My homepage and all the old pages will be removed, and I will no longer maintain the rather big wiki website I used to host. Several other areas that have not been maintained for ages and that have no visitors will also go away. I will also no longer post on http://blog.g-b.dk, so if you are subscribed to a feed from there, make sure you update your feed reader to http://torben.g-b.dk/ instead.

What remains is just this new site, containing a blog and a gallery. The blog might contain everyday stories and thoughts, as well as pointers to new additions to the photo gallery. Hopefully this approach will be more useful to people who care about me and my life.

We are have found an apartment that is pretty much the same as the one we have, except that it is not in Vienna but in much nicer surroundings. More information will follow shortly. Stay tuned, or better yet, ask!

The tricks they use are so simple that, literally, anyone can be part of their scenes. So why don’t we see more of this? Where are the ‘branch offices’ in other cities?

Since my experience so far tells me that I am not ready for a Windows-based PDA, I am going to have my trusty old Psion repaired. Again. Again. I just don’t see that there is any product in the market today that can be a serious replacement for the Psion Series 5:

• Three weeks battery life.
• Laptop-like quality keyboard that can actually
  fit six if not ten fingers.
• Decent applications that don’t crash – ever.

Can you recommend anything like that?

Update 20080401: I had the unit repaired (again) because there really is no good replacement.

Watch this video, and pass it on if you feel like it. Tell me what you think. Isn’t this worth acting on? One YouTube commenter says:

We live, we consume, we die, without any regard for our host, the perfect destructive virus. I would say 90% of the people on this planet are too lazy, don’t have the right, or are too controlled by their government, to act upon what you are saying.

Are you going to let that be the last word?

Here is a link to just the video:

Many GTDers are commenting on the problems with deciding the proper width and breadth of their projects; some people try to measure and compare the number of projects they have on their desk and then try to decide what that number means in terms of their GTD-fu.

David Allen often mentions the importance of creating clear and atomic next actions. When you’re doing your weekly review and are looking through your master project list, you come up with clear and atomic next actions for each. Perhaps I’m just wired differently than “The David” (or been programming for too long), but I have real trouble connecting the dots between a big fat project such as “Deploy BTT application” and the tiny concrete action to “email Amish re user load estimate” — it’s just too far a jump. No way am I going to get there from here; I need to go through a number of intermediate steps on the way. The deployment form wants to know the number of concurrent users. Amish is the contact point for end users. I should ask him to get me the figures. Then I can fill in the form.

Ah, but The David also says one should not have the same thought twice (and so on), so I probably should be making notes of these actions, be they proper next actions or not. So, I can either write more than only very next action items on my context lists, or I can queue up a bunch of ensuing actions on my project plan.

I should not be spending so much time on juggling sequent actions! There is simply too much rewriting and restructuring going on. Ideally, sequential actions ought to line up by themselves. I need to trust my system (another Davidism), but as long as I have no easy way of morphing projects to action lists (so I won’t weasel out of doing it), it is evident that I am only trusting it for input and output — not the part in the middle, the actual planning and rearranging into context lists.

One half of the solution to this is using an outlining editor. That, and discarding the notion of only tracking literal next actions. By doing this, you will allow your project outline — of which you will need exactly one — to contain a fractal of big projects, its constituent tasks, their prerequisites, and eventual next actions.

The best approach I’ve seen so far is Life Balance, but its interface is so horrible that the experience is, in a word, unbearable. That’s why on a daily basis I’m using Bonsai; its approach is different but the interface is very efficient. It’s just that I’m forced to arrange my actions in an awkward manner so they show up (only) when they should (once you’ve tried LB, you’ll know what I mean).

There’s a hidden trick here, and it may seem counter-intuitive at first, but try it and you’ll see why it works (in software that supports it): The trick to organizing a project outline for action is to store items that can be done in parallel as siblings, and nest sequential items so that the first items are the deepest. This way, all the endnodes (items with no subitems) are your next actions! Simple!

Think about this. It means that I have only one single project on my plate. Who cares how many projects you have? If you don’t factor in how much action is involved, the project count is a useless metric (I can lift one thousand rocks — if they’re all sufficiently small). It also means that once a project has run out of actions, the project itself appears on the action lists, ready to be ticked off as complete, finished, done.

So instead of counting how many projects you have on your plate, you should be counting ‘preprogrammed’ next actions. That tells you how far you’ve thunk ahead, a metric which is actually useful. If the number is low, you should sit down and plan some more actions in order to keep your momentum going.

The other half of the solution is to automate the process of looking through the (now fractal) project list, cull all the actionable items (the endnodes), and distribute them to appropriate context-specific next action lists. The last step requires that each item has a context flag; this is a natural thing to add when you’re writing the item in the first place.

Remarkably, there is no software that does this! I find this remarkable because (being a GTD newbie) I’ve been through my share of “productivity pr0n” to find a proper mobile GTD-centric application and, probably, so have the over seven thousand other members in the GTD_Palm newsgroup. We all use a more or less (mostly less) elegant combination of two to five built-in and third-party applications to manage our lists and GTD-ness. How did this become the ‘normal’ state of affairs? Anyway, we’re working on remedying that now.

I’ve tested Office 2007 extensively, and find it a tolerable replacement for the previous version, although it’s extremely frustrating every time I have to spend several minutes finding something that I knew exactly how to find in the previous version. Even though there’s no reason to upgrade to Office 2007, if you’re setting up a new system, it’s just as good as the previous version, even a little better in some places. But Vista is another story.

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled).

So there you have it. Stick with what you know, and save yourself a lot of grief, and time, and money.

• Skype
• Norton Security Scan
• Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar

It doesn’t look like a lot when listed that way, but still the Pack helps me by keeping this software up-to-date, and it’s an easy one-stop shop when I originally installed the stuff. Besides, I may be swayed to use more parts of the Pack (particularly Picasa), and it’s easy to install (and uninstall!) from the Pack’s console.

But should I? I asked myself if I ever really need any of this.

Mail: I’ve not used a mail client for years. I discovered that Gmail is much easier to use than any other mail application, and I can access it anywhere, and it has even better spam filtering than my own Bayesian filter (which is pretty good, in fact) on my (not at all good) webmail. So Gmail is for me.

Documents: I started typing my texts into Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and now I can access those wherever I am — except on the road, but I also couldn’t do that earlier. While on the road, I still have my trusty old Psion Series 5. I still work locally with other formats, like photos and MS Publisher files, because I need more precise features than available online (yet). I have not yet installed any Office suite on my pc, and I’m surprised to see that I don’t need it: I discover that I actually do not use all those old documents that I keep backing up and caring about. Should I need a document and miss MS Word on my pc, then I can just upload it to Google Docs and work with it from there. That way, Google Docs will only contain files I actually use(d).

Photos: I have a lot of photos. I could use Picasa to manage them, too. The upside would be the elegant (and to me, important) integration with online galleries, not least Picasa Web Albums. But I don’t like the way the Picasa application works, and I also want to publish to a gallery on my own domain. These two issues keep me from Picasa, otherwise I would probably have switched already. As yet, I find that cam2pc works better for me because I can configure it so that when it downloads the photos from my camera, it will name the photos and put them in folders exactly like I want. That is a powerful feature that lets me navigate tens of thousands of photos directly in Windows Explorer, rather than always having to use a specific application.

Maps: I no longer use my MS AutoRoute 2004. It is good, but Google Maps is better. And it has the most up-to-date maps and street information, it is excellently searchable, and it is fast. There is barely an argument left for installing a map application locally. I live in Austria and Google Maps is American, but it easily beats Austrian online map sites anyway. Because Google Maps is so good, I actually use mapping info much more than I used to. When it takes so little effort and time, I look up addresses much more often than I used to.

Will it be possible to work online-only? Not fully, but the most useful things are already available. Give it a few more years, and you’ll have most useless things, too…

Do I trust my data to online services? That’s a much tougher question, and much more subjective. My brother dislikes Google and others than can and want to peep into your mails and stuff, but I don’t feel bothered by it. As long as I don’t see ad banners and my data is not given to third parties, I am not concerned. I feel that Google is doing a good job of keeping my trust, and they provide the best online platform for complete data management. I’ll go with this and see where it takes me. I might run a homebrew linux with heavy double encryption and only use plaintext online services through an anonymizer, but to me, it’s simply not worth the trouble. Google may be evil, but if they are, they are even better at hiding that fact than they are at delivering useful services.

But I didn’t mean to praise Google, they are just the major player. I mean to say that “online” is a way of life, it may even be a fact of life, and there is less and less sense in staying “local”.

The weather was absolutely fantastic: barely a leaf moved, not a cloud in the sky, and 28 degrees C. We all met a bit outside the city where a motorway is being built across a field. Deserted in the weekends, this is the perfect airfield – even with an integrated dirt track for the model cars! Nine helicopters and two cars were lined up. All but a few of the heli’s were petrol-powered, so there was ample power for stunts, and lots of showing-off ensued.

Markus gave me an R/C controller. Instead of its own antenna, it had a “student-teacher” cable that plugged into Markus’ R/C controller, so that he could start the heli, get it well off the ground, and pass some of the controls to me while still controlling the rest himself. In case of any drama, he could instantly take full control, so I was safe to perform my first flight. It was easy! Markus has been bragging to everybody about me ever since, but to me it didn’t seem like that big a deal. It was great, great fun, but just hovering a heli in place, some 15 meters in front of me, was much easier than I had thought. Even hovering with a gentle cross-wind was much easier in real life than on the simulator. Markus tells me that others have spent between 6 months and 2 years to achieve what I did with 1½ hours sim and two minutes of air. He thinks that next time we go fly, he’ll let me do a (student-teacher assisted) take-off and landing too.

Two fellow colleagues also caught interest, but they were not present. They will go fly today while I have other appointments. They are both really hooked and are starting to buy equipment of their own. Everybody is pushing me to do the same, but I am firm on the argument that I have enough electronic toys already, and this is a new expensive and time-consuming hobby that I prefer to just observe, though I admit that it would be great fun until my bank account collapses.

You can see some photos in my online gallery under the topic “Friends”.