I'm not making any new years resolutions this year, not with any particular ends in mind. I read this post about what makes lasting change a few hours ago and it rings true with me.

I'm going to try to get out of my head when I'm not being happy and whenever I find myself finding excuses to just do the same thing as always, look at what would actually make a difference instead.

Carpe annum!

When you've got a pile of email coming in all the time, some of which can be immediately acted on and some can't, you may find yourself with a feeling of paralysis when you look at your inbox with 17 unread messages from a week ago and 4,724 from the last few years (read). If you feel it, keep reading.

Reclaim Your Inbox

There's a recent trend among Dyn employees, particularly in support, to try something called "Inbox Zero." Today I'd heard it enough times that I had to find out what it was. I asked Alan and he sent me this hour long video that I started watching in the background while scraping through my mail in the morning hours.

Strangely, today became the biggest day in getting lots of email demanding my attention and action I've had in months, all while I was learning about Inbox Zero. The idea is to have nothing in your inbox. This is surprisingly easy to achieve.

• act quickly if the request is simple
• use external task tracking rather than your inbox as a TODO list, there are thousands of these
• delete things you'll never need again
• delegate quickly if that's what you need to do
• file mail to folders quickly

I got a few additional tips from Alan.

• set up filters for things you never have to respond to
• make a folder for the folders those filters filter to
• collapse that folder so you don't see that you have mail in those folders

It only took about an hour to sort through my mail and get it filed in such a way that I can now log into my email and see only things that I haven't seen and I need to act on. It's calming and I'm more productive.

If you're an avid user of Twitter, like me, you may have noticed that you don't write a journal anymore. Twitter has replaced your diary; you may find yourself viewing your life through the lens of twitter. There: now if you're going to disagree with me really loudly, you've probably gotten it out of the way already.

So?

There's a problem with this, a problem you may not realize. Unless you're Tucker Max, you may actually have moments and thoughts that you don't want to shout to the world, or even your friends. The problem isn't privacy, though. The problem is that once you start using Twitter to chronicle your life, you might just not write about private things. Your journal isn't a confessor and a moment of reflection anymore; you've forgotten you used to write in it.

But..

You don't use Twitter, you say? This really applies to any social networking platform. If it still doesn't apply, this post isn't about you. This post is about the people who forgot their journal.

I've been actually doing my TODOs a lot more reliably lately. This means that my Psyched instance on my phone ends up with a ton of things filling up the interface that are already checked off. I got tired of this; now Psyched has a feature for hiding completed tasks. It's also got a few other minor UI improvements.

Check out the Psyched page for the release!

I'm currently in Atherton, CA at my friend Katy's place for a bit. Katy and Casey had a joint birthday party; party construction was under way. Since they just moved into this new (quite awesome) house, they hadn't quite figured out what to do with the lemon tree yet. It produces a wide variety of insane lemons (some of them are small, some of them are huge. Some of them look like a wizard turned an evil person into a lemon.

So, I made hard lemonade. First, pick lemons. Next, put lemons (sans peel and seeds) into food processor. Process until in a nice slurry. Strain through a wire mesh to get "homestyle" lemon juice of the freshest kind.

After that it gets quite simple; blend the ingredients as follows together, serve cold with ice.

• 1 part lemon juice
• 4 parts water
• 1 part simple syrup
• 1 part vodka

Serve and enjoy!

History of Psyched

I've been maintaining my calendar application for over 2 years now. The first release was in January 2008. I use in on my Nokia N900 daily, and on my Linux laptop at work. I plan on soon getting it added to the testing apt repositories for the N900 (freemoe). Right now it's not easy to invoke on Maemo, and requires installing libraries from the N810.

Today's Release

Today's release is nothing special: it just allows entering times and durations a bit more freeform, not requiring colons. This makes it easier to enter on a phone especially. There is a difference that exists here: before, any duration that didn't contain a colon character would be considered a decimal number of minutes; now, the colon is assumed to be entered, and anything to the left of the right-hand 2 digits is hours, not hundreds of minutes.

To download the release, check out the Psyched page.

So, here's the idea: something that's sort of munin, sort of nagios, and doesn't monitor computers. Instead, Ramirez monitors you. He'll sit in your UNIX machine, doing his damndest to figure out what you're doing and when.

The eventual goal is to be able to take various state feeds (is your phone on the LAN, is the shower on, is the toilet being flushed, is the fridge open, tempearture outside, temperature inside, when did you last tweet, is the A/C on, is the apartment door open) and infer things about you. Having a direct mobile interface is important as well.

Potential Ramirez applications:

• taking social networking to its absurd conclusion
• notice when you haven't cooked lately and remind you that eating out is expensive
• suggest you turn off the A/C because it's nice out
• inform you that you're late to work

The list goes on. So far I've got 1 svn repository, 1 sensor, 2 commits, and 9000 ideas...

There's a lot of cool stuff to learn at this year's Velocity conference. However, a few things stand out as really popular:

• Hyped NoSQL key-value stores with serious caveats
• Waterfall charts for analyzing front end web performance
• Reworking datacenters and networking

Sometimes you don't realize something's a great term until you hear it in context. I'm gonna have to re-use this one.

In software, there's a delicate balance - it lies between putting so little in your releases and too much.

When you do too little, that you spend more time managing your work than working. When you do too much, you may spend more time thinking about your work than working.

We all know thinking and managing are bad. To avoid these things, I follow a few simple rules.

• When you start worrying about the possible unexpected consequences of the release, push it now.
• When you oscillate between placid calm and sheer panic, cut your next roadmap target in half and calm down.