Makin' a list and Jottin' it twice

Oh. My. God.

This could be life-altering.

I can't really say that I'm an inveterate list-maker, but I am an inveterate list-loser. If I had a nickel for every list I've started and lost....well, I wouldn't be sitting here doing work things at 11:45 on a Sunday night with the temperature a lovely six below zero. I completely love the idea of lists, but the actual implementation of them is where I sort of fall down. [Click here for a book that, by strange coincidence, I happen to be reading at the mo.]

I don't just love to-do lists. I am prone to making lists of all kinds, and some of these now exist in my brand-new Remember the Milk account. Such as Wish List (things I don't have, but want like an iPod and a microplane grater), Organizing Needs (things I don't have, but need to solve an organizing problem at home, like a container to corrall my various electronic device chargers) and MP3s (songs I would put on that iPod, like Radar Love and Thunder Road.)

I rely heavily on my PalmPilot to keep me organized, but one feature I have never had much luck using is the To-Do list. Much as I liked the idea of having all my to-dos in one spot, with no pesky paper scraps to lose, it has just never worked for me to do all of that data entry. I'm not entirely sure that RTM will work any better for me, but I'm willing to give it a go. At a bare minimum, I can type a lot faster than I can write with a stylus.

I find the interface to be a little clunky, and it seriously bothers me how things jump and move when you mouse over them. I think it will take a while for the whole thing to become second-nature, and to start using all of the functionality to its fullest capacity. For a start, though, I can envision reading my email with RTM open in another window, transfering to-dos into it and DELETING the email instead of leaving it in my inbox to get lost among the other email clutter. That's something.

One problem I can foresee, especially at home, is that I don't always happen to have the computer on when I need to make note of a to-do. Oh, wait, that's where Jott comes in, right? I must say, though, that calling Jott from my cell phone to remind myself to buy toilet paper while I'm sitting in my living room approaches the bounds of the surreal for me.

Jott transcribed the Jotts I sent perfectly, but for giggles I want to try out a few accents and see what happens. I noticed some goofs in the Project Play list, such as where someone who clearly meant "bring the wood in" got transcribed as "bring the wooden." (Bring the wooden.....what? And where should I bring it?)

Cool as all this is, my problems with information overload continue. So now, besides my work email and personal email, I also have inboxes on RTM and Jott. How many inboxes does one person really need?

This could all be even slicker if I didn't have a geriatric Palm that does not have Internet capabilities. Maybe I need to put a Palm upgrade on my Wish List. Or maybe what I really need is an iPhone, so I could send myself a Jott, which I could access on the iPhone, reminding myself to download The Farmer and the Cowman Should be Friends, which would go into my MP3 list on RTM, and which would prompt me to put the song...on the iPhone.

Is that full circle, or just way too complicated?

Does Google control the world?

Jeez Louise! Is there anything that can't be done from a person's Google account?

This was so totally and completely cool, I hardly know what to say. I thought I was very au courant with my little flash drive, carrying my files around with me, but honestly, it seems downright quaint compared to the Google Docs model. I don't have to worry about losing it, inadvertently sending it through the wash, or wreaking digital destruction when I forget to eject the little beast before removing it. Not that I've ever done that.

Always on the cutting edge, my cohort Frenzied Librarian has already started putting a few work documents on Google docs and inviting collaboration from the rest of us. I'm wondering how this compares with something like Basecamp for working collaboratively. I find Basecamp a little confusing, to be honest, and I'm not sure the same thing couldn't essentially be accomplished with Google Docs, but maybe I'm missing something wondrous about Basecamp.

When I was learning about Flickr, I felt vaguely uneasy about my photos being stored someplace other than my own hard drive. What if Flickr goes away, and I can't access my photos? Perhaps the more relevant question is, what if my hard drive crashes and I don't have everything properly backed up? Given the ominuous clicking, grinding and moaning sounds that sometimes emanate from my relatively ancient CPU, this is not an academic question. Not that I don't do regular and exhaustive backups. Daily even.

Besides just collaborating on projects, I now have a new way of helping patrons save documents that they are about to lose because their internet time is running out, instead of fumbling with the staff flash drive. Or giving patrons a documents option when they're using our express internet machines, which do not have Microsoft Office on them. Or making nifty display signs at my computer and printing them at the one computer networked to a color printer, without the clunkiness of emailing an attachment to myself, messing with the flash drive, or even inserting a floppy into the computer before remembering that there is no floppy drive behind that slot. Not that I've ever done any of those things.

I also think this would be an awesome way to do schedules and time off requests. Instead of our current piece of paper tacked to the staff bulletin board, we could have a document on which to make our schedule requests. We could update the master schedule in one place when someone trades or makes some other change, and all of our supervisors-in-charge would have access to the most up to date version of the schedule without us having to fax, email or otherwise communicate changes. We would avoid problems when someone forgets to fax the schedule to the supe-in-charge when she calls and asks for it, and fails to remember until the next day. Not that I've ever done that.

I've used Google Docs to share expense information with a certain ex-spouse, and find it a big improvement over the former system of emailing spreadsheet attachments and the multiple versions that process used to create. My only beef at this point is that I still have to email copies of receipts as attachments, since the files are too big for Google Docs.

Cool cool cool. What will those Googleites think of next?

More IM thoughts

I finally did get IMing to work. I found that the Meebo Me widget works just fine on my home computer, but not at work, unless you're using Firefox. I am still having just a wee bit of trouble wrapping my mind around the intersection of Meebo and other services. My middle-aged brain tends to think of Meebo as something that is essentially the equivalent of Google Talk or Yahoo Messenger, so I'm wondering why anyone would use anything other than Meebo or Trillian, since you're not limited to just one service. I am faintly, dimly aware that you can't necessarily IM someone using Meebo unless you already have an account on one of the services. But honestly, I am not even 100% sure that is true, since anyone can Meebo me through my widget.

Right?

I think I need to get our twenty-something page to explain this to me. This is definitely a generational thing. I know this from reading the blogs of some of my young whippersnapper colleagues, for whom IMing is yesterday's news.

TMI

So I guess I have information overload issues with Web 2.0.

Take Week 2's Project Play assignments. Lots of interesting reading in there. But one link just leads to another, and I'm clicking around, going off on lots of tangents and before I know it, I've been at the 'puter for two hours and I'm taking a quiz to see what I can do to improve my sleep.

Not that it wasn't all fun and interesting. [Well, actually, a lot of it was just stupid or mediocre comments to blog posts, but that's another topic.] And yeah, I know, one link leading to another is Kind of The Point.

But I get a little frustrated with all the jumping around from thing to thing. I either lose the thread I was pursuing, or I see something tangential that is interesting and can't find my way back to it later.

This might not be so bad if I had no other life, but I really don't have time for all this. It isn't only a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff; there's just Too Much Stuff out there, both good and bad. How to keep it from taking over my brain and my life.......?

Testing...1-2-3

My first blog post. Assuming it works, that is.

Setting this blog up was an astonishingly angst-ridden process. What should I call it? What should my name be? How to be clever, but not too cute? How will any of these decisions come back to haunt me in the future?

And, perhaps most important, why will anyone care?

I have much more to say, but for now I'm just trying to get my PP homework done. And see if this works.