Max and I had a great time at Geekend, and I had a blast presenting some thoughts on building reputation systems. It was fun partly because I don’t have all the answers yet and there’s a lot way to go before I actually have a system I’m happy with. But, it was great to hear good questions from the audience and consider new stuff.
I took the end of last week off to hang out with the kids and relax a little. We had a great time going to the beach, playing video games, grilling things, going to the playground(s) and taking the boys to their first minor league baseball game.\
The Savannah Sand Gnats put on a pretty darn good fireworks show. We let the boys stay up impossibly late, filled them up with cherry lime-ade, sprite, french fries and hot dogs and tried to explain the finer points of the national past time (they know the ins and outs of the Star Wars story, but not the art of the sacrifice fly. It’s all my fault).\
There are ~~two~~ three sets over on flickr – at the playground, us at the game, and the fireworks show.\
Enjoy!
If you’ve never heard of it, Evernote is a note-taking app that is accessible from anywhere. They have desktop applications for OS X, Windows and the iPhone and a really nice web interface too. I clip things I’m reading to it all the time to either save for later or because I know I’m going to want to send it to people and might not be able to find it again. I put quotes in it I want to save, put URLs to things, and even jot notes down on the iPhone if I come up with an idea while I’m out. It’s fine for that, but I didn’t become a heavy user of it until I started keeping track of my to-do list. I’d tried implementing GTD (Getting Things Done) several times before, but it never stuck, until now.
Evernote has the idea of notebooks and notes. I have notebooks called Stuff – for everything not work-related that’s not a to-do list, Journal – for all my daily to-do lists, and Work – for work stuff I want to remember.
Here’s how I use it for keeping track of my daily to-do list:
This sounds really anal, I know, but it’s really helped me concentrate on my productivity, and how much time I spend doing things other than the stuff I really need to get done that day. I also remember more of what I do during the day just by writing it down.\
The to-do items in Evernote are still a little buggy. For example, until recently, you could only add them in the desktop application and you couldn’t mark them complete in the web if iPhone apps. I just checked and you can’t mark them done in the web interface… oh well, nothing’s perfect (and it’s still in beta).
There are some great web apps out there that are all about to-do lists, and I’ve tried most of them (I got the farthest with Remember The Milk). I think Evernote is sticking because I use it for more than just the to-do list, and I can get to it wherever I am.
Today is Max’s 9th birthday. To celebrate, I took the boys to the Oatland Wildlife Center to see some alligators and other wildlife. Little did I realize that it was a two mile hike around the center to see everything. And we did the whole thing. I, of course, took pictures which are up on flickr if you want to go see the rest of them.\
And just because it’s maybe my all-time favorite of Brian, here’s a bonus pic!
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My mom came down this weekend and we went on a dolphin tour (Captain Mike’s Dolphin Tour to be exact)! I don’t have time to tell the whole story now, but it was great. It was the perfect length – the boys were just starting to get antsy at the end of it and we saw lots of dolphins. The rest of the photos are here. I haven’t gone through all of them (we took a ton – I took 235 with the big camera, Max took almost fifty and Brian took a dozen or so), so I’ll probably add some more to the set this week.
