John Poelstra

Bringing order to chaos and clarity to confusion

Page 26 of 33

Five Resonations

Leaping Again and Again Until We Get it Right by Colleen Wainwright–The best path out of our gridlock is to “Leap Again” even if it is a leap into failure.  I love Colleen’s writing style and poetry. Attention as a… Continue Reading →

The Future of Work

I am on-again, off-again subscriber to Time Magazine.  I use it as a way to spend (waste) less time surfing the web for news and stay informed–except when I decide not to. The on-again off-again nature of my subscription is… Continue Reading →

Knowing and Doing Part II

I appreciated Kevin Fenzi’s post on Knowing Vs. Doing and it pushed me to clarify the thinking behind my original post. Kevin has a great point that there can be a lot of enjoyment from “knowing” and acquiring knowledge to… Continue Reading →

Getting Outside of the Box

In the Fedora Project we exchange a lot of ideas on mailing lists and IRC.  Some of our conversations go around in circles no matter what year it is.  One reason for the lack of progress is fear of failure. … Continue Reading →

Is Doing More Important Than Knowing?

In Tim Ferris’ book The 4-Hour Work Week, he talks about skipping the news circuit–that doing so will add more hours to your day and ultimately doesn’t matter.  He isn’t advocating being uninformed.  He’s advocating using time intentionally for things… Continue Reading →

Irrepairable Failure

As we we think about what “change” means to the future of the Fedora Project, I couldn’t help but think of it in light of Seth Godin’s post, The Reason You are Stuck: The resistance loves committees and it hates… Continue Reading →

Today’s Resonations

I’m trying something new which is to occasionally make a post of five links to articles I’ve read or podcasts I’ve listened to that resonated with me.  Here is the first batch: The U2 Method of High-Impact Writing by Oleg… Continue Reading →

Or You Could Post to a Mailing List

What issues are you passionate about in the Fedora Project?  What are you doing to move these things forward besides talking about them on the Fedora mailing lists? Seth Godin’s excellent post about procrastination and email reminded me of Fedora… Continue Reading →

Protecting Files and Directories With encfs

Sparks had an interesting post about Thunderbird email security. This reminded me of another technique I like which is to run Thunderbird and Firefox from an encrypted directory.  In addition to encrypting the data, Thunderbird and Firefox won’t start without… Continue Reading →

Getting Fedora Out of the If-Then Loop

An increase in the number of people downloading Fedora could also increase the number of new potential contributors. In another refrain of the debate about whether defining a target audience for the default “Fedora Distribution” is a good idea or… Continue Reading →

You Get What You Track

I lost 14 pounds in 2009 because I set a goal and checked in on it a few days each week.  Fedora can benefit in the same way. The topic of weight–amount, gain and loss–is a very personal and sensitive… Continue Reading →

Fedora Talk Powers NFR's Success

We had what I’m calling a min-Fedora Activity Day today for No Frozen Rawhide (NFR).  As announced earlier this week, a few of us met on Fedora Talk and Gobby (two of my favorite Fedora collaboration tools!) to make sure… Continue Reading →

Importing Mailing List Archives to Thunderbird

Have you ever subscribed to a new mailing list and wanted to read all the old posts in your email reader?  Here’s how to do it.  We will use the Fedora Development list mail archive for January 2010 as an… Continue Reading →

Turn Death by Meeting into Life by Agenda

Recently someone complimented me in an unusual way: “You have the best meeting agendas,” they said. I hadn’t ever thought about it because the only thing I ever evaluate is the outcome of my meetings–whether people are engaged, the discussion… Continue Reading →

Gnome Desktop Full of Files & Directories

Have you ever had the Gnome desktop suddenly show every folder and file in your home directory? Have you ever nuked the ~/Desktop directory (intentionally or not) and wondered later why all of the files and folders in your home… Continue Reading →

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