Bringing order to chaos and clarity to confusion

Category Productivity

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 →

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 →

The Curse of Knowledge

A few of the goals I set for myself in 2010 were around making the Fedora release processes better known and understood. I’ve made it a personal challenge–I plan to have a pile of URLs and email archive links to… Continue Reading →

Rescuing Lost Web Form Input

One of my favorite, must-have Firefox plug-ins is It’s All Text.  Not only does it make writing long entries in web forms pleasant, it can also save your bacon.  Just today I wrote a long email in Gmail using It’s… Continue Reading →

Is Collaboration Overrated?

This quote struck me from an interesting article called World Wide Mush by Jaron Lanier in the Wall Street Journal: Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the whole world to take on the quality of having been… Continue Reading →

Goals for 2010

Studies have shown that written goals have a higher chance of being met.  I have found this to be true and am being more deliberate about setting them for 2010.  I like the idea of setting goals better than I… Continue Reading →

Gobby Makes Meetings Better

At a recent project management class at Portland State University, Tonia McConnell–a great instructor I’ve worked with in other classes–asked me how my meetings were going.  Since my first class with Tonia I’ve used Gobby more deliberately in a lot… Continue Reading →

Inconsolata: A Great Fixed Width Font

The Fedora Project’s in person events are great for picking up new applications and tips from other people.   I love it when little surprises come along that make the desktop experience more pleasant.  Discovering Terminator was the last time this… Continue Reading →

Fedora on a Dell XPS M1330

Ten months ago (March 2009) I got a new work notebook to replace a broken and out of warranty Thinkpad T41.  After going back and forth between the Lenovo Thinkpad x61s and the Dell XPS M1330 I decided on the… Continue Reading →

Hosting Good Meetings

At the suggestion of design diva Máirín Duffy, I’ve been reading Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown. I’m not that far into the book, but a lot of it resonates with me.  Particularly… Continue Reading →

Addicted to Opining

Chris Brogan raises some interesting thoughts and questions in his post “Are We Addicted to Giving Our Own Opinions” The tools we use for social media have empowered us to be steady-flow commentators. Watch Twitter or Facebook during any event,… Continue Reading →

Our Fragile Existence

This Thursday is Thanksgiving, an official holiday in the the United States.  I am extra thankful this year.  It wasn’t so long ago that I felt more invincible.  Aging has a natural way of reducing that.  Potentially fatal accidents, more… Continue Reading →

Fedora Talk Activity Day

The Fedora Talk “activity day” was two full days packed with good discussions, learning more about Asterisk, sharing some good laughs, and getting a lot done.  Paul Frields did a great job coordinating the logistics for the event including our… Continue Reading →

More FedoraTalk And More Action

The long anticipated Fedora Talk Activity Day starts this Friday. If you have ideas or special needs for Fedora Talk, please update the use cases on the wiki.  See our overall plan for additional details. We’ve been doing as much… Continue Reading →

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