Rand Wacker

Having spent a fair amount of time in Tokyo, I found this article to be both insightful and hilarious.

One of my best friends works for Linden Labs, the company behind Q107’s media darling Second Life. For those of you who haven’t heard, Second Life is essentially the Metaverse as visualized by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, a completely virtual world where people can create a live whatever they want. Always a neat idea for hackers, but like most technology, the initial usages revolved around geeks and porn.

I’m excited to see this start changing though, as I knew it would when they added voice capabilities. Now the world would go from being IRC with avatars to a real virtual world where people could interact more naturally.

I was particularly happy to see this post on the every-influential TechCrunch talking about the greater utility of the virtual world, and reversing their previous stance “that this year Second Life has provided a range of tabloid fodder that we’ve seen fit to print”.

Go Linden, here’s hoping you figure out a business model that will at least let you stay alive, if not make the extremely passionate people who have built this amazing technology at least somewhat rich.

Update 10/14/07: Someone pointed out that it was Neal Stephenson, not William Gibson who wrote Snow Crash…do’oh!

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

This guy is pretty funny: The Philip DeFranco Show

If you’re looking at my actual blog, take a look on the right. There you will see a “Recent Tweets” section that will give you real-time updates about what I’m doing/how I’m feeling/where I am. It could actually be delaying the page load since Twitter is a frickin’ dog, but I figure I needed something to keep this page fresh.

For all you RSS followers, I haven’t put the Tweets into any RSS feeds yet, as the temporal relevance falls off quickly. If you have other thoughts feel free to leave me a comment.

Even though life is completely insane right now and I’m juggling 100 hour weeks with work, school, and baby, I still manage to get my email inboxes down to zero messages most days of the week. When I see co-workers that have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of messages in their inbox it just boggles my mind. I ask, “How do you know what you have to act on?” and usually get some mumbled response combining unread status, flags, luck, and “some things get missed.” Inevitably when I ask why they operate this way the response is the same, “I don’t know when I might need to refer back to something.”

People, your inbox is just that, an inbox. Its a waypoint for new items that need to be processed, not a storage file.

A long time ago I would read through my email and for every message that might in some way be relevant I manually copied it to a read-mail folder. That way I kept my inbox clean and still maintained a history of messages in case I needed to search backwards.

Mail volumes continue to increase though, and the few seconds per message it took me to manually copy was a waste of time. As disk space has gotten cheaper and search capabilities faster I’ve moved to a new model, the complete “Mail Log”.

Basically, I’ve added a server-side mail rule that automatically copies every single message that is delivered to me into a separate “Mail Log” folder (and all outgoing mail into a “Sent Mail” folder). This all happens automatically behind the scenes, I don’t have to worry about it. Now when I’m done with a message in my Inbox I delete, no worries. If I ever need to refer to it again I open up the Mail Log and search for it. Easy peasy.

This works great on Exchange with Entourage as well as on my personal mailbox (powered by procmail on the back end). Gmail does this automatically (brilliant). Sometimes I rotate archives for manageability (quarterly at work, yearly at home), but some day someone will build a mail client that can reliably store and quickly search 10+GB of mail messages so I don’t have to worry about this.

Stop using your inbox as an archive. Get the historical crap out of there and only look at the stuff you really need to worry about!