New blog

As previously announced, I’ve moved my blog to its new home at http://blog.johnmilner.com. I’m starting fresh on the Posterous platform as it look to be pretty dead simple and should make quick posts and media posts much easier. Moreover, I’m looking forward to changing my posts from more long form to short tidbits and pulling in other content I find interesting.  Rather than try to import over my prior posts from this blog. I’m going to leave this wordpress version as an archive for the time being. I won’t be updating this blog, but for as long as it makes sense I’ll keep the archives here on johnmilner.com. So go ahead and check out blog.johnmilner.com, if you subscribe to the RSS feed it’s been updated for you by feedburner. Someday, I’ll find something to put up here on JohnMilner.com

Another inspiring TED talk

“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint”

Sadly, I spend a lot of time making PowerPoint slides, and I fully agree with the theme of this article. Sadly, I spend a lot of time making PowerPoint slides, and I fully agree with the theme of this article. We have become too dependent upon PowerPoint, and it’s over used and almost always inappropriately used.

Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com.

Quick thoughts on the iPad

as I’m writing this on my iPhone on a flight across the country for a business meeting I can’t stop thinking how nice it would be to have a ipad right now (of course I would want the 3g version). I see a lot of potential for the iPad as a third device, but have decided to no get one just yet (mostly since I’m looking to replace my MacBook Air with a new MacBook Pro).

Travel is one of the few situations where I really see great utility for the iPad. In my current case, the iPhone is just a bit too small to really consume the content I would like (read it later, instapaper, kindle, & manage personal email) as well as battery life issues., Since I’m traveling my large bulky work laptop hauling my MacBook Air as well is just too much. Sure, one could say just use your work machine. First, I think most people would like to keep their personal files off of their employers computer, and second the battery life on average laptops isn’t that great (mine is less than 2).

This is where the ipad would shine, great battery life and about the size of a tablet of paper. Additionally, I would love to get an ipad rather than spend a sizable chunk of change on a pretty well equipped 15″ MacBook pro. If only there were a slick photo management app for the iPad that would sync with Aperture on my desktop (don’t need the editing features, just want to be able to do the organization projects, flagging, rating, metadata) I wouldn’t have a need for a MacBook pro. Humm.. there’s an app idea for someone. only problem then is storage space, which is where a push to the could would be really helpful.

Read it later digest

I often find myself doing triage on online content either out of Google Reader or Twitter, and the two services I use to manage my deferred content are Instapaper and Read It Later. I primarily use instapaper for long form content and articles without many graphics (e.g. from The Atlantic). For me, Instapaper saves content for when I purposefully take time to sit down and read. On the other hand, I use Read It Later on a daily basis for all the short web content, videos I want to watch later but not send to Boxee, and things I should do while I am on another machine.

Due to the volume of content I save to Read It Later it’s often hard to find what I want to read. The article(s) I’m looking for always seem to be buried in different places in my list. A while ago I started playing with the beta version of Read It Later Digest, the developers answer for users with problems like mine. Digest is a web-based reading tool which automatically categorizes links you’ve saved into topics. From the site, you can customize your topics and read within each topic. Moreover, the site allows one to access the content without leaving the digest page in a text only version which is a huge time saver.

Digest allows me to read content in a slimmed down formant very quickly. If I want to check out what’s going on in the sailing world, I just head over to my sailing topic. If I want to read through all the posts from the NYT Deal Book blog I saved out of reader this morning I just visit that topic. Read it later digest has significantly improved my efficiency and enjoyment of reading all the links I’ve saved. I’m really excited to see how Nate, the developer, will incorporate Digest into the iPhone/iPad version.

Tax day

Today is April 15th, which is tax day here in the US. I’m not going to start a discussion over what is a fair amount of tax, we all need to pay our share for the services we use everyday. However, income tax compliance is extremely costly and time-consuming.  First, I am not a tax professional. I do spend a bit of time working with corporate taxes in my profession and generally consider myself somewhat intelligent with some financial and accounting matters.

That said, I belive our system needs a serious compliance overhaul. I just wrapped up and filled my taxes earlier today. I have a fairly simple tax return. It’s probably more complicated than the average americans but no where near a “complex” return. In fact, my returns have gotten easier since I no longer work for myself. however, this year, even with the aid of tax filling software, I still spent hundreds of dollars on tax prep and in aggregate approximately 12 hours of my time preparing my return. It’s absolutely ridiculous for my fairly simple situation. To make matters worse, the rules for things like capital gains and losses are so complex I’m not even sure if everything is correct (I hope it is).

There are very few things I hear in everyday conversation that gets so many Americans as worked up as the complexities of our tax compliance system. It’s time our country simplified the income tax compliance burden. Income tax prep is such a burden Mark Perry estimated the cost of income tax compliance to equal the “state of Utah’s entire annual output“.

Radio silence

Sorry for the lack of recent posts, the recent pick up in M&A activity has kept me very busy lately. One hopes it’s a sign of building economic recovery. I’ve got about a dozen half written posts  (including a fairly in-depth update on a few of the web services I’ve been using in my personal metadata experiment) that I’m hopping to get through at some point.

Reducing the content I consume for more simple living

Lately through my “personal metadata experiment” I have been noticing I am spending a lot of time-consuming content that I feel I have a NEED to consume. The majority of this content is news (via google reader and email alerts), twitter, and podcasts. While I really do love consuming this content it take a lot of time out of my day, furthermore, it is a never-ending fire hose of data. As a result, I’m always left feeling like there is more data that I NEED to consume and it ends up taking time away from other tasks and interactions I would rather be doing.

So this weekend I have been going through my google reader list, newsletters, and people I am following on Twitter and unsubscribing from everything that feel I don’t NEED to read or follow. I’m going to keep a list of the feeds and people who I have unsubscribed from in case I find myself needing to add these sources back. Taking an approach of extreme cutting, and then adding back as need be. This is one step I am taking in an effort to simplify parts of my life and provide more time for productive tasks and to spend less time trying to “keep current”.

One thing that I am looking for are suggestions of highly refined, high quality, and low volume RSS feeds you enjoy consuming.

365 project blog update

Visitors to my blog will notice that the home page is almost all posts from my 365 project, a photo project which challenges me to take a photo everyday. First, I’ve found it pretty difficult to take a photo everyday, especially in the winter where I am working indoors during all hours of daylight. There really are only so many photos I can take of my office, home, and commute. As a result, going through the motion of trying to post a photo each day to the blog helps motivate the daily photo taking. That said, all the 365 project posts drowned out the more meaningful posts of this blog. I have considered moving these post over to a tumblr blog, but that is just one more platform to deal with. So I’ve decided I’m going to keep posting the 365 project photos to this blog, however, they will be excluded from the home page and for the same reasons the photography category which is accessible from the “Photography” tab at the top of the page.

The 365 project post can be found by selecting the tumblelog tab at the top of the blog, the 365 project category on the right sidebar, and they will remain in the RSS feed. It will take some time to move all the posts over (as I can’t seem to find a way to easily batch remove categories from posts).

Fun with fortune cookies #3

Another good fortune cookie. If only it wealth were that easy.

Work hard and you will become more wealthy.

Hit up the tag “fortune cookies” for other fortune cookies.