Secondly digital music metadata lookup services are collaborative and automate the movement from a digital file to the appropriate metadata, while academic metadata services do not.

To understand why these differences exist we examine the divergent evolution of metadata standards for digital music and academic papers. It is observed that the processes differ in interesting ways according to their intent. Specifically music metadata was developed primarily for personal file management, while the focus of academic metadata has been on information retrieval.

We argue that lessons from MP3 metadata can assist individual academics facing their growing personal document management challenges. Our focus therefore is not on metadata for the academic publishing industry or institutional resource sharing, it is limited to the personal libraries growing on our hard-drives. This bottom-up approach to document management combined with p2p distribution radically altered the music landscape. Might such an approach have a similar impact on academic publishing? This paper outlines plans for improving the personal management of academic papers—doing academic metadata and file management the MP3 way—and considers the likelihood of success.

While I’ve been babbling Mike and Adam have been doing something actually useful and have Bibdesk doing AutoFile, so that it cleans up and consolidates the PDFs strewn all over your hard-drives.

Yes I, along with somewhere between 499,999 and upwards of a cool million, people went to DC this Sunday to show support for women’s reproductive rights. I grabbed an old-school National Organization of Women “Keep Abortion Legal” sign and trundled along with the grrrls. The event was cool with lots of good feeling and bonhomie. Hilary Clinton spoke but the best pre-march entertainment where the “Take back the Cunt-ry” spoken word artists: “I’ve been your mother, your wife, your maid, your civil rights activist, your freak at night”.

Caught up with my LA girls, Debra and My-linh, who are looking fabulous. Good things happen with these girls so we ended up Saturday night at a very good little chilled club called Red which had no sign and no one in it until 12.30 ;) It is near DuPont circle on Jefferson at the dark windows. Bargain with the door guy. He loves it. No really he’s just bluffing.

The anti-choice protesters were remarkably weak. Lots of gruesome photos of fetuses that completely miss the point.

I’ll type it slowly because I’ve heard that they don’t read quickly.

Ending legal abortion would not stop abortions, it would only mean a return to dangerous and exploitative illegal abortions.

Oh and what is up with opposing Sex Ed, contraceptives and abortion? Shit people give a girl some options! I really don’t think I’d heard the word abstinence before coming to this country.

Prize for the oddest sign, “If you can’t handle unplanned pregnancies, get back in the Kitch”. I guess she ran out of enthusim or somefing.

I had two activist revelations this weekend. Firstly I think that this is the first time I’ve been “active” to support the status quo. “What do we want? Status Quo!” Well ok, I exaggerate but you get the point.

The second was best put by John Stewart on the Daily Show when talking about gay marriage, “You mean it isn’t going to be compulsory? What’s the fuss about then?”.

The whole weekend was worthwhile, after all no less than Gloria Steinem promised me asylum in the coming women’s revolution. And I hear that she has some sway ;)

So here’s the source: MP3s: Omnigraffle | Visio XML and Academic PDFs: Omnigraffle | Visio XML.

As with the rest of the site they are released under the Creative Commons licence specified above.

Nothing better than making diagrams to procrastinate and with OmniGraffle and the easy OS X PDF screen-shots it is just so much fun. Of course delving into the operating system to get icons is also fun.

Anyway, for your viewing please I give you my workflow diagrams … Firstly we have the reasonably functional MP3 process:

And now the pretty darn disfunctional academic pdf and citation management process. The white boxes are the missing components. Notice also that the PDFs never have metadata tags …

Of course this is the worst case one without a citation manager, like Bibdesk. Speaking of Bibdesk Mike merged Adam’s RTF preview code today so CVS has new goodies which we’ll roll out asap.