I have no excuse for not working out more often, beyond my usual 30 minutes three days a week. Cartoonist Randy Glasbergen has a great cartoon that has gotten me motivated again.

Link to cartoon: http://www.glasbergen.com/images/fit00.gif

In a psychology class I took in College we devoted a months worth of classes to the number 7, how people can efficiently remember exactly seven things at any given time. So it was cool to see Paul Buchheit’s post We all have tunnel vision where he explains that since we can only hold seven items we should not try to forcibly hold more. This also goes along with my other post: Using Technology Vs. Inspecting Technology.

I remember little from that class, other than there is a reason why phone numbers are 7 digits.

Michael Hyatt has a great post on How to Shave Ten Hours Off Your Work Week. My favorite of the seven methods he outlined:

Touch email messages once and only once. Okay, let’s be honest. How many times do you read the same email message over and over again? Guess what? The information hasn’t changed. That’s right. You are procrastinating.

I have a personal rule: I will only read each message once then take the appropriate action: do, delegate, defer, file or delete it. I describe these in more detail in a post I made last week.

Guilty.

I’ve found myself lately inspecting technology, software and hardware, with the desire to learn something. A new online service comes along and I sign up, test drive it, and then move on. I rarely seem to actually “use” technology lately.

It is a really bad habit I have gotten myself into and I think it is because of my obsession to “know” everything I possibly can around technology. And this is just stupid. First off, there is no way to learn every bit of anything and the approach I am taking, as I am sure many do, is to consume mass quantities of something without any care for its usefulness. Secondly, why would I want to? I think I’d rather be an expert a few things that have some general knowledge in numerous things.

Use Technology
That’s what it is meant for. I will no longer buy a new product, sign up for a new service or download another piece of software unless I personally have a need for it. Not even for research will I do any of these things, because this is another way into fooling myself that I “need” to use a piece of technology.

It is a simple filter and I really hope that it will help keep my interests in tack.

“Coming Up On…” has to be one of the most irritating phrases in reality television.

Yes. Let’s waste thirty seconds showing highlights from a scene we are about to see. Program developers are so afraid that our tv-dope-sick mind will wander to another station that they will do anything to keep us watching.

Please. We are not idiots. We get it. A climax every six minutes followed by a commercial. Oh. Wait. The commercial is the climax.

We love TV. We’re addicted. We’re watching your show. Quit fucking with us!

Door County 2007, probably one of the best holidays in awhile. All we did was relax, visited a few towns and ate tons of cherry pie. The food there was surprisingly amazing! We ate like kings and only had one so-so meal.

Eating Cherry Pie at White Gull Inn, Fish Creek, Door County, WI.

Kathy digs into her Cherry French Toast at The Cookery, Fish Creek, Door County, WI.

Fish Boil at White Gull Inn, Fish Creek, Door County, WI.

View all: Door County 2007 Photo Gallery

News.YC user fauigerzigerk did a great job of listing out all the prominent technology companies and the number of founders they were created with. I do not know why I find the topic of “how many finders does it take” so interesting, but I do.

There is also some great discussion around BitGeek’s posting Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!, also found on news.ycombinator.com.

I primarily use the Google Reader as my RSS reader, but one thing about it kind of irks me… It doesn’t read my mind.

No, seriously. Whenever I subscribe to a new RSS feed through Firefox Google asks me if I want to add the feed to my Google Homepage (iGoogle) or to my Google Reader.

Ok. No biggie, right? I can deal with one simple question, a quick click of the mouse. But I have never used the Google Homepage nor have I once clicked the “Add the Google Homepage” button.

I know this would be easy for Google to implement, just read my mind and remember which one I like. Or is there a way to set this in my Google settings I am not seeing?

UPDATE (Jan. 29, 2008): You can complete a full system restore to a new hard drive with Time Machine. After installing the new hard drive startup your Mac with the OS X Leopard install DVD. But instead of going on with the usual install process, select Utilities > Restore System from Backup and follow the prompts. (via lifehacker at Restore Your Data with Time Machine)

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Time Machine and SuperDuper are both backup solutions for Apple’s OS X operating system (SuperDuper is not yet available on Leopard at the time of this writing). Both effectively copy your entire hard drive to an empty volume like an external USB or Firewire drive, but there are a couple of subtle differences.

I thought I may be able to drop SuperDuper once I upgraded to Leopard, but it looks like it will be a part of my arsenal for some time still. Here are the key attractions of each:

Time Machine
1. Copies all files to backup location.
2. You can restore individual files by date. Going back a year by default.
3. You are unable to boot form the backup source.
4. Has the potential to eat up quite a bit of storage.

SuperDuper
1. Copies all files to backup location.
2. No historical recovery.
3. Boot directly from the backup source. (External Firewire drive)
4. Space used for storage will remain relatively the same.

The ability to backup from my external Firewire drive is HUGE to me. If my hard drive crashes I want to be able to simply restart my Mac and boot directly from my backup drive and have a working system. Time Machine lacks this luxury. Instead you would need to replace the hard drive, reinstall Leopard and then run a recovery from Time Machine.

It does have historical backups going for it though. So if you deleted a file a few days back and realized you now need it, you can still get it – You can also recover older versions of a file.

It seems redundant to have two dedicated backup drives, but if I want the best of both worlds…

I’ve been playing around with Songza, a new, closed beta, music search engine that lets you create playlists on-the-fly.

Here’s how it works

Enter in a band or song name and Songza returns a list of found music files – For everything I search for it gave me back items found on YouTube, mostly live stuff. You can then perform actions such as playing the song, rating it, adding it to a playlist, grabbing the embed code etc. There is no way to create an account yet, but your playlists will be there for you when you return, ala cookies.

The interaction and UI is very interested. Actions remains hidden until you click on a song in the list – See screenshot below. They must be using quite a bit of JavaScript and AJAX, but does not feel heavy. Everything works really well I must say.

It is a really cool site and I am actually quite excited to see what direction they take this thing. Especially seeing that there are endless possibilities with online music.

Songza was developed by Humanized, Inc., a Chicago based software development company.

Note: I tried adding their embed code to this post, but it really messed up the layout. I am sure it something I am doing in my CSS.