John Poelstra

Bringing order to chaos and clarity to confusion

Page 21 of 33

Good Looking Garbage Man

One of my 2011 goals is walking several mornings each week before work.  Most mornings I head out between 5:30 a.m. and 6:00 a.m.  The world is incredibly peaceful at this time and I love the stillness and being in… Continue Reading →

Rework is Worth it

Rework (affiliate link) by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson was on the read eventually list, but it called out to me as it was waiting to be re-shelved on a cart at the library.  I was already in the… Continue Reading →

Set a Full Countdown

Thankfully Sankarshan didn’t follow through on his threat to petition that I post productivity tips every week because I’ve definitely been off of my blogging game.  The early morning blogging routine has been replaced with exercise and methodically working through… Continue Reading →

GNOME Power Management Goes Too Far

From Richard Hughes’ blog on February 2, 2011, In GNOME 3.0, we’re defaulting to suspending the computer when the user shuts the lid, and not providing any preferences combobox to change this. This is what the UI designers for GNOME… Continue Reading →

Running Elluminate Live! on RHEL 6

I’m continuing to run RHEL 6 on my laptop and encountered a recent challenge getting a Java based collaboration tool called Elluminate Live! (now known as Blackboard Collaborate) to run on it.  The necessary package is installed by default in… Continue Reading →

Fedora Problems or Complaints?

I’m following Fedora from afar these days, mostly from the planet and occasionally through people I know at Red Hat.  Apparently some people are not happy with the direction Fedora is perceived to be going. This doesn’t come as a… Continue Reading →

Why Are You Here?

I liked the quote below from a book called The Noticer by Andy Andrews (affiliate link).  I copied it into my journal several months back and came across it while searching for the highs and lows of 2010–a journal is… Continue Reading →

How Old Are Your Tapes?

Another insight from How to be an Adult in Relationships (page 47) hit me as I thought about a new project I recently took over.  I get a strange vibe discussing it with some people–an underlying assumption that no good status… Continue Reading →

How To Be An Adult

I recently started reading an interesting, fairly dense book called How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving (affiliate link) by David Richo.  By dense, I mean it isn’t a book to be read quickly… Continue Reading →

2010 Fourth Quarter Goals

The fourth quarter of 2010 has come to an end as has the year, so it’s time for a final evaluation and wrap up of the year since the first and second, and third quarter check-ups.  Here’s how things went,… Continue Reading →

Five Recent Resonations

How (and why) to Stop Multitasking by Peter Bregman— “Research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at doing several things at once than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more… Continue Reading →

RHEL 6 EPEL

With less time to live on the edge in Fedora-land these days I went looking for less excitement by way of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for my Dell XPS M1330 laptop.  I was motivated to take a step back… Continue Reading →

Open Source Scheduling and Project Management Tools

I receive occasional queries for good open source project management and scheduling tools.  As you probably know by now, our scheduling tool of choice for Fedora is TaskJuggler.  TaskJuggler provides a great benefit to Fedora in its flexibility as a… Continue Reading →

The Public Isolation Project

Some of my recent posts have covered technology and human interaction.  I was pleasantly surprised to find the Public Isolation Project going on here in Portland through a post in Newspaper to New Media.  It was fascinating and fun to follow each day…. Continue Reading →

Presently Somewhere Else

It seems to have become an acceptable practice for some people to disappear every time they get a new text message.  We’re sharing the same physical space with the intent of connecting personally, but we aren’t.  And if we are,… Continue Reading →

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