A couple of months back, I was giving Dan Benjamin a hard time [http://twitter.com/chrisbowler/statuses/766202338] on Twitter, claiming that someone replaced his avatar with a caricature of Cabel Sasser [http://cabel.name/] (of Panic [http://www.panic.com/] fame). Dan replied, with a link [http://twitter.com/danbenjamin/statuses/766204067] to the source his avatar, which was supplied by the gang responsible for Happy Webbies [http://www.happywebbies.com/]. Although I was merely giving Dan a har…
It's easy to have a routine or setup that keeps you organized when things are slow. But a lot of people (should I say all?) lose trust in their system when things get crazy. When you're so busy things like eating and sleeping start falling by the wayside. So busy that things you care about get no attention. For the first three months of this year, that's what my life has felt like. With a full time job, a large family, starting a new home business, Fusion, and some client work, as well as…
I've used Quicksilver on and off every since I started using a Mac. Upgrading to Leopard initiated my longest break from using this swiss army knife of an application. Spotlight performance had improved enough that I simply got used to using OS X's ability to launch applications and find certain documents or web pages. It wasn't until Jamie Phelps [http://www.jamiephelps.com/] started singing the praises of Quicksilver to me this past summer that I installed it once again. A couple months later…
I've had the opportunity to rent a few movies off of the iTunes store now. For the most part, the experience is smooth and user friendly. For those who have not yet ventured into the world of online movie rentals, iTunes is a good alternative to the brick and mortar alternatives. Here is a quick list of my likes and dislikes (no apologies for the bulleted listI loves me a good bulleted list): The good Convenience: An obvious attribute, but important enough to be mentioned here. The ability to…
Ever since purchasing my first Mac, which had Tiger installed, I've been interested in the potential of Automator. Unfortunately, time and opportunities have both been lacking and I've been unable to spend much time with the application. But that's one of the nice things about having your own blogthings that once were categorized as 'play' can now be categorized as 'work' or 'research'. And since getting serious about my site and posting regularly, there have been a couple of workflows that I…
Ever since I've had the desire to have my own weblog, there has been the aspiration to do it full time. Blogging as my job. Who wouldn't? To be able to research, to write and to experiment with the things I'm excited and passionate aboutsounds like a dream job to me. This desire really started around the time John Gruber left his job at Joyent [http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/initiative] to write for Daring Fireball [http://daringfireball.net/] full time. I was just getting into the world of…
When I wrote recently about keeping track of your digital activity via a custom log file [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/custom-log-file-revisited/], I received an email from productivity consultant, Matthew Cornell. In his message, he reaffirmed his belief in the benefits on keeping a log file. He also appreciated my thoughts on de-cluttering and and had this to say on that topic: > Don't forget "at hand" filing next to your new desk. My immediate thought was, “Yep—that's an important part of…
With this attempt to focus more on doing [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/in-search-of-depth/], it's helpful to first examine why so many people struggle with the constant desire to tinker with, tweak, or worst of all, completely change their productivity system. Whether this is a problem only for us technical folks or whether there are certain types of people with this tendency who exist across all industries and focuses, I'm not sure. But I am sure of this—it's a problem for me. And I'm not a…