Tales from Minnesota

Well, it’s been a strange day. Yesterday the snow around here had all but melted away. This morning I woke up to over a foot of snow and it’s still coming down tonight. We’re under a blizzard warning right now. I monkeyed with a dead snowblower long enough to get it running at half-choke for 2/3rds of a 3 car driveway, and then headed downtown with Aditi to help clear the sidewalk in front of The Urbane Animal. I posted a bunch of photos to my Flickr account, just to prove we actually got snow in Southern Minnesota. So having finished all that, I decided it was a snow day and settled down for some serious geekery…

I’ve known for a while that my bastardized version of GTD wasn’t really going to have the desired results. I decided to research a little further and try out all of the GTD apps to figure out what would work best for me. So far I’ve got about 12 solid hours of hacking, tweaking and testing in and have narrowed my system down to a few apps. I’m going to use them for a week and if I still like them, I’ll blog about the system. It relies heavily on tricks from Hawkwings and 43 Folders, as well as some apps that I found that bridge the gap between Packrat/Backpack and Kinkless.

I needed a relatively simple system that would encourage me to use it. It had to be geeky enough for me to enjoy it, and it had to be cool enough to impress my friends. It had to use Quicksilver, sync between multiple machines, handle correlations between files, emails, events and to-do items and it had to look pretty good. The options are many, but there wasn’t one “all-in-one” app that really did it for me. I’ll state up front, and again when I blog about this for real, I didn’t give kGTD the respect it probably deserves. It gave me a headache and I didn’t like the pricetag on OmniOutliner Pro.

In the meantime, here’s a gem for you… Instant Handbrake makes a one-click process out of putting a DVD on your iPod. With H.264 encoding built in, it’s snappy and looks great. I’ve got “It’s All Gone, Pete Tong” on my 30Gig right now…