PolarLava::Blog

So just shy of 8 months ago was when I was Joining the iPhone Cult.  And today I officially exit the cult.  I've long known this day likely would come, as my phone —both iPhone and previous RAZR's, were company supplied.  Thus as part of a cost cutting effort they have revoked phones from a number of us.

To say I don't care and I won't miss it would certainly be a lie.  I used it extensively for email, calendaring, notes, texting and todo's as part of My Organizational System (GTD).  This was a primary tool for getting things done while not in the office.  A tool I found to be 10 times more valuable than my laptop.  But my voice usage (which was used to determine my usage) shows that I used my phone very little for business.  This is true, because the overwhelming use of my phone was the data plan, not voice.  But irregardless, I get it, as the bottom-line is that this was about the cost.  Not just of my phone, but numerous others.  It adds up, and it was determined to be too great of an expense for what they felt they were getting in return.  That's entirely fair, after all it's the companies money, right?

So it will likely be an adjustment going from an iPhone to no phone at all.  After 4 years of having some kind of a phone, I've come to depend on it.  It was invaluable for reminding me of meetings and responding to email after hours.  All of that will now have to be done from my laptop.  Something that frankly will happen less than when I had the phone because it has nowhere near the convenience.  On the plus side, I know I will never get called on holidays and such as I did last 4th of July.  :)

The time may come when I do get another phone at my own expense, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.  Because I would certainly want a smart phone with a data plan at this point.  And being I'm raising a family of 5 (including my son's child support) on a single income, it's certainly not an easy expense to justify.  But all in all, it could be worse.  Losing my phone is an inconvenience, losing my job would be a far worse scenario.  Sadly, one that's probably not completely out of the realm from my perspective.

Being our girls started taking piano lessons a few months back, we've bought a piano for them to practice on.  The little plastic keyboard wasn't cutting it anymore and we were hopeful that this would encourage them to practice more.  Thus far it seems to be working out as they do seem to be using it even without being told they need to practice.

As noted by the title, this is a Wurlitzer Spinet Piano.  It was a little more that we intended to spend, but for the added cost the sound is much better.  It was also kind my wife's preference to buy a Wurlitzer as they were originally made here in North Tonawanda where we live.  That was long ago and this one was actually produced by Baldwin who used to own them.  In any case, it's here and it looks like this:

So in what has become an annual tradition, I trekked off to Michigan to go sit on a frozen lake and freeze my ass off.  And what also seems to be part of the tradition most of the time, we didn't catch squat.  Only the Northern Pikes we biting, and the closest we came to legal (24 inches), was a couple of 22 inchers.  Here are this year's pictures.

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?  ;)

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.