The Nine Lives – Ian Cheung, Information Architect in Osaka, Japan

I never knew that ABS Plastic was a conductor until I had a tour of a sign maker’s factory where they plated signs made from ABS Plastic.  Not a very useful fact, but pretty interesting at least for me.

Sorry if any of you have tried to reach me through email and have it bounce back to you, I had some serious email problems lasting about a week.  I’ll spare you the long and frustrating story.  Suffice to say that the problems have been at long last resolved so you sent me a message to have it bounce back, please send it to me again.  Thank-you.

I’ve stopped trying to use Vitalist for GTD, the main reason being is that it keeps changing. In a way it is good that it is developing but it drives me crazy that the fundamentals change and there isn’t anyway of keep using the old system. One day you’re tootling away fine, then wham the things you did don’t work anymore, throwing you off your workflow.   I guess that once they have everything settled then it will be a smashing system but I can’t wait and so I’ve gone back to paper.Paper is great, for a number of reasons. There is no wait for the program,browser or site  to load (which can be painfully slow on a 128kbit connection). And you can use it anywhere. I went back to paper-lists for my NAs and the biggest disadvantage is that as you complete a bunch of NAs and add more, you eventually have to write out a new list to keep everything tidy.

That’s why I was delighted to come across GTD+R. GTD+R, the R stands for Rhodia notepads, let’s you shuffle your NAs around in stacks. There’s no rewriting lists and there’s minimal effort in transferring the items from your Inbox to your lists. Apart from the simple methodology the key ingredient is the set of folding pockets. The system is even more portable than the B5 binder I was using and it helps with daily, weekly and monthly reviews.

You can find the GTD+R system here

The templates are free to download and print out and there a video of how to fold the special pockets.

For the first time in a long long time I am happy with my GTD system and I don’t think I will be changing the way I do things for a while. If you are using paper lists and are happy apart from the constant rewriting of lists, give GTD+R a try.

Here’s something that I implement in passwords, verification emails and if I programmed captcha I would without fail do. Remove all ambiguous characters from the captchas you generate. It is ridiculously simple to do. Less than 30 seconds editing of an array and it will save hundreds of mistyped/misinterpreted verifications and user frustration.  For example under some fonts the letter O and the number 0 look the same.

Characters to exclude are the letters o, b, z, q, g, s, i and the numbers to exclude are 0, 1, 2, 5

Yes, you can use these characters if they look sufficiently different in the font, but sometimes down the line you might change the font forgetting the consequences.

I’ve been experimenting with the Google Maps Plugin and it is pretty cool. Easy to use, and works with WordPress 2.1 and 2.2

It’s been very handy on my LivinginOsaka.net blog, instead of trying to explain exact directions I can now just post rough directions plus a map. You can see an example in use here: Where is Hyatt Regency Osaka?

(It also prints out nicely)