Alan Gutierrez

My MacBook is becoming dangerously slow. It is cutting into my productivity. With Eclipse and Firefox open, I am unable to really do anything. Programming requires taking notes as I go along. I keep my notes in Backpack. If switching from Eclipse to Firefox takes 30 or more seconds, I lose my train of thought. It is ridiculous.

Do you think that’s petty? A minor inconvenience? I don’t think so. If I were writing a book at a typewriter and something occurred to me, I could reach for a pad of paper and scribble a note, and move on.

Imagine though, I had to ask my dog to run to the other room and fetch my pen and paper. I sit and repeat the note in my head, so I don’t forget. Meanwhile, I track the progress indicator of canine claws on hardwood.

Nothing like that spinning beach ball, or hour glass, or watch, to mesmerize you while you repeat your tiny brainstorm like a mantra.

You switch the focus of a powerful machine to a menial task. Storage. You may have been running full bore on your writing, spreadsheet, programming, and now you’re sitting there repeating to yourself, tell Paul about the lunch, tell Paul about the lunch, tell Paul about the lunch.

Of course, by the time Firefox comes up, I’m thinking neither about work or lunch. Whatever fancy bauble is on the Google start page commands my attention.

Instead of walking up to you with your pen and paper, the dog has returned with a brass band, everyone you forgot to stay in touch with since high-school, and what he claims is a perpetual motion machine.

This is a real productivity killer.

A great many people and things that beg your attention, sprung upon you after a wait just long enough to muddle your train of thought.

Update: I ordered 2GB of memory for my MacBook from crucial.com. At $82.00 it seems like a bargain, down from the $205.00 that it once was. Let’s see how much faster the MacBook becomes.

Today (no not today, last week, I didn’t post this then), a I met a man walking across the 7th Ward, taking pictures. He was fussing with a home that was going to soon be demolished. The home was in very bad shape. It was occupied before Katrina, but it was in bad shape then. From the looks of it, the house would have collapsed already, except that it leaned back onto a tree in the back yard.

This man told me his evacuation story. It was stunning. The story itself was stunning, but what’s more, the story telling was stunning.

At some point, I realized that I was entertained by the story. It was one thought then the next. The first thought was that was aware of the time spend telling and listening. The sun was going down. I was walking at the time I was walking because the sun was going down. It is a good time to take pictures. I thought, I had better keep going, because I was supposed to take pictures. The second thought was that I was none the less listening. I wanted to hear the story.

By now, I know the series of events for a New Orleans Katrina evacuee.

Hearing a person tell their story is like Shakespeare. You have heard the story before. You know what is going to happen next. Like Shakespeare, you want to hear the story again, with new particulars. You want to hear how this person will tell his story. Every story is unique. How individuals handled themselves is unique. The togetherness of certain agencies and non-agencies, and the incoherence of others.

In hindsight, I wasn’t aware of the time, until after I’d understood that the story would not end in tragedy. Then I wanted to hear the details. What was the experience of the different agencies? Where did you go and who did you see? How deep was the water and where?

What I’d like to say, is that the story I heard today was well told. At points, I’d step back and think about how he constructed a scene. How it was unfolding in my mind’s eye. The metaphors were carefully chosen.

Why was he so good at this? He didn’t try to control the story. He told it. He didn’t waste time setting the scene. He’d offer one piece of evidence that it was dark. Not the hackneyed hand before the face. No cliches. A point of reference. Then I was on my own to know what dark was, as he described what he had to deal with in the dark.

My take away was that, in order to be an effective speaker, I need to lighten up. That was the take away before I knew why. At first I thought that the same sort of nuance you put into telling a story that will keep an audience enthralled, will be embarrassing you if someone is not interested in what you have to say. (Which is my personal challenge to post this somewhere.) I know I’m more interesting when I allow myself to be animated and self-deprecating.

The real take away, though, is that you let the story tell itself. Let the story tell itself through you.

That was to be the title of a wail of anxiety about how it’s the last minute when I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. Just wrote an excellent little post in Kiloblog about how to use Chip In to raise money for Bayou Boogaloo. Then, before I press save for the first time, I wonder, should I post this at Daily Beta. I’ve not done anything with that site in a long time.

Now, something that was supposed to make life faster, is making it slower. Injecting long term decisions into short term decisions. This is driven by a false sense of permanence. The sense that permalinks mean that one must choose carefully.

The point of this post, and of this theme, Getting Things Half-Done, is to study all the places where I stop. How do you overcome the dead stop? The paralysis of indecision?

In this case, it’s a variation on the fear that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. When I write a post, I have one chance to position it. I had better choose wisely. That is the foreboding nonsense that speaks in hushed tones in the back of my head. How neurotic.

In the last year, I have become more of a programmer. Still not (self-)published, but at the very least plugging away, happy with the foundations, and not turning back for another rewrite. This comes from a way of dealing with the many little murmurs of doubt. I write it down the doubt in the form of a question. Then I wait for it. In a day or so, the answer comes.

This is not always going to work. Waiting for it assumes that you have a the knowledge of the technique necessary to have those moments of illumination. More to the point, am I really going to allow a quandry like, “where do I post my little rant?” to simmer in the background? It’s not really a problem to be solved.

With some problems, stop means wait. With others, stop means nothing.

In response to my frank comments at the indev.ca forums and my blog post How I Lost My Morning to Tagging and EMail, one Scott Morrison wrote me to assure me that the data was not lost, and asked that I help troubleshoot the problem.

Obviously someone who suffers the delusion that the customer is always right. I subscribe to the Be Nice Or Leave school of customer service. Especially when the customer has yet to pay for anything.

So, rather than be a complete bastard, I zipped up a copy of a sample message, one from the server, one from my MacBook, and sent it on its way. Maybe that will tell him something.

But, what would I do if it was my code? I’d connect to the IMAP server and trace though the code. I really want MailTags to work. I figured, why not just set up an email account for Scott? No better way to reproduce the problem.

I set up an account and sent him a message.

A few hours later, three messages from Scott. The first two zeroing in on the fact that Dovecot stomps the X-Keywords header, where the tags are stored. They are also stored in a JSON string in the X-MailTags header, so the third message had a new MailTags bundle that reads the tags from that header.

After dropping it into place, I rebuild my mailboxes, and my tags reappearedThey were never lost, stored in two separate headers. Apparently, Courier IMAP is not capricious as Dovecot. It doesn’t munge headers the way Dovecot does. Scott’s communications shows that he knows his way around IMAP. Certainly keeping a MailTags specific header for the tags shows foresight. That time spent tagging was not lost.

Now, I’m tagging away again. MailTags is very much a part of my workflow.

That and Mail ActOn, which is another indev.ca addition to Mail.app.

Actually, I’d spent the day despondent wondering what I was going to do without MailTags, now that I’d become accustomed to it.

Update: It is a known issue with Dovecot, as noted in Problem/workaround with X-Keywords and Apple’s Mail.app. I wonder how this is address in Thunderbird, since it seems to always behave correctly, although there is evidence of issues as in 1.0 beta3 not preserving X-Keyword header?.

Update:: I’m now, as of April 14th, 2007, eagerly awaiting Public Beta 10. I’ll be checking the Mail Tags 2.0 site frequently. Public Beta 9 just expired. Scott Morison expires his betas so people are forced to upgrade, which is not a bad idea at all.

I’ve been fastidiously tagging my email using Mail.app and MailTags. I’d developed a routine, where I’d copy my mail into a directory for tagging, and then add tags. I’d make sure that the days mail was tagged before shuffling it to an archive.

When MailTags is added to Mail.app, search becomes very slow. This was a problem that I reported in the forums under Search is Unacceptably Slow.

Now, when I rebuild a mailbox, the tags are not downloaded. I’ve reported this in IMAP Loses Tags. This is the deal breaker.

Now I’m looking at Tag the Bird again and wondering how long it would take to hack in IMAP support. Tagging in Thunderbird 2.0 is a joke, as noted in the discussion on the Mozilla wiki, one choses their tags from a drop down menu, which means you must limit your vocabulary.

Reference was made to Tagocity, an extension for Outlook. Thunderbird and MailTags should strive to be half of this, for starters.

I don’t think the guys at Thunderbird really get tagging. As a developer, when I’m in heavy software development mode, my email channels are few and high-volume. The proverbial fire hose. A focused, high-pressure jet of email.

I’ll subscribe to mailing lists, and exchange information with a few collaborators. I can create folders to manage a handful of projects, that have a large volume of mail.

Thunderbird is great for listservs, but with a listserv, you don’t need futher categorization. The discipline of moderation keeps the listserv on topic. Tagging is nothing you need to do.

In my work in outreach, email comes from everywhere, and will make reference every aspect of my work. It is a monsoon. Classification of the email is the first step in responding to it. Gathering the droplets of information into tributaries. Here tagging is a potential life changing tool.

Developers don’t get tagging. (Thunderbird developers especially. The Mozilla project is hamstrug by it’s many, many forums, and depenedency on IRC.) Developers are accustomed to well moderated listservs and newsgroups.

GMail doesn’t do tagging right. The drop down list is painfully slow. You must create a list of tags to choose from. You can’t add a tag that you might use only every once in a while. “French Quarter Festivial” is something that I might get email about ten times a year. I don’t want to have to scroll past “French Quarter Festival”, 363 days of the year.

It’s only saving grace is that it tags a conversation, so that you only need to do this once, and messages thereafter are tagged.

MailTags is close to ideal, except that it’s broken. I’d love to help fix it, but the new version is not open source.

When you have a stuck In-Sink-Erator, you’re going to want to read Installing A Food Waste Disposer from HammerZone.com (Better Living Through Handymanness).

In applying getting things done, I’m finding that I’m capable of piplineing tasks, in the way that processors pipeline instructions, or better still, the way the salesmen pipline sales. Things happen in parallel. You move each as far as you can go. Because of Getting Things Done organization, you can work on the next action, inching along. Then you’ll find that there are bunch of tasks that need a nudge and they’re finished. Suddenly, you’re getting a handful things done every day, because they are at the end if their pipeline.