Sean’s Blog

I almost feel like I’ve been cheating for the past week. After a long time pimping MonkeyGTD, I’ve switched to Remember The Milk. I don’t think I am going to be switching back anytime soon either. After I wrote the post last week about staying organized away from the computer I started to look into applications that would work on my Blackberry.

Remember The Milk got some serious love on Lifehacker’s Best GTD applications and I though I would give it a try. I was pretty much immediately blown away. RTM had everything I was looking for and more.

First off, it is web based and free (for the non-pro version). It easily manages my tasks and has a mobile interface (this was the killer for MonkeyGTD in my book). It integrates with Google calendar and can send me messages when tasks are due.

One of my killer apps was to be able to jot down books I wanted to read and then have access to that list at the library. I simply created a list called Books, and started keeping track of books I wanted to read whenever I came across them. Then when I made a trip to the library, i just logged on top the mobile interface, pulled up my book list and grabbed several of them. I added a couple books on the fly at the library that I didn’t want to take out yet, but wanted to read in the future.

When I got home, I put in a task to return the library books due on the books due dates.

The Pro version has tools that will actually sync with the native Blackberry applications, but right now I don’t need that level of integration.

MonkeyGTD is a great tool, but I am going to be sticking with Remember The Milk. Give it a try. It rocks my geeky world.

Flock is billed as the Social Web Browser. Being somewhat anti-social, it didn’t seem to be anything that I really would use. I mean, I blog, have a flickr page and use LinkedIn, but I really didn’t use any of the “Social Networking” sites. This weekend though, I wanted to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr and saw that Flock had built in Flickr support. So I though I would give it a try. After playing around with it for a couple hours, I thought I would give my impressions.

Read more »

Since the time it was published back in 2005, I’ve been hearing good things about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.  I bought the book last year at a used bookstore, but only recently got around to diving into the 800 pages.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the story of the return of magic to England during the Napoleonic Wars. During this time “theoretical magic” is a gentlemanly study that mostly involves reading a writing about magicians of the golden age of magic several hundred years before.  This all changes when Mr Norrell, who can actually do magic (”a practical magician”) offers his services to the British government to help with the war effort and the cause of returning English magic to greatness.

Norrell is a stuffy little man who believes he is the only one qualified to bring  back magic to England as well as the only one to direct it.  During this time Jonathan Strange discovers that he can do magic and moves to London to learn under Norrell.  The conflict between Strange and Norrell, as well as the repercussions from  one of the earlier acts of his magic dominate the rest of the book.

I was of two minds about this book.  The voice of the narration was suppose to model the time it was happening and at times it was funny.  Other times it was just  grating.  I didn’t really find many of the characters likable or even that interesting.  The pacing is slow and until the last third of the book didn’t really grab my attention.  That being said, the last third of the book I found very enjoyable.  But after I had finished, I questioned if wading through 600 pages previously was worth it.  The “amazing” type reviews  that the book got seemed to miss the mark (at least in my opinion).

   Several weeks ago, I signed up for IwantSandy.com. IWantSandy is a virtual personal assistant which is really scheduler and reminder program. The cool thing about Sandy though is that she will contact you in pretty much any way you choose. Email, SMS and Twitter are all ways that she can get ahold of you.

Read more »