Esther says I have an unhealthy obsession with Merlin Mann of 43folders, and for the most part she is probably right. Essentially I want to be Merlin Mann (although I don’t have as cool of a name). He is a productivity guru, even though he says he is the most productive procrastinator in the world.

Back to the point of this post.

About a week ago, I sent Merlin an email, it went a little something like this:

Merlin,

My wife says I have an unhealthy idolization of you as you end up being quoted in far too many of our conversations.

I do have a question that I think you might be able to glean some light on. I have a lot of applications in my Applications folder on my fancy new Macbook, but I don’t feel that they are organized enough. I normally use Quicksilver to launch my applications, but I have some orphans that I don’t use. Do I just delete them? Do I put them in a “Fallow Programs” folder and check it regularly? What would you suggest?

Thank you very much in advance, and if this email gets eaten by your email robots, I won’t take it personally.

Jered

He is just the guy that would be able to solve my issue. I really didn’t think I would get an email back, but low and behold, today, in my inbox I had a email from Merlin Mann. It read:

On 2006-12-11, at 10:51, Jered Benoit wrote:

My wife says I have an unhealthy idolization of you as you end up being quoted in far too many of our conversations.

Awesome! Everybody loves being quoted. My wife never quotes me, if it’s any consolation. She doesn’t even listen to my podcasts.

I do have a question that I think you might be able to glean some light on. I have a lot of applications in my Applications folder on my fancy new Macbook, but I don’t feel that they are organized enough. I normally use Quicksilver to launch my applications, but I have some orphans that I don’t use. Do I just delete them? Do I put them in a “Fallow Programs” folder and check it regularly? What would you suggest?

The big question is what would organizing them do for you? Like any kind of organizational thing, it’s smart to start with a desired result — good way to avoid accidental busy work. May not be much payoff for you futzing here.

Another thing to think about is that some (not all) Apps get confused if you change where they are located on your drive. This is increasingly not a problem on OS X (thank goodness), but it’s something to keep in mind.

And finally, as far as deleting, I would only delete the very large ones that you never use; they’re not doing you any harm, and you never know when you might need ‘em.

Thanks a million for the note and the kind words. May you and your wife have many happy healthy and organized years together.

all the best,

/m

Wow! A real email from my productivity idol.

It’s going to be a good week.

I’m watching ScobleShow about Blogtronix (show link) and Vassil Mladjov, CEO, said something very interesting about 1/2 way through.

Roughly transcribed:

Many companies are using blogs for PR and marketing … You need to start somewhere … Why do I need to email the whole company, when I can just post one blog post and everyone can go and read it and give me some feed back. That way you are not clogging the email system, you are not spamming people, and everybody, even the people you may have forgotten to email, can give you feedback and comment, even with external customers.

Silicon Valley gets it.

I took Friday off, Esther and I relaxed all morning and then around noon finally ventured out. We went to the mall and looked for christmas gifts etc. Let me tell you something, I hate holiday shopping or malls. I’m not sure which, but they are so analogous in my despise, I think it’s both. Malls are just ways to herd people together and get them to spend more money than they need to and that pretty much is the entire holiday season.

When I have kids I think we are going to have a non commercial Christmas. They’ll get, maybe, 3 gifts from a store (kind of like the three wise men), and the rest will be home made or hand crafted. My cousins used to have that kind of Christmas, and I think that it’s really the way to go.

I guess I should talk to Esther about that …

• Geek to Live: How to access a home server behind a router/firewall - Lifehacker
  VNC is what I need
  (tags: howto networking web webserver)
• 10 things you should know about connecting Macintosh OS X systems to Windows networks
  Doing this tonight
  (tags: apple guide howto networking tutorial windows)
• How to setup WDS between a wireless router and an AirPort Express - Download Squad
  Doing this tonight
  (tags: howto networking wifi network)

At work, originally uploaded by jeredb.

Photobooth is a productivity killer. I will never get work done again!

Birdman, originally uploaded by jeredb.

Whoa!

Hair, originally uploaded by jeredb.

I found this great little photobooth plugin Flickrbooth. Expect to see more of these kind of photos.

And Barbecue sauce!

Last night Esther and I went out to dinner at Chili’s, which was surprisingly good. A wonderful little thing that the Chili’s people do, is add a trivia to their little drinks menu. Most of the trivia I knew, but it was fun to read them to Esther. I had a sampler platter, including ribs and shrimp (at Esther’s request) and Esther had a steak and chicken Quesadillas. It was pretty good, and as I told Esther last night, the only time I remember eating at a Chili’s with with my grandmother. That of course let to Esther insinuating that she reminded me of my grandmother and that devolved into chaos (good chaos).

So why were we having a dinner out? Esther is kind of done with her semester. She presented a major paper yesterday and outside of a single final she is done! She has survived her first semester as a Ph.D. student, hoorah!

Also last night, I worked on getting the laptop and the media center PC all hooked up where I could use it as a real computer as well as the media center hub. I installed TightVNC on the PC and Chicken of the VNC on the mac, which is much better to use than Remote Desktop Connection, which locks the PC when I disconnect. I also setup Dynamic DNS updater to eventually allow me to access the computer anywhere without having to use Orb. Now I just have to figure out how to get around the router directly the PC.

• 11×17 Binders
  I plan on ordering a lot from here!
  (tags: paper 11×17 binder folder tabs organizer organization)