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Pretty Good Hat

This week's notes

TextDrive Migration

I wrote a bit about the TextDrive re-birth a couple of months back, and last week I got my ticket to my new server. Over the course of several pretty happy evenings I completed the bit-by-bit migration of a couple of active and several mostly-defunct domains, back to TextDrive. This feels good, but there are some bumps in the road over there. I think due to the volume of new account setup, the TxD folks are having trouble providing support to users encountering problems, and there appears to be some inconsistency among server configurations.

For me this has all been mostly okay. I’m happy to be on a shiny new box and my hosting needs are pretty light these days, anyway. But for what it’s worth, the migration I did was straightforward and basically problem-free.

Privilege

Tom Morris writes on Geeks and Privilege.

The reason we’re seeing such vicious anti-equality bullshit in the geek community over the BritRuby situation and other conference type stuff is because the very existence of societal inequalities (against women, racial minorities, gender/sexual minorities) threatens the whole idea that hackers got where they are because they are super-fucking-smart.

It’s a smart piece, well worth the read and certainly worth thinking about at more length.

GTD

I spent some time in grad school really tuning a Getting Things Done workflow. I contributed a bunch to the TextMate GTDAlt Bundle and was pretty dialed in for a while. I used it right up until the time I made a career shift post-PhD and lost the handle on my workflow in the transition. Last spring, among a pile of increasingly-complicated work, I picked up the emacs habit again in order to use org-mode and organize my activity and the huge volume of notes I was making.

Doing a more organized effort at GTD didn’t really seriously occur to me, though org-mode has worked very well as a part of that workflow, namely a good collection bit via its capture/remember functionality. Then I started listening to the recent Back to Work episodes on GTD, and have been giving a more official system a bit more thought. I don’t honestly know if the contexts thing works for me anymore, partly because that particular element seems so oriented towards the tools, but the conscientious approach of “what can I do now to advance a project” really appeals to me. If nothing else, a good appraisal of how I’m working should be a useful exercise.

From the Pinboard list

A few more things I’ve noted lately: