Looney Zunes

As already stated, I am a recent iPodder. I pride myself on being fad-resistent and only bought one when it suited my purpose. However, I always appreciated the aura that Apple built around their devices. As a technologist who can enjoy stylish items, it was good to see a company willing to spend time making their devices look good. After all, most households own a computer and the beige boxes (which I own) aren't exactly works of art that you would want have on display. Think back to cool science fiction movies like Gattaca and you can see what we needed; Apple provides that. For me, though, I want value for money and that's why I will continue to buy my PCs from small computer shops and then hide them in my study.

So Microsoft figures it is time to give Apple a run for its money and along comes the Zune. I won't describe it because you must be living in a cave if you haven't heard about it. Odd name, but odder still is that it appears that the obvious domain name, www.zune.com, is already taken. Surely that would have been a marketing showstopper. Also, my curiosity lead me to check out the related store. It doesn't appear to be that easy to find. I first Googled "zune store" but there really wasn't anything apparent. So it turns out that it is called Zune Marketplace, off the www.zune.net site which under Firefox looks like something a 12 year old created, a white page with images and some text. This is being a bit picky, but exactly what generation is "Welcome to the Social" supposed to appeal to? Sounds very 1920s to me. I did like this cheeky dig at the marketing campaign. Nonetheless, the Xbox survived to the second incarnation (although gamers are a pretty fickle demographic) and it will be interesting how the Zune performs.

Defining yourself

As a consultant, soft skills are very important and along this line, a colleague pointed me to an online personality test, which I promptly performed. It is based on Carl Jung's psychological theories and called a Myers-Briggs test. I have been partial to Jung's work, reading a large book on the man some years ago and finding it to be quite sensible. The engineer in me can be skeptical about such things and a pet hate of mine is that Sigmund Freud gets so much attention in pop culture despite having, in my opinion, far more fanciful ideas. I have no doubt that his popularity is due to his fixation on sexuality as a key human motivator. Interestingly, Jung and Freud were friends, or at least Freud saw Jung as his Protege carrying on his theories, but Jung started to disagree and eventually parted company. One of his criticisms was that Freud's sample set was not wide enough to form theories on people in general - predominantly wealthy, conservative housewives. Flicking through Freud's Wikipedia entry, it appears he was a cocaine addict, with there being a theory that this increases sexual interest and obsessive thinking.

Getting back to my original topic, it turns out that I am an INFP. This is interesting because each type (there are 16) has relationships to all the others and this gives you pointers on how to deal with them. So I sent it out to a few of my friends and colleagues and got an interesting response. It turned out that my fiancee was an INTP who apparently make good companions to my type - a fact which empirical methods had already proven to be true. A close friend who I worked very closely with at school was an INTJ, the description of which is very accurate. The relationship between INFP and INTJ is advisor which explains elements of our friendship. I wonder if this interests me because of elements of being an INFP...

The next step would be to do this in an organised with my colleagues and see what comes out. It will be interesting to see if people feel comfortable having their character type freely known by their colleagues.

i(hate)Tunes

Love the iPod. Can I just say I really love the iPod? Makes me feel like when I first had a walkman with a decent tape collection. There's nothing like walking through crowded Sydney streets of a Friday night with Pnau blaring in my ears so loud that I can barely hear anything else. Its like having a soundtrack for your life. And watching video podcasts is cool. And audio ones too.

But I really, really hate iTunes. Firstly for a piece of software that is only downloading files, why does it need to consume 60% of my CPU!? And not mention the times I left it on overnight to download podcasts or sync with the iPod only to find that it had crashed and no work had been done. Oh, and the fact that there is no resume functionality on downloads, so download 80% and the quit iTunes; when you come back in, it often won't even start again, it just tries and (due to there being a half downloaded file on the file system) fails complaining that the URL doesn't exist anymore - which is wrong! More: you can't control how many files are downloaded simultaneously, so when my bandwidth got choked to 64k (due to download exceeds) it still blindly tried to download three 100MB podcasts at once.

Regarding podcasts, I watch or listen to them and they become 'watched' and lose the blue dot, but often don't get deleted. But sometimes they do. So I have to periodically clean them up myself so I don't fill the hard disk. Annoying.

End rant.

So, what did you do on the weekend?

I have a confession to make. I went to the Rugby League International between Australia and New Zealand at the Dome. Sacrilege, I know... but I did spend the first half with my walkman on listening to the Melbourne v Sydney soccer match. As a Victorian, rugby is not my greatest love, although I have found myself appreciating the Union World Cup when it was on a few years back. Some of the rules are a bit strange, but as a cricket and AFL fan, I know that this is nothing to write home about. The crowd puzzled me. For most of the match, it felt like we were at a cricket Test - very subdued. The only excitement came when someone looked like they might get somewhere. Considering this was supposed to be an international with a lot of passion in it, it was pretty civilised. I would reckon that you average AFL home and away game would inspire far more crowd activity.

One other interesting thing (at least for sport loving Melbournians) is that the seat-moving-in feature of the Telstra Dome was in action. I heard about it at the time it was built, but had never seen it used. It looks like it reduces the seating capacity so that could be why they don't do it more often. But it looked cool!

The final point is that we only went because we had free Medallion club tickets, including car parking. I wouldn't have paid for what I saw.

Podding

A comment reminded me of something that I wished to mention. This may surprise some people, but I am the proud owner of a black, 80GB, video iPod. And a pleased one at that - the video quality and storage capacity are awesome. Now, Apple fans will probably be horrified to hear that not only did I not take photos of the packaging and various stages of its opening, but I actually threw the stuff out once I had liberated the iPod! In fact, I had ripped and torn the packaging during the act of opening it - a crime in some circles.

The upshot of it is that I have discovered the 43 folders podcasts and despite the fact that it looked about as interesting as listening to the sound of grass growing, it is actually quite good. I found myself relating quite quickly to their discussions. On a more entertaining front, I discovered Channel Frederator which is an animated/cartoon podcast and has some really good stuff.

First test

I have now come into some work that will keep me busy for the next month or two, and this will be a good test of my GTD skills. Initially I found I slipped on inbox processing, and have remedied this by trying to have a physical inbox on my desk (previously I just processed things as they came in). However, I am enjoying applying the 'what is this' process whenever something is processed, rather than just delaying that decision. Also, I think I am probably not writing down as many things on my lists as I should be.

Open your mind

It has been one full week since I started using the GTD processes. Practically, this means carrying my action lists and my tickler file to and from work. A few people have mentioned hi-tech options but the current set up suits me fine. Initial thoughts are that I really notice the mental freedom of not having to keep my to-dos in my head. Its quite relaxing to ride the bus in the morning and not have try to dig up all the things I needed to address, especially on a Monday! When I turned on my computer and looked in my email system's @ACTION folder, I saw that I had a code review to complete. I had no trace of that task in my active memory - and that felt good, meaning I hadn't spent any time over the weekend thinking about it. Yet at the same time, I was more likely to complete it.

While the title of the book makes it sound like the system helps you to do things, the real benefit is that it helps you to do the right things. Tasks that had been floating around for months were finally nailed down and completed. I also like the mental 'inbox' process: something comes in, say a phone message, and you force yourself to work out what the next step is - and that's what you write down. In busier times, I sure I will have a staged inbox cycle where I will process things in a batch, but now I can do most as they come in.