PolarLava::Blog » Archive of February 2009

New Belgium Fat Tire

February 20, 2009 @ 03:35 pm | Category: Beer

Vinos Piñol Terra Alta Ludovicus (2005)

February 18, 2009 @ 06:33 am | Category: Wine

Wachusett Black Shack Porter

February 16, 2009 @ 06:29 am | Category: Beer

So a few months ago I added the Beer page. This is a single-page index of the Beer! blog topic.

So in true programming laziness, I've now cloned it to make the new Wine page which is a single-page index of the Wine blog topic.

February 15, 2009 @ 12:11 am | Category: PolarLava Website

Arts and Crafts Chandelier

So about a month ago my wife went to The Antique Lamp Company looking for an arts and crafts style light —sorry, my humble abode and me make it hard to call it a chandelier, for our dining room remodeling project. And although they didn't have anything readily available, they do restoration work on old lights. So they did have two units that she found interesting so hauled me down there a few days later to check them out.

So we went, I saw and we both liked one better than the other. It's fairly basic and was originally configured with two electric and two gas lights. It's also in fairly rough shape at this point, but bear in mind that I trust my wife's visionary abilities 100%. And being that all nice things arts and craft get snapped up —at a hefty price, we opted to put a $20 deposit on it. He was going to start working on it, but it's going to take a while to rehab, which is fine because we're far from ready for it. So once he's done with it, my wife will then select the glass to use with it. And the best part is that if we decide we don't like it we get our deposit away and move on because he says he'll sell it in a matter of days anyway. Cool. So now you need put on your visionary glasses and see the following with a shiny brass finish and (probably) light rose colored, (probably) square glass…

Did I mention that it needs a LOT of very expensive rehab? ;)

February 14, 2009 @ 10:54 pm | Category: Brainwork

Toodledo: Further adventures in GTD

So I've become a bit obsessed about my My Organizational System (GTD) which was exacerbated by Joining the iPhone Cult and then complicated by Killing Sandy.  That was a bit difficult initially, but I've adapted after taking Rob's suggestion to give Toodledo a try.

It's been a while now and I can pretty clearly say that at this point I'm definitely hooked.  It doesn't have the SMS support that Sandy had, but I don't need that now because they have an iPhone app.  This makes it really easy to manage anytime anywhere.  At my desk at work or home I can use the web interface, and on the go I can use it from my phone.  They also offer a number of widgets that allow you to access it.  Being a Netvibes junkie, I have that widget, but honestly don't use it much as I pretty much have the Toodledo site open in a tab all of the time.  It also has a Twitter interface, but again, I don't really use that either.  That would probably be useful if you have a non-smart phone though as it would somewhat replicate some of Sandy's SMS functionality.

And as time has gone by I've started to use more of Toodledo's features.  Most recently I started to use the Notebook feature.  Which is useful, but even more useful if you get Appigo Notebook which can synchronize with the Toodledo Notebooks!  This returns the note functionality I previously had in my Palm days.

I also have been syncing my todo's to my gCal, but I'm not really using that much these days.  I really like gCal, but my phone is tied to our Exchange server at work.  Unfortunately these days I need to use that but would like to explore syncing it to gCal as well.  The notification/accept/decline functionality works well, but beyond that it's pretty weak.  You can't schedule meetings with other, only for yourself.  And then you can't even flag those as private if you want too.  Very annoying.  Plus I miss the ability to have multiple alerts for an event.

There's a lot of additional functionality in Toodledo, particularly for hardcore GTD's that I don't currently use.  Maybe someday, we'll see.  But even as I'm using it now its become an incredibly useful tool for me on a daily basis.

February 14, 2009 @ 08:21 am | Category: Brainwork