Leadership Rochester: Program Day #1

It's been a while since I've had a chance to really update this blog, and those who know me know why; involved in far too much stuff!  Most recently, I've been accepted into the 2013 class of Leadership Rochester.  This group takes local leaders and introduces them to not only the problems facing our area in a personal way, but also introduces them to those in the community who are working to make things better.   The class is made up of a two day retreat wherein you spend the first day meeting your fellow classmates and  then spend the second day participating in a simulated society exercise.   After, one day a month is spent engaged in community issues and solutions.

I'm not going to tell anything about that second day of the retreat, as it should remain a surprise to everyone who has the opportunity to attend!

So, instead, I'll tell you about the first program day, Getting Grounded.  The class was divided up into multiple teams who each took different routes around the city to get a better picture of our community.  My team scored the City's Sectors 4 & 5, which comprise a significant portion of the 19th Ward (where I lived for 15 years) and the entirety of the Inner Loop.  We started the day meeting up at the Downtown Presbyterian Church .  We were given our driving directions for the day and then let loose onto the City!

Our first task was to stop and check out some new, very expensive homes being built downtown.  These homes are located near the Plymouth Avenue area inside the loop and will be going for upwards of $250,000.  Not a small chunk of change for the area they're in!  The idea, I believe, in pointing these out was to showcase how there is an uptick in the number of people moving back into the City each year.  They're not moving into cheap homes, though.

From there, we took a brief driving tour of the Corn Hill section of town.   Although I've driven past it a thousand times, and have eaten at the restaurants in Corn Hill Landing dozens of times, I never really took the time to head back behind Nathaniel's to see what was back there.  Turns out, that's a shame as there are some truly beautiful streets with amazing and diverse architecture!

Once we'd completed our circuit, we headed back downtown to get to our next stop, the Rundel Library, to meet up with city planner, Tom Hack.  I'm ashamed to admit that having lived in Rochester for 18 years, I'd never actually stepped foot into the Rundel.  But, then, since I'm a seriously digital-type person, I honestly haven't spent much time in libraries, period, over the last 20-25 years.  I'm glad we had to stop in because the Rundel is a beautiful building!







And, what brought us to the library?  Well, Tom Hack, as I said!  He spent a goodly amount of time chatting with us about plans that are in the pipeline and wishlist for the City.  He explained about the "watering" of Broad Street, which would essentially close off that street in a way that pays homage to the fact that it was once part of the Erie Canal.  I'd heard about this plan before and always thought it was a stupid idea, but after seeing the full presentation, I'm VERY impressed!  It really fits in with the RocCity 2.0 walkable downtown concepts!

Was that the only reason we were meeting up with Tom?  Nope.  Tom was also there to take us into...the subway tunnels!!   For those who don't know, Rochester once had a subway, but it's been abandoned for about 60 years.  I'll spare you the background, though.  TEDxRochester 2012 speaker, Mike Governdale does a much better job of it on his blog, RochesterSubway.com.  I've been wanting to get down into the tunnels for quite some time, so I was stoked when I found out my team would get that opportunity!

It lived up to expectations, too.  I know it sounds stupid, but you have to understand that I rode the subway in Philadelphia every day when I was in high school.  I never got the opportunity to see anything beyond the platforms and what flashed by as we zipped through the tunnels.  I knew it was just going to be a dank, dark hole in the ground, but nonetheless I was glad to have finally gotten the chance.  The first thing I noticed?  A whole lot bigger than I'd thought!  I've seen pics others have taken, but they're typically just of the Broad Street tunnel.  There's so much more beyond that, and it was just creepy and cold and oh so neat.

The second thing, which was impossible to overlook, was the graffiti art everywhere.  According to Tom, it changes from week to week, yet they've never actually seen anyone in there doing it.  Each artist apparently gets a section to work on, and it appears almost as if there's a competition going on down there.  Apparently, there's also folks who live in some parts, but we didn't get to meet any of those... :)













After leaving Tom, we continued on our tour.  This time, we focused on the 19th Ward.  We headed over to the Clara Barton school #2 where we met up with folks from Rochester Roots, a group that works with kids from the schools to farm fresh vegetables which are then sold at the St. Mary's public market.   We got a tour of their facilities and greenhouse, but the real point of directing us here was to see the disparity in living conditions between here and Corn Hill just a short jaunt away on the other side of Ford Street.   One really gets a sense of what the Occupy movement was about when you get dropped right into the midst of it all.

We then drove to the Boulder Coffee on Genesee Street to meet up with one of the directors of the 19th Ward Community Association.  We chatted for a bit about what they're doing to increase the economic potential of that area, including getting the Brooks Landing project approved, funded and built.  This has been a great boon to this community as it's driven money into a neighborhood that desperately needed it and the transformation is spectacular.  We toured the area around the Staybridge Suites hotel which is just a gorgeous place to spend time.





From there we headed to lunch at Deli Sandros, a new deli representative of the revitalization of that community.  Wonderful food, and if you get there an the Buffalo mac & cheese in on the menu that day, do NOT skip it!

At this point, we were WAAAY behind on schedule and so had to zip through the remainder of what we were supposed to see.  But, on the whole, I think we got the point...there's a huge disparity in how people live in Rochester, but there's a lot of change happening that should lead to better things.  We headed back to the church where we were greeted by a panel of community leaders.  Each team then took a few minutes to create a presentation of what they experienced, and every one was so varied from every other.  I think the one that was most interesting was the one that headed to Pittsford.  Their tour started out visiting a trailer park!  In Pittsford!

I learned a lot about our area in that fast-paced day, and have gained further appreciation of the hard working folks who are putting in the effort every day to make a difference in their community.  I'm inspired by people like that, I suppose that has something to do with my doing TEDxRochester, and it energizes me to know there's so many people working to make Rochester a better place.

Tomorrow is program day #2: "Who takes care of whom", and about all I know is I'll be at the Open Door Mission at about 6am.  So, that means coffee is #1 on the agenda!

An open letter to Hasbro and the Brony community

I was going to write a bit of a history intro to this article, but in doing some research on children's TV, specifically the conversion from entertainment to 100% marketing, I stumbled across this article at Cracked (one of the most unbiased sources of news today).  The preamble sums it up better than I could:

Most Gen-Xers don't realize that they owe many of their Christmas memories to the FCC. During the early '80s, parents became concerned by the kinds of things their kids were seeing on TV, so they asked for new rules regulating advertisements shown during kids' shows. Bowing to pressure from the White House and from toy makers, the FCC responded to these concerns by pretty much deregulating children's television altogether. Kids' shows quickly became half-hour commercials for toy lines, which parents began buying at unbelievable rates.

I wasn't all that surprised to find that Hasbro was one of the main culprits in this conversion.  G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero was pretty much designed from day one to be a vehicle to sell more action figures from their dead toy line to kids.  Following on the success of Lucas' prostitution of the Star Wars franchise, everyone wanted the opportunity to bombard kids with new shows that featured dozens of main and background characters that could be pumped out by being assembled by slave labor in China to a slathering audience desperate to play with such memorable characters as He-Man's friend, Cocaine Bear.

Fast forward to 5 years ago when my wife and I were expecting our first child.  Not wanting her to be a fully programmed consumption machine, we made the "difficult" decision to get rid of cable entirely and limit ourselves to online programming only.  I quoted difficult because it turned out the only part that was difficult was the follow through of the decision.  Five years later, I honestly don't miss cable at all.  My wife, stuck at home with the kids all day, is starting to feel the jones, though.

On the whole, I think we've done a good job keeping our girls from being spoiled brats. We limit their TV programs only to what we can find on Netflix or online, and even then only allow access to those shows that either are educational or have a reasonably good message.  Our oldest daughter's current favorite is the new My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic series.  Now, I'll add the disclaimer here that I have decided to fully embrace my bronihood.  I even have my own Zecora figure sitting on my desk at work.  (Now don't start being a smart alec, it sits alongside my "new paradigm" dalek.)  But, my rant below is all about my girls...

Yesterday was oldest daughter's first day of pre-school, so I took the opportunity to hit a Toys R Us to see if I could FIND a Zecora for her.  You see, the problem with My Little Pony is there are primarily two types of people buying the figures: adult bronies with cash to spare and adults scooping them all up so they can resell them online for higher prices.  The fact that these are toys made for kids doesn't come into the equation.  Zecora sells out within hours of being put up on the Toys R Us websites, and almost as quickly in the stores.  If you want one, you've got to be fairly lucky or willing to spend twice as much to get one.

And, whose at fault for the root of this problem?  Richard Garfield.   "Wait!  Isn't he the guy who invented Magic: The Gathering?"  Yup.  And, as much as I love the game, I have to admit the deleterious effect it had on the gaming industry.  Most card games after ended up being collectible. Why?  Maximizing profit, of course.  Hell, even the newest iterations of D&D now use miniatures that come in semi-collectible blind packs.

Thanks also to Pokemon, this meme has infected the general toy industry, too.  Nearly every toy line these days has at least one set of items that comes in a blind pack and is collectible.  Except...they're not, really.  The companies have learned that they can gouge the hell out of their customers by creating an artificial scarcity for their products.  This forces consumers to buy large quantities of product that they don't want in order to acquire the small quantities they do.  As a result, secondary markets open up that serve to gouge consumers further by charging insane prices for the individual items folks should just be able to buy to begin with.

And, it leaves me scrambling to find boy ponies for my daughter.  Of the little molded figures that come in the blind packs, and are the most fun and easiest for small hands to play with, that's what she wants the most:  some boy ponies.  We caved and bought her quite a few of the blind packs so she could have the small ones to play with, but she was disappointed to find no boys in the mix (I know, I'm worried, too).  This latest set is the first to have boys, so when I saw some packs I decided to get her some.  But, first, I looked online because I knew some collectors had "decoded" the codes on the bags to determine what was inside.

With a list of the four codes representing boys in hand, I hit the store only to find two full display boxes full of bags...and only one boy in the lot (fortunately, it was Big Mac who she wanted most of all!).  The store had even taken to shrink wrapping the bags to minimize the possibility of folks buying only the most "valuable" ones.

Assholes.

Here's the deal collectors: you might make a small amount of profit by taking toys from my daughter for a short period, but if you think putting these in boxes to fund your kid's college education in 15 years is going to work you're sadly mistaken.  Remember, it's an artificial scarcity only.  The increased prices will only last as long as they're on the shelves.  After that, prices WILL fall.   In 15 years, that box of Big Macs you've got stashed away will be worth less than what you paid for them, even counting for inflation.  Trust me.  Fortunately, my little girl's got a daddy who will jump through hoops to get her the one or two figures she really wants.  But, if I catch one of you in the store rooting through blind bags...well, just keep in mind, the baseball bats are near and my anger is quick.

As for Hasbro, I know you're not going to change.  You're a prime example of the evil side of capitalism.  You're happy to gouge the parents of kids who just want some toys to play with only to maximize your bottom line.  Rather than putting out these figures into boxes that allow me to know what I'm getting, you'd prefer I instead pay $60 for the figure I want rather than $2.  I hope each of your executives spend an eternity in hell being finger-cuffed by Rarity and Twilight.

Oh, and Princess Celestia is white.  You might want to watch your own damn show before putting out toys based on it!

Confirming my bias for t-shirts

I've been thinking about writing an article about this subject for a while, but based on events of the last week, it's obvious to me that the universe has been prompting me to do so. The last little nudge, described below, was what prompted me to finally sit down and put fingers to keyboard.

So, aside from the fact that I'm generally a bit of a slacker, I have a fondness for t-shirts. They're soft. They're comfortable. And, they more often than not have a symbol or saying on the front that is representative of my mood that day. It's like wearing my heart out on my sleeve, only in this one's on the front.

The whole thing started on Father's Day when my wife and oldest daughter presented me with my gifts, a couple of awesome t-shirts:

Now, before y'all think I've gone and lost my mind, I ask you to remember: I have a couple of daughters.  Bigger daughter is a huge fan of the new My Little Pony show.  The problem is, so is a significantly large population of adult males.  Bronies, they're called.  And, while I have to admit I do enjoy watching the show with her...No, really, it's not a terrible show.  Some of the plots are fairly complex and have lots of jokes for the parents!  Like, the bowling episode where everyone in the bowling alley is from The Big Lebowski.  And...you've stopped believing me.  Okay, moving on...

While I do enjoy watching the show with her, and consider myself a closet brony, that's not why I have My Little Pony t-shirts.  I have them because it's almost impossible to find themed shirts in kid's sizes!  Really, and truly!  Adult My Little Pony clothes?  No problem.  Kids?  Sure, if you want to spend $20 on a t-shirt for a four-year-old.  So, the reason I have a few of these shirts is I wear them for my daughter.  She can't, so I wear them for her.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Now, the acquisition of these fine t-shirts made me realize that I need to re-think my t-shirt collection.  I haven't counted yet, but I'm sure I've got at least a hundred of the things.  As I've lost about 40 pounds in the last year, a large majority of them don't fit anymore, so maybe it's time to prune.  Before getting rid of them, though, I thought it might be funny to take pics of all of them and put them out there for everyone to marvel at.

Then, I forgot about the idea...

A few days later, though, Gizmodo ran a story about the "World's Most Awesome T-Shirt".  I'm not going to bother trying to find it to link to because frankly it was a stupid article.  The t-shirt was a $65 thing with nothing on the front except a tiny logo.  Sorry, I've got more brains than money...still, the universe reminded me I needed to write this article!

Then, I forgot about the idea...

But, two weeks ago I got my weekly e-mail from ThinkGeek.  Big fan of the ThinkGeek, they sell some quality stuff, but this issue had this baby:

I have to say, I thought about it for about 24 hours before laying down the cash.  DJ PON3 in Tron stylee?  It really does fit both of our styles (largest daughter and I), so it really was about spending the $20.  Once I made the decision, though, I decided to also take advantage of their "One Random Shirt of Surprising Awesomeness" special.  You spend $7, and they send you a shirt, whatever they have left.  What the hell?  I'll roll the dice.

My package arrives and what's inside?

Okay.  Being a math and science geek, I like it on the face of it! But, what could this equation possibly mean??  After racking my brain for a minute trying to think if I'd seen it before, I decided to look on the back...

Awww!  Have to be honest, I had thought of buying this one when I first saw it!  Well, that was a heck of a deal.  Rolled the dice and won!  That don't happen often enough.  And, lest we think I accept the plot of just any equation, I asked Wolfram Alpha what it thought:

Ha!  Confirmed!

As I said to my wife, this is such an awesome representation of our relationship.  We both had been going through some tough stuff early on and weren't too sure if we'd make it.  But, we took a chance and have a happy and loving home as a result.  This one is now in my Top 10 favorite t-shirts because of that.

Well, hell!  Now, the universe is practically SCREAMING at me to write this article!  Alas, though, I really had no idea what I'd write about.  I'd had some ideas floating around, so I let it percolate for a few days before the last reminder showed up.

My wife is friends with, and now works for, a fellow who owns a local horror-themed t-shirt company named Fright-Rags.  Fright-Rags doesn't do your typical horror t-shirt, though.  They often try to pull out some tidbit from a movie that only a true fan would know, such as the ever-popular "Damn enchiladas" from Friday the 13th.

Beyond the fact that they make a high quality product and have great customer service (their shirt folding peon's pretty awesome, too!), the owner, Ben, is a really great guy.  As an example, he has a friend with breast cancer who is without health insurance (oh, look, the Supreme Court just spoke on behalf of the universe today as another reminder!), so he put out an amazing, limited edition t-shirt with all profits going to his friend.  It's NSFW, so scroll down carefully!

Yeah, I know.  In 21st century America, I shouldn't have to call THAT out as NSFW, but there you are.  Anyway, after all of this, I mention Fright-Rags because they're currently taking part in Chase' Mission Small Business.  Please, please, please...click that link, sign in and vote for them!  These folks REALLY deserve to win the $250k.  Maybe that cute shirt-folding peon will even get a raise!  If there's anyone who deserves to win, it's Ben. The universe will thank you for it.  After all, it's been reminding me all week to tell you about it...

....or, has it?  You've now just taken part in an example of confirmation bias.  This is the failing of how your brain is built that forces you to favor information that confirms your beliefs.  On a small scale, confirmation bias is why when you break up with someone, every song seems to be a sad love song.  Or, when you are thinking about buying a particular model car, you start to see that car everywhere you look.   You'd probably seen dozens of that model of car the day before you decided to buy one, or heard that song on the radio before you broke up with your significant other, but  because you're thinking of it now you notice it more.

On a larger scale, it's why when trying to disprove some lefty/righty nonsense, you only find unequivocal righty/lefty brilliance to debunk it.  It's your brain telling you "you're right".  Sorry, it's not the universe or any other higher power talking to you.  It's just another example of how natural selection can never get anything perfect, least of all your brain.

Congrats, you now know what that fallacy feels like, and will never fall for it again!  See, a great article, and I snuck some critical thinking in on your ass.  Ha!  So, next time you're thinking some higher power is pushing you toward one side of a decision, just look down at your t-shirt.  It'll always steer you right...

Or.  Not.

A tale of great customer service

Last year, at Valentine's day, my mother-in-law bought our daughter a pink, stuffed cat. Pinky, as he's been named, is my daughter's "favorite and best!" Pinky sleeps with her every night and comes down every morning to sit with her as she has breakfast or watches TV. Out of the last four show-and-tells at school, she has taken Pinky to show off four times. I'm not exactly sure how to make this clear to you, but....

She really loves this cat!

My wife and I live in terror of the day something happens to Pinky. Since we got our new dog, we've found she has a fondness for chewing on stuffies. Since he is well loved each day, Pinky spends a lot of time in the washing machine and has lost a lot of his luster. You can see this clearly in this picture with him and a not-so-loved sibling.



So, on a whim, we decided to look around some to see if we could find another kitty just like Pinky we could keep on hand as a "spare". Now, we know clearly that should we need to replace Pinky, it isn't going to be a one for one swap. She'd know immediately it wasn't him. Our planned cover story is that Pinky's brother came to town to be her friend since Pinky got lost. Or, something like that.

After poking around for a few, I decided one night to just look at Pinky's tag. Sure enough, the name of the company, Galerie USA, was there along with a URL. Score! I was a little discouraged at first as it appeared they might not deal directly with individuals, but figured I'd drop them a line all the same.

I relayed basically the same story to them as I have now to you and a day later I got an e-mail back from someone in customer service with a picture attached of a stuffed pink cat. She wanted to know if this was him, and if so they could help us out right away. It wasn't the Pinkster, so I sent her one of what's left of our boy (note: see the above picture again). The next day, they replied right back with a picture of a brand new Pinky!

I replied that was our kitty and offered to pay however necessary to get him in hand and was told...nope, thanks, just send us your address, we'll send him out to you. Wow! When I sent the address, though, they told us they were sending...well, let's just go to the picture...



Yup, that's Pinky, second from the left, surrounded by THREE siblings! They sent us THREE! They arrived today and are waiting patiently for the day they can come out of their box in the closet (our second daughter is arriving next month, perhaps she will one day get her own Pinky).

Now, granted, this was a small gesture and probably cost them all of $2 to do this, but that's not the point. Joni, the lady I dealt with spent a couple of days e-mailing me back and forth trying to find the right toy and then shipped them out within minutes of confirming we had the right one. It made a big difference to this dad to know there are potentially a couple of future tears that could be avoided by our having something to fill the void should it ever come, and that means the world to me.

Thank you, Galerie, and especially Joni, for helping us out. You got 2012 off to a great start for us!

Life logging with Evernote

One of my primary reasons for moving back to Evernote is that I've always wanted to keep a journal. I've never been good at it all, and it's come back to haunt me from time to time as I try to remember when a certain event happened. Before my journal, my e-mail served as my primary method of refreshing my memory, but that's limited to stuff I might have needed to say to someone. Major and minor events went unrecorded.

I've also been thinking about all of the data that I put "out there" each day that is captured only on Facebook or Twitter and might be difficult to find again in the future. Or, I might want to relate something that I posted on Facebook to something in my journal. Sure, Facebook's Timeline feature helps a great deal in finding older posts, but I'd like to have as complete a record of my day as possible in just one spot.

So, inspired by this TED video, I needed to figure out a way to create my own aggregator and use it to log my life...or as much as possible.





In terms of a basic app where I write what happens each day, Evernote is perfect. Each morning, I simply create a new note in my Journal notebook and type away. But, we're here today to talk about some of the other stuff I put in there.

Similar to in my previous post, the secret sauce that will tie the social network aspect into the journal is IFTTT.com. To recap, "If This, Then That" monitors the social networks you give it access to, and when something happens that matches criteria you setup, it'll trigger an action you specify. In this case, a lot of what I wanted to pull in is covered by the default triggers and actions. When I post a status, it's pulled directly into Evernote. When post a photo, same thing. Easy!

Twitter's a bit more difficult. I'll admit, not a big fan of Twitter. I use it because I have to, because so many others use it. But, as the first network I'd axe if I could, yup, Twitter. As a result of my disdain, I rarely ever check the Twitter, so I miss things. But, not anymore! I've setup actions so that if someone mentions me (or TEDxRochester) or sends me a message, I'm sent an e-mail. My own posts are injected into Evernote directly. Why do I have it go to e-mail? So I can see it, of course! I've then got a filter setup in Gmail to automatically forward those to my Evernote account. Two birds (it's Twitter. Tweets. Get it? Birds?), one stone.

The big drawback to this methodology is I get a very cluttered journal. My end goal is to have one note per day that I can go to. Evernote itself provides the mechanism in their Merge Note feature. Select two or more notes and you'll have a bunch of options come up. Simply choose Merge! Now, a hint: click on them in the order you want them in the merged note. I start by clicking my daily note, then my e-mails with my wife (more on that in another article) then the social network stuff notes before hitting Merge. That way, they end up in the note in that order. Done!

With these simple steps, I'm able to cull together a daily journal entry that covers a lot of what I do during the day, but it's not perfect. Still a number of things to pull in. Most importantly are the conversations between the most important person in my life, my wife! But, that's still a work in progress with lots of custom stuff to make it happen....

In the next installment, I'll tell you about the tags I put into posts and how I can use them to gain some basic statistical insight into my life. I'll also talk about some of the more esoteric data that makes its way into the life log.

Nighty Night, Tasker!

If there's a time where I want something else to do all my work for me, it's right before going to bed and just after I get up. When it comes to my phone, I'm fortunate to have that thing in the form of Tasker. Now, this set of profiles might seem a bit lazy, but why do extra steps I don't need to?

The first part of this has to do with the app I use for an alarm clock, Gentle Alarm. It was the App of the Day on the Amazon store a long, long time ago and I'm glad I took advantage of that offer. I highly recommend it as your alarm clock app for a couple of reasons. First, the gentle alarm function. As I've mentioned before, I have trouble getting up in the morning. Here's the blurb about how Gentle Alarm helps with this:

Alarm clocks can't know if you are in light sleep or deep sleep (those movement based alarm clock don't work) but they can play a very quiet pre-alarm which you will only hear if you are in light sleep. If you are in deep sleep, you will simply sleep through the pre-alarm.

The pre-alarm plays 30min before you really want to get up (you can change that). If the pre-alarm wakes you up, you will be more refreshed than if you had slept until the main alarm because at that time you would have fallen back into deep sleep. Give it a try and I am sure you won't want to miss it anymore.


Now, since shifting to nights, I haven't had much need for an alarm clock. But, I do have to get up early from time to time and can say that it does seem to go a lot easier when I use Gentle Alarm to get me up. Take my anecdote for the datum it isn't. :)

Secondly, Gentle Alarm integrates with Tasker. That will come into play later, though as I want to go over the "Nighty Night" task first. This profile came about due to some weirdness that was going on with my phone. Some nights, not every night, Gentle Alarm would switch from it's darkened Night Mode to regular mode. As the screen was generally at full brightness before I put it into Night Mode, it would come on and flood the room....waking my wife. Not good. As it would occur in the middle of the night when I was asleep, and didn't happen consistently, troubleshooting it was out of the question. I needed a workaround.

I already had a profile set that would silence my phone starting at 11pm, I thought maybe I could integrate the workaround into that. But, in thinking about the various permutations, I wasn't happy with a simple timed launch of the event. For example, I could be up late one night, or go to bed earlier another. An entry that was tied to a specific time just wasn't going to cut it. I wanted more manual control of the automated process (I know, right?) and that's where Tasker's ability to create notifications comes in.



At 9:30pm each night, Tasker puts an icon in my notification area entitled "Nighty Night" (Alert task -> Notify). When I click that notification (State event -> Notification click), it runs the Nighty Night task which sets up my phone for going to bed:


* Turns all of the volumes off
* Sets screen orientation back to "on" (I don't like having my screen rotate most of the time, so I leave it off, but Gentle Alarm works better rotated)
* Reduces screen brightness to 35
* Creates a new notification called "Wakey Wakey"
* Launches Gentle Alarm.
* Enable my Daily alarm that is set to go off at 9am (in case I get to sleep in, more on this later).



So, just prior to going to sleep, I hit my notification, hit the Night Mode button on Gentle Alarm and I'm good to go! Two taps to get everything just how I like it before heading to sleep.

Then, comes the morning. Again, permutations of when I'll get up demanded I have some level of manual intervention here and that's where the Wakey Wakey notification mentioned above, as well as the Tasker integration of Gentle Alarm, comes in. If it's a morning where my daughter gets up well before my daily 9am alarm goes off, I can hit the Wakey Wakey icon and it'll reset everything that Nighty Night sets (orientation, screen brightness, etc). It'll also disable the Daily alarm since I don't need it now that I'm awake. On the other hand, if this is one of those mornings my wife lets me sleep in, when I dismiss the Daily alarm it signals Tasker to run Wakey Wakey instead. This way, no matter what time I wake up, whatever I do first will set my phone up for regular use.



The last thing Wakey Wakey does is put up another notification that allows me to reboot the phone with one click. My ROM of choice on my Evo is MIUI. It's a great and gorgeous ROM, but some of the builds have been a little flaky, so I've taken to rebooting it in the morning each day. With the notification, I hit reboot and by the time I've gotten downstairs and had a swig of water, my phone is again ready for use. Done!



As I said, these are all tiny tasks, but these are the minutiae that our days are made up of. These minor tasks never seem a burden until you figure out how to get rid of them...and then you wonder why you put up with them so long! Tasker..it does a body good!

The Great Evernote RSS Reader

For years, I've had an on-again off-again relationship with Evernote. As someone who is terminally unorganized (my doctor says I only have 40-50 years left to live because of it), my biggest problem was finding a way to make all of that data ubiquitous so I can manage it easily and everywhere. I'm back on again with Evernote, primarily due to the introduction of their Chrome extension, Clearly.

For some time, I'd used Readability as a way to get the data I wanted into whatever I was using as a note-storage vault. Using the Readability bookmarkelt, I could easily trim pages from ad-flashing, comment-choked nightmares into slim documents containing only the information I cared about. Someone had even combined the Evernote Clipper bookmarklet with the Readability one making for a one-click solution. But, it never really worked perfectly and, as stated before, Evernote never had enough love from me to make it long term.

But, Clearly DOES work extremely well! And because of it, I've taken another hard look at Evernote and have fallen in love with it. I'm inside this tool every day now, sometimes 5-6x each day...either updating my journal or trying to get the hundreds of notes I already have squirreled away into a neatly organized mess.

As with most tools, once you start power-using it, you start to see the potential to use it to solve other, apparently unrelated issues. Such is what lead to this idea I'm about to outline...

As with most geeks living in the 21st century, I suffer from information overload. I'm subscribed to about 50 different sites via their RSS feeds and use Google Reader to keep up with it all. But, I've found the way I do things to be too slow and cumbersome. My primary issue is with Gawker sites like Lifehacker and IO9, the two sites I feel compelled to visit every day. I have no idea what the issue is with these two sites, but I can have Chrome open all day long, with dozens of tabs generally in view at any time. The instant I open more than two pages from Gawker, my whole machine crawls to a halt.

Now, it's very likely it's some combination of my extensions and the proxy at work as I don't experience this issue too often elsewhere. But, seeing as most of the visiting of these sites occurs when I'm in between tasks at work, it's a pain in the ass I had to find a solution for. I also had the problem that it might not be something appropriate for me to read at work, so I'd fill up my inbox with things to read later...and then never get to them.

Additionally, if I find an article I like, I'm likely to want to save it. Since coming back to Evernote full time, I've been using Clearly to snip them up. If what I want is going to end up in Evernote anyway, it seemed to make some kind of sense to just figure out a way to eliminate the middle man.

And that's where If This Then That comes in. IFTTT is a site that will automate your social media for you. For example, I've got a task setup that will fire every time I post a status message on Facebook and send it to me as an e-mail. Since Facebook's search leaves a lot to be desired, plus I wanted to have an archive of things I posted there, this process makes my social network history much more manageable. (Recently, I've started switching these tasks over to put the items in Evernote instead of sending an e-mail.)

The secret sauce in this task is IFTTT's ability to react to an item being starred in Reader. When I do that, IFTTT posts that article into an Evernote notebook named RIL (for Read It Later, see what I did there?). I can then go in at my convenience and just read the articles in Evernote. As an added plus, they're already in Evernote, I just have to drag articles I want to keep into the appropriate notebook when I'm done reading. Or, if I don't want to keep it, I just delete.

One last tidbit: most sites will only post a summary of an article in RSS. Some, like Lifehacker, will offer the full articles on a separate feed. If they don't, you can try WizardRSS. It's a site that will pull full articles instead of summaries from the site and give them as their own RSS feed. It doesn't work on every site, but it gets enough of them that I watch each day.

I've been using this method for about a week and a half now, and I have to tell you it's made my RSS surfing so much more efficient. For example, when I'm done looking through a particular site's articles, I always mark the whole site as read so I easily know what's got new stories when I come back. The problem is, if I found an article that I had the slightest interest in but didn't want to read it at that time, I'd just leave it unread in Reader. Messy, messy! No more, I've moved all of those waiting to be read articles into Evernote and I'll get to them when I get to them.

Now, Reader is generally empty except for the few new items. I can scan through all of my feeds in a matter of minutes and star just the items I MIGHT want to read. I can then read them on my phone or computer at my convenience. I gotta tell you...it's made me so efficient at getting through my news I run out everyday and that's something that's NEVER happened before!