Elemental

I regularly cull my RSS feeds. And I must admit, I add in as many as I dismiss. One I keep trying over and over again is Seth Godin. He got added back in and then deleted again in quick succession.

This is not to say I don’t find his posts interesting. However, I trust other people who I read to point out the posts I will find interesting, rather than wade through 100% of his posts.

I had suspected my blog did a similar job for others. Rather than read all the blogs I do, you trust my opinion (or trust it enough) to task me to point out those articles of interest to you. Recently I asked connections on LinkedIn to recommend my writing as a blogger, and I was really pleased to find out my hunch seems correct. Thanks so much to everyone who commented and recommended.

It’s the Long Tail in action – and those who potentially win in the Long Tail are not those who produce the content at the narrow end of the tail, but those who aggregate and filter it.

Of course, there is a relationship which needs to be built up there.  You don’t trust me the first time you visit here. But eventually it costs you less time to come straight here than somewhere else.

mel starrs Geekery Blogging, filters, rss

This is one of those posts which blogs were originally invented for – a record of something I did to my computer which I can refer to in the future, so I know how I did it.

Every company I have ever worked for has used Outlook. As a tool, it has it’s limits in it’s “out of the box” configuration. Below are the three main tweaks I use to keep my inbox to zero. Note – I use folders extensively to keep project related email in. When projects reach a milestone (out to tender or report issued etc) or a conversation reaches a conclusion, I archive to the central repository. This is not my ideal way of working, but given the constraints I’m working with, it’s the best solution I’ve found so far.

The first tweak is to keep all my incoming and outgoing live emails in one inbox. The sent items get automatically filed in my inbox (although not from the crackberry) and deleted from the sent items. Instructions for setting this up are here complete with screen shots. As a summary:

Rules and Alerts > New Rule > Check messages after sending > Next > Specified folder (Inbox)

To delete outgoing mail from sent items (and only have in your inbox):

Tools > Options > Email options > untick save copies of messages

The next part of the equation is to set up a key shortcut to move emails into folders. Depending on your work flow you may also want to set up a copy shortcut. Personally, I try to keep only one copy of an item at any one time (hence deleting the sent items).

Full instructions are here (third tip down the page). Basically, you end up with an Alt+1 shortcut in a new toolbar which will give you the ability to move emails to a folder without using the mouse.

The final tweak is to make Outlook look a little more like Gmail. I use this inside my project folders to help me decide if a conversation is finished and can be archived. Click on any of the fields at the top of the inbox. Choose field chooser and add the extra field ‘conversation’. Drag onto the toolbar. Remove the Subject field. Right mouse click and arrange by conversation. You should end up with a nested view of conversations, and as all your sent items are in there too, you can keep track of who said what, when. You will have to do this for each folder you are using this method on. I don’t use it in my inbox – my inbox should really only have outstanding non-project related emails and incoming unread emails.

A few more useful keyboard shortcuts for Outlook:

Alt + w Forward

Ctrl + u Mark as Unread

admin Geekery Gmail, gtd, inbox zero, Oulook, Productivity

I’m not quite sure when I crossed the line from nerdy reader (a lifelong habit) to full on geekdom, but I suspect it was when I discovered blogs. I’m not ashamed by my geekiness, in fact sometimes I’m quite proud of it. But it wasn’t until I started working with a bunch of Gen Y’s who, if the press are to believed are constantly IM’ing and Youtubing and can only converse by txt, and my geekiness was an order of magnitude greater than theirs, that I began to realise how far across the line I’d crossed.

So how many of the signs below can you identify with?

1. You have a personal contact card from Moo with your twitter, gmail, linked-in and blog address listed, colourfully illustrated with photos from your Flickr feed
2. You have editted a Wikipedia page and monitor changes to it via RSS
3. You digitally stalk an online ‘celebrity’ i.e. you have a Dilbert day to a page on your desk, follow the RSS feed, read Scott’s blog but just don’t think much of the animated cartoon (alternatively your fangirl/boy obsessions may centre on a different victim – Merlin Mann, Neil Gaiman, or Wil Wheaton are all fair game – now Kathy Sierra isn’t blogging (though she is on twitter) I can’t think of another female in the same league?).
4. You look up information while a discussion/argument is still in progress – that’s what google on the crackberry was invented for, right? My friends will probably disown me if I ever get my hands on an iPhone.  Hat tip to geek dad for pointing this one out.
5. You have chosen the technologically superior (and most importantly, free to view) Humax over paying for a Sky+ subscription, and you prefer to gorge on TV series on DVD in their entirety than wait for a paltry episode per week. Having been burned as an early adopter for most gadgets you’re waiting for internet TV to settle down before committing to any one solution.
6. You have read, digested and tweaked David Allen’s Getting Things Done within an inch of the original intent, and now run a complex system of notebooks, Gmail filters, Zoho notebook, Instapaper, WatchThatPage and RTM, which someday will be consolidated into the mother of all productivity systems
7. You have turned one of Hugh McLeod’s gaping void cartoons into a business card, mug, mouse mat or t-shirt (see also no.3 above – fangirl/boy behaviour)
8. You own and tote around a Linux netbook such as the Asus Eee and generally favour open-source or creative commons over traditional models of intellectual property
9. You have cracked your work’s IT lockdown and only ever use Firefox, plus you have tried to introduce colleagues to Yammer or Twitter, Delicious and/or wikis and discussion forums
10. You know your Meyer Briggs personality type and thinks it explains quite a lot

There is obviously no hope for me. This list could have been expanded to 20 quite easily, but I thought I’d better stop before I completely expose all my foibles! Anyone else wish to confess their geeky habits or quirks?

admin Geekery Geekery, Productivity, Web 2.0

It’s been quiet on here and likely to continue for the next few weeks, partly due to the fact that I am studying madly for my LEED-AP exam. I’m also considering finally getting my ASHRAE membership sorted out, something I’ve been meaning to do for years.  The two go hand in hand, as ASHRAE members get a discount on key LEED documents like User Guide 90.1 (which is also the key energy standard referenced in Estidama and many other international building rating systems).

In lieu of me blogging, have a wander over to 2 new kids on our block.

Su (aka @SuButcher on Twitter) has started blogging over at Just Practising. Having followed Su on Twitter, I’m looking forward to posts longer than 140 characters!

And Liz Male (who many of you will know) has started a blog AND a Twitter feed. Find Liz at Footings or @LizMale.

Welcome to both, and they and others can be found on my blogroll under bloggers.

And if you’re reading this asking yourself what on earth Twitter is, perhaps you need to read Pam‘s excellent guide to social media (pdf – warning – LARGE file size).

I’m off to memorize a 400 page manual – see you on the other side…

mel starrs Geekery American Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, Social Networking, twitter

Image via Wikipedia

Clearing out some MBA stuff and keep coming across snippets regarding models, heuristics and concepts which I want to keep for future reference. Here are some:

• theories are stable explanations for recurring phenomena
• theorising is “sense making”
• “there is nothing so practical as good theory”
• 3 stages to theorising:
  • concepts (define)
  • conceptual framework (description of connections)
  • theory

And some stuff on cognitive styles:

• Intuition – “knowing, without knowing why”
• “Truly outstanding managers are those who can couple hunch, judgement and synthesis with logic and analysis” (Henry Mintzberg)

Don’t have the money or rigid blocks of time to do an MBA? Check out this reading list “The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List” which has been knocking around for a couple of years. You’ll still need ‘time’ but with disciplined self learning you could theoretically get through the list in 1 year (77 books in total). More probable that it will take 2-5 years though…

And books I would recommend which aren’t necessarily on the list above but which touch on theories, statistics, decision making and all that stuff:

Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty Gerd Gigerenzer

Judgment in Managerial Decision Making Max Bazerman

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Levitt and Dubner

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell

Supercrunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted Ian Ayres

and a couple I have on my reading list for my holidays next week:

Wikinomics Dan Tapscott

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Nassim Nicholas Taleb

mel starrs Geekery books, Malcolm Gladwell, Management, Marketing, MBA

I’ve been a fan of del.icio.us for some time now. Regular readers will know I use it to pull in short comments on topical articles. It’s an immense time saver for me.

The website has been given a spruce up, and for me the best improvement is that the description field, instead of having the 255 character limit, can now hold 1000 characters. So expect fewer randomly truncated comments from me.

I know a few of you use del.icio.us and few others dabbled but didn’t find a use. I’d recommend giving it another go. As far as companies using it, I see Pellings are still active (although no posts since the end of May). I see it as a potential great communication tool internally, for those items which colleagues might be interested in, but don’t want an email (a pull rather than a push mechanism). If anyone knows of a proprietary system which will do a similar job without being ‘public’, drop me a line.

mel starrs Geekery delicious, knowledge management

I’ve swapped my WordPress theme back to DeepBlue, which you will probably recognise.  Readers were reporting difficulties using IE6 on the old theme (which was only a placeholder, really) so I’ve switched things back and tested it on Firefox2, IE6 and IE7.  Virtually no-one who visits here uses IE5 or below, so I didn’t test with that.  I’ve not upgraded to FF3 yet either, so someone let me know if it looks squiffy on there.  For all you Safari and Opera guys, I’m afraid you’ll have to let me know too.  Of course, it’s only ever IE that seems to have the problems ;o)

I’ve tidied up the sidebar too, pulled out a few widgets which were redundant.  I had wanted to get a cleaner look but struggled to find something which looked how I wanted and did what I wanted.  Maybe I’ll treat myself to a professionally designed theme next time. Or learn to write one from scratch…

mel starrs Geekery browsers, themes, WP2.5

Readers may have missed this comment posted recently by Martin B, so I’ve reprinted it in full here:

Another belated follow up on your post (original post here): we just recently launched Degree Days.net, a free site for generating degree days: http://www.degreedays.net/

Since writing that article about problems with degree days, many of which are caused by poor data, it occurred to me that, instead of talking about the lack of good data, we should really do something to fix it (we are a software company after all)… So we made Degree Days.net.

It generates degree days on the fly, using temperature data from the excellent Weather Underground (we’re oh so grateful to them for giving us permission to make Degree Days.net).

The search function is a little hit and miss, but there are actually something like 1000+ UK weather stations in there that you can generate degree days for. Many of the stations have poor data (Degree Days.net says if it has to make estimates), but the airport stations are generally pretty reliable.

You can get HDD and CDD going back 36 months, in monthly, weekly, or daily formats, and to any base temperature you choose. All completely free.

I haven’t used degree days in anger for a while now, but this resource looks very useful. Here’s a screen grab from a quick example I pulled down for Leeds Bradford airport.

I’m know the guys at BizEE would welcome any feedback, if anyone wants to check out the site. Good to see someone addressing a problem, especially with an opensource ethos.

mel starrs Geekery degree days

Firstly, apologies for the hourly del.icio.us posts – I think I’ve fixed the problem now and there should only be one a day now at most. We shall see…

Broadband services have resumed and I’m back on my old computer. After a year of being mothballed, it’s behaving remarkably well and I’m poking about at all the extensions and add-ons I previously used on Firefox and around my PC.

Some of these are real time savers so I thought I’d share my top list of productivity tweaks for Firefox.

1. Use Firefox as your browser. Seriously, why use IE? Plus all of these add-ons and tweaks are for Firefox, so this list will be of no use to you if you don’t start there
2. Use del.icio.us and the Firefox browser button to post interesting articles and then publish to your WordPress blog using Postalicious. A massive time saver for comments on articles under 255 characters.
3. For longer clips from webpages, try using the Google Notebook extension, which allows you to clip direct from the page into Google Notebook (including a link to the original article). As I’ve said before, Google Notebook can then be used to draft up blog posts. There is then the option to send to Google Docs and blog direct from there, or use your favourite blogging platform (I tend to work inside WordPress). You can find the download for Notebook extension once you have set up for account.
4. As part of the peripatetic lifestyle, I have fully embraced the Google mothership, as you can log in from any computer and everything is only a few clicks away, plus the search functions are awesome. So, it’s no surprise that I use Google Reader as my RSS feed reader. Once you have over 1000 posts to read, you get a message which says 1000+, which is a bit depressing. Better to know exactly how many posts you have not managed to read (and let’s face it, it might force you (well, me) into culling a few feeds which have outlived their stay), so I use Google Reader Notifier Firefox Extension. It quietly sits at the bottom of my browser and updates at set intervals to tell me how many unread posts there are. I like the fact that I can set it to be unobtrusive – I check it when I want to, not when something happens (it’s on my terms rather than forcing me to be reactive – I’ve turned off Google Mail notifier because it intruded into my workflow too much).
5. My two favourites add-ons for Firefox are both for links within webpages. The first is Linky. This is an outstanding add-on and I’m sure I only use a fraction of it’s functionality. I use it to highlight lists of links on a page and open them all at once, each one in it’s own tab. It saves me hundreds of mouse clicks and enables me to power through research. I cannot recommend it highly enough. The second one is a similar idea and allows you to download multiple files (pdf’s, mp3′s, .docs, etc etc) which have been linked to from a single webpage. It used to be called Download Them All! but has now changed to Downthemall (which I read as Down the mall – shopping on my brain). Again, a great timesaver.
6. And to keep track of all this time I am saving, I use a wee add-on called time-tracker which allows you to track how much time you are spending online. Useful for those times when you say “I’m just popping online for 10 minutes” and 6 hours later you wonder where the day went.

Feel free to add any others you find useful in the comments.

As I’m back at my desk now, I can now try out such goodies as Google Earth and SketchUp, Second Life and Twhirl. I forsee vast chunks of time disappearing forever…

mel starrs Geekery delicious, downthemall, firefox, Google, linky, wordpress

As an industry, we love acronyms.  For newcomers this may be confusing. 

I toyed with the idea of a seperate glossary page with links to sites, but that seemed quite a heavy workload.  So I compromised and added a WordPress plug-in which automatically displays acronyms (if I have defined them) when you hover your mouse over the text.

Try it: BREEAM, EPC, WRAP, CIBSE, DSM et al. You don’t get a link to a website, but I credit you all with the intelligence to stick the phrase in a search engine and then I don’t need to maintain broken links.

If you use WordPress and want to try it out, the plug-in can be found here.

Hope someone finds this of use…

mel starrs Geekery acronyms, plugins, wordpress