In a recent post about, ooh, three months back, I gave an overview of managing my personal workflow.

Basically, I’m not finding a self-management system like Personal Kanban to be of much use.

• Tasks seem to be either ‘to-do’ or ‘done’; there is no ‘doing’ stage, so recording the progress states of items give no value & just creates overhead, especially as there’s no Kanban-style application for my Android phone. I’m finding Remember The Milk and Google Calendar to be more useful (just logging tasks in Google Calendar seems about the right level)
• Over the last few years my life has become more stabilised, but also time-poor. I never seem to have the ’space’ to do things, but also never seem to have large gulfs of time in which I’m doing nothing. (Where does the time go? Age-old question, I know)
• Repetitive tasks (literally those set up to repeat) in RTM seem to get done, whereas unique tasks – where one imagines the value is – generally don’t (perhaps they need further decomposition?).
• Agile/Lean systems like Scrum/Kanban haven’t really taken off at work, being still largely plan-based rather than adaptive; so the expected driver/pressure on my personal life isn’t present.
• In reverse, I’m also spending a lot of time just trying to catch up on personal tasks; recently had the idea of ‘personal slack’, where I reserve time for misc projects (not ‘goof off’ time) similarly to Google’s 20% time. Time to link to a book I’ve never read!
• I’ve largely given up on Google Reader, I can never get through it. Don’t even get me started on social media like Twitter. How do other people do it? I guess most of them are “social media types” whose actual job is to camp on Twitter all day with a megaphone and soapbox to hand.
• I’m picking up bad habits, in that overloading myself with multiple projects (Lose weight! Tone up! Learn to properly swim! Learn German! Oh, and do weekend programming too.)

So, it now seems to me the challenge is to add more productivity/value into the time spent, not just “do more” (insert well-worn Dilbert cartoon here).

I considered running a poll on “what to try next” but given this blog’s low readership, think the results would be embarrassingly disappointing

So, this leads me into various meta-organizational activities like goal setting & avoiding procrastination, but this is largely familiar ground & so delivers little 80%/20% value. After sleeping literally most of last Sunday for no apparent reason, I’m also fed up of needing 9 hours sleep a day, so training my body to use less sleep. Rising at 6:00am for a week to get more done in the morning… such as writing this blog post to encapsulate how things are right now.

Right now I feel terrible Just had a conversation with my housemate about the apparent futility of forcing my body to go against the grain; I’ve always needed a decent amount of sleep but when I get it, in the mornings I’m on better form than a lot of people I know. Also the feeling of staying in lots of nights to just get things done, but never seeming to get anywhere… even the idea of taking my holiday shower gel bottles to work for use in showering there after swimming seems like a huge revelatory idea, but that’s silly.

Three weeks later

Well, it’s three weeks later & I still didn’t make this post, other things took priority. So, the bottleneck isn’t there. I have managed to clear down many other tasks though. And also, as expected, I already had my sleep time optimized (or I need 9 hours naturally) – after a week, I found myself having lie ins (& being pleased at the extra time available to do it, false economy eh?), and then, when I got the flu, all the personal progress all went out of the window…

I’m keeping this post as it is a good example of the rambling train of thought that happens when I try & write a coherent blog post at 6:30am

Rumour has it that Google is about to launch another social networking service, Google Me.

So apropos of little, here’s a very interesting presentation by a Google staffer on their research into social networks.

If they can incorporate this quality of research into a social network (Facebook seems to have little interest in this area beyond land grabs; are they starting to just sit on the money?), and make it stick compared to their various attempts (cross ref: my frustration with the high level of noise on Google Buzz, the constant flood of junk and self-promotion on Twitter, etc.), then they might be on to something…

Earlier this month I went for ten days holiday to southern Germany (mostly the Black Forest) & Switzerland.

People asked me to take lots of photos to live vicariously through them; I’ve now uploaded them to Flickr. Yes, this is mostly an upload bung (too many photos! I’ve largely given up on the Facebook album as they got uploaded in a mixed-up order & re-organising them is a right pain); I also have videos but am checking out which service to use.

Based on what people have asked me, you may find this interesting:

• This was the first time I’d been to continental Europe for some twenty years; previously was family holidays as a child/teenager
• I went by myself; I also went camping, with a rucksack. It saved money & I wanted to do camping again, complete with Trangia stove.
• A major part of this holiday was no real plan, just the freedom of doing whatever I felt like. Was planning on Austria & maybe even Slovakia; next time…
• Despite knowing very little German, I had no problem navigating two foreign countries on my own. Admittedly, most people speak English (“the tourist’s language”, it was called), but that was people’s largest concern out of the way
• I’ve bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10 for the trip; it does HD video & geo-tagging of photos; the location map shows this feature is usable, but not perfect (if the every-few-minutes GPS update fails due to signal strength, don’t use it to determine where you were, especially if you’ve just stepped off a train). The TZ10 also developed a spot on the sensor & is being 28-days repaired…
• Places included; Basel (for the flight); Freiburg, The Black Forest (Schwarzwald), Feldberg, Interlaken, Berne & Zurich (as train stopovers, not impressed), Schaffhausen & the Rheinfall (much nicer) and various touristy train stops such as Schlossee lake and Lauterbrunnun. It may not surprise that I felt somewhat at home in Freiburg & Schaffhausen, but felt like aright tourist in Switzerland.
• It was very nice & brought on a lot of personal reflection. Preferred the Black Forest to Interlaken. I’m planning on learning more German (ho ho ho, yeah like I have the time to do that!) & going again, maybe at year’s end….

When I posted about the Public Facebook Feed, I hinted about the long development time. I’ve also mentioned my use of Personal Kanban.

Well, it’s been a few weeks, and still not gotten around to this post, which discusses my usage of it and similar tools in organising my own life. As the delay also implies, this is a mixed bag so far.

Reminder of intent here:

• Organize my personal life. I wouldn’t call myself disorganized, rather I’d like to be more productive
• Apply lean/agile software development tools/approaches in my personal life to this end. A very good starting point for more info is Personal Kanban, which I’m going with over other Scrum or heavyweight systems like Get Things Done, which appears firmly to be in the “add endless embellishments” stage

The two main mechanisms are Visualize your work and Limit your work-in-progress. I’d like to use something like AgileZen, but it has no data import-export. So I’m sticking by Remember The Milk for now, especially as it has an app for my old Windows Mobile phone, and my new HTC Desire.

So, what do I feel the main impediments are here? I feel it exposes that:

• My current setup encourages a ‘todo list’ mentality
• There is no feel of the ‘flow’ that is supposed to occur – the “Goals/Tasks/Backlog/Doing/Done”. Instead, it’s more “ToDo/Done” with little rhythm or awareness of greater goals. I’m unsure if this is an issue, a benefit (“fit the process to suit you”) or if it’s a barrier to being hyperproductive
• I somehow never seem to have the time to significantly work through the backlog

I’ve talked this over with a few people, including people at work also involved with Agile & our use of Kanban there, and personal friends involved in management-like activities. No conclusion was reached.

So why don’t I feel as productive as I should? I’m not exactly sat around watching TV all day. And when I e.g. do watch TV with my housemates, it’s usually with my netbook with me, multitasking. (Side note, I’ve noticed an increased ability to do this, something well-documented as Internet technology encroaches. To the point where if I’m doing just one action that isn’t at work, my brain feels like it’s idle & starts to chug over some other task in the background, to my annoyance if foreground task is, y’know, important, like a conversation or something. Even now, I find myself saying “C’mon!”to the computer as I want to get this post finished and move on to some other task, and it doesn’t respond as fast as my thought processes, which already feels several steps ahead).

Maybe it’s good old-fashioned information overload (or rather, the filters are broken), but this seems like a cop-out.

Perhaps my throughout is at an effective high already so I get few returns? My life work-in-progress limit is “full”. But a) I don’t seem to have much to show for it, and b) there’s lots of talk about being hyperproductive. Perhaps the value I think I should give items isn’t the value I actually give them. Or maybe I am just reaching an effective life balance between “doing stuff” and “living life”?

It doesn’t feel very balanced, though. Just like my Google Reader list which constantly has thousands of unread items, I have a lot of items to do, books to read, etc. that never happen. (Upstairs is an unopened copy of The Guardian I bought yesterday, the first in many years, bought as a symbolic gesture as they switched support from Labour to the Liberal Democrats for the imminant General Election.. Have a feeling it may not actually get read.)

This “never ending pile” is a common feature of life, I know, but it seems more acute now than at any other stage of my life, which hints something else is going on – maybe my work-in-progress limit is in practice lower than what I think it is (a common Kanban issue)… Reviewing this post before I hit ‘Publish’, it seems more like a random infodump from a hyperactive brain. Maybe I’ve just had a bit too much coffee on not quite enough sleep?

This is certainly not a definitive post, and hope to follow up on it sometime soon(!); I’m pretty sure I’ve read items dealing with this on the Personal Kanban site. Perhaps this is a self-perpetuating shallow loop whereby I am missing some component and so never really ‘get into it’?

Went to the Facebook F8 Conference Keynote last night; it was extended into London due to the volcanic ash.

Facebook’s juggernaut just gets bigger & bigger. There were some very powerful platform announcements made, to basically extend themselves over the entire internet, including sucking every page/object on the web into their ecosystem; these explain them much better than I could:

• The Next Evolution of Facebook Platform
• The Graph API

This also raises a few hackles with me, mainly:

• a) the fast disappearance of the Anonymous/Private Web; all sites will know who you are by default and store lots of information about you & your activity, and how it all interrelates.
• b) all this information lives inside Facebooks’ servers, not on the Open Web.

Anyway, somewhat typically paradoxically, I’ve bunged up a couple of Social Plugins on the site as a test (see above & left); they really are just as easy as adding some HTML to your Wordpress templates. ¹ Yes, no-one visits this site, but that’s not the point!! (nerdy rolleyes).

I’m not really bothered about the ‘compelling social experience married with rich metadata’ blahblah on my personal site here, but I would be rather worried if I ran a site heavy with user interaction, like say Lovefilm.com who was a launch partner last night.

They’re already finding themselves having to use Facebook to get some kind of user experience/marketing edge. You know how Windows is slowly, quietly dying, since everyone just does everything through a web browser? Give it a few years, that could be you; Facebook having pretty much hollowed out your entire business model & you’re basically a server farm wrapping around their platform. And Facebook want 25% of your ad revenue.

It was very interesting to see Microsoft playing second fiddle to Facebook as it is…

When Facebook changed their privacy settings last year, I’ve been looking for a way to display public updates – and only my public updates – to the world.

But, of course, Facebook has other ideas. I was at first expecting them to show up on my public profile page, but no; it’s an fully public profile or nothing… and you have to be logged in to Faceboook to see it. A Twitter-style lifestream is not on the cards, it seems. And you can’t use RSS feeds either, as they include no privacy information, so you can’t filter by ‘Everyone’ content.

So, I’ve given up on waiting for Facebook to follow up on the initial ‘Everyone’ noise, & have written a PHP Facebook Platform application to retrieve these public updates myself.

The application is at http://apps.facebook.com/publicstatusfeed// http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=331369174049. The FB app is just an iframe pointing to the application code on my website, at http://vodex.net/publicstatusfeed/.¹

I’ve released the application code at http://code.google.com/p/publicfacebookfeed/. Please note this is in an initial release. There is not much documentation, test cases, or any caching, for example. ²

How to use

• Visit http://vodex.net/publicfacebookfeed/ ; you’ll be taken to http://apps.facebook.com/publicstatusfeed/ to grant the application some permissions. Click ‘Allow’ a few times.
• http://vodex.net/publicfacebookfeed/rss.php?uid=YOURFACEBOOKUSERID is now an RSS feed of your public updates!

Whew, that was easy. Note that if you’re not OK with my website accessing your Facebook activity, please download the code & set it up yourself on your own server.

I’ve also put up a human-readable diagnostic page, at http://vodex.net/publicfacebookfeed/core.php?uid=YOURFACEBOOKUSERID. Mine is at http://vodex.net/publicfacebookfeed/core.php?uid=802410391.

How it works

Sadly, I didn’t enjoy developing this – Facebook Platform has a reputation for a volatile API & incomplete documentation. In total, it took me around 12 hours (admittedly spread out over some months of leisure time) for what should be a simple task.

I also found a few forum posts etc. of other developers attempting this, but no working applications or real guidance. Perhaps no-one is that interested in this area? I find it surprising that I could be among the first to figure it out.

Anyway, do something similar to the below (or check out the code):

• Your application must request offline_access and read_stream extended permissions.
• When the user authorises, store their session key (MySQL works just fine). These used to be called ‘infinite session keys’.
• The session key allows you to access the user’s content without having to go via the Facebook UI. In the script to actually get the content, create your Facebook client and then set the session key to that which you stored earlier. Do not go through requiring permissions again, as that’d trigger the Facebook UI, which you don’t want if e.g. the server is polling an RSS feed, with no human in sight
• For the content itself, use Stream.get, and not the more obvious (& apparently deprecated) Status.get, as that allow querying by privacy. (Hat tip to the Facebook Developer stand at the PHP Conference for this!)
• Get streams for given userID with privacy of ‘EVERYONE’ and then do interesting things with it.

So there we go; I can now finally have public Facebook activity in this site’s lifestream. If there’s interest in this application (i.e. I’m not just scratching my own itch), I’ll look to proceed further with it.

A random search for ‘vodex’ has uncovered that I’ve suffered a similar fate to Chris Heilmann’s blog! (I read him after meeting at the Yahoo Conference in 2009, but that’s another story).

In my case, I was running a script I wrote several years back, “Thumbmaker”, and at some point had left some folders world-writable, which were abused by spambots (see his post for details).

Unlike him, I’d inadvertently cleaned the whole lot out when I upgraded my site recently.

They’re lurking in Google’s index for the foreseeable future; an example is http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=site%3Avodex.net+avi.

As an aside, like Chris, I also have a Google Alert for ‘vodex’ but they’ve never shown up in there… implying that this is old spam, & this happened some time ago…

I started using Google Buzz as soon as it launched; and that included following people who followed me, knowing that they could be out-of-the-gate spammers. (Interesting how the bootstrapping of a social network feels different to a mature one.)

I stopped using the Buzz web interface as it’s just so noisy at present, reading activity in Google Reader instead. Right now I have 263 followers, and yes some of them are spammers, though also a lot of real, proper people. I’m unsure how they find me, presumably via items I like in Google Reader.

But one of them caught my eye – a user called Phasuk. I’m used to having a large unread list of items, but he stood out from the rest, having shared 303 items.

And… they are all completely mundane posts about wire drawing machines. All from a mundane blog about wire drawing machines:

Basic principalsThe art or process of wire drawing like the name implies is to draw a wire of a bigger diameter through a hole with smaller diameter hereby reducing the diameter through plastic deformation while the volume remains the same.

“He” (though I assume it’s some kind of automated program) is creating a blog, all about wire drawing machines, creating lots of bland but readable articles, and then using a Google Reader account, sharing them to anyone who’ll follow him on Buzz.

I’m no expert in spamming. But, I’m unclear what the intent of this is.

I can understand if you create a site with lots of copied & pasted content to draw people in & click on your ads. But this is quite well structured (check out the tags on the front page), only has a couple of ads on, and who is interested in this highly obscure subject?

So, thinking a quick google would show more light on the subject.. but it didn’t. Nor did a twitter search – at time of writing , http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wire+drawing+machine has only three items. His twitter account, http://twitter.com/phasuk111, complete with charming picture, is the same sort of thing, but with travel guides.

No-one is talking about him, so these highly boring spam sites are presumably a lot more commonplace than I realised… but paradoxically, he’s not spamming everywhere, so again, what’s the point?

My best guess is once the site gets old enough for Google etc. to ‘trust’ it as a genuine site, used by/shared to genuine people (like, er, me) that’s when it overnight is suddenly full of warez/porn ads/etc.

But I am largely guessing. Maybe it’s some sort of experiment by someone? Maybe (doubt it) it’s not a spammer at all, but juts someone with a very special interest in wire drawing machines?

Either way, as this is a sort-of new blog, I thought I’d make a post, lard it with honeypot references, and see what turns up.
I figure there’s little risk in this, given the generally open nature of social media. Hope I don’t get proved wrong…

EDIT: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=wire+drawing+machine+vodex – wow, showing up in Google in less than five minutes. Presumably PubHubSubBub real-time foo at work…

Very well, let me take the step & publish my first actual blog post that isn’t imported from the old site or Livejournal.

I’m writing this around 8am the day the clocks changed in the UK, with its distinctive “mini jet-lag” feeling as the light & my body clock shift slightly. Seemed like a good time to do it.

As per my last post, Livejournal seems in increasing decline; I checked there yesterday to see what my friend list looks like these days and, well, as the saying goes, things fade away. Virtually everyone is using Facebook, Twitter, or both. On one level, it’s a shame, as they had the potential to be as successful as Facebook¹; but on the other hand LJ seems to be reverting back to its fanfic roots, so “to your nature be true” I guess.

So, I’ve decided the theme of this rebooted Hello, World post is self-organisation. A quick summary of some ways I’ve been slowly organising my life over the past few months:

• Converting this site to use Wordpress rather than a bunch of custom CMS scripts. This is an ongoing behind-the-scenes process: yesterday converted the Fortean Times Icons page to use NextGen Gallery rather than my own, unmaintained, Thumbmaker script.
• Importing/backing up Livejournal to here. Wordpress has matured so much, it’s a compelling choice; especially if Livejournal ever do go to the great 404 page in the sky as is constantly rumoured. I’m not sure how to handle redirects at this point, or if Wordpress will ever support friend-list style privacy (though out here in the Open Web, I appreciate it’d be missing the point a bit).
• Remember The Milk – to call it just a “to-do application” would be an injustice. Do yourself a favour and check it out. (Hmm, the mere act of writing a blog post has a “talking to the world” feel, which a Livejournal, Facebook, or Twitter post doesn’t even if they are public. Psychological shift detected…)
• Personal Kanban. Try Kanban 101 for an introduction. Using AgileZen at the moment, both personally and at work, with little traction sadly as there data import/export. Current plan is as soon as a decent Kanban tool can import/export, end up using Remember The Milk as a data backend.
• Dieted via the appallingly-branded Celebrity Slim & lost around another 20 pounds since October.

There we go. I’ve also helped launch a site for my friend Sabina, cleverly titled sabinalucia.com/, and sort of promised myself to write/blog more often, as recommended by numerous “personal improvement” sites. A statistic about how 99% of Internet content is produced by less than 1% of its population comes to mind, but I really can’t be bothered to look it up (8am Sunday morning, remember?) and this is already a surprisingly long grab-bag post already. So let’s leave it there & see how things pan out…

In a previous post, I talked about migrating http://vodex.net from the hand-rolled custom scripts to Wordpress. Well, it’s taken a while longer than expected due to other priorities, but it’s done!

Current strategy is to use the site as a set of static pages rather than an actual blog as described here. Then used various plugins like PHP-exec, along with some refactoring, to get the applications, such as MailMaker, over to Wordpress-usable format. The front page is a lifestream of my various web activity, including public Facebook content when they next sort out their APIs.

Observations:

1) There’s a lot of old, old content on that site, that wasn’t so obvious/exposed, and that was largely ignored in favour of Facebook/Google Reader, etc. Now it’s in Wordpress & generally more discoverable, it’s slightly embarrassing, like the RecordHash Data Object, or frankly bizarre, like Waxy Dogheads. I may well end up hiding a lot of these pages.

2) Wordpress is a great platform, it’s really matured. After the content tweaks, it’s much more suitable than the custom CMS I’d writtenmyself.

3) Ruby on Rails applications aren’t ported over, but they don’t work right now, possibly because…

4) The main driver for this was my host breaking PHP, email, and the Rails apps during some sort of systems upgrade I wasn’t notified about. I’m on a ‘development sandbox’ for just $25 a year. Time to change that I think.

5) Now that I’ve started this post, I have the urge to start recapping other areas of my life, such as the use of Kanban, going on a badly-marketed diet again, and other stuff. But Livejournal is on the slide more than ever. Shall I start blogging proper again, or am I joining in the trend of blogging dying off & using increasingly mature social media instead? Could this become my last ever LJ post? Time will tell..