As I get more responsibilities and things to remember, I really have fallen to my tools to help me keep going. Since my workflow was based upon one of my good friends and has only increased, I’d like to share what works for me and maybe some ideas that can help you no matter your place in life.

There are several methodologies on how to become more productive. One of the more popular ones is Getting Things Done (GTD). This, in particular, speaks to organizing tasks into non-overwhelming ways. For many of us, this is a task in and of itself. This is where computers can come to the rescue.

There are many task management systems that implement GTD. They tend to strive to help you to add tasks quickly and only view what is important to you. In general, they work to help you keep track of and continue to progress on your tasks. I’ll go more into this in the next section where I discuss something I use.

Other general productivity programs exist to help you focus by either removing distractions or sometimes creating them so that you can appropriately rest. Some distractions or simply interface ambiguities or inefficiencies can really take away from a workflow. Having a good workflow for you is really the target of being productive. Having to leave your workflow or otherwise be interrupted can be the death of a day’s productivity.

So what do I mean when I say workflow? This isn’t really a formalism or anything of the sort. I mean the actions that one has to go through to accomplish work. For the simple example of taking the trash out, this would involve getting shoes, getting the garbage, bringing it to the appropriate receptacle, and returning. This seems very simple, but it becomes even more apparent that a workflow can be interrupted if one had to stop in the middle, search for something (say a key), pause to ensure that all the garbage had already been properly collected, and finally evaluate one of many possible receptacles to ensure the correct one was chosen. Our target it to help one discover a pattern that helps to reduce or remove interruption from productivity and otherwise makes life less stressful.

On a lighter note, I just got a new PMP: a Cowon D2. I also will give some feedback on that and give a link to the excellent review I read before purchasing (I need to get it out of my history at home). Hopefully all that tonight.

Random cool thing I found: tntnet. I had heard about C++ server pages before, but tntnet is the project that really makes them shine. They claim that it can serve c++ dynamic pages fast than traditional web servers (probably apache) can serve static pages because the c++ pages get compiled. Awesome for speed. The syntax looks pretty nice to for making the views (and you get the c++ goodness for all of the processing).

Also, I’ve been getting a bunch of random (spam?) messages at a bunch of my email addresses. I know I am on just about every spam list known to man, but these are just weird. The subject is always 3 characters long. It’s always uppercase letters (ISO-8859-1 encoding) and might contain a number (like Y7V). The message is a bunch of random phrases together separated by line breaks and tabs. They seem to be relayed from various domains (like 0451.com 1-tek.com and mail.ru). If anyone knows what this is, i’d love to know. This is one sent to quad341@quad341.com (which i bounce to my gmail account).
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scientific community when questions come up on implementing UN decisions
in ten thousand years. The Law said stay; Jonathan said go; and by now he
So I decided the hell with it. The last time I had gone into the Zone at
"I do " he said softly.

Anyone know anything or getting something similar?

Well, so you all are informed, I recently have bought 2 Pete Namlook cds (well, 1 from iTunes) and 1 Tetsu Inuoe cd. They are Silence, Air, and Zenith respectively. They’re some of the best ambiant that I’ve heard in a while. It really is ambiant, though, so be prepared and be amazed.

I had oral surgury last Friday so I’m just starting to eat real food again. Kind of annoying to say the least. Also, the new Marco Torrance album is available for presale on Cardamar Music. Check it out or preorder here.

There’s also a new Marco Torrance mix on the mirror. I haven’t even listened to it yet, but it’s supposed to be pretty ambiant too. It’s the only Torrance one on there, so feel free to browse for it until I post and have listened to it and have a link.

On the music front, Cardamar has put together a new mix. It’s another really nice one. Personally (at least today), I prefer Globespinning (which was his last mix), but his latest mix, Colours Come And Go is still wonderful. It has a greater spectrum and gets dark like Cardamar does best. Honestly, i’m not into the dark and slow yet intense feeling today (massive headache), so the lighter feel of globespinning is what makes it my favorite today. Do not miss this new one though. It’s quite nice. It’s on the music mirror with md5 hash if you want to download. Cardamar will probably release the tracklist in the next couple days (when he gets the time).

Hopefully tomorrow I can post about 2 classic cds i got this week. Classic is such a weak term for one though. Just amazing.

Oh and Opera 9 beta 2 passes the ACID 2 test. I find this great. The widgets are kind of neat as well. You might want to take another look at opera. It does integrated content blocking like adblock finally.

Well, my job is looking at making some web applications with me heading the project. Luckly, I got the department head to agree to load Zend Studio Corporate for me and one other person. This should be fun. Doing this makes me want to push off any major coding projects that were going to take my free time. I’m going to be coding about seven to eight hours per day. I don’t think my free time should be taken up by that too. I might change my mind though. This means any ideas that I’ve said about zpProjects are on hold probably until after summer.

See “Movies” in the title and wonder why it’s there? I guess I’ve never posted about movies before since I really don’t watch many. I finally got my dvd of Elephant’s Dream. I bought the dvd since I know Jan Morgenstern of Wavemage Productions. It was expensive, but I like supporting artists (I always send extra to Cardamar for the cds). I really was impressed. Jan did an amazing job on the sound and it was a pretty cool short. It is available for download from the above link. Consider buying a dvd to support the guys if you like it.

I also was given a short movie to process. This consisted of Windows Movie Maker and iMovie (the second was my final choice). This is a non-artist’s view of both.

Windows Movie Maker is installed by default on most Windows XP installations. I’m running XP Media Center on my desktop (3800+ X2, 2 gb ram. Specs are important for video processing. Hard Drive speed could, but I was working with a network drive and that was fine. The capture from the camera is where you need the speed). I can honestly say I was impressed by the software. It does help you to put together a decently impressive work. My main interest was splitting video, fading to and from black, adding titles and credits and maybe some chapters for the dvd and an extra title. Well, the first few are really easy. You literally just drag the effects down onto the clips or scroll to the point and click split. Very nice. Titles are easy and have a decent amount of options also. Problems arise when you want DVD as the final output. Even when outputting it to AVI at 720×480, it does not make mpeg 2 so the video needs to be re-encoded and authored by another program. This also means chapters and such have to happen elsewhere. This is reasonable. It’s movie production, not authoring. Its the fact that it does not allow you to really put in simple text without some weird transition that annoyed me. Moreso, I wanted to try iMovie from my Mac Mini and was stunned.

iMovie is part of the iLife set and technically isn’t free. I still look at it as essentially free software since it comes pre-installed on virtually every newer Mac. It’s pretty cheap when you consider how much you get in iLife also. Another important part is iDVD. iMovie gives you almost everything Windows Movie Maker does and then much more. It does not have a couple of the title and credit formats, but it brings its own. Splitting and adding extra audio and adjusting levels is all very easily done with a couple clicks. There are even complete themes to use with your movies that are very impressive looking and coordinate with the themes in iDVD for authoring. The problem I see is you cannot use the same element like credits multiple times. That annoyed me, but I accepted it and moved on. Some of the cooler aspects is the emmense amount of video and audio effects that are available. Yes, WMM has some, but there are so many more and better ones in iMovie. The especially cool ones are Quartz (the graphics rendering engine for Mac, like DirectX for Windows) based. I don’t know exactly why they are called that, but they have impressive redering effects. You must look through them to really see how impressive the effects look. Adding extra text and titles is very easy also in iMovie. I was happier to see that you can set up chapters right here since you can export the movie in a massive amount of formats including sending it to iDVD to make a DVD. iDVD is then a very nice and simple authoring program that will set up animated menus and set up animated icons from templates. I’m not sure how you can start from scratch (since, honestly, I don’t care. I’m not an artist and would probably just get frustrated with the work involved), but it might be available. When all of this is set up, I had a slight problem. I don’t have a DVD burner in my Mac. Have no fear, you can export a disc image and burn it elsewhere. You should be aware, it can take a while to render the menus and such (i think it took 30-40 minutes on my 1.67 ghz PPC Mac Mini). Just be aware, it creates a .img file that is actually an iso. Just rename the file so most burning program will accept it.

Since I really enjoyed the processing, I think I’ll try out Sony Vegas (since I’ve seen a lot of praise for it and it’s pretty cheap). I’ll update with how that went later.