DrHogie.Com A blog about me. Whoever that is.

Digital Cleaning

It's funny how badly having things untidy can unnerve me. My wife gets tickled at some of my OCD-ness qualities. Example: all the video games and movies on the shelf need to stay in their cases and be in alphabetical order. I feel accomplished when they're like this -- I feel unnerved when they aren't.

I try to keep my bookmarks in my browsers (which stay synced by XMarks!) organized as well -- but all too often they end up overflowing all over the place. I'll find a nifty site in GReader or my Twitter feeds, bookmark it for later observation, and there it will stay for months and months. The nice thing is I'm hoping Pinboard will be the last piece of the puzzle in this workflow.

Currently, this is how my bookmark bar looks:

The first 3 bookmarklets will let me take a given URL and send it to Pinboard, Instapaper, or my WordPress blog. The different folders are self explanatory: Daily for daily sites I use all the time, Main for sites I'll visit a few times a week, Admin for bookmarks to all the servers at work, Reference for any online manuals I'll need for different things.

The last 3 folders are really a thrown together hodge-podge of all kinds of links to anything and everything I've found over the years. Now, instead of keeping them in a bookmark bar, I'll move the ones that are work keeping to Pinboard. It's a very nice bookmarking service that gives me a taggable, publishable, searchable database of all my different bookmarks. It even gives me an RSS feed of my latest submitted bookmarks, which reside in that widget in the upper right over there. So after this post I'll start going through and either deleting a lot of this junk, or submitting it to Pinboard for a permanent home.

Sidenote: I found a nice, clean theme that I really like for the site -- Lightword. I may try playing around with editing the theme and/or even rolling my own theme at some point. It would give me an excuse to finally learn CSS, I suppose.

At any rate, hey: four days, four posts!

Information Processing (or why I <3 Instapaper and you should too)

My biggest virtual albatross I carry around my neck is the double whammy of Google Reader (and the 98 websites I subscribe to) and my public Twitter account (it's setup for following/responding-to celebs/news accounts/etc. -- everyone but people I've met in real life). The only time I've ever let loose and flushed my unread counts with either was when I came back from our Thanksgiving vacation -- and that's only because my mobile Twitter client that keeps a backlog of tweets without constantly refreshing every 5-6 hours of tweets. So there's always articles I'd like to read or things I'd like to see, but don't have the time when doing a quick perusal of said feeds.

That's where Instapaper comes in.

It's this really awesome service that Marco Arment runs as a one man show. It's really simple: You send Instapaper a URL and it retrieves a streamlined version of the page, and caches it for you on their server. You can then read this streamlined version on your iPhone, iPad, web browser, or have it delivered to your Kindle/e-Reader of choice. It makes plowing through reading a backlog of articles painless and easy. Once you're done reading an article, you can delete it forever or archive it so you'll have it later on.

The power of Instapaper comes from the many ways to get articles/URLs into the service. The official Twitter client on iOS and Tweetbot both have "Send to Instapaper" options on a tweet. GReader also has a "Send to Instapaper" option for every article you look at. So while going through my backlog of items, I can very quickly skim through the noise looking for worthwhile things to read. If you happen upon a link in the wild that you want to read later, there's also a Javascript bookmarklet you can use to send the link to Instapaper. Then when I have the time/desire to read meaty articles, I can pull up my Instapaper account and go through them.

The best thing about Instapaper is the cost. Setting up an Instapaper account is free on their website. Marco funds Instapaper by sales of his iOS app which is a mere $4.99. If you want to use the auto-delivery options for your Kindle/eReader device, he charges a subscription of $1/month to keep his servers. It helps me manage my Read/Review items better than anything I could imagine. Give it a shot -- the web-only features are free!

Fucos

As the great Wil Wheaton once said: Fucos. Accomplishing the growth I want will only happen if I can learn to focus on the task at hand. I have no idea why, but I've never been able to work on a given task for more than an hour or three at a time when it's work related. Give me a video game or a programming-type problem or a book and I can blast away on it for hours and hours and lose all track of time. Anything else, and I start getting restless and stir crazy.

I've had the day off today and spent the majority of it working on end-of-year stuff for work. My better half's been plugged up in the bedroom clawing away at her pile of paperwork herself. Right now I'd love to do nothing more than pile up into a worthless pile of lazy and kill a couple of hours before calling it a night. However, here I sit: plugging away at this pile. With any luck, I'll be able to create a plan of attack for tomorrow as well. I'm starting to learn the best way to stay focused is to plan every day. But -- just like anything -- that takes a conscious effort to MAKE the time to plan every day.

I think this is where I'd have some awesome inspirational quote to sum everything up, and maybe as I post more and start thinking of a daily post I'll have one. For now, I sat down at this browser tab a few minutes ago and thought "What in the world am I going to post about?" Two hundred and seventy-five words later, I have an answer to that.

On a completely unrelated note, I found out tonight that both my children absolutely love fried deer. This pleases me more than I can express that the kids took after their mother in this department instead of me (the city slicker).

(Two days in a row!)