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.

The power of time off

Another great TED clip I watched the other day. The power of time off. While taking time off to recharge is something that is often thought/ talked about by employers I get a feeling most people believe it’s “the man” preaching to “look good” to their employees. I’ll admit, I’ve felt that way before. Historically, I have not thought such an amount of time off is warranted in most positions (including mine, despite how much I may  want it), however I have see how powerful it can by through my aunt, Helen Milner, who is a professor. That said, maybe Stefan has a point, as people are working longer into their lives in modern western society maybe it makes sense to consider breaking up those 40+ years of career work with a sabbatical year every so often in return for fewer retired years.

I know I’ll start thinking about planning a sabbatical year in the next decade.

The blizzard of 2010 (aka Snowpocalypse 2010)

Over the weekend DC was hit by a massive blizzard dumping up to 30 inches of snow across the region (for those of you who don’t already know). I chose to stay warm indoors and not venture out in the blizzard or travel too far around the city. After the snow stopped falling on Saturday afternoon I ventured out around my neighborhood. Below is a slide show I snapped with my pocket camera as I and the neighborhood frolicked in all the new snow (lots of sledding). Nothing fancy or artistic.

Click the image to play the slide show

Or visit the Flickr set here

Fun with fortune cookies #2

Another fun fortune cookie. I am wondering what the thrilling time is going be.

A thrilling time is in your immediate future.

Fun with fortune cookies #1

Starting a series on comical fortune cookies I receive. Here’s a good one. I still don’t even know what this one means. Any thoughts?

Confucius say: lovers in triangle not on square.

Introduction to personal metadata

Lately I’ve seen a lot of new tools, be it web apps or gadgets, that help us keep track of the things we do on a daily basis. Wether it be tracking weight, food eating, exercise, sleep, or any of the many of other activities to track. Like my new fitbit.

Personally I have tracked certain activities for a few years, primarily my diet and exercise. Lately, I’ve been expanding the data that I track and the tools I use to track the data.

As they say you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

This is the beginning of series of posts in which I’m hopping to talk about the tools that I’m using and other tools that are out there to track and manage our actions, or as I call it “personal metadata”.  Brad Feld has had some interesting posts on this subject which he calls human instrumentation here, here, and here, Bryce Roberts also has discussed this, as as well.

Stay tuned to the tag personal metadata for details on the tools I’m using.

Pandora vs. Last.fm round 1

I’m late to the party, I know. These two online music providers have been around for some time, and while have known about them I’ve never really taken the time to understand them. I don’t have a large music collection managed through iTunes; I’d say it’s about average sized, and I go through phases where I would add a lot of new music for a few weeks then add nothing for weeks. So new music discovery is often sporadic, and for the last year or so I have left the task to podcasts like All Songs Considered and those compiled by some of my favorite DJ’s. I used podcasts because they are easy; iTunes manages them, downloads them, removes them, and transfers them to my iPhone seamlessly. I tend to do most of my listening while working and for some reason I could not get Pandora to play in Firefox or internet explorer while in the office. I blamed our security policies but never really spent much time trying. I also did not try last.fm as Pandora has always been explained to me as the simpler to use service of the two. I didn’t want to install their plug-in to only find out I couldn’t listen at work.

My year as a vegetarian (nearly vegan)

Time flies by. It didn’t hit me on the day, but the other day I was reminded that it was just over a year ago (the anniversary would have been almost two weeks ago, on the 5th) I decided to become a vegetarian again (for the second time in my life). This time rather than chose the lacto-ovo route as I previously did many years ago, I chose to take it a steep or two further and become a strict vegetarian. Strict is basically vegan, which is what I tend to call it when dining out as most people have no idea what being a strict vegetarian is, but they tend to understand what vegan mean.

iTunes podcast sharing between computers

I listen/ watch a LOT of podcasts and mange them through iTunes on my primary mac. I find it pretty easy to keep current on the audio ones by listening to them on my iPhone while working throughout the day, but the video podcasts just seem to pile up because they require more attention and are harder to multi-task to. As a result, they rarely get watched on my iPhone, in fact I don’t even sync most of them.

So I have been looking for a workflow solution to keep current and get through the backlog of video podcasts. While I spend a good amount of time in the mornings and evenings at my primary mac I find myself using most of the screen real estate for photo processing or other tasks which doesn’t leave me with a lot of room to play the video podcasts on this machine. Moreover, unlike audio podcasts, I have found when playing a video in a separate window iTunes does not advance to the next video when the current one finishes playing. This requires a lot of back and forth between what I’m working on and iTunes.

My FitBit finally arrived!

It’s been a long time of waiting (not as much as some, thankfully), but I came home this evening to find my new FitBit waiting for me! Setup was a breeze and now I’m headed out to relax after the week. But I’ll post more details later. I got the FitBit to add to my personal data tracking which I’ve been drafting a series of posts about, hopefully I’ll be able to at least introduce the series in the next few days!