Beth woke me up this morning and said, “Britney Spears wants to change her name to Federline.” This did not improve my mood. Nor did the usual poking-her-fingers-in-my-eyes to get out the eye boogers, nor the sheet removal, nor yet the tickling. We were up late again last night: me setting up the web server on my home machine and tinkering on the command line, she doing C. We should really start tracking our uber-geek quotient — perhaps there’s a Movable Type plugin for that.

Today I signed up for a free trial of O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf, an online reference library, so I could get the updated-for-Panther version of a hack I tried unsuccessfully to implement last night. (Fellow geeks: changing the shortname of my OS X user). It’s very usable and nifty, so far. Perhaps some other publishing companies should consider a similar business model.

Tonight, my friend Daniel is going to help me repair my laptop’s WiFi antenna. Computer geek, meet geek with a soldering iron. (Note: both geeks are myself.) If all goes well, my a55munch aftermarket antenna will be cannibalized to repair the factory internal antenna. My next project will be turning a NES controller into a USB joystick I can use with Keyworx. Oh yes.

The short list of work still needed to get my home server up to snuff is: - update Apache - update Perl - update mod_perl - get Instiki to make its pages web-accessible, dammit – or failing that, switch to another wiki, e.g., VoodooPad

Once that’s done, making Apache much more secure, I’ll point to it here. Then you people can see my calendar and such. (Joy!)

Getting Things Done

The essence of GTD is good lists. Most to-do lists are an amorphous, sickening mass of madness: in a word, Cthulhu. It does one no good to have a project (find an apartment) next to a wish (learn to juggle someday) next to an action (make eight copies of resume). GTD teaches you to collect, process, organize, review and do your stuff. For those who prefer a text file or a PDA to a pencil and a legal pad, I highly recommend adopting GTD from the nerd angle as outlined in Merlin Mann’s How Does a Nerd Hack GTD?. It’s working well for me so far. Just simplifying my trusted places to a handful of text files has been a big productivity boost. My Movable Type notes blog just wasn’t doing it for me anymore.

Links

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. I started an account a couple weeks ago and it’s been really useful, especially since I’ve subscribed to the OS X tag. Here’s a super handy function I found that does the screamingly obvious in Excel: concatenate a range without you having to fill in each cell ref by hand.
- MultiCat function