No Progress on Integration

I promise I'm going to do it, but my schedule doesn't block any time for it. I've got to finalize my personal organization system and chuck all of the extraneous stuff. Is this the classic "I'm so busy I don't have time to get organized"?

I'm liking Twitter more and more. Next week I'll be traveling and twittering almost exclusively instead of updating blog posts. It'll be interesting to see how it works, and whether anyone finds it worthwhile. It's how I'll keep my office abreast of what's going on.

I just bought MindManager software from Mindjet. This is mind mapping software that I've been wanting to use for some time. I've been mapping with pen and pencil for a while now and find it a great way to organize my thoughts, brainstorm etc. I'm a very visual kind of guy and looking at a picture really helps me absorb the information. I'm waiting on a new PC before I fire it up so maybe I'll play with it next week and give you some examples of what it can do. I'm reading the manual in the meantime. A first for me....

Did We Beat South Carolina?

That was the most unsatisfying win I think I've ever experienced as a Vol. We couldn't do a single thing right the whole second half. Not one.

I felt like I had cheated somebody or stole candy from a baby or something later. My wife asked "aren't you happy you won?" I said "Nope, not at all, it was gross".

Horrible, pathetic, miserable and we still won. Unbelievable. At least it was Spurrier.

Official Invite

Today I sent out an official invite to family members and a few close friends to join my Twitter micro-blogging experiment. It'll be interesting to see who shows up in the coming days. If it's just me, that's ok too. I'm working on some work applications that I'll be testing also.

Tech in Emergency Management

What if you used Twitter to send in short reports from the field and they were all viewed on the big screen back in the Emergency Operations Center or Headquarters Command Post? HQ would have a heads up on what is going on in the field, wouldn't have to take phone calls and translate into a database, and....everybody in the field could monitor what was going on in the other areas.

Seems to me there are good simple applications for Twitter like this. I see folks using it during conferences in a very similar manner. It's a big bulletin board.

The really, really nice part is that it seems to update so quickly and let's you know the age of the post. Quicker updates more frequently instead of the long, once a shift situation reports.

Integrate or Die

I jotted down all of the on-line free apps that I take advantage of last night and was shocked (or amused) at the number of systems I use occasionally. The number was like 15. Most all of them talk, and many have overlapping functions. Usually, they do some things very well, and other things only ok. I use some to update others, some to display others etc. For example, I use Remember the Milk as a to do list manager, and it sends tasks to Google Calendar which I view in iGoogle. Is this too much (many?) different apps? Is this level of integration ok or do I just need to pare it down more?

I'm going thru this list now and I've decided to really think hard about how I want to input, update, status and read my daily information as well as post to the different blog sites I use. I'll post my pared down "system" as soon as I get it figured out.

By the way, it's nice to have a suite of free tools to choose from. Not a bad problem to have.

Time to start posting again

I have been posting to other blogs since January and due to family concerns, decided to let this one go dormant for a while. I really enjoyed doing it but it was hard to post to two blogs at 5:30am each morning and then read the paper, deal with family, go to work etc. So I let this one go.

But now...I am giving Twitter a try and want to run my Twitter feed on this page. So I'm going to crank it back up. It won't necessarily be updated each morning. I update a work blog and that is my top priority. But I'll post fairly regularly I promise.

I want to test out the Silverlight Ink to Flickr to Twitter application and see if also I can use the same apps to mobile blog for work. So far it is working great.

More on that experiment as it goes.

You can catch my Twitter stuff at http://twitter.com/joelwalker