Link of the day: Yahoo search pad

This looks like a fantastic way to compile research and share it with others, especially for travel plans. To see what I mean, check out the demo video. Great job, Yahoo.

Write notes on your cellphone as text messages

I had an idea a few days ago. It's a variation of the email important to-do items to yourself. If you're out and about, you probably don't have a pen and paper, but you do have your cellphone. You can text message yourself and save it as a draft. (Hopefully, you remember to look at the draft later.) If you don't mind spending a few cents or if the content of the message is important, you can actually send the text message to yourself.

Maybe this idea will become anachronistic when cellphone manufacturers decide to put more PDA functions in their phones...

Link of the day: RescueTime

Lifehacker mentioned the computer usage tracking software RescueTime almost a year ago, but I didn't try RescueTime until now. [Note: The Lifehacker post is a little old so I recommend visiting the RescueTime website to see the current features.]

As long as you're not too worried about privacy or installing yet another application on your hard drive, RescueTime seems like a nice piece of software. It tracks what applications and web sites you're visiting, then transmit that information to a central data server where you can log in and see how you actually spend your time. It's sobering to see that you thought you did six hours of work, but actually only three. Of course, this doesn't work very well for off-computer time like updating my research notebooks.

In my first week of usage, RescueTime seems like a killer app and I recommend it. I'd like to write a more detailed post on RescueTime at some point (maybe a few weeks or months from now?)

Creating a knowledge vault

Cal Newport blogs about writing down what you learned so all that studying doesn't go to waste.

I've been having exactly the same thoughts lately. I moved my website to siteground.com because they claim to make it easy to install and use MediaWiki, the wiki software used by Wikipedia. I suppose I could have used something free like pbwiki, but pbwiki uses proprietary software. I want to have control of my data and be able to back it up and move it to other servers if necessary.

Take notes on your family and friends

Here's an interesting idea I read about on Parent Hacks via Lifehacker. The idea is simple: take notes during phone calls with friends and family.

Usually, I'm very good at remembering details, but I seem to forget some details when I talk to my parents over the phone. Maybe it's part of the child wanting to separate themselves from their parents aspect of growing up, but I'm just not a very good listener when it comes to my parents. It's easy not to listen because I talk to them on a regular basis. I don't feel the same urgency as when I get in contact with a friend who haven't spoken to in a year. I think it might improve my relationship with my parents to take notes. I've started a text file on my computer called people-notes.txt. I'm sure that businesspeople already do this kind of thing for their clients and collaborators.

I still can't remember what day of the week my dad goes to calligraphy class. Of course, my dad has no trouble remembering details about my life...

Some new productivity things I'm trying

First, I'm going back to an old-fashioned idea: time cards. I use grid-lined index cards (available from Levenger). I write down the times of day in 15-minute blocks, going from 12 midnight to 11:45 am on one side and 12 noon to 11:45 pm on the other side. At the end of each day, I recorded the number of hours spent on various activities such as sleeping, hygiene, meals, research, teaching, homework, classroom, sports, exercise, administration, errands, news reading, internet surfing, etc. I'm hoping this will help me be more efficient.

Second, I have a bad habit of checking email whenever I'm bored, so now I'm limiting myself to checking my work account twice a day and my non-work account and Facebook once a day. Of course, there will be exceptions if I'm expecting something. I sent up a reminder for myself in Yahoo Calendar telling me when I can check my email. The reminder goes to my Yahoo email account which is not publicly available and only serves as an organization hub for todo items.

I'll report back on if any of these schemes work.

Sharpie micro pocket pen

I settled on the Sharpie micro as my pocket pen. Here's a photo of it with an index card laid over my shorts:

Sharpie micro and Staples Mini Gel Stick pens as pocket pens

Sharpie has a new pen called the Sharpie Micro which comes in an array of colors (over 10!). It has a fine point tip (about the same size as the typical ball point pen). The best part is the Micro is tiny - about 3.5 inches long and 3/8 inch in diameter.

Staples also carries a Mini Gel Stick pen. It's a little longer than the Sharper but a bit thinner.

Both pens are cheap. The Sharpie is $1.50/pen and the Staples Mini pen comes in packs of a dozen: $3.78/dozen (either black or colored assortment).

GTD and creativity

Both Keith Robinson and Merlin Mann discuss how creativity fits into the GTD system.

As Keith shows, you can use GTD to setup a framework for doing creative work. You can write lists of things you want to be creative about. You can use GTD to process the outputs of your creative thinking. If your brainstorming yields five ideas, you can put down "investigate idea #1, investigate idea #2, etc" on your to-do list. You can use your GTD system to capture all your ideas. But the one thing that GTD can't do is make creativity like cranking widgets. I suppose you can make a to-do item like "Think about X for one hour". But then the next action (assuming that you don't come up with any ideas) is to "Think about X for another hour."

GTD is a system for processing, not coming up with ideas or brainstorming. One should recognize that limitation and remember to keep up to date with the @someday list!

Link of the day: Colloqium talk on community-based data management

I learned about a really interesting talk via Dave Bacon's blog. Here Raghu Ramakrishman talks about the emergence of social websites (e.g. flickr, del.icio.us, etc) and how the future of the web may lie in leveraging community input to improve data extraction. In the beginning, we had the web which was just static text and pictures. Then Alta Vista and other search engines used anchor text to improve searching. After that, Google came up with the concept of page rank. By looking at the many levels of linkage and giving more reputable sources a higher weight, you can come up with the most relevant search result. The next step in the evolution of the web may be using the direct input of users (e.g. tags) to improve data extraction.

Ramakrishman has been doing research on a very small-scale example called DBLife. It is a site that tries to extract data about academic researchers in the field of databases. If you search for a particular researcher, DBLife will attempt to generate pictures of the researchers, his/her list of publications and talks, and other information. You (the user) can then submit input on whether you think the information is accurate. So Ramakrishman's great hope is that we can develop software that is easily maintained by a community of users, that it will be easy to abstract the underlying structure of DBLife and apply it to other communities like Hollywood (e.g. HollywoodLife). In other words, one could give the software to another community without them having to look at any code.

The video of the talk is available here.

Tech: Espresso Book Machine

At the Technology Review, Jason Epstein discusses the evolution of book publishing. He notes that as the book market has become driven by best-sellers, the large catalogue of rare (arguably more interesting) backlisted books is disappearing. One way to solve this problem is to have a device that can print and bind books automatically given an electronic file (just like how you can print Physical Review articles from .pdfs on your home laserjet). It turns out that machine has been invented. It's the Espresso Book Machine.

Tech: Zoom H4 digital recorder

The Edirol R-09 now has a competitor: the Zoom H4. They are similar products apparently, but the Zoom H4 has more features and costs $100 less. The downside to the Zoom H4 (according to Amazon reviews) is that it has a much more complicated user-interface.

Link of the day: Scrapbook and cosmology calculator

At some point (2008?), I'd like to organize my collection of saved webpages. The Scrapbook Firefox extension seems like a good choice.

After learning general relativity, I now have a passing interest in cosmology. Today I found out about a web-based cosmology calculator which "computes times and distances as a function of redshift for user-defined cosmological parameters."

Digital audio recorder: Roland Edirol R-09

Digial audio recorders were featured today in the New York Times technology section. One exciting product is the Roland Edirol R-09. Unlike voice recorders, the Edirol samples at a much higher rate (44 kHz) and so can record music. The Edirol has a built-in stereo microphone. It also uses AA batteries and 2 GB SD cards, which is great if you are doing a marathon-recording session. One promising application is to record snippets of unconventional music (e.g. folk music in a remote country), particularly if you're a music historian or a composer. To learn more about this recorder, check out the review roundup here.

Tech: Digital pen

An alternative to tablet PCs is the digital pen, featured in a recent New York Times article.

Virtual checklist

It looks like quite a few people use checklists. There's even one online called Joe's Goals. You can grade yourself based on how many good habits you fulfill and how many bad habits you succumb to.

Physicists discuss tablet PCs

Following up on my previous mention of tablet PCs, Dave Bacon and Gordon Watts have posted blog entries describing their experiences with tablet PCs. It sounds like tablet PCs are a very neat tool, but not quite refined enough yet for mainstream use.

Share your library online

Now, besides sharing your photos via Flickr and your links via del.icio.us, you can show off your book collection at LibraryThing! For more details, read this Christian Science Monitor article.

Link of the day: Coccinella

My friend uses Coccinella to collaborate long-distance on theory projects. He showed it to me on his Mac. The program acts like a digital whiteboard. If you buy a pen tablet, you can write equations and draw figures on an "electronic" whiteboard that your friend can see on his/her side of the internet. Combined with talking over phone/internet, it's almost as good as an in-person meeting.

Career: Academic skills

My sister sent me a link to a class that teaches "Graduate Research Methods In Psychology". I like how it is organized by a senior graduate student.

It would be nice if we had something like that for our physics department. Our department sponsors graduate student pizza lunch seminars and that seems like an ideal venue for "skill" talks. We could have talks on topics such as speaking, writing, ethics in science, creativity, life hacks (my personal favorite), etc.