David Wiley just wrote an excellent post about the "death" of learning objects. He's right on the mark, emphasizing the learning part of the buzzword, while us geeks who were attempting to implement some of the early LO-based software got so woefully distracted by the object and reuse angles. He's also much more articlate than I am, so give his article a read, then come back here. I'll wait. Go ahead.

We were wandering around a mall this afternoon, and while Janice was looking in some foo-foo shop, Evan and I ducked into Black's Photography. The camera dude sees us enter the store, and asks if I have any questions. I ask about the XT, what bundles they have, specials, etc...

Then, he pulls out the little key, and pulls an XT down from the display. "Here, try it out..." he says, knowingly.

I just did a quick Google for OmniOutliner todo-list templates, to see what ideas others have come up with to help manage the flow of tasks and demands, and found Kinkless Getting Things Done - a set of templates and scripts for OmniOutliner to help categorize and prioritize stuff that needs doing.

Very impressive stuff - it helps you define context (where/when something needs to be done) and then sets up a set of views on your projects and actions to help you get through them efficiently (or, in my case, without getting distracted by shiny tangents. OOH! A tangent! I should follow that! Wait...)

Well, I guess I'm committed to Dvorak now. Prompted by some tips from Ryan Poling, I just rearranged the key caps on my Powerbook's keyboard. In the office, I use an external USB keyboard that has already been fixed to support the Dvorak layout. But, this afternoon on the bus ride home, I cracked the 'book open to hack on my Rails bookmark manager - and realized that although the key caps were still QWERTY, I was starting to think in Dvorak. Light at the end of the rainbow...

After I wrote some thoughts about what I'm looking for in an RSS reader, I realized that the only application that comes close to what I was describing is BlogBridge. It has prioritization of feeds and items via "Starz", and ties into social services (both a custom network for sharing keywords and ratings, and a direct connection to my del.ico.us account).

It's got some room for improvement - my biggest beefs are resource hogging and the seeming inability of java apps to open URLs in a browser without bringing it to the front. But they aren't fatal flaws - only annoying.

Inspired by Brian's newfound love for Getting Things Done, I've decided that it's time for something to finally give way here as well. I'll be simplifying a lot of things, starting with my insane collection of RSS feeds.

I just unsubscribed from 150 feeds. That's more than many people subscribe to in total. And I could probably prune a further 100 or so feeds if I try a little. Sure, I won't be reading all of my news directly from the horse's mouths, but I'm sure anything important and/or interesting will still find its way to me after only a slight delay to account for network lag.

I just cashed in all of my Aeroplan miles for a return flight to Northern Voice 2006. I'm SOOOOO looking forward to those couple of days in Vancouver. I'm skipping the DrupalCon that's in town the week prior to NV so I'm not away from the family toooo much... I was originally planning on hitting both events to gather ideas for the seemingly endless lineup of Drupal-related projects we're working on at the Learning Commons, but will settle for lurking on whatever online component they have, and catching the Coles Notes version during Moose Camp...

I've been giving some thought to my ever-growing collection of RSS feeds (now up to 498 subscriptions) and realized that I don't "read" many of them. The majority of the feeds (half? two thirds? more?) are merely scanned.

Why scan so many feeds? To me, it's about patterns. Keeping my peripheral vision (peripheral mind? is there such a thing?) pouring over more information than I could ever consciously absorb. And being able to pick up on subtle variations in the attention of the flock that I am a part of, as well as other related flocks.

With the shiny new backup hard drive, I'm in the process of almost-properly backing up our servers. I'd had to resort to using rsync to mirror critical files and directories to spare hard drives on our main server - handy, but not exactly best practices. And even these drives are nearly full.

Now, I'm just finishing up with an initial backup of these files and directories to the BDE - using the Finder to manually drag stuff over into folders for each server and volume. Something like 100+ GB of important files, media and data. And the drive still has ~300GB free. I don't even want to think about how long it would have taken to burn DVD backups...

For the last few years, I'd forced myself to make weekly backups to CD-ROM. Then, when I outgrew 650MB of backup space, I switched to DVD-R. That worked, but backing up was goddawful slow - bringing my system to it's knees during the backup process. Eventually, I got lax about backing up. It's been months since I've burned a backup disk, and I was starting to get a little nervous. I had been using a tiny portable hard drive, but it was small enough that I had to skip entire directories.

Back in 2000, I was working on a very large project, writing a lot of code. So much that I started to suffer the early stages of the dreaded Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (with the übersexy wristbraces, too). I'd heard of a different keyboard layout that was designed to optimize typing efficiency by minimizing the amount of movement by each finger. The keys were arranged so that the most commonly used characters are on "home row" and exact placement of keys was determined via statistical analysis.

I followed a howto for adding that hot AJAX loving to a Rails app, and now my gestating bookmark manager has a slick add-a-new-bookmark-without-reloading-the-page form, making it feel pretty responsive. I really wish del.icio.us had implemented that - it takes a LONG time to reload the page (with huge tag cloud) when adding a bookmark...

Anyway, I pieced together code from a howto and a wiki page, and it took me maybe 30 minutes to get it going (with Family Guy playing in the background, so not 100% attention-requiring).