You know how Oprah has her annual Favorite Things episode, where she goes through her list of favorite things, explains why she likes them so much, and then gives every member of the audience all of those things for free? This is exactly like that. Except for the free part. Although a lot of this stuff is free, come to think of it.
Coworking at Caroline Collective
For those of us who telecommute, it gets boring working at home. Working out of coffee shops is a little better, but we can’t have a regular desk with all of our stuff, and we don’t really get to know the locals.
Coworking means a shared office space where folks can come in with their laptops, plop down, and work with free coffee and WiFi. We get to know each other, we can ask each other for help and ideas, and we meet people we might not ordinarily get a chance to run across.
Caroline Collective is Houston’s coworking space. You can drop in anytime for free when you need a break from telecommuting or office life, and when you like it (and you will like it) you can step up to renting your own desk, or even renting an office with a door.
Why rent a desk? Because you can leave your stuff there (speakers, monitor, paperwork, etc) and it’s cheaper than spending money at a cafe every day. Free WiFi and coffee!
I’ve even got a live webcam at Caroline Collective. That is, when I’m there, of course - weekdays 7-8AM CST to whenever I feel like leaving.
Getting Things Done (GTD)
Do you get nervous at the thought of opening your email in-box because there’s so much piled up, and you don’t know where to begin? Do you struggle with to-do lists and project management software? Tired of struggling to keep your dayplanner up-to-date? Feel like you’re never going to catch up?
David Allen’s book Getting Things Done has been the answer for me and for a few of the folks I work with. It’s a simple, no-nonsense approach to managing daily tasks. Knowledge workers these days have an unending stream of incoming “stuff”, and the GTD philosophy is about rapidly handling as much as you can, as fast as you can, and feeling absolutely comfortable knowing that you can’t handle everything.
I showed my current manager into the GTD philosophy, and he caught on right away. He went from hundreds of emails in his in-box down to less than half a dozen in a couple of weeks. He responds faster to requests, and clearly feels confident in managing his day-to-day inflow of tasks.
There’s no mysterious rocket science, no expensive software, just a few straightforward changes to your day-to-day behavior. To learn more about GTD, visit these sites:
- The David Allen Company - the guy who wrote the book on GTD, so to speak. He offers tips and tools, and his coaches write their own columns with tips too.
- 43Folders - funny, friendly opinions on how to implement GTD techniques in different programs (Outlook, iCal, etc) and how to manage projects better.
- RememberTheMilk - GTD can be done with any to-do list style software, and I chose RememberTheMilk because it’s free, it’s web-accessible from anywhere (including PDAs and Firefox and Flock), and it’s easy to use.
Travel Stuff
- Cruise deals - VacationsToGo.com: we’ve bought two cruises from these guys. The site is helpfully organized by departure city and date, and they make it really easy to find the right cruise for you without going through a lot of promotional garbage. Unfortunately, the customer service leaves a lot to be desired - we’ve struggled to get our tickets to the house on time - but the prices are great. If you see the perfect price for the perfect trip, jump on it, because even here, they go back up as the destination date approaches.
Web Sites & Blogs
I keep all of my bookmarked web sites online at Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service. You can check out exactly what I’m looking at these days, helpfully organized with tags to group them by category.
I also use an online blog-reading tool called Bloglines that you can check out and see what kinds of blogs I find interesting.
Computer Gear
- SAN management - Onaro SANscreen - SAN work requires very precise attention to detail, and the software that comes with most SAN gear doesn’t make that easy. SANscreen keeps a close eye on your storage network connections and makes sure the everything stays plugged into the right ports and sees the right LUNs. It’s harder than it sounds. After every night of SAN maintenance, SANscreen is the first piece of software we open. It gives us good peace of mind knowing we did things right - or shows us exactly where to go fix our goofball errors. The pricing is completely fair, especially in the expensive SAN world. Doesn’t work with iSCSI, though.
- Windows Explorer replacement - Total Commander: I abhor Windows Explorer. I’m a dos-prompt guy. An old friend of mine turned me on to Norton Commander years ago, and this is a newer, more powerful replacement. If you do a lot of work with files, you owe it to yourself to try this out. Does everything from FTP to directory comparisons to zipping.
- Server monitoring - ServersAlive: system administrators need a fast, easy, and inexpensive way to get alerted when their servers aren’t serving. ServersAlive is the best way I know to stay on top of dozens or hundreds of servers without training, maintenance, or lots of extra staff time. We’ve since graduated to Ipswitch WhatsUp for its more in-depth monitoring, but if you’ve got less than 100-200 servers, ServersAlive should be the first software you evaluate.
- Servers - HP c-Class Blades: multi-core CPUs changed the way I feel about blades. HP engineered the bejeezus out of these things, and it pays off in ease-of-use. In one week, I rolled out 11 blades in my spare time without feeling like I’d deployed a little army. Their System Insight Manager makes it easy for us to stay on top of the health of our infrastructure without doing tons of manual configuration - goodbye, IBM Director. Blech.
