The first thing I really had to do in order to start giving Hiveminder a try was to load in all my tasks from OmniFocus. This was a little tedious. Unluckily for me, I missed my bus home on Friday and had to kill four hours at the office, waiting for the next one. I used some of this time getting things loaded into Hiveminder and then cleaning up the data I’d loaded.

A lot of Addex features rely on your ability to put extra information onto address book entries. A really simple example is its generation of procmail rules. If it’s going to filter mail from Mom into the “family/mom” folder, I need to be able to tell it that I want that kind of filtering. Address book programs, though, are not usually designed to store all the information Addex wants.

I’ve complained before about how stifling I find GUI mail apps. I can’t commit a few twitches to muscle memory that allow me to perform useful and complex operations the way I can with mutt. There are some things that GUI apps get right, like high-level folder browsing, but mostly I just despise them. Mail.app’s integration with Address Book always tempted me, because I am pretty careful about putting everyone into it. It was irritating to get nothing out of it. Ages ago, I wrote a little program with Mac::Glue that would generate a mutt aliases file from my address book. Later it grew to produce some other configuration, and finally it became addex.

In the index for “Catalyst” book, you’ll find no entry for model, controller, action, dispatch, or ActionClass. These are some of the most fundamental concepts in Catalyst.

For St. Valentine’s Day, Gloria gave me a Nintendo Zapper, which is basically a two-handed Wii remote holder that acts like a combination light gun and thumbstick. It comes with a little demo game called Link’s Crossbow Training, in which Link shoots targets, kills monsters, and runs gauntlets. Last night, John C. asked me, “But what else would you play with that?”

I felt pretty good after cataloging what I want from a mobile phone, so I think it’ll be a good idea to do the same thing for productivity/todo software.

A million (alternately, five) years ago, when I was working at IQE, I got sick of trying to use any of our existing project tracking software to track my todo list. Instead, I started using index cards. I put the big chunks of todo into Project or Press Your Luck (the project-managing add-on to our internal helpdesk software), but all the task-level stuff became index cards instead of helpdesk tickets.

I’ve gotten some mileage out of Facebook. I caught up with a few old friends, whom I otherwise would’ve never heard from. That’s about it. I actually appreciate that a lot, but the rest of Facebook can really just go to Hell.

A few other CPAN authors have already uploaded bundles that install all the modules they want to have around before they start working. This has always seemed like a good idea, but with all the re-installing of perl I’ve been doing lately, it’s finally hit home just how much time I can save.

Ages ago, I got an Audible membership. Three days each week, I walk about half an hour to the bus and about half an hour home. For most of the year, I can spend that time reading a book. In the winter, though, it’s just too cold. My fingers freeze, even if I read with one hand in my pocket and switch back and forth. Audible sells audiobooks, and I can listen to them on my iPod while I walk. They have a subscription model where get one or two credits each month, and each credit can be exchanged for one book. Sometimes, this is an okay deal: you pay $15 per month and get a $25 copy of the abridged version of a popular novel. Sometimes, it is a great deal: you get a $40 copy of a twenty-five hour classic.