Hack Your Day | » How to keep a clean inbox in Gmail

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via Hack Your Day | » How to keep a clean inbox in Gmail

I guess the cat’s outta the bag. Yup, I’m a GMail addict. I am sometimes forced to use Outlook for work and I hate every second of this software-generating-spam-machine.

I live and breath by a near-to-GTD-philosophy. The main point is, keep the inbox empty and life is good. When mail arrives, look at it. Can it be acted upon in two minutes, then do it and get it out of the way. If not, can it be delegated to others? If so, do that. If not, put it on your calender so you know you have a certain time to deal with it. If it’s just for reference or information decide whether to delete it or archive it. I am not really into GTD and the “workflow” mindset, but I really have gotten to love this simple approach. Take a lot at the link above to read more about it. Or get the book “Getting things done” by David Allen – it’s the bible for the GTD-people 🙂 It’s not free, but GMail is 🙂

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Categorizing my blog…

I ran the blog through the typealizer – just to check what the heck I have been writing, and this was the result:

ISTP – The Mechanics
[ISTP]
The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.
Analysis
This show what parts of the brain that were dominant during writing.

Twittervalue

My Twitter is worth $39

Transcription software

You can’t help it – in the weird world of academics, you are sometimes left to figure out the meaning behind other people’s words. Particularily – making interviews and transcribing them (and then interpreting or performing some form of qualitative analysis). I am trying to find a piece of software to make the job easier. So far, the best candidate is Express Scribe from NCH Software.

The software works very well once you get the hang of it’s little knacks. And of course, it’s free. One problem is that there’s a limit to the length of the audio you can load into it. But that can be solved by chopping up the original audio into smaller segments. Now, what I thought was an excellent feature was that it provides system wide playback controls. That means, you can sit in the wordprocessror of your choice and type the transcript as you please, while using the F-keys to control the playback. I also found the slow-down-option handy. You can slow down the audio to any speed, but if you choose to play the audio back at less then 50 % of original speed it gets hard to hear speech, in my experience.

There were also some hangups when I tried to load a file of about one hours length. It took several minutes to load the file and software seemed to not respond while loading it up.

I guess this freeware is rather limited, but it did exactly what I wanted, provide an easy way to slow down and control playback of audiofiles.

What is OpenID?

via What is OpenID and how to use your Gmail account as OpenID. « Technofriends

This was another post I wrote quite a lot about, and then SPLOINK all the words disappeared after posting. Oh well. So I won’t bother again.

Although I have to say that OpenID is a fairly cool thing. I have been waiting for hovering cars and moon holidays since I was five years old, so the OpenID is at least a step in the right direction. Oh come on, off COURSE OpenID is cool!

A Vision of Students Today & What Teachers Must Do | Britannica Blog

via A Vision of Students Today & What Teachers Must Do | Britannica Blog