Rich Mintz

I bought into the idea of satellite radio quite early, right around the time I moved to Atlanta in 1999. Often what brings us to try new technologies is the recommendation of others, but I didn’t need one for this, because satellite radio seemed like a no-brainer — commercial radio at the time was awful (maybe it still is, but who listens anymore?), I was living in a place where I couldn’t get consistent NPR, I missed the bluegrass and community programming on WAMU — and then this New Thing came along.

From the start, I was an XM loyalist, and not just because I knew several people who worked at their headquarters in DC (although that was part of it — and I loved the company’s roots in the District itself, where they outfitted studios in a then-ratty neighborhood off New York Avenue NE before it was obvious to everyone else that the gentrification of that part of DC would actually work). XM was the purist’s choice; in their founding narrative, which I’m sure was more than a little true, they amassed a stupefying collection of recordings, hired the world’s best music curators and on-air talent, and set out to make something worth our loyalty, in response to the appalling field of steaming manure that commercial radio had become in the ClearChannel era. Sirius, by way of contrast, always felt like a naked money play.

So XM raised a stunning amount of money (there were satellites involved, after all — and if I recall correctly, one of the early ones went off course toward Mars or fell into the sea or something, and they had to build a new one — I’m sure it’s on the Internet, you can look it up), and over the next several years, they stumbled in the direction of profitability without ever quite losing their soul. I remained a subscriber for 8 years (!), upgrading my radio once or twice. I’m no music snob — I’m not even that much of a connoisseur — but there’s music I just plain like that you can’t hear on commercial radio and that’s too much work to steal off the Internet or rip from CDs. And besides, part of the point of radio has always been that an intelligent editor programs it for you, at least in theory, so that you can learn about things you’ll like but wouldn’t have found otherwise. Services like Pandora achieve a similar aim in a different way, but I find they require too much thinking to make me happy.

With XM, I was able to indulge my love of legitimate bluegrass, and dance and electronica, and even (to my secret shame) kickass Nashville country music. (Anyone who doesn’t like Kenny Chesney after listening to this or this, or Tim McGraw after this, or Trisha Yearwood after this, needs their head examined.) I bought multiple boomboxes and accessories so I could listen in the car and at home and especially in my bookstore (Peachtree Highway Books, in Atlanta’s Candler Park, 2002-2004, R.I.P.), where I spent most of my waking hours for two years. (Yes, XM, I was an occasional terms-of-service violator, as were many, many other intown Atlanta small businesses in those exciting entrepreneurial years.)

When I moved briefly to Little Rock in 2003-4, I discovered other XM loyalists among my friends. So apparently it wasn’t just me! We traded tips and occasionally even shared equipment. XM kept me company on those long, long drives from Atlanta to Little Rock (usually with an overnight in Tupelo). And in 2005-6, as friends and I founded BusyTonight in New York and tried hard to make a go of our technology business, XM was one of the things that kept me sane during that turbulent period.

I ended up canceling my XM for a combination of cost reasons and lack of use — for a period of several months, I just wasn’t home much, in that way you can get in a city like New York before you get your grownup footing. But now I’m feeling the hankering. Among other things, I feel the lack of editorially programmed bluegrass in my life, and the podcasts I listen to aren’t doing it for me. So I think I’m going to resubscribe. I just passed four hours on JetBlue in the past 24 hours with satellite radio playing in my ears continuously — and I like it. I was worried that the Sirius/XM merger would wreck everything, but most of my old favorite channels are still there, so it’s time to give it another try.

More about inbox zero soon, but it’s a good feeling:

…because if you Google “horn Clarabell”, the first hit is this blog post that I published twenty minutes ago. (But when they start indexing stuff 10 seconds before I press “publish,” that’s when it’ll really start getting freaky.)

Since a couple of people have asked me: I still like the Macally BOOKSTAND iPad case, but after about a month it’s already showing its wear. It picks up grime (and it’s hard to clean), and the leather on the tongue is starting to split because that’s a point of strain that you’re constantly shoving into the slot when you open it. I’ve attached a few photos to show what I mean.

I give this thing about a six-month lifespan before it falls to pieces. Then again, the iPad inside is absolutely pristine AND much more usable with these new configurations available, so it’s doing its job.

I’m trying to decide whether to bother with the iOS 4 iPhone upgrade, given that I’m certain to be buying a new phone within a few months. I’ll only get a few of the new features, and there are lots of reports of slowdowns associated with the upgrade.

Relatedly: I did set out to do the upgrade last week, only to find myself stalled during the backup phase like this guy. I’d already concluded that a wipe-and-restore — or, more gently, a “delete all apps, upgrade OS, then restore apps one by one,” assuming it works — would be my next step.

As a subquest to my endless quest for personal productivity, I’m trying to get a more efficient system in place to handle the blog queue. I honestly don’t understand how the people who blog for a living keep up with everything (although I realize that some of them, like Andrew Sullivan, do have interns and/or the occasional paid staffer to throw at the problem).

I am generally speaking an adherent of the Getting Things Done tracking philosophy (slightly modified to fit my own personality a little better). If you’re feeling reductionist, this reduces to five principles:

• Keep only one* queue of “things to be processed/evaluated,” and process it regularly (e.g., daily) and systematically, into…
• One master list of things to do, ordered by project, on which you…
• Clearly identify for each project what is the single next action you need to take;
• Review the master list on a schedule (high-level review daily, detailed review weekly) to prune it of cruft;
• When processing the queue, do right now anything that you think you can finish in less than five minutes.

*I actually have more than one queue, but I process them into a single list.

(I won’t get into the philosophy or practice behind this, which are amply explored in David Allen’s books and in a host of cultish Web sites all over the place. But I will say it feels right to me.)

I had a pretty good system going, using the spectacular open-source Taskwarrior command line app. Unfortunately, two things happened. First, my task list got way too long to handle effectively inside a terminal window; and second, I got this iPad, which has Changed Everything.

Now I’m all about the cloud — about finding ways to make my data accessible from anywhere, on any device. And so I’m afraid that a command-line app that ties me to my laptop probably isn’t the right answer anymore.

The Evernote Web site turned me on to Nozbe, a GTD implementation for Web and iPhone that has a new iPad application that launched this week. Like Evernote, all your Nozbe data syncs magically across all your devices. I haven’t had much luck with task management software, which always feels way too heavy, but this one seems a little gentler, so I’m trying it out.

I’m testing it first as a blog workflow management tool. Right now I have my blog post queue stored in about five places: in Taskwarrior, in Evernote, in Google Reader, in my WordPress drafts folders, and in my head. That’s way too many places. I tried centralizing in Evernote, but Evernote (just like Gmail) is more useful as a storehouse of heterogenous, unstructured information that’s universally available and easily searched than it is as a taxonomic tool. So we’re going to test things out in Nozbe and see what happens. So far I’m optimistic. It can’t be any worse than my current tracking tangle is.

For all you crazy people lined up for 5 hours in 95-degree heat to get your hands on an iPhone 4, because the iPhone 3GS you bought six months ago is now virtually a doorstop in your eyes, consider this: within my adult lifetime, portable phones weighed 17 pounds and came in a briefcase. (And, like, I’m not even that old.) And the only thing you could do with them was talk on the phone.

Nevermind that — the first cellphone I actually owned, which was very similar to the one changing the lives of the people in the video below, cost me 99 cents a minute to use — and everyone thought that was normal!

More retro phone porn here.

We have a MacBook Pro that (based on our research at home) is apparently suffering from the Nvidia graphics card defect described here. (More from Apple here.) The Apple Store diagnosed the problem tonight, took the computer with a promise of return in 5 days — then called a couple hours later and said it would be ready tomorrow, no charge. Nice!

I think the machine is out of AppleCare at this point, not to mention out of warranty, so I’m particularly impressed. When those people are good, they’re good.

The new version of the WordPress app for iOS (including iPad) is out tonight in the App Store. I’m trying it now. It promises to fix a bunch of bugs, including copy/paste (confirmed fixed), “can’t change category after saving to server” (confirmednot fixed), drafts handling (we’ll see), and a lot of other stuff. So far so good.

UNC social media researcher Fred Stutzman (glamour shot at left) this week announced the release of Anti-Social, his social media-blocking productivity software for Mac OS X.

I have friends who swear by Freedom, Fred’s previous creation (for Mac and Windows), which disconnects the Internet on your computer entirely, for whatever interval(s) you specify, so you can get work done without distractions. Anti-Social is a narrower tool, locking you out of social media sites in particular, but leaving the rest of the Internet available.

We will leave as an exercise for the reader the question of Where This All Might Lead.