A Blast from the past & A little shout out

Apologies for the delayed post - I've been out of town on personal and business trips, I'm preparing for up-coming workshops and one-on-one work, plus continuing my switch to the Mac (!), so a short post this week.

A few blasts from the past

For my new readers, here are a few past posts you may not have seen:

• Using "Follow the energy" to refine your personal development experiments
  
• Use Gmail's "star" to highlight your good news
  
• Living in the moment, preventing regret, and appreciating life
  
• Camera Phones and Ten Cent Augmented Reality
  
• Photo Blogs, Wikis, and Memories for Life
  
• Debbie Downer and the Six Thinking Hats
  
• When inputs exceed your workflow system's capacity
  
• And just to keep it light: Top 10 things people are Getting, in addition to 'Things Done', 12 Wild Things people are visualizing, in addition to "Success", and How to Make The Ultimate Cup of Hot Chocolate.

Lots of GTD-related posts

Some GTD-related articles you might not have seen:

• Are daily to-do lists and GTD compatible?
  
• Best practices for GTD and administrative assistants
  
• Dealing with Meeting Notes - GTD to the Rescue!
  
• Depressurize your email with a 24 hour response time
  
• Reading Books The GTD Way
  
• Some GTD warning signs
  
• Some answers to "Should I keep it?" when filing
  
• Some common GTD questions, with answers
  
• What's your maximum response time?
  
• Transitions: A secret ingredient to Getting Things Done?
  
• Is GTD the "Extreme Programming" of Time Management?
  
• Plus a few fun ones: A GTD WorkFlow tool: The five stages on a business card cube and Personal Productivity Playing Cards!

Shout Out

I always enjoy hearing success stories and good news from friends and readers, so here's a little tip of the hat.

• Photographer and buddy Steven Vote continues to take great pictures.
  
• The great folks at Rokenbok showed what customer service means when I lost a part. Hey - How can a former engineer resist these toys?
  
• I connected with the other Matthew Cornell not too long ago. Him: Painter, Me: helper of successful, overloaded, smarties. (Question: A while back I believe I came across a book about a person's quest to meet everyone on the web with his name. Took a year or so, IIRC. Anyone know the book?)
  
• I recently received a surprise copy of Heidi Roizen's Skinny Songs - upbeat music that encourages keeping the pounds off. Great idea, and timely - check out What GTD and Weight Watchers have in common.
  
• Pam's "Escape from Cubicle Nation" book is real, and coming!
  
• Colleague Taco Oosterkamp has released his book on using Outlook productively.
  
• Kudos to Tracy Welsh and her company's super-useful program WebDrive - I used it for years before switching to the Mac.
  
• Tatsuya Nakagawa and friends have come out with their book Overcoming Inventoritis: The Silent Killer of Innovation
  
• Andrew Flusche has a nice "crash course" on copyright fair use.
  
• Ted Vickey's book 101 Fitness Games for Kids at Camp is out.
  
• Bob Walsh's marketing and selling ebook MicroISV Sites that Sell is out, and it's a great value.
  
• Michael Sampson wrote a whitepaper The 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity: The Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Analysis
  
• Peter Radizeski's written SELLECOM: 101 Ideas for Marketing in the Telecom Jungle
  
• And finally, thanks to Alvin Soon, Nicholas Bate, Steve Spalding, and everyone else who's reminded me how important it is to give public acknowledgement.

Have some recent good news of your own to share? Let me know!

Comments

[Adrian McEwen]

He wasn't looking for just people on the web (in fact he had a TV series about the search here in the UK) but you might be thinking of [ Dave Gorman? | http://www.davegorman.com/projects_are_you_dave_gorman.html ]

[Adrian McEwen]

Oh, and I don't know if it quite classes as good news, but recently I've been working on my [ A-Z of Personal Productivity | http://www.mcqn.com/weblog/a-z_personal_productivity_introduction ] series, which you might like to read.

[Jhunter]

Why are you switching to Mac, Matt? Or Matt, Mac? :)

Jeff H -- Texas

[Michael]

Thanks for the mention Matt.

[Matthew Cornell]

Adrian: Thanks a bunch - I think Adrian Gorman is it! Your A-Z is a great idea. Well done.

Jeff: > Why are you switching to Mac, Matt? Or Matt, Mac? :)

These things converted me to Mac: 1) Apps don't crash the
OS. 2) Installing most apps is *safe*. Finally, the clincher was
Vista. It's an OS that no one wants - bloated, slower, expensive,
confusing. It's so bad most people demanded new computers come with
the previous version! With the Mac, people *love* updates, and they're easy.

That said, lots of growing pains. E.g.,

Power user keystrokes: Taking time, and not all available.

Finder inconsistencies: surprising, given their UI reputation.

The help system is weak in some ways.

Quicken and MS Office 2008 are very disappointing, surprisingly. PowerPoint in particular is missing the more useful "Send To Word" feature found in Windows. I think this is because it also does not support VisualBasic, which the former appears to be written in. And copying two images in PP and pasting into Word gives an "out of memory" error on my 2GB RAM MacBook Pro...

Address book is buggy and weak. Major disappointment.

No good equivalent to WebDrive. MacFUSE is slow and way too unstable.

Keystroke nuttiness, esp. in Aquamacs. Taking too long for muscle memory to form.

But, BIG: Spotlight just plain rocks. It Works. Period. Brilliant.

[Jhunter]

Matt: Thanks for the info! I've been "wanting" to switch to Mac for years; being in the architecture field I love all things visual -- especially Mac's GUI ... but there still seems to be a huge chasm betwixt ... I'll keep researching, and thanks again.

Cheers from Texas.

Jeff H

[Matthew Cornell]

Jeff: You're welcome. I was a real soul-searcher, but I'm happy I did it. I must say, [ Parallels | http://www.parallels.com/ ] has saved the day twice: Running Windows versions of Quicken and PowerPoint.

[Lisa Braithwaite]

I got a package once for another Lisa Braithwaite, who lives in another state, so that was weird. We e-mailed back and forth a couple of times. Hers is her married name, though, so I wasn't quite as excited to "meet" her. I know there are a few others around, but I've never introduced myself.

I love the Dave Gorman story!

You have a friend named Taco? How cool a name is that?

[Matthew Cornell]

Hey Lisa - good story. And yes, Taco it is!

[George Hay]

Hi Matt, i thought you are a linux guy (according to your excellent "My Big-Arse Text File" arcticle). At which time have you switched to Vista - and are you still using emacs for your Text File ?

I really enjoy your blog, so keep on blogging ;-)

-- George Hay

[Matthew Cornell]

Hey George - thanks a ton for reading. Re: Linux, you probably know that [ Mac OS X | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_os_x ] has a unix-like OS under the hood, so it's quite comfortable. So tools like [ Aquamacs: Emacs for Mac OS X | http://aquamacs.org/ ] are readily available. Big arse continues!

Re: Vista, never actually used, but I trust the word on the street.

I really enjoy your blog, so keep on blogging ;-) Much obliged. Posts have slowed down temporarily, but I'll ramp up again once the current batch of consulting is over.