BrockLi Soup

At some point in our lives - let’s call it “college” - many of us downloaded illegal copies of software because we didn’t have the money to purchase it, or because we needed the money for something else - let’s call it “beer.” Not that I would do such a thing, of course.

Now that I’m not flat broke, I’m more willing to pay for well-designed software that I find useful, and much less likely to spend a lot of time trying to find and figure out flaky free alternatives, or consider “other” means of acquisition. These are some of the Mac apps that have been deemed worthy of my purchase lately.

AppZapper

Uninstalling applications on a Mac usually just means dragging them to the trash. It’s a simple method, though incredibly difficult for PC users to get used to. However, not all applications can be removed so easily. Sometimes, configuration files lurk in your Library or elsewhere. Furthermore, it can be hard to get rid of things like plugins and widgets if you don’t know where to look.

AppZapper fills this hole - it’s the “uninstaller Apple forgot.” It’s true that Apple should have just included this functionality in the OS, but since they didn’t, AppZapper is definitely worth the $12.95.

Transmit

It seems like there should be at least one free FTP client for the Mac that doesn’t suck, but since I haven’t found it, Transmit was worth $29.95. After the 15 day free trial, you don’t get to use favorites and it limits your session to 10 minutes. For months, I resisted the price tag. I assumed that there simply had to be a good free alternative out there, and any FTP’ing I had to do was done in 10-minute increments in Transmit. I don’t know why I held out for so long, because Transmit is a great product, and the developers deserve to get paid for it.

TextMate

This isn’t a new purchase (I’ve had it for about a year), but TextMate has become more and more useful to me lately. I wrote a post about it a couple days ago. It was a little cheaper when I bought it, and $64 seems pretty steep for a text editor, but it meets needs I didn’t even know I had.

OmniFocus

OmniFocus is the kind of thing that I should really use more than I do. It’s a fantastic GTD-style task management app, but it would be a lot more valuable to me if I could just get in the habit of using it to track things I need to do. I’ve made a few well-intentioned attempts at my own GTD system, but I always seem to put a bunch of “I should do this eventually” type stuff into my system (in this case, OmniFocus), and then I never want to open it because I’ll be faced with all this crap that I need to get done, so I just keep making little post-it notes and ad-hoc lists and things still fall through the cracks. It took me about a dozen tries to quit smoking - maybe it will take me a dozen more to start using OmniFocus.

I finally got around to reading Getting Things Done. I first tried to implement it during that month or two we were incredibly busy at work, so it didn’t really take - at least partly because I never did a full mind-dump to get everything in the system to begin with.

A couple weeks ago, I started playing with OmniFocus, and decided to give GTD another go. Since then, I’ve gotten pretty good about putting stuff in.

The problem is getting stuff out. I still haven’t gotten into the habit of checking OmniFocus when I’ve got free time to see what I should be doing. I feel like everything in OmniFocus is still in my head - I have some free time and think, “I don’t feel like doing any of that stuff,” because I know what stuff is in there. I need to get in the habit of checking it on a regular basis, so I can just put all my to-do’s into it and forget about them.

If anyone has any advice or suggestions on forming that habit, let me know.

College doesn’t really prepare you for the real world. You learn a lot of stuff, which is nice, but a lot of times they don’t teach you how to use it. It’s kind of like learning geometry in fifth grade: I memorized the details and thought I understood the concepts, but it was years later before I knew what to do with any of those concepts.

College was the same way - or at least, it was for me. You spend a lot of time learning about programming languages and syntax, but not a whole lot of real-world project development. For homework, you get clearly defined projects, and the professor never changes the specs halfway through, or adds a bunch of new requirements after seeing the first version. I can’t imagine what would have happened if a professor tried to pull that on a class, but that’s how it goes in the real world. While you’re taking classes, you have to track where you are on a project or two for each of them, but generally, that’s it. Right now, I’m working on two major projects: I’m doing a couple big parts for one, and managing (really, “coding most of”) the other. There are several parts of each that I’m responsible for, parts that other people are responsible for, things I’m waiting to get from the client, and the remainder that isn’t clearly defined yet.

I remember taking Needs Assessment and being told that we would need to know how to gather requirements and things like that, but I didn’t really believe it at the time. At the beginning of this year, I really didn’t need to know how to do it - my manager or a senior developer would come to me with a fairly well-defined project to do, and I’d do it. Sometimes it was changed after the fact or even partway through, but I got the set of requirements and wrote the code as specified. More recently, I’ve been dealing directly with the client a lot more than I used to, and I’m doing a lot more project management than before. I’ve got changes, new requirements, and bug reports coming in from three or four directions and need to manage the schedule for all of it.

In retrospect, this is what Needs Assessment and Tech Transfer (two classes in the IT department) were meant to handle, but I don’t think that any of us took it seriously at the time. In my defense, I took both of them my last quarter at RIT, so my priorities were elsewhere. Would I be better prepared for my current job if I had paid more attention? Well, it’s hard to say - since I wasn’t too interested, I really can’t even remember what we did in those two classes.

Then again, sometimes the sink-or-swim method is the best way to learn. I’m doing a much different job than I was six or eight months ago, and I’ve learned a lot in the process. As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been reading Getting Things Done. I haven’t gotten very far, but I already feel like I’ve got a better idea how to handle all this stuff. Plus, you know, the Internet needs another GTD fanboy.

For the second time this week, I’m wreaking havoc on my subscriptions in Google Reader, because ya know what? I don’t need this much news, nor the guilt I feel for never reading it. Even so, I feel just a little guilty every time I removed a blog, even though I don’t know any of the authors and rarely even read their posts.

I’m down to around 130 feeds now. I know that sounds ridiculous, until I tell you that I cut about 60 earlier this week, and 20 more since I started writing this post. A lot of the remaining 130 don’t update regularly - probably 20 are friends that don’t blog much, and another 30 are other low-post feeds. I can’t believe that six months ago, I managed to keep up on so many of them. No wonder I didn’t go out much.

And as long as we’re talking productivity, I FINALLY started reading Getting Things Done this week. I’ve been reading it on the Metro, so I’m only about 50 pages in, but already I’m feeling a lot more relaxed - knowing that I’m at least taking some initiative to sort out this mess has reduced my stress level a fair bit. Cleaning out my feed reader is step one - I know very little about the GTD system at this point, but I think that getting rid of all that unnecessary distraction will help.

And as long as we’re talking books, I also started The God Delusion last week, and I’m liking it a lot more than I thought I would. Richard Dawkins has always seems kind of dry, and…well, BRITISH, so I was worried it would be boring, but he keeps a pretty good pace. It’s another book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time and finally got around to starting.

And as long as we’re talking about God, I feel I should mention that we decided on Friday that “God” shall henceforth be known as “göd” (pronounced sort of like “gurd,” for those of you that don’t speak German). Just so you all know.

It seems that over the past two years, I’ve heard from a consistent stream of friends and acquaintances who have converted to the Getting Things Done system. Most recently, it came up when Lewk and Schmitty were here last week. Lewk whipped out his well-worn copy and explained how he’s been keeping track of things on to-do lists and the like.

And then I realized, it’s been ages since I had a real to-do list.

Obviously, I keep one at work, because I always seem to forget the minor details in my pursuit of the bigger picture. And I’ve still got a list of project ideas that I’ve had running for a few years now. But really, I haven’t kept a running, daily-consulted to-do list since I finished classes. In a way, it’s been kind of nice: I’ve felt relatively free from responsibility. I’ve done a lot of reading. I’ve put a significant dent in the list of movies I hadn’t seen (that list doesnt count, since I never really made it). I can’t really say I’ve accomplished much, though.

I think it’s time for that to change. I’ve been feeling listless lately, like I’m not sure what to do with myself, and having some personal projects on deck would certainly help. But then, what to do? I’m losing interest in programming; it’s not the kind of thing I can do all day at work, and then do at home for fun. I keep saying that I want to write more. I’ve got the time, and I’ve got the means, but I don’t have the inspiration. I have some ideas, but when I actually go to write them down, I don’t know what to say.

Lewk mentioned that writing things down has helped him be more creative. It’s true that I tend to be more stressed when I lay in bed each night, mentally re-hashing everything that needs to be done in the coming days. I still carry my Hipster PDA, but haven’t used it much lately. I also got in on the Moleskine craze a little late, but I’ve been jotting notes and making lists in there a bit more lately. It’s tough to get in the habit of making a quick note when ideas occurr to me.

I’m hoping that Lewk is right, though: maybe taking a couple minutes to get things out of my head and onto paper will allow other things some breathing room.