Meet thy maker

“Prepare to meet thy maker!”. You must have heard that phrase somewhere (Or at least its less cool, non Dog-Latin equivalent: Prepare to meet your maker). Most likely in one of those terrible Jean Claude Van Damme movies we all bitch about in respectable company but watch in secrecy (and, need it be said, extreme boredom). Well, in any case, what does it really mean? How the hell [pun not intended……. at first :) ] do you prepare for something as weird as that? No, that’s just silly! And I am not going to waste anyone’s time by filling out the rest of this post with step by step advice on doing the same. i.e. nothing like- ‘#42: In front of Him, another layer of deo just won’t cut it. Better break out the soap’. No, this is about small disasters. The things that make you fell you have to prepare to meet your maker. In particular, two that struck me like a large plate of expensive noodles. With meatballs.*

Now, what is a small disaster? ‘Small disaster’! Its almost an oxymoron! Well, a small disaster is something that really, really sucks. It won’t, by definition, matter at all in the long run and it usually doesn’t affect the world at large, just a few people, maybe you and a few friends, who think similar. A small disaster is your favourite book store closing down, Its finding out that the flavour of ice cream you love will no longer be made or that the bookmark you’ve used for twenty seven years will be kitty litter in a few hours. Its the thing that makes you feel that the world’s ending now. When in reality, all you really need to do is look in the mirror (and if your head works anything like mine, laugh your guts out at the sorry figure you see), take a deep breadth and get on with the business of living.

So what happened to me? What could’ve possibly made me write this post? Well, first, you need a lil background. See, I’m what you call a geek (Gee, what was your first clue?). I live by the stylus on my PDA and on the mind-numbing uberness of the interweb. I am also a rather ordered geek (read the post titled ‘The hammer of order’ for more on that). I like my email, tasks, contacts, etc etc to stay in sync. I also need my mobile internet access (I’m the kind of guy who thinks Google-stalking you is easier than just asking you what you do. And did I mention more fun – chances are, someone’s uploaded that old Vegas vid on YouTube!). And I had it all! Airtel’s dirt cheap ‘Mobile Office’ data plan was perfect for me- 75 Rupees a week and I had unlimited net access wherever I went! And then there was the free hosted exchange by the nice people at mail2web. That allowed me to keep everything in sync, let me access anything I wanted from anywhere and was really, really easy to use on my WinMO PDA.

Then they died. The exchange service was the first to go. The mail2web people wanted to upgrade their software to match Microsoft's latest version (Which, according to Bill’s marketing department was just a little bit better than FSM* heaven) and ended up running balls-first into a wall of licence agreements. The result? They couldn’t let the service be free even if they wanted to! (And you thought Gates had idiots working for him before huh?). So they pulled the plug on that nice slice of heaven and decided to charge for the stuff that I’d been enjoying for all of zero. Dealing with that blow wasn’t actually that bad, not compared to what’s happened now, but I digress – my exchange died and all was smote in its ruin. (According to Tolkien that means “things were f**ked up cause it went bust”). So, I dealt with it. I shifted back to the windows live ‘push’ service Microsoft offers for free (and which is nowhere near as good as exchange) and came up with an ad-hock way of backing up and accessing my stuff online: Microsoft’s ‘My Phone’. It took patience, some surgery and a little fiddling around but it seems to work for the large part.

And then Airtel went and decided that a freakin’ duck would make good VP of marketing material (I think they thought a quack would lend them more credibility with the Godman demographic). They went and discontinued the entire mobile office scheme. And replaced it with a charge of 30p for every 50kb transferred. Read those lines and weep ye! 30p for every 50kb! That's bad by the standards they had in biblical times (Imagine John trying to publish to ‘http://bible.blogspot.com’** and running into repeated 404s)!

I’m dealing with that disaster as we speak. I have opera mini set up as my default browser (all tricked out to reduce usage). My email is configured to arrive only at certain hours of the day and It doesn’t download anything but the text. I also have a connection monitor in place that warns me if I use too much. But its hard, I’m dealing with it one day at a time. Wish me luck. Or better yet, wish Airtel luck. I’m going to go after them with stuff covered in cool yellow-and-black hazard signs.

peace….. Unless you work for Airtel

*FSM, noodles, Meatballs etc. I hope you know I’m referring to the church of the flying spaghetti monster.

**I think there is actually a blog by that title. I haven’t seen it and have nothing to do with it.

PS: bout all the weird religion references…. well, I had to tie the post to the title (liked it, didn’t want to change it) somehow right?

The hammer of order

You might’ve noticed the ‘GTD in box’ and the ‘tickler file’ in the rather odd photo I posted a little while back. You might’ve recognised them as being components of David Allen’s personal organisation system – Getting things done. You might’ve wondered why I, of all people, have an organisation system (my desk is practically a work station!). And a formal one at that!

Now, a personal (and professional) organisation system is something you’d likely find in the corporate world. And if you know me you’d know exactly how much I disdain the corporate world- It’s essentially a massive (and unnecessary) ego trip that everyone is somehow fooled into playing along with. But in any case the real question is: why does an affirmed Geek like me have one?

There are many answers to that question: I have terrible memory, I tend to loose things that I’d likely want later and I make a mess of things that should’ve been straightforward. In short, I suffer from the first stages of absent minded professor syndrome. I’m not quite there yet (hell, I’m still an undergrad!) but its progressing.

Absent minded professor syndrome, which we shall call APS because three letter mental disorders are so  loved in the medical world right now, is a state when your mind is constantly wandering. You think of one thing and that leads to another and that to another and so on. You love the thought stream, you live the thought stream and you exclaim in absolute delight at the wonderful ideas your sub-conscious coughs up. Unfortunately, that love leaves you with a predicament: either live the stream in your head and loose touch with whatever is around you or force yourself away from it and live with the knowledge that what you really want to be doing right now is a mere mental hop, skip and jump away.

Well, I don’t want to do either. I want to be able to enjoy my particular brand of madness to the fullest while loosing as little touch with the real world as I can. The answer, therefore, to the question of why I try to be organised lies in the true nature and purpose of an organisation system – to free yourself of unnecessary thought and worry.

The the essential first principle behind GTD (getting things done in buzzword form) is simple: Take all the thoughts that are clawing for your attention, whether they be as mundane as ‘do your laundry’* or as profound as ‘pen out the interesting approach to AI you thought up’* and put them down in a trusted and efficient, filing, organisation and reminder system. (The buzzword for this being ‘total capture’.) Once everything is in the system you needn’t worry about it anymore because you know you’ll be reminded of anything you need to do when the time and place are right and that any information you need is going to be right where it is supposed to.

That leaves your mind free to do whatever its doing right now! And what I’m doing right now is dreaming whatever I care to dream of, secure in the knowledge that I’ll do everything that needs to be done and sure that whatever I imagine and care for will never, ever be forgot**.

In short, I live in order that my mind may live in beautiful, beautiful chaos.

 

*Both of these are actual entries in my next action list!

**Please, please tell me you got the reference! A clue if you didn’t: the 5th of November.