Ceaseless Student

If you’re reading this through planetolin or another feed reader that doesn’t show this as bold. This post reads far better if you click through to the actual post. I’m rather annoyed my formatting doesn’t show…

So this is post actually comes from people asking what I do to keep organized. People are particularly intrigued by Boris, an apparent nerd who’s constantly on his computer, using little notebooks to jot notes. Does he use them to keep organized? What does he write in them? Does he have a record of that time that I… uhmmm… never mind. He has everything on Outlook… are these connected?? Anyhow, these questions and more will soon be answered. Read on fair internet friend.

So here’s my slew of organizational tools:

Real-World (physical)
2 moleskine notebooks
moleskine cahier notebook
pad of small paper

In-Between-World (computer)
Outlook
EditPad Lite
Word
Excel
Timesnapper

Fake-World (interwobs)
Netvibes
Stikkit

Aight. So I use a lot of junk. True enough. Now here’s what it does.

Let’s start with the moleskines. Apart from making me seem incredibly pretentious, these notebooks (yes all three) are constant companions Pocket Notebook 1 is dedicated to school. It lives in my left pocket. It has some of the best notes I’ve ever written. The reason is that I take shoddy notes over several pages of legal pad and then shrink them down to moleskine size; writing things after you see the big picture in a concise format does wonders. This notebook also holds random thoughts about projects, notes on interview with people, class rules, circuit schematic… if it happened to me and it’s related to school, this book wants it. This past semester it has also served as the place that I do my time-tracking (I’ll talk about this s’more later). Pocket Notebook 2 is not dedicated. It welcomes everything and anything to it’s home in my right pocket . Dreams I remember, emo journal entries, directions to your house, bad drawings, the size of my car’s windshield wipers, games of tic-tac-toe. Man this book’s messed up (I just flipped through the pages). At the back, it holds my expense tracking (more later). Cahier is evidently moleskine’s word for super-thin, flexible, cardboard-covered notebook. It is short term memory. I only end up using about half of it because I tear out pages when they don’t allow me to see everything they have on them at a glance. Things here are waiting to be added to lists, schedules, or some more permanent type of storage. This is the notebook that I really don’t part with. I remember one time in recent memory that I didn’t have it on me. I was quite unhappy. I don’t like relying on my memory… My Pad is good for reminders. It is almost always blank and it draws my attention to it strongly when it’s sitting on my desk with anything written on it.

Outlook runs my life. Yay outlook calendar! The other cool thing it does is have a great folder called ‘awaiting.’ When I want a response to an e-mail I cc myself and a rule puts it in the ‘awaiting’ folder marked as read with a green flag. This lets me see at a glance what e-mails I’m waiting on from the ‘for follow up’ search folder. EditPad Lite keeps notes on things. It’s basically notepad with tabs and less memory hogging. Generally these have something to do with an item on one of my lists… I’m actually starting to phase out EditPad for Stikkit, but I think it’s only a partial phase out. Word is used for things that I want to look pretty. Admittedly, this is fairly rare, but sometimes I’ll write up ideas from my notebooks here to be kept for posterity. Excel is responsible for both my time and expense tracking. After writing down whenever I spend time productively, I type it up on Sunday during dedicated organization time. I do the same with my expenses and end up with pretty charts and graphs that make my life easy to understand. Or at least specific facets of it… Anyhow, Timesnapper also helps things easy to understand by taking a screenshot every minute. Great for figuring out how much productive time I should be tracking!

Here’s where the fun starts in earnest. Netvibes holds all of my lists. There’s a school to-do list, a single action list (eg fill out expo form), a multi-action list (eg document olin experiments) and two special lists. One of these, ‘waiting for’ is passive. This is where you go when you’re stopping me from getting something done by not having done something yourself (yet). The other one is the red list. Nothing is n the red list when I go to bed. Things on the red list must be done before I’m done with my day. There are a number of secondary lists that I only check once a week during my dedicated organization time. These are things like ’skillz I want to learn,’ ‘money I’m owed’ and ‘books I want to read.’ And then there’s Stikkit. This neat little web-app has completely taken over the job I had remember the milk doing (SMS reminders) and the job I had del.icio.us doing (tagged, searchable bookmarks). It is also taking a lot of 0f EditPad’s job. Stikkit now holds most of the extra stuff about my to-do list items. These are great b/c they’re searchable, taggable and online. Sorry EditPad, but you are quickly becoming obsolete…

So. Let’s review. All of my notebooks have any information I feel is important shunted onto Netvibes as items on lists, onto Stikkit (or EditPad) as notes, onto Word as something nice or onto Excel to be made pretty. In theory, I should also be using my scanner to get things (including my notebooks) digitized and organizable, but this isn’t happening currently.

Wow. That’s a long entry. Peace out.

All right. So Stikkit gets a rating of “pretty badass.”

I decided to give Stikkit a run and see how I liked it. I use only a few of its multitude of functions. I’m a firm believer that a product that does one thing best is better than one that does lots of things OK; to that end, I’ve gotten it to be best for a couple of things, I’ll see if more show up later.

Basically I use Stikkit for:
-SMS reminders
-Bookmarks plus
-Quick, random notes
-Details for to-do lists

SMS Reminders:
This is super-simple and super-useful. I love outlook. It let’s me know what’s up. That being said, Outlook is a pull system. Even Outlook reminders aren’t really push. They only work if you’re at your computer at the time. With stikkit, I can turn on SMS reminders and then just write something like:
reminder name
thursday at 15:00
detail, detail, detail.
remind me
On thursday, half an hour before 15:00 rolls around, I get a nice text message with my stikkit’s text in it. Nice!

Bookmarks:
In Stikkit there’s this thing called the stikkit toolbox. It’s a little button with some neat javascript functionality. You click on it and it pops up a stikkit with the title of the website you’re on as the first line (title) of the stikkit. It puts the URL as the second line. Then it skips a line and adds any text you had selected on the site. This is great for picking up interesting tidbits that you can go back to. And, of course, you can add whatever before it gets sent to stikkit (eg tags).

Quick, random notes:
This is basically self-explanatory.

Details for to-do list:
This one is sweet! So I keep to do lists on netvibes. They’re nice, but they are, by nature, super-short. So, I have one item on my list that say SigSys - hw 8 (thurs). Then I have a stikkit titled SigSys - hw 8 that says:

SigSys HW8
due Fri, Apr 27th

(H8.1) text problem 8.6
(H8.2) text problem 8.8
(H8.3) text problem 8.10 a c
(H8.4) text problem 8.11 a
(H8.5) text problem 8.12
(H8.6) text problem 8.18

Additional problems will be posted soon

@olin,sigsys

I can search for it easily and I have more details within easy reach.

Boris’ fixins:
Here’s how I made it more useful for myself on netvibes (my home on the internet). I made 2 widgets that use the external widget module (). What you need to do is add source code to it for it to do things. The really simple widget is just a nice view of my stikkits and my stikkit bookmarks (this is a compilation of links made from urls in stikkits). I use it b/c the rss feed that stikkit provides has a non-zero refresh rate. Also it lets me see more things at the same time. By far the more interesting and useful widget is my new stikkit widget that lets you create new stikkits from inside netvibes. So hot. If anyone wants me to set them up with stikkit, netvibes, some combo or any other program/webapp that I fanboy all over: I really enjoy making other people’s computers the hotness to doing thing that I should actually do; just wing me an e-mail.

So there’s plenty of features I’ve yet to use. The calendar ends up getting filled with things I put in for SMS reminders. The peeps feature is completely unused. This lets you just keep data on ppl and stuff and seems worthwhile. Also the to-do list feature seems like a nice way to add detail to my current lists that I’m not using. So many features… In fact, I talked to Mel a lot and she has an idea for this sort of database for sharing notes by book and page and lots more etc. etc. I’m going to see if I can make it work with stikkit and s’more programs; the key is machine and human readable…

[Alt + Shift] Man I’m not getting any practice with this whole Dvorak thing… arghh… I think I’ll switch outright in the summer, but time is too pressing now…

Anywho. I’m writing at this time because I was talking to Mel about everything ever. Man we covered sooo much. What I’m most excited about is archiving Olin. This is going to be my big college-building thing this summer and into whenever. I already registered a domain (olindocs.com) and that domain currently holds absolutely nothing. Mel was thinking along similar lines once upon a time and she happened upon a couple of apps; the one that;s closest to doing what I want seems to be dspace, but I honestly wouldn’t know because I haven’t had time to look through it yet. It needs to be searchable and taggable and probably provide some default hierarchy. It needs to hold all of the documents from past and current classes.

Most importantly, I think we need something like a lab notebook. We are supposed to be an experiment. We should have a record of what we do so that it’ replicable beyond Olin. Also, this information should be easy to access for anyone that’s interested. Hopefully it’ll also mean that students can find stuff from old classes more easily, but that’s secondary to the idea of archiving to document our experiments.

I’d love to write more, but I (yeah, even Boris) need sleep.

In another thing that came from our conversation about archiving, I think I’ll give Stikkit a try. I’ve read about it and it always seems cool, but I’ve yet to try it… odd. I’ll see how I fare. If what I’ve read is true, I might give up my first two tabs on netvibes and my always open editpad for this… I’ll definitely say something if it ’s that good.

This is a bit different. Today I bring you one of my favorite hacks ever. I’ve been reluctant to let go of Opera in favor of Firefox for one reason: I want my tabs along the side and not the top! But now it’s all better. [Alt + Shift] It does, however get kinda hairy…

Step 1: Move your tabs
Navigate to the chrome folder in your Firefox profile and add a css file.
-Go to run and run %APPDATA%
-Navigate to mozilla and profiles etc until you get to chrome here’s where I ended up:
–C:\Documents and Settings\bdieseldorff\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k5ok4umo.default\chrome
-Now add a neat little css file to do what you want. I have one up for any interested people here. The name must be userChrome.css
-Chuck that into your “chrome” folder and restart Firefox.
Well damn. That needs work.

Step 2: Make it actually do what you want
Get Tab Mix Plus and set your options to work well
-The options we care about at the moment are under display
–Tab width: choose something between 100 and 250 ish. I
–Use bookmark name as tab title is nice too.
–Restart Firefox

Not too shabby. But the weird gradient needs to go. Up until here I’d been following guides more or less, but I got myself a lucky hack…

Step 3: Make it look nice
Get PageStyle2Tab and wonder why it makes everything all better.
-Restart Firefox
-That’s the only step. While I have pseudo-educated guesses, I don’t really get why or how it works. But it works and I haven’t found anything else that turns the trick. *shrug*
SCORE!!! css hacking, Tab Mix Plus and PageStyle2Tab FTW!!!!

Man that felt awesome. I should also take a quick moment to endorse All-in-one Gestures. It was the other part that I needed to switch from Opera and was substantially easier to implement (read: basically done for me by Mozilla). w00t!! Anyhow, I’ll miss a couple of things, but Firefox also has a trick or two that Opera can’t touch so I think I’ll be OK.

Alt + Shift

After writing this post I noticed that I didn’t rant about how good netvibes is. That would not do so here’s the appropriate rant:

It is good. Oh so very good. It is my homepage. It owns a huge portion of my life. Thankfully, Outlook, netvibes and Moleskine have still left me with a 30% share in my life.

Eeek. Forgot to post yesterday. I have to keep up with this better. So I came up with a neat idea about creating netvibes modules that can be used by Olin students. The idea is super-simple and a basic level of implementation is ridiculously easy. I made a collection of links level module for sigsys: and one for circuits: . These modules are currently just collections of links but I’m working on making ones that will use rss. For example, there could be one that updates every time Brad puts up a new circuits handout. Pretty neat I think, but I doubt I’ll have a lot of time to put into this until the summer.

Yesterday some Meta ppl ended up going to 7-Eleven. It was pretty awesome cuz we totally brought back the 90s w/Marco’s music. Nice. 4 and a half weeks left. 5 projects left for meta. Sweet.

As part of my MetaOlin IS, I’m reading through all of the honor board minutes I can get my hands on. The first step was easy; most of the minutes were easy to find on a network drive. That being said they were all organized at different times by different people and even in different formats.

The different formats were easily the most annoying.

Since word documents are slow to load, mutable and otherwise annoying I decided to make everything a pdf. I started out by using PrimoPDF to print to pdfs; however, Zamzar was a much faster solution. This site lets you upload files and then it converts them to another format; super-chouette! Changing names in batches is much easier with 1-4a Rename.

Also, Foxit Reader is much faster than adobe acrobat reader.

So I’ve had this conversation a number of times. The basic premise is that everyone at Olin has to swear loyalty to someone in the class directly above them. The question is: which senior has the biggest kingdom? Please speculate in the comments.

Alt + Shift

Alt + Shift
Y’know what’s neat? Google Trends is neat. Sure Google TiSP is convenient and Google Paper helps the environment, but do they have the potential to be neat for long enough periods of time that I deem it necessary to have a three key-press shortcut to it? No. That honor is reserved (among others) for gTrends. So what’s so cool about gTrends? This:Sad. The legend isn’t part of the picture and I’m too lazy to do it properly with screenshots. Anyhow. Blue is “GTD,” red is “lifehacker,” and orange is “43 folders.” Basically Google trends gives you an idea of how much each of these terms is searched versus time. We can see that lifehacker seems to have a similar slope to GTD (short for Getting Things Done), but 43 folders, a more hardcore, niche GTD site, seems to be struggling when it comes to generating new awareness. Largely, the people who would use 43 folders tend to know about it and don’t need to Google it whereas lifehacker is a word that’s tossed around and might make people curious. Sweet! Here’s another example I found fascinating:
The red is genocide, the blue is Darfur. This one shows quite a good correlation and shows off another sweet feature of gTrends; it attempts to link relevant news stories to these search trends. For example, the big spike at B is linked to a news story with the headline “Darfur Rebel Group to Sign Peace Deal.” The last bit of data on the graph is the reference news volume. I don’t know what this is so I’ll make it up. I think they probably just search to see how often your search term appears in news. Not surprisingly, current events search spikes will closely correlate to news spikes, but things more independent of news, like GTD and related sites, will correlate badly.
Anyhow-the moral is: gTrends is super-cool. If you have some cool trend searches, put them in the comments.

So this is from a conversation I just had about my posts. I plan on posting once a day. This, of course, is based on my definition of a day. My very pragmatic definition is that a day ends when one goes to sleep for the night or when the sun rises. Similarly a day is considered started when you get up after sleeping for the night or the sun rises. Some of you’ll be all like: “Dude, there’s some time when you’re asleep that’s neither…” Nobody cares. You’re asleep; it doesn’t matter what day it is.