imac

The new iMac looks kinda ugly to me. What’s with the black border around the screen? is that a beard? And the keyboard looks bugly, though bluetooth 2.0 is nice, I think. Who knows if it actually works better.

outlook quoting

Tried this outlook QuoteFix macro thing but it doesn’t quite work. Now I’m thinking about a two part solution: a vb macro that does the same thing as QuoteFix to create a reply and then pull out the text to format it, but for the actual formatting part, run a separate python script. I should be able to write a much better quoting engine in python.

Lifehacker

Lifehacker.com is a fantastic site.

Inbox zero

I watched this Google tech talk about managing email, much to the dismay of my roommate. While the talk is very fluffy and hand wavy and certainly not worth 40 minutes of your time watching, I’ve tried to adopt the suggested way of dealing with email anyways. So far it seems to work well. The gist of the approach is to essentially always keep your inbox empty. Every time you check your inbox, you should ‘process’ your messages (i.e. do something with them) rather than just read them.
To me, that means: If it’s crap, delete it. If its something I can read in a few seconds, read it, and archive. If it’s something that I know I’ll need later, put it in a ‘saved info’ folder. If I just ‘might’ need it later, then just archive it. If I need to reply, and can do it right away, then do it and archive. If I need to reply later, then move it to some folder or mark it some how.
Sounds stupid, but I actually noticed a couple changes:
First, keeping my inbox clear really saves me time in the long run. Algorithmically speaking, the cost incurred in processing an email is amortized over each subsequent glance at the inbox. Before, I had thousands of messages in my inbox, and a single checking of that inbox was essentially a linear scan through to confirm “in-progress” threads. The more threads and messages, each check was more costly and more error prone. Now, I often find myself staring at an empty inbox. It’s actually kind of jarring. Makes me feel like I get a lot less mail than I thought I was getting. But more importantly, each check is a quick binary decision: is there any mail in my inbox?
Second, having an empty inbox is peace of mind. In retrospect, having a full inbox always made me feel like I had some set of pending tasks that I could never keep in my head. That there were N threads that I had to respond to. Even if there were no such threads. The sight of threads existing was enough to make me worry that I missed one in the list somewhere.
This kind of scheme works pretty well with gmail, but outlook is more of a challenge. I had to fiddle with my filtering rules quite a bit. Maybe I’ll write about that some time.