So we go through troubleshooting away. For twenty minutes. I cannot reproduce his problem even using his authentication credentials. We’re at the part where I ask him to use the command line to do his checkout—and if you knew this special needs person, you’d know I’m asking quite a bit here.

Just then, and I shit you not this is 20 minutes into the troubleshooting I get this on IM:

special needs guy [4:52 PM]:
the OK button is now enabled. Seems pretty wierd but it stays dithered unless you enter something into the checkout directory - using the browse button to place a path there does not enable it

special needs guy [4:53 PM]:
I am good to go now

As seen on Metafilter

I’m not so certain they deserve nice things though.

From the bin of forwarded emails that are actually fun to receive.

Celebrations last night and today. I’ll really let loose if NE-2 puts an electoral vote in Obama’s column. I cannae believe Indiana went Obama too. This is real dogs and cats living together stuff here.

And now a word from the curmudgeon in me: Let’s not lose this and actually get some of the crap from the last eight years fixed. Oh, and universal health care would be nice too.

Speaking of curmudgeons, I have to hand it to McCain. Last night’s concession speech was incredibly gracious and somewhat unexpected. It’s either the dying gasp of moderate Republicanism or a return to sanity for the party. If his campaign’s tone more closely resembled this speech I think things would have been a lot closer and I wouldn’t have minded a McCain presidency so much.

But, yeah, Obamanation!

And sit it does.

Usually one of three things happen at this point. Most likely I’ll reply / perform the action required to clear this message in the next few days. If it gets beyond this point, though, bad things happen. Most likely it will sit until it becomes so stale it just doesn’t matter any longer and I delete the damned thing and feel tons of guilt. The last thing that happens is that it gets accidentally deleted in one of my bulk clearing operations.

See, for better or worse, my email inbox is my primary collection point. Oh, yeah, we’re talking GTD methodology here. My three or for personal email addresses and the auto-redirect from work all dump in to this bin. Now that I do CM at work I get 20 - 50 automated build status emails per day. My team also has a habit of CC’ing the team list whenever we work through a problem. On the one hand this helps with communication and gets more eyeballs on the problem quickly. On the other it generates tons of email churn when you’re not immediately involved in a particular problem.

But I digress. The point being that I sift several hundred email messages a day which, for most of you, is probably no big deal. Let’s just say I’m not the world’s best multi-tasker. So what happens is the inbox fills up with gibberish and eventually I go on a wholesale delete binge. I don’t want this to take all day so it involves some mental triage whereby I estimate the necessity of keeping a message around by looking at the subject, sender, date and what I can dredge up from memory. Needless to say, it is an entirely fallible system.

Add to this mix the tendency of my ISP to choke in mid-fetch and then do a complete dump of everything in mbox the next time my client goes after mail. Nothing like getting your last week’s worth of mail a couple times every day. Each time this happens the messages that require action have to run the triage gauntlet.

All of this to say that I know the solution to the problem. A basic tenet of GTD is process your collection points and move the stuff requiring action into an appropriate bin/list/what-have-you. Leaving your action items to mingle with your inbox keeps you from being able to trust your system and if you can’t trust it, the principle benefit of not having to remember everything on your plate at all times goes out the window.

So I made a point today of getting my GTD tool in order (yay OmniFocus!) and have managed to keep my inbox empty-ish for most of the day. OmniFocus is no longer stale. iCal is up to day and is an accurate reference tool again. In short, life is much better this way. I know in my heart and head that GTD works. It’s just my lizard brain that gets lazy and causes the system to break down.

So we’re not big on lizards any more…

This made for a few rounds of levity amongst the team this morning. And when you’ve slept for shite, you need all the levity you can get to make it through the day.

It’s yer birthday.

Go Otis.

It’s yer birthday.

The Toaster marks two years with us and somewhere between four and six IRL. No party for the Cat Box Raider—and he is certainly ripe today—this year. We didn’t mark Morton’s in August so it just wouldn’t be fair. At any rate…

Go wish the blockhead happy birthday yourself…

And then I try to not get my hopes up….

It’s not working. An election just might go the right way this century.