brain tags Je Maintiendrai

Telephone or e-mail

The productivity guru of the moment, Tim Ferriss, writes in his book how he was able to reduce the amount of e-mail received by setting up an autoresponder to tell that he only reads his e-mail once a day and that it is better to phone him for urgent matters.

I believe him, when he tells that this technique has reduced his e-mail load significantly. But what he doesn’t tell is what happened to the number of telephone conversations he received. In my case, I notice a clear increase in telephone calls when I am very busy and cannot answer e-mails within the usual 12 hours. And guess what, when I am very busy, the last thing I am waiting for are telephone calls! When somebody phones me, that person decides what I will be doing for the next two minutes and when I will give attention to him (now!), while with e-mail I am the one deciding who should get my attention and when.

Tim’s trick only works because his workload is very low. When you’re workload is higher and you need to spend more time in the zone, it makes more sense to change your voice mail message to tell people that you can only be reached by phone during one hour a day and that they get faster response when they send their inquiry by e-mail.

My killer GTD setup

Most of you know that I also write in Spanish on my other weblog El Canasto, and you might even have visited it to see what it looks like. I just remembered that two months ago I published an entry in both Spanish and English, participating in a meme about my ‘killer’ GTD set-up. Basically I describe how I work and what productivity tools I use. If you’re interested, just head over to My Killer GTD Setup, which might also help you learn a little bit of Spanish as the translation is right next to it.

coComment just got more difficult to use

For quite some time I have been happily using coComment. For those who don’t know this service: coComment basically keeps track of the comments you leave on web sites. If you’re like me, reading and commenting on many sites, it can be difficult to track the replies to your comments. coComment captures your comment and tracks the conversations started by those comments on a single page instead of having to revisit all sites you’ve commented on.

Yesterday coComment released a new version, bringing more social features. By doing that, they threw out the real value of their service: tracking conversations. The new page reserves 75% of screen real estate for groups, friends, favourites and neighbours, leaving just enough space for only five conversations:

Furthermore, all my conversations have been marked as unread, and I could not find an option to mark them all as read. This is not an upgrade, this is a downgrade!

A relic from the past

I just remembered that a little more than a year ago I took of my watch. The main reason was that my skin was irritated by the leather in the hot weather. And I knew that I didn’t really need a watch, as I spend most of my days behind the PC with a little clock in the corner, and usually wear both my mobile phone and my Palm with me.

Now, after more than one year without wearing a watch, I don’t miss it at all. Not only because I have clocks in other places, but most of all as time is not that important. While wearing a watch I found myself checking the time several times a day, while actually I only have four moments on the day on which I really need to know the time: the moment I have to wake up (taken care of by the alarm clock), the moment I leave the office for my lunch break (I will notice as my colleagues will leave too), the moment I go back to my office after lunch (which is after the weather forecast on TV finished) and the moment to go home after work (once again, I only have to follow my colleagues). For none of these moments I need a watch.

The more I think about it, the more useless watches appear. In fact, nowadays they only serve as a fashion accessory or in case you are out without a mobile phone. The watch has become a relic from the past.

Static versus dynamic publishing

Now that Movable Type 4 has been released and leaped ahead of WordPress, the old discussion of static publishing versus dynamic publishing shows up again. Movable Type by default uses static publishing — it generates static HTML files with are served to the visitor — while WordPress uses dynamic publishing — all content is served directly from the database. What method is better?

As usual, the answer is: it depends…

Static publishing requires less server resources per visit, but it takes longer before updates (entries, comments and template changes) are visible. With dynamical publishing, your changes are immediately visible to your visitors, but you’ll need more power to serve those pages.

For most bloggers it won’t make any difference, as they hardly tweak their templates and receive few comments and visitors. However, if you like tweaking your templates, you might want to go dynamic, and popular blogs are better off going static.

But wait, I can hear you think: there are some very popular blogs using WordPress… That’s right, and without exception they use some kind of caching method to lower the server stress. On the other side, Movable Type can also run in dynamic mode (which is what I use for this blog), and you can specify for each template whether it should be served statically or dynamically, allowing you to optimize your site’s performance.

Conclusion: for low-traffic sites, it doesn’t matter whether you publish static or dynamic. If you have many visitors you probable want to use static or hybrid publishing.

The end of TinyURL?

Lately —especially since I use Twitter— I receive a lot of URLs in TinyURL format. That made me think: if TinyURL gives out a unique URL each time it is used, when will they run out of URLs?

On their site they state that they have more than 42 million of them, which doesn’t sound like an awful lot. All TinyURLs I receive have a six character identifier, such as 3bso2z. A little calculation (six positions with 36 options per position) gives me 2.238.976.116 unique identifiers. More than two billion, that sounds already better. And if they run out of Ids, they can simply use seven or eight characters, which I still consider tiny. Eight positions give 2.984.555.162.628 (2 trillion!) unique identifiers!

It is clear: TinyURL is here to stay.

You know you've lived in Spain when...

For everyone who has spent more than a holiday in Spain and for whom some of the following are true….

1. You think adding lemonade, fanta or even coke to red wine is perfectly acceptable. Especially at lunch time.
2. You can’t get over how early bars & clubs shut back home — surely they’re shutting just as you should be going out?
3. You aren’t just surprised that the plumber/decorator has turned up on time, you’re surprised he turned up at all.
4. You’ve been part of a botellon.
5. You think it’s fine to comment on everyone’s appearance.
6. Not giving every new acquaintance dos besos seems so rude.
7. You’re shocked by people getting their legs out at the first hint of sun — surely they should wait until at least late June?
8. On MSN you sometimes type ‘jajaja’ instead of ‘hahaha’.
9. You think the precious aceite is a vital part of every meal. And don’t understand how anyone could think olive oil on toast is weird.
10. You’re amazed when TV ad breaks last less than half an hour, especially right before the end of films.
11. You forget to say please when asking for things — you implied it in your tone of voice, right?
12. You love the phenomenon of giving ‘toques’ - but hate explaining it in English
13. You don’t see sunflower seeds as a healthy snack — they’re just what all the cool kids eat.
14. You know what a pijo is and how to spot one.
15. Every sentence you speak contains at least one of these words: bueno, coño, vale, venga, pues nada…
16. You know what resaca means. And you had one at least once a week when you lived in Spain.
17. You know how to eat boquerones.
18. A bull’s head on the wall of a bar isn’t a talking point for you, it’s just a part of the decor.
19. You eat lunch after 2pm & would never even think of having your evening meal before 9.
20. You know that after 2pm there’s no point in going shopping, you might as well just have a siesta until 5 when the shops re-open.
21. If anyone insults your mother, they better watch out…
22. You know how to change a bombona. And if you don’t, you were either lazy or lucky enough to live somewhere nice.
23. You’re either a Los Serrano person or an Aqui no hay quien viva person.
24. You don’t accept beer that’s anything less than ice-cold
25. The fact that all the male (or female) members of a family have the same first name doesn’t surprise you.
26. The sound of mopeds in the background is the soundtrack to your life.
27. You know that the mullet didn’t just happen in the 80s. It is alive and well in Spain.
28. You know the difference between cojones and cajones, tener calor and estar caliente, bacalao and bakalao…and maybe you learned the differences the hard way!
29. On a Sunday morning, you have breakfast before going to bed, not after you get up.
30. You don’t see anything wrong with having a couple of beers in the morning if you feel like it.
31. Floors in bars are an ideal dumping ground for your colillas, servilletas etc. Why use a bin?!
32. You see clapping as an art form, not just a way to express approval.
33. You know ensaladilla rusa has nothing to do with Russia.
34. When you burst out laughing every time you see a Mitsubishi Pajero
35. You have friends named Jesus, Jose Maria, Maria Jose, Angel, maybe even Inmaculada Concepcion…
36. When you can whistle at or applaud a tia buena and you get a wink instead of the middle finger.

Politicians

In the coming years I would like to see politicians wear maintenance uniforms instead of business suits, because when they wear business suits they represent business. When they wear maintenance uniforms they are the servants that they are supposed to be.

— Danny Hoch

Frustration

30 minutes after updating this site to Movable Type 4.0 RC2, I read this. Back to work…