James R Sullivan

I purchased the T-Mobile Dash (aka HTC Excalibur). It’s a swell phone with a QWERTY keyboard running Windows Mobile 5. I was going to get a new BlackBerry but I had two requirements that BlackBerry couldn’t fulfill together:

1. QWERTY Keyboard

…plus…

2. Camera

They have phones that do one or the other, not the same together. It seems like a good move so far. The joystick is WAY better than the jog-wheel on the BlackBerry! Now, when in a grid, instead of using two keys, or using the jog-wheel like crazy, I just press the directional pad “down”. It truely is a revolutionary idea. WTF.

The must-have applications for the phone???

1. Google Maps (even though the j2me on this phone crashes and makes me reboot the damn thing)

2. Google Email (ditto)

3. Skype - Needs WIFI though. Lag? 1 second.
4. Windows Live Search Mobile – works like google, but by microsoft. No faster or slower. Just different.
Oh, and the manufacturer has a wiki for their product. That’s nice: Here.

Xbox Tetris.

It’s the most addictive game I’ve played since Grand Theft Auto Vice City.

Doubt it?  Play and you will see.  After 10 hours or so of game-play you get into a groove where you don’t even see the blocks and your fingers just move and guide the block into the right place.  The fun part is really that there’s basically un-ending levels of the game.  You can play basically forever (just like GTA) but it’s – I think – the most downloaded game to date on cell phones.  No wonder.

We’re implementing an internal helpdesk tool at a small business.  We reviewed a lot of the Open Source systems out there and found one that was just like an enterprise-level system but also customizable, runs on LAMP (easy setup/easy maintain), and is pretty popular.

Eventum

It’s used by MySQL as their external product helpdesk.  There were only a few points that we customized and made it a very slick offering for what we need:

1.  Project = Internal
2.  Priority = 1. Can’t Do Business / Mission-Critical to 5.  Project / Scheduled
3.  LDAP integration so people don’t need another password
4.  Email integration = Not perfect out of the box.

After having the system work for us in an all-internal aspect, we’ll look at offering it to our customers as our company helpdesk for our customers.  This could give us a central location to manage project work for both internal and external endeavors and a great point to integrate with our CRM system.  Plus, the per-seat license is $0 since we have LAMP expertise in-house.

Ok, I’m a die-hard GTD fan. The system is really fantastic for me (an information worker) where it’s less schedule-focused and easy to adopt into technology with almost any tool. Plus, I feel like the system encourages you to feel better about your organization system being personal than forcing you into a mold. I have taken personal organization classes before. GTD is my favorite.

I write this blog entry with an offering of a little tweak that I use that helps me avoid procrastination and focus on daily priorities:

That’s my Outlook Task view grouped by Categories. That is all my categories. I found it much more straight-forward to adopt only the core contexts instead of lots of super-specific ones. Other than the little number of contexts, what else is different?

The “TODAY” context. Outlook allows you to assign a task to two categories. I use it in my morning review. I set some goals for myself in the morning that I want to accomplish this day (i.e. things i need to do to keep a project on schedule). So, when I do the review – I just right-click on tasks, enter the category picker, and ALSO check off the “TODAY” Category. This way a task remains in “Office” or “Internet” but also gets added to my “TODAY” context. I leave the “TODAY” category open and make sure that I’m working to accomplish them through the day. Of course, sometimes you don’t get to complete one of them – so it can sit there until tomorrow – or, if the priority changed, take it off the “TODAY” context.

For me, this has made a great difference in feeling bad about forgetting the important thing for the day, and it definitely beats the post-it notes that I used for this before!

I love Google-Image-Search, not for how useful it is…

(one of my favorites is helping figure out what kind of person you’re supposed to meet later in the day – not sure if the name is a boy’s name or girl’s name? Perform a google search and see the images… more girls? probably a girl you’re going to meet.)

So, doing that search – from the mother of the baby that fell out of a window and was caught by passer-bys – i got this one:

http://www.pucpr.edu/fotografo/graduandos%20fotos_2006.htm

Chock full of really awesome icons to use in your favorite brand of instant messenger, email signature, desktop background (if feeling very ironic), etc.