I may be taking this simpler-is-better thing a bit too far. Earlier I looked at software development, cameras, computers and writing. Now I’ve begun evaluating my workflow and the software I use to get things done. For example, I’ve used Mutt to manage email for a very long time. It can be configured to do just about anything and there’s really nothing faster for tearing through mailing lists. Its behaviour can be tweaked to do amazingly geeky and wonderful things.

While using Textpattern for this site I started work on a plugin for displaying Flickr photos. I never got past the proof of concept phase, and moved to WordPress before having a chance to finish it. Thankfully, I don’t have to recreate it here, since this fine plugin seems to work lovely. I’ve created a WordPress “static” page template and tossed a call to the plugin at my new /flickr/ page

Last Saturday evening shortly after midnight I was mindlessly browsing around when I ran across the Kubrick template for WordPress. I liked it so much I decided to use it for my own little ‘blog. At the same time I figured I’d update WordPress to the latest nightly build. 3 hours later I was realizing what a terrifically bad idea that was. Repeat after me: never, ever change more than one thing at a time!

Apparently, the 7 people on the planet who care deeply about podcasting are complaining that the iPod Shuffle isn’t suited for it. Good lord. Who cares? There are two reasons for not caring. First, podcasting is silly. Have you ever actually listened to a podcast? They’re almost universally useless, mainly because podcasters only talk about podcasting. That’s a very boring closed-loop-incest-fest if you ask me. And second, Apple makes plenty of iPods that are useful for listening to podcasts.

A favorite quote by someone I’ve forgotten is “Do not mistake complexity for sophistication.” This continues to be good advice. I’ve been tricked into complexity many times. It sneaks its way into everything—software, consumer devices, even the written word. I’m going to get rid of it in as many places as I can. Software – I develop a boatload of minor, and some not so minor, web applications. The urge is always there to put in a ton of cool features that absolutely nobody is going to want or use.

For those of you not reading this via RSS, sorry for mixing up the design again. I wanted to test some of the new WordPress 1.3 theme features and ran into this particular template and thought I’d see how it felt. All I’ll need is a fancy image up top there and I think I’ll keep it.

Not totally happy with my productivity lately, I found this post from the always useful 43Folders interesting… “Because, you know: you can’t just turn it on and instantly be the thing you wish you were. It takes reflection, thought, iteration, and a personal commitment to facing the stuff at which you suck. And we all suck at something. You totally suck at something, and it secretly drives you nuts every goddamned day.

It never ends. Now folks are spoofing the HTTP “referer” field so that links to their sites show up in log reports. Here’s an example from my log report… A fella could get tired of dealing with this after a while.

I’ve been using MarsEdit 1.0 for posting here recently, but my demo just expired. It’s worth the $24.99 but before shelling out the cash I thought I’d give Ecto a shot. Nothing to report yet as this is my first post, silly.

I was lamenting the fact that I missed being able to middle-click a link in Firefox on OS X and have the link open in a new background tab. You know, like it did on my Windows box. Dan overheard this and told me about customizing the button behaviour using the Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) mouse control panel. Sure enough, I added the Firefox.app and assigned the middle button to Cmd-Option-Click. All better now, thank you.

In order to give my new scanner yet another test, I grabbed a random slide from the pile I’d scanned some time ago. This one happened to be of my dad in France during his Navy tour in something like 1961. I posted a side-by-side on Flickr, but here are a couple of crops demonstrating the difference in scans between the Nikon Coolscan V with Digital ICE and the Minolta Scan Duel III without.

My GTD implementation wouldn’t be complete without something to capture all those little to-do items on. I was trying to use a mini Moleskine for that but the thing is just so nice that I can’t stand the thought of writing “throwaway” stuff in there. And there’s no way I’m tearing any of the pages out. My solution to this was to use a scaled back version of the Hipster PDA by slipping a dozen or so 3×5 index cards under the elastic band.