A New Job

So I'm now in my third week at Global Cloud. It's been a lot to absorb coming from such a small shop to a much larger shop. Finally seeing processes and standards in place! All the developers and designers use version control - I'd tried to get that to catch on before, but couldn't get any buy-in...

I'm working with lots of CF again, so that's a lot of fun and I'm moving back to more of a designer role as opposed to a swiss army knife. I still get to program, but now I've got folks making sure I'm doing things correctly instead of flying by the seat of my pants. The good thing is I realize all the stuff I did before was mostly right, nice to have that validation!

So more to come at some point. Getting settled into a new house, a new job and soon a new marriage. Then I'll start to take a better look at CF8 since I haven't done much with it for awhile.

It's that time of year again...

A List Apart has posted their 2008 survey, so if you work on the web get over to ALA and take the survey. It's quick, easy and painless. This is the second year they've done this and it offers some great insight into the web workers world.

check it out

Mindmapping

As I continue to refine my workflow process I've begun to rely on mind mapping for my brain-storming sessions. It's also a great way for me to keep my focus in meetings and I now have notes that actually make sense to me when I go back and look at them.

Amazingly as I was working on this I noticed that Lifehacker covered the mind map on Monday. I still get some strange looks around the office, which I find interesting since I work at an Ad Agency (everyone doodles during meetings... mine are just on-topic)

So far I've had the best luck with a big sketchbook, I really like the feeling of putting pen to paper. Mapping on the computer is good for somethings, but I've noticed that I works better if I start with paper.
That being said, mindmeister is great, so far the best software I've tried. In the beginning I tried some of the others - but the terrible clip art shapes killed me. MindMeister doesn't let me doodle in the margins, but they don't insult my design intelligence either. I still haven't tried the map via email, although that looks like a pretty good way to get something started on the road.

I'm not sure if mind mapping has made me all that more productive, or if my projects are better thought out. Only time will tell. I do know that it has made long boring meetings tolerable and given me notes I can actually decipher after the fact!

iPhone 2.woe

or Everyone should have seen this coming all along.

Since late last night I've obsessively been clicking the software update button in iTunes 7.7 to see if 2.0 had been released to the general public. Knowing my luck I didn't want to install the firmware that gizmodo posted about yesterday. So I was a good Apple FanBoy and waited to install till Apple told me I could.

So what do I get for this patience? A brick and now I'm phoneless.

I updated this morning around nine and then after restarting the phone I started getting error messages. Most of the time I see a pop-up with the extremely informative error message "We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (-4)." That really just translates into - "Hey, we didn't think this thing would catch on, so we didn't prepare for the activation traffic."

Now I've got a phone that doesn't work and NO idea when it will. Hope no one calls to make an offer on my condo today.

Thanks Apple.

*** UPDATE ***

so finally it went through and now I have a phone again!

(10+2)*5 - relearning what Merlin taught me...

I'm back on a hyper-productivity kick.

I found my @work to-do list getting longer and longer, and my @home list wasn't in much better shape. Looking back through the apps, widgets, etc. that I've saved over the years I came across one that I found extremely helpful in the past (I used this for most of the productiveparenting.com build) and decided to give it another shot. A huge thanks to Merlin Mann, who has made most of us web-workers at least somewhat more productive over the years. You can read his original article here 43Folders.com

Merlin Mann's (10+2)*5 Procrastination Hack

Ten minutes working plus two minutes not working (surfing the web, daydreaming, etc.). Just repeat this five times and you'll have knocked out an hour of work. It's really amazing how much one can accomplish when working in ten minute blocks. I was able to knock out a bunch of SEO tasks I'd been avoiding, organize the last few months files, respond to emails & voicemail's, and even launch a website.

Right now I'm testing out FlexTime from red sweater software. I just downloaded a copy, using the 30-day trial version at the moment. Don't know if it's worth $18.95 quite yet, we'll see as the 30 days go by.