• “You’ve Got Waves”: How to Get Google Wave Notifications – Gina Trapani
• The Most for Your Minute – Productivity501
  Turns out the order in which you do stuff matters. Sometimes a lot.
• Desktop Fun: Starship Theme Wallpapers – the How-To Geek
  these must be the coolest.star trek.wallpapers.evah.
• Who’s In Charge of Your Life? – Ali Hale
  should be you actually, but all to often you let it be someone else
• The relentless search for “tell me what to do” – Seth Godin
  ‘ When asked, resist ‘
• Think I Won’t Pay for Quality Web Content? Think Again – Louis Gray
• See Maps of Street Address Locations the Easy Way – the How-To Geek
• Workspace of the Week: A simple study – Erin Doland
  Being a workspace geek, I can’t help but link to all those beautiful workspaces that catch my eye every now and then. Enjoy and find some inspiration
  And did you know there’s a group on Flickr devoted to this subject -Unclutterer Workspaces- heading toward 3,000 members *drool*
• Get Customizable Distraction-Free Writing with CreaWriter – the How-To Geek
  I already knew about OmmWriter, the great Mac tool for distractionless writing. I helped myself with DarkRoom, a nice replacement..be it a bit too..distractionless Now the Windows platform has a perfect OmmWriter replacement, and I’m definitely gonna give it a whirl!
• Free yourself from distractions with Concentrate – Erin Doland
  ‘ If you’re a Mac user and often find yourself tempted to goof off when you should be working, I want to introduce you to Concentrate ‘
• Stop Wasting Time by Matching Your Past High Levels of Effort – Armen Shirvanian
  ‘ Once your mind reaches a certain understanding, your mind will never go back to not having that understanding. In the same way, you can always return to a production ability, or winning streak, that you once had ‘

Well, to be honest, it was not really dragging myself..I still like to make roundups of what’s new in the blogosphere, but as you’ve noticed, the daily schedule is history for some months now. A couple things have changed, let me explain:

for years I keep an eye on all kinds of software development related blogs. Adding more new blogs than removing others led to an accumulation of hundreds of feeds to follow. At a certain moment I thought “well, since I’m covering a big part of what’s essential in software development out there, maybe other people can benefit too. And that how I started to share links (originally on blogspot.com, and since May 18, 2008) here on my own domain.

While I do this with pleasure, I noticed two things

1. keeping up costs a considerable amount of time (duh!) and
2. my interests started to change: programming no longer is my deepest passion. Oops.

Already for years I’m practicing the art of working as productive as possible (as most of you probably do, too!) but more and more I saw I kept up with blogs in this domain rather that the programming realm.
Added to this came the realization that my long term goal is not staying a software developer. While it’s good to know *what* your goals are, working towards new goals means loosing interest in the old ones, in my case programming related stuff. Like errr, the blogs that were linked to in the Linkblog on a daily basis.

What does this mean? Well, I’m investing a lot of time now in getting towards my new goals. It’s not clear now how it will turn out exactly. What it certainly means is I’m heavily interested in other stuff these days: lifehacking, working smarter, new developments in web2.0 and social networks. What intrigues me is how individual professionals and businesses alike can use tools and practices to their own advantage in a smart way. Add to that the implications this stuff has on our economy and society. Believe me, things are changing. More than a lot of people and companies  realize. But enough on this. For the moment.

Man, cut to the chase and tell us what’s happening to your blog!

Fair enough, you want to know what’s happening, and you’re completely right! I’m wasting your precious time.
Well, to keep it short: my intention here is to keep on posting Linkblogs and other tidbits related to all that lifehacking stuff. While I’m doing my best, it will not be possible to keep up with daily updates, how much I would like that. Time available to me is not evenly distributed, so updates probably will be a bit irregular.

Still I think it’s an exciting world where a lot is happening that defines our future. If you’re not convinced, why don’t you let me show you, by serving you those productive links…in 2010!

Wishing you a great New Year, and be careful with those fire crackers, if lighting them is a habit where you live. It certainly is here in the Netherlands.

Hope to see you all back next year! And do let me know what you think! In a strange way it’s soothing to see I’m not the only one with a Link Blog Problem

• You Don’t Need to Regularly Reinstall Windows; Here’s Why – The How-To Geek
  Great tips to keep your Windows top notch..for ages!
• Get Things Done with The Middle Way Method – Jason Fitzpatrick
  ‘ If you’ve tried various productivity systems and found them either too focused on top-down or bottom-up management, you might want to take a peek at The Middle Way Method, a system that blends the strengths of both techniques ‘
• When Doing is Due (and the Things That Keep Us From Doing) – Glen Stansberry
• One Number Checks Unread Counts for Gmail, Wave, Reader, and Voice – The How-To Geek
• Enjoy Distraction-Free Writing with WriteMonkey – the How-To Geek
  Here’s the same idea as below, for Windows!
• Ommwriter Creates Serene, Unadorned Writing Space – Whitson Gordon
  Combination of serence music with a distraction free environment makes this look like a great tool. Mac-only though…
• Are You a Productive Geek? Here’s the Site You Must Belong To – the How-To Geek
• MailDrop Automatically Adds Email Attachments to Your Dropbox – Kevin Purdy
• What Are Your Creative Solutions to Weak Cellular Coverage? – Kevin Purdy
• 10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling – Rick Mans
  Reelly, have a look
• 13 New Lessons in Customer Service from a (Good) Car Salesman – Amber Riviere
  ‘ I’m happy to report these latest lessons in customer service from a car salesman (and this time a good car salesman) ‘
  Good news from the car salesmen front for a change
• My Most-Used iPhone Apps of 2009 – Marshall Kirkpatrick
  At the end of every year it’s the same: “best of” list are found everywhere. I don’t do lists like that, but there are a couple that I as a recent iPhone owner am especially interested in
• Evernote Makes Major Updates to iPhone App – Will Kelly
  Great stuff. Evernote is a wonderful app. Be it for you iPhone, Mac or Windows machine. It synchronises to and from everywhere!
• Ten Essential Time Management Tips – Ali Hale
  Time proven time management tips

PROGRAMMING

• Twitter Word Cloud Visualization with Google API – Elijah Manor
• Book review: Professional Refactoring in C# & ASP.NET – Jef Claes
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Released – Phil Haack
• LINQ Query Syntax – a whistlestop – Marc Gravell
• Microsoft PDC09 keynote highlights – Maarten Balliauw
  Look, it’s already PDC time. Time flies when you’re busy doing other things…
• How We Do Things – The Team Room – Scott C Reynolds
• Using the JQuery dialog widget in a custom SharePoint web part – Charles Lee
  On JQuery UI… ‘ Actually it (like a lot of the JQuery UI widgets) is an incredibly powerful tool to your client side arsenal ‘
• Where do you benefit from dynamic typing? – Jon Skeet:
• Reproducing a WPF memory leak – Ayende Rahien
  ‘ (…) I started getting more reports from people experiencing large memory usage from NH Prof. That lead me to try to track it down again ‘
• Writing Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests – Adam Goucher
• How to get Started with TDD – Miško Hevery
  ‘ Best way to learn TDD is to have someone show you while pairing with you. Short of that, I have set up an eclipse project for you where you can give it a try: ‘
• Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) released on DevLabs – Matthew Podwysocki
  ‘ If you’re not familiar with Rx, it is a library for composing asynchronous and event based programs together using observable collections (IObservable<T>) ‘
• The High Cost of Losing a Developer – Dave Laribee
  ‘ The point of this post is simple: RETAIN YOUR GOOD DEVELOPERS ‘
• Request/Response Service Layer: Conclusions – Davy Brion
  ‘ Now that you’ve learned everything there is to know about the Request/Response Service Layer (RRSL), i’d like to repeat the benefits of the RRSL that i stated in a previous post: ‘
• Raising Events With Rhino Mocks AAA Syntax – Richard Banks
  ‘ I was just helping out someone today and showing them how to do it using the Arrange, Act, Assert (AAA) syntax in Rhino Mocks 3.5 and I thought you might be interested in know how to do this as well ‘
• It Doesn’t Matter If You Know What You’re Doing – Lee Brandt
  ‘ Developer’s, in general, are always afraid to let other developers see they’re code. They are afraid they won’t measure up ‘
• Clojure: A first look at recursive functions -Mark Needham
  ‘ Clojure doesn’t perform automatic tail call optimisation so we end up with a stack overflow exception if we run the function with a big enough input value ‘
• Mindfulness and Agile Teams – Amr Elssamadisy
  ‘ Fewer distractions can be found in many Agile teams as they focus on delivering customer value and having self organizing teams focused on one project at a time ‘
  A keynote
• Four Attributes of the Ideal Pilot Project – Mike Cohn
• Make Email Your Servant (Not Your Master) – Paul Sloane

THE REST

• The Complete Guide to Google Wave Is a Comprehensive Book on Wave – Google Wave – Lifehacker
  do you already Wave? Find me on azuidhof [AT] googlewave [DOT] com, let’s start the conversation!
• Disciplanner Makes Tracking and Assessing Your Goals Simple – Jason Fitzpatrick
• Tom’s Planner Is an Impressive, Intuitive Project Scheduling Tool – Adam Pash
  Cool new planning tool. Try it while it’s free!
• Information Pollution Alert! Living with Data Smog – Dustin Wax
  ‘ it’s not just that there’s too much information out there for one person to adequately encompass, it’s that there’s too much data out there to even make out the information clearly ‘
• Productivity Down! An Emergency Response Guide – Organize IT
  ‘ We’ve all been there, and more often than not when you’ve lost your momentum it’s doubly hard to get it back again ‘
• How to Achieve Critical Goals – The 4 Steps – Mr. Self Development
  ‘ Failure to achieve a “critical” goal renders the achievement of-all-other-goals inconsequential ‘
• 12 Lists That Help You Get Things Done – Dustin Wax
  Want to be *really* productive with your lists? Split them up. Dustin explains how
• Productivity Tips #15: Focus On That Which Matters Most – Organize IT
• The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Something – Leo Babauta
  ‘ (…) don’t get discouraged if you’re just starting out. Have fun, like we all did in the beginning. If you have fun, you’ll learn to love it, and THAT’S when it clicks ‘
• Searching for a Shared Virtual Workspace? – Clemens Rettich
  Showdown between Google Groups and Windows Office Live
• How To Focus On What Truly Matters – Sid Savara
  ‘ How did I end up working on all these things that aren’t who I am, and that don’t represent where I am going? ‘
  What to do about it
• Five Best Online Backup Tools – online backup – Jason Fitzpatrick
  Don’t leave the house without an online backup plan in some way. Me? Dropbox all the time!
• 25 Internet Startups That Bombed Miserably – Business Pundit
  Always great to read about other people’s failures. As long as you learn the lessons that can be drawn
• Watch 4 Days of TED India in 4 Minutes [Video] – Amit Agarwal
  This Friday I’m going to TEDx Amsterdam here in the Netherlands (well, a simulcast streaming version of it, to be exact, since I wan’t on the invitation list ). Looking really forward to it. Amit has a couple video’s from the Indian version to whet your appetite with TED, in case it’s new to you
• The importance of innovation in the era of the “new normal” – Jim Carroll
  ‘ I’ve witnessed first hand what innovation leaders are doing to ensure that they can survive and thrive in a period of n rapid economic change ‘
• 13 Ways I Get Back into Blogging after a Vacation – Darren Rowse
  Getting back into the flow can be hard after a holiday. Darren shows how the get back the magic inspiration of writing
• The Anti-Social Network – Omer van Kloeten

• Six political animals you might encounter at your client’s office – Chip Camden
  Chip has a great overview of difficult personalities you might will encounter somewhere in office space. And most importantly, how to deal with them
• People Motivation: Target Intrinsic Desires – Jurgen Appelo
  ‘ (…) what is intrinsic motivation? Well, let’s investigate, starting with Self-determination theory ‘
• Thoughts about the Design Master Class – Laila Bougria
• Change base directory of a site in IIS – Alkampfer
  ‘ This technique works for IIS6 and IIS7 with the “IIS 6 WMI Compatibility” installed. The purpose is changing the directory of a web site in a remote server ‘
• Twitter is crowdsourcing the translation to Italian, and I’m part of it – Simone Chiaretta
  ‘ The cool thing is that the interface is not being translated by a team of professional translators but by a selected number of users ‘
  And Simone is among those users. Earns you at least a nice ‘translator badge on your profile page
• URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – Scott Guthrie
  ‘ This is the eighth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release ‘
• Life inside an Aggregate Root, part 1 – Richard Dingwall
  ‘ One of the most important concepts in Domain Driven Design is the Aggregate Root — a consistency boundary around a group of related objects that move together ‘
• Dead Simple Geolocation… – Scott Galloway
• Showing a List of Today’s Birthdays in SharePoint – Kirk Evans
• VSTS 2010 TMap process templates infographic – Clemens Reijnen
• Software Externalities – Phil Haack
  ‘ (…) these so called “simple” solutions need to factor [maintenance, ed.] in, or the customers will continually be left with the clean-up duty while the polluters have long since moved on ‘
  Spot on!
• Why I Prefer Web Application Projects – Brendan Enrick
• Avoid Entrenched Dependencies -Steve Smith
• Changing the role of test managers – Gojko Adzic
• Using SQLite in 64-bit .NET environments – Benny Michielsen
• Build Your Own Data Access Layer: Enabling Bulk Inserts – Davy Brion
  ‘ Note: This post is part of a series. Be sure to read the introduction here ‘
• TIP: How to Run Programs as a Domain User from a Non-domain Computer – James Kovacs
• Non-Technical Factors that Lead to Poor Architectures – Mike Walker
• The Woodcutter and the Leprechaun – Kees Dijk
  Story time! ‘ There once was a woodcutter working hard cutting down a tree. Suddenly a leprechaun appeared and started yelling stop stop ‘
• High Scalability – High Performance at Massive Scale – Lessons learned at Facebook
  Referal to a webscast on how Facebook manages to handle it’s enourmous user base
• Team Explorer 2005 & 2008 & 2010 Beta 1 Compatibility Matrix – Teams WIT Tools
  Issues and workarounds.
• All the Nobel Prize Winners by Country – Amit Agarwal
• Git# Offers Git Access for .NET and Mono Projects – Abel Avram
  ‘ Git# is meant to be “fully compatible with the original git and shall be a light weight library for cool applications that are based on git as their object database or are reading or manipulating repositories in some way ‘
• Try to knockout before you consider to mock-out – Venkat
  ‘ As more programmers are getting excited about test driven development (TDD), one concern I am
  hearing more these days is “my tests and mocks make it hard to refactor code.” ‘
• A Guide to Receiving Feedback Part I: Ask for It – Patrick Kua
  ‘ I think there are plenty of resources for how to give effective feedback (…) yet I can’t find as many about the other end, or how to go about receiving feedback ‘
  So here it is
• Scala: Code Kata #2 – Karate Chop – Array Slicing Attempt – Mark Needham
• Seven Essentials Teamwork Skills – Mishkin Berteig
• Share Folders in Google Docs – Google Blog
  ‘ You can now share folders with your contacts and even make some of your folders public ‘
  Certainly a nice addition to Google Docs!