Tuesday July 26, 2005

In Praise of Deadware

As you can tell from my blogroll link to 43 Folders, I am a devotee of Getting Things Done—albeit of the PC variety—which really has changed the way I work. For the last several months, I’ve been using a piece of essentially dead software—Keynote, a freeware tabbed-notes app that appears to have stopped evolving in 2003. It’s great, particularly for free-form info juggling, but you have to do a lot of the juggling yourself, rearranging items on your lists by hand.

So, as GTDers are wont to do, I spent the weekend looking for the “perfect GTD application.” I have tried them all: GTDTiddlyWiki, NextAction, a load of shareware PIMs. I’ve tried implementations with Excel and looked into MySQL databases—all just to find a way to sort contexts any way I want them sorted.

Then I finally found Ecco Pro, which is as dead as software gets without being forgotten entirely, as you can tell by the space age bachelor pad font on the packaging. An application that dates to the late ’90s, Ecco still has enthusiastic advocates, and now I know why. Ecco is great, and by far the best way I’ve found to implement a GTD-style system. The reason? Tags. Tags, of course, are all the rage—from Flickr to Gmail—but I’ve yet to see any information managers that use them effectively. And while Ecco doesn’t use tags, per se, it comes as close as anything I’ve seen by allowing you to file items in as many folders—or, if you like, in as many contexts—as you want. And, in turn, you can views those folders in any combination you want using various “views.”

The way I use this functionality is by assigning tasks that can be done in more than one context—say, either at my work computer or at my home computer—to all those contexts and then create views that display all the contexts I have in various situations. My call list might appear in both my Home and Office views, for example, since I have a phone in both places. And these aren’t copies of the items. These are the items themselves, so if you make a call at the office and delete it, it disappears from all folders and views. Powerful stuff. To think I had to resort to deadware to make that happen. And I still use Keynote for all my documents, so I now have a completely discontinued GTD system in place.

You can download Ecco here and find a pretty good (although, for my taste, overly-complicated) GTD template here. That’s where I started.

Posted by jim at 05:02 PM ||

Sunday July 24, 2005

Oh How the Edgy Have Fallen

When Sears stopped carrying Benetton clothing in 2000—in the wake of the company’s infamous “death row” campaign—iconoclastic creative director Oliviero Toscani, who had handled the company’s ultra-edgy branding for 18 years, shrugged. “Probably it’s good,” he said. “Sears is an old company. We need a more modern partner.” Now, five years after Toscani’s split with the company, it looks like they’ve found one. Now if she were only on fire …

(Thanks to A. for picking up the pamphlet pictured above.)

Posted by jim at 12:59 PM ||

Friday July 22, 2005

Three Little Dots

Have you ever thought that—way back in the early days of New York’s smoking ban—Christopher Hitchens must have been caught in some sort of scofflaw dragnet and been forced to work for the government? I think that all the time. … Jack Nicholson? He’s an asshole. … Slate’s Hua Hsu says R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” song cycle is “a showy, confident gesture that playfully hints at the facts while seducing you with its fictions,” which I guess—or hope—is just a fancy way of saying “ponderously stupid and offensive to the ear.” Next thing you know a call comes through on my cell phone/I tried my best to quickly put it on vibrate/But from the way he acted I could tell it was too late. Please. … Daniel calls the right’s bluff on the root causes of terrorism. … A bookseller does the numbers on one store’s Harry Potter madness.

Posted by jim at 11:55 AM ||

Thursday July 21, 2005

The Only Way to Win is Not to Play

A while ago, I mentioned in passing the Daily News’ successful crusade against the Drawing Center. By riffling through all the exhibitions the Center has hosted since 9/11, the paper was able to find three pieces they deemed unpatriotic and—in turn—found members of victims’ families to be offended that the museum was included in construction plans at Ground Zero. They manufactured a controversy out of whole cloth, in other words, and a partisan one at that. One of the works contantly cited by the News is an image of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, a topic which is of course quite separate from 9/11, except according to the Bush administration and its know-nothing functionaries. Being directly affected by 9/11 hasn’t univocally determined survivors’ views on Abu Ghraib, the war or even on Bush. To use anecdotal objections to hijack public policy is dishonest.

Now, the good news. The Drawing Center might pull out of the project all together. Even better news—the Daily News didn’t get to break the story. Rather, Crain’s New York Business (I work for Crain, but in another division) reports that the Center has put their planning on hold. Furthermore, “a number of arts executives, including one on the committee that selected the Drawing Center for the site, say the center should pull out even if it gets the assurances it wants from the LMDC, because its every move will be intensely scrutinized.” Says one exec, “The Drawing Center just got its first dose of what it’s going to be like to be there. Whatever it shows there will be subject to undue criticism.”

And other arts organizations selected for the development plan—including the Joyce and Signature Theaters—are beginning to have remorse as well, “saying privately that they wish they hadn’t been selected.” And who can blame them? What organization of any kind—a business, a non-profit or whatever—is going to want to become a tenant at Ground Zero, where its every move will be subjected to an ideological litmus test?

Maybe the idea that what is built at Ground Zero should represent something vital about New York should be scuttled altogether. Let’s lease the land to the nearest red state, Virginia, and build a gigantic water slide from Richmond that terminates in a giant Holidome-like affair that sells FDNY hats and Lance Armstrong bracelets and that ice cream that looks like little balls of rubber, so tourists can swoop in and feel the sorrow of an event they didn’t experience and be confirmed in their moral certainty that Bush has done everything right, despite what a majority of New Yorkers think. After all, if those most directly affected by 9/11—residents of New York and D.C.—got to determine public policy, Bush would no longer be president.

Posted by jim at 02:01 PM ||

Wednesday July 20, 2005

With Katie Holmes as Alien Adultress Hester Prynne

Alexandra recently picked up a Pocket Classics comic book version of The Scarlet Letter—from not so long ago, 1984—that features some rather strange cover art. Perhaps knowing that the volume would be competing with the actual book, on the one hand, and with Intellivision, on the other, the publishers gave the classic tale of early American Puritanism *yawn* some hacky sci-fi flavor with a flaming “A” shooting across the heavens amid apocalyptic clouds. Think War of the Worlds (or perhaps Dianetics.) The full cover appears below.

Posted by jim at 11:17 AM ||

Welcome to New York

During a recent—and rare—stint as drivers, A. and I captured these bits of political commentary posted along the BQE. Now seemed as good a time as any to post them.

Posted by jim at 09:03 AM ||

Friday July 15, 2005

Three Little Dots

Well, I guess that’s one way to boost your blog traffic. (And, yes, I am ashamed of myself, thank you.) … Telltale signs. Brilliant. … According to my friend Pat, I look exactly like the guy in a new Blockbuster ad about buying vs. renting DVDs. I’m not convinced, but—hey—if it qualifies me for Celebrity Fit Club 3, I’ll keep my doubts to myself. … I got some spam from Swift Boat ringleader John O’Neill this week. I’m so glad I signed up for their entertaining alerts. Stolen Honor producer Carlton Sherwood is being sued for defamation by veteran Kenneth Campbell, who is depicted in the film. John says I will hear from Sherwood, who needs money for his legal defense fund, shortly. I can’t wait.

Posted by jim at 03:16 PM ||

Thursday July 14, 2005

Three’s a Crowd Pleaser

Now that Karl Rove has been outed as the outer of Valerie Plame, it should come as no surpise that Bush’s chief political advisor is mounting a three-pronged defense. The talking points seem to be these: 1) He didn’t actually name her, 2) He didn’t know she was undercover, and 3) He was just trying to help Matt Cooper understand that it wasn’t Dick Cheney who sent Joseph Wilson to Nigeria. (It wasn’t Valerie Plame, either, but nevermind.) Now, none of these alibis pass muster, but—we know from the run up to the war—that this is what the White House calls consensus building.

If you’ll recall, we supposedly invaded Iraq for three reasons: 1) In retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, in which it supposedly particpated, 2) To head off an imminent threat posed by the country’s stockpiles of WMDs, and 3) To liberate the country from tyranny. Today we know that 1) and 2) were based on falsehoods. By floating them as rationales, however, the White House was able to scrape together enough popular opinion to move forward with the invasion and win a presidential election. Could the administration have built this kind of consenus on 3) alone? Doubtful, as the declining popularlity of the war now suggests. But as 1) and 2) have faded, 3) has been taken up by the faithful as the reason they were for the war in the first place, whichever argument roused their support in the beginning. This is the sense in which the administration has been dishonest. Its strategy has consistently been to offer as many rationales as possible—each one picking up a constituency of its own—and then making its stand on whichever one sticks.

And that’s how Rove is handling his embarrassing involvement in the Plame affair—with a scattershot of alibis, any one of which might get him off the hook. While this isn’t quite the “kettle logic” described by Freud—since the explanations aren’t mutually exclusive—it does show a healthy respect for the relativism conservatives are always fretting about, and raises the question, once again, of who’s postmodern now?

Posted by jim at 01:11 PM ||

Wednesday July 13, 2005

Hobson Lives!

Those of you who remember my post on Hobson’s vs. Hobbesian choice—and my subsequent correspondence with Kurt Andersen on the subject—might be interested to know that, though arcane, “Hobson’s choice” is alive and well, at least in Hoosick, N.Y. There, it serves as the name of a shop that deals in dried flowers that A. and I passed on our way back from Vermont this weekend. It’s a funny name for a retailer when you think about it, since Hobson’s customer service policy was pretty draconian, but I guess that’s the way they are up north.

Posted by jim at 11:59 AM ||

Thursday July 07, 2005

Three Little Dots

Pictures from London on Flickr. … Jayson Blair tells (or, rather, told—I don’t know how I missed it) all in the surprisingly slick Bp: The Healthy Living Magazine for Those with Bipolar (pdf). … All I know is this article sure made me want to sneak around smoking cigarettes. (33 days and counting, thank you.) … When did surfing become automatically incompatible with “serious writing”? Just wondering. I mean, without the internet, I’d just be sitting here with *gulp* myself. … I’m traveling tomorrow and Monday, so don’t come around here looking for me.

Posted by jim at 02:36 PM ||

Wednesday July 06, 2005

Mixed Messages

Ms. Subways—God love her—and deodorizer Mitchum appear to be locked in a battle for the heart of the New York subways. But now that we’re not getting the Olympics—praise be to all that is sensible and good—who cares?

(Thanks, A.)

Posted by jim at 10:27 AM ||

Tuesday July 05, 2005

The USO: Then and Now

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Posted by jim at 01:16 PM ||

Friday July 01, 2005

Three Little Dots

Onion scribe Joe Garden is running for host of Late Night in 2009, when Conan O’Brien takes over The Tonight Show. The road to the Late Night desk will be rough, especially since no election is planned—yet! Still, things started gaining much-needed Joementum yesterday with some sort of boondoggle in Madison. God bless America. … Want to speak like Britney Spears? Simply insert an “l” into “awesome”, like so: “Man, this sex is awlesome?” It works. It really does. … Meet the Kurt Andersen action figure. … Eugene Mirman is v. v. funny.

Posted by jim at 01:45 PM ||

Acid Reflux: The New “Exhaustion”

“I was diagnosed with acid reflux, anemia, hypoglycemia, my liver was swollen, my kidney was infected.” —Lindsay Lohan, explaining her dramatic weight loss to Us Weekly, July 11, 2005

“If Ashlee Simpson’s stomach was upset Saturday night, imagine how she’s feeling now. The 19-year-old singer was busted for a Saturday Night Live lip-synch gone awry. Her manager-father said Monday his daughter used the extra help because acid reflux disease had made her voice hoarse.” —Associated Press, October 25, 2004

Posted by jim at 06:10 AM ||