• How to kill an organization: 5 barriers to Kaizen
  After a post on the Simplicity Habit about Kaizen, I found this. Or was it the other way around?
• Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too
  After some interesting sailings at work, this post about how Zappos pays people to quit made for an interesting read.
• How Google Does Project Managment
  I recently was on a staff retreat for work and we were trying to figure out a project management system. As usual, the best solutions are home grown.
• Access 1Password data on your PC via Firefox
  I am a fan a HUGE fan of 1Password. And while I have a mac at work and home, I feel for my cross platform brethren. This might be a way that you to can feel some 1Password goodness on the Windows side.

Esther and I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls today. If you do not want to have the movie spoiled, do not read on. This is an in-depth and critical review of the movie and no details are spared. Do not read on if you do not want spoilers.

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Social networks are wonderful things. I have been able to keep up with my cousin’s who are spread across the country, reconnect with old high school and college friends, but they also generate a lot of noise. Being a joiner, I know that I am partly to blame for the amount of noise I get, but still the systems generate a ton of messages that I don’t care about. Noise lives somewhere between spam, bacn and messages I want to get. Just like I try and reduce the amount of email I have, I would ideally like less noise.

Example

Here is the problem with the “news” I am getting. Most of the “news” items, I do not care for: What applications are added, who becomes friends with whom, profile changes. Frankly, I don’t care. Facebook offers privacy features that control how my information is distributed, but not the information that is incoming. Some people I am passing acquaintances with, I don’t care who they become friends with, isn’t there a way I can rank them a “Friend -1″ or “Friend +1″? The other issue I have with Facebook is the way people “invite” me to use applications. This is spamming, out and out. If I already have the application, then great, I want to know people whom I have classified as “friends” who also have the application. Otherwise, don’t show me “invites,” I’ll add whatever applications I want, not the other way around. You may be thinking: Jered turn off notifications, you don’t have to get these messages. I have. I am running silent. The way I get notification is when I login. So, if you are a “friend” on a social network, please do not “invite” me to an application. I won’t invite you, because even if you are an acquaintance, I respect you a little more than that.

“Haste is a form of violence.” [via SvN]

I posted about my wishes for the iPhone 2.0, and I didn’t think that wish list would come in handy so quickly. I have had issues with my Macbook, Merlin, recently, it would not recognize the battery at all. Even with the battery in, when it was plugged in, would restart. I assume this is because the battery was trying to take over. The Macbook operated as though the battery did not exist, even though I had a brand new battery. I took Merlin to a Genius bar. The Genius said that I should send it in. Today, I finally had a chance to. Which means I am operating on my work laptop or my iPhone. I was going to attempt to use just my iPhone for everything. Email, web surfing, even podcasts. It would be all possible if… the iPhone had copy and paste.
iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich on Vimeo. To blog, I write and then copy and paste text to make it more coherent. Conducting some of the day to day business (web surfing), I need to have copy & paste. That and the ability to use the horizontal keyboard everywhere.

June is coming quickly, never more true as we wait for our baby. It has been rumored that Apple is releasing SDK built apps for public consumption. Oh yeah, and that iPhone 2.0 3G thing. While I am curious about the 3G availability and any price increases on the 3G data plan, the thing I am most excited about is the third-party applications. Some of the applications I am most looking forward to are:

• OmniFocus Lite
  I need a way to take my OmniFocus with me. Syncing (not necessarily over-the-air) is critical and I would like the application to be a mobile version of the robust Getting Things Done application.
• Office Lite
  The mobile office suites are limited to viewing most document, that combined with the iPhone’s native view-only capability makes getting real “office” work impossible, unless you really like Marker Felt fonts. A iPhone native office suite would be very nice, I don’t need it full featured, but cut and paste would be very attractive for me to throw some dollars at.
• Call Screener
  Blackberry has a cool app that lets you whitelist calls you want to receive, but lets the rest go to voicemail. I love this idea. I would easily throw $20 - $30 at an app like this.

Photo by AdobeMac Back in Mid / Late March, I wrote about how I was going to conducts some self experimentation based on Neuro Linguistic Programming. My experiments were:

1. Weight loss using the Neuro Linguistic Program “I can make you thin” by Paul McKenna
2. Changing sleep patterns and speed to asleep using Pzizz, a Neuro Linguistic Program.

Results on the weight loss have been marginal. I have been supporting a pregnant wife, which has put a whole lot of food in front of me, some of which is of questionable health values. At the beginning of the experiment, I weighed in at 184. I am currently weighing between 181 and 183. Not much of a loss. I think that this portion of the experiment will be greatly helped with my wife is no longer eating for 1.5. I know it sounds like an excuse and it is, but it is hard to control what you eat when you don’t do a whole lot of the cooking 1. The Sleep experiment has been much more productive 2. While I have not had a problem with getting to sleep quickly, Esther has, particularly since becoming pregnant. Getting up every couple hours hasn’t helped. Esther would say that Pzizz has helped her fall asleep quicker and get back to sleep (although that could be attributed to pregnancy induced exhaustion). A corollary experiment to the Sleep experiment has been the Nap Experiment. The Nap Experiment grew out of the Sleep Experiment and adds the Pzizz Naps to my routine. So far the use of the naps have been spotty at best, but the results have been phenomenal. I have woken up after 20 minutes invigorated and full of enough energy to get me through the rest of the day without making me lose sleep at night. Notes:

• I am going to get back to the “I Can Make You Thin” program. I think it could be very effective, I just need to follow the simple steps consistently. Will make a concerted effort to do so for the next month
• The Sleep Experiment has been a success so far. Will follow up with Esther to check her thoughts.
• The Nap Experiment should be included three times a week to see if it is an efficient way of beating the mid-afternoon / early evening energy slumps.

Related posts: Self Experimentation