Lloyd Leung

Inbox zero is when you have zero messages in your inbox.

You setup a bunch of verbs that you can ever do with emails.

• Delete
• Delegate
• Respond
• Defer
• Do

Pretty simple.
To help with this process…

Mark all your stuff that you filter into folders, as read. If you don’t read it often, unsubscribe to those lists. These lists have search functions, use it.

Why am I keeping a list of emails that are anceint? Archieve it. If it’s absolutely useless, delete it. If I’ve responded to it, archieve it.
Check out this link: http://www.43folders.com/2007/07/25/merlins-inbox-zero-talk/

A good analogy is, if you’re a subway sandwich artist, when you get an order, you don’t sit down, and wait for more orders, you handle them as they come in. Not collect them, and when you feel like it, do them.

Inbox zero requires discipline. Watch the video in the above link, and get a feel for how to handle your inbox disaster.

Yes, RSS is old news. Everyone and their dog has an rss feed. Okay, maybe not.

However, here’s a super easy way to to monitor RSS feeds.   Thunderbird!!! Yes, that’s old too, I know.  If you don’t have News & Blogs, you’ll have to add an account first.  Now you have an easy way to just drag new feeds over.

1. Find an rss feed, look on the side of this side, and you’ll see an RSS feed.
2. Drag it to your News & Blogs section in thunderbird.

Now I don’t need to open up all my those sites to figure out what if there’s something new. RSS feeds will automatically find out for me, and notify me whenever something is new.Suggestions for RSS use:

1. Monitor a friend’s del.cio.us bookmarks. “Hi SAM! I’m watching you!”
2. Monitor someone’s blog.
3. okay, here’s a real useful one. Monitor new file releases on sourceforge.
4. Forums and Announcements

That’s how I’m using RSS… any other suggestions to use RSS?

Seems like everything I do these on the computer requires only the following:

• Open Office .org – for writing documents/spreadsheets etc…
• Thunderbird – for email
• Firefox – web browsing

For IRC, I’m using MIRC, as that works under wine.

I also now have discovered bluefish. Which is a graphical text editor with syntax highlighting. Excellent application in my opionion.

Eagle layout program is a good PCB design application, however, it’s crashing on me recently… who knows why. I’ll compare version numbers, and upgrade if need be.

I’m trying out the 43 folders system. Plenty of websites out there that show you how to use this system.

Along with this other system, which prioritizes tasks into priorities.

1. Important and Urgent.
2. Urgent
3. Important
4. Other Tasks

definition of Important

• of great significance or value; “important people”; “the important questions of the day”
• significant: important in effect or meaning; “a significant change in tax laws”; “a significant change in the Constitution”; “a significant contribution”; “significant details”; “statistically significant”
• crucial: of extreme importance; vital to the resolution of a crisis; “a crucial moment in his career”; “a crucial election”; “a crucial issue for women”

definition of Urgent

• pressing: compelling immediate action; “too pressing to permit of longer delay”; “the urgent words `Hurry! Hurry!’”; “bridges in urgent need of repair”

I define the above to terms to show the difference. Important is of value and significance. Urgency has a time associated with the given task. Think of this as a two by two matrix.

Immediate and Urgent
- Stuff that must get gone ASAP, such as bills, immediate projects, etc.
- If you don’t get it done by the given time, there’s negative consequences.

Urgent
- Tasks that needs to get done by a given time.

Important
- Stuff that needs to get done, but with no time line or time due is in the future.

Other Tasks
- Tasks that are neither important or urgent.

You must prioritize tasks.

Something else I’m trying out.
- Write out 5 tasks that I must to get done for that day.
- Keep at those tasks till I’m done them. If I complete them all early for the day, create 5 more. If I do not get these new tasks done for the same day, no worries.
- Repeat.

Tips to accomplish this.
Keep that list with you at all times… have it in front of you… it must be a constant reminder.

Don’t go making a super long list, and trying to get them all done, it just doesn’t happen. I would group errands together like post office, banking and grocery shopping all in one go.

How to synchronize the google calendar and motorola razr v3c

Make sure the drivers for your motorola razr v3c are installed properly.
Install bitpim and make sure it detects your phone. Get the latest version, I’m using at the moment version BitPim version 0.9.0.6.

Within bitpim, file -> import -> google calendar

1. Click “Browse …”
2. Click new, the URL is for the iCal link to your google calendar. [See in google calendar, sharing the calander, and there should be an iCal link in the first tab.]
3. Give it a name, and click “OK”
4. Select the desired calendar
5. click “OK”
6. click “Import”
7. click “Add”

That should now be in BitPim’s memory. You will have to upload the new data to the phone.

Becareful of overwriting manual phone entries.

Mac commercials annoy, but this parody of the mac commercials is just hysterical
Read more…

Links update

Games

• Tetrinet like game
• Two player sudoku
• Scorched earth but with 3d graphics

Utilities

• Open Office . Org – Greate free functional office suite, able to export PDFs, and open MS Office documents, among others.
• Free zip/rar tool
  Supported formats:
  • Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
  • Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
• vlc – nice little application to play videos.
• editplus – great text editor with syntax highlighting and all

Security

• AVG – grisoft free antivirus scanner
• spybot
• Alternative Windows updates
• Firefox – more secured browser then MSIE
• Thunderbird – more secured email application then Outlook or Outlook Express

Patches

• apatch – patch Windows Live Messenger
• msg live plus – adds functionality to Windows Live Messenger [READ the install prompts carefully!]

I took the leap and installed ubuntu dapper 6.06 on the laptop.

I’m quiet impressed with the speed, and everything.

I had some issues with getting the wireless network card to work properly. I’ve got it working, but I still have to do something manual with it, “sudo ipdown ath0″ “sudo ipup ath0″ before I get an IP that I can use.
The ATI Radeon mobile 7500 works well… with some 2d glitches… but nothing major. Just some buttons in gnome get artifacts… like snow or static over buttons.

Automatix broke my first install, so I just trashed the install, and used easyubuntu instead.  Automatix wasn’t a bad thing, probably that I asked it to install the ATI drivers, which weren’t compatible with my card.  I probably should give Automatic another try, but easyubuntu has everything I need essentially.

Overall, very stable, battery check feature works, hibernates well, automounts my usb key… any quirks I find, I’ll comment about it later

Click to view this… Read more…

BBC NEWS | Politics | UK holds Microsoft security talks

So this is where big brother – George Orwell’s 1984 comes true.  Im not sure if I should be scared or what.  But this is a great push towards a open source alternatives.  How soon would a cracker reverse engineer this backdoor and allow access to all your sensitive information?

The idea is great on paper at first.  When you realize the potential damages that can occur afterwards, it’s a pain.

The current methods of obtaining sensitive information does not tread on anyone’s rights.  Well, that’s worded poorly.  I mean it’s not trampling on anyone’s right.  It may step on them, but not trample.

With that said, how much fun will it be when you have a 10 year old script kiddie, reading your sensitive documents?  There are just some things you would rather have private.

Backdoors are a bad idea.  It’s a gapping security hole, that one would never have.  The potential damages that this may cause, should not outweights the public interests.