A Calendar is the Last Great Frontier
Workflow wise, I’m pretty set on many things. I love the Studio Neat Panobook and Totebook for note taking. Both are amazing and I can’t see myself ever leaving them. Task management wise, I used to live in Things and then Todoist and then Things again. But that process taught me one thing about todo lists. They are the worst way to measure your life. They create anxiety and unrealistic goals because they are islands on to themselves. The fix for me was creating a daily goal list the night before and put that in my Panobook. Then I can check those off with a pen and life feels wonderful. For those reminders that need a little reminding, I just use Apple’s Reminders app which does all I need.
Email is awful, but there is no help in sight (maybe Hey will solve this). I suppose Slack owns the chat space. But Calendar is what just fails me every time. I’ve tried all the products. Fantastical, Google Calendar, Timepage, you name it. The simple fact that I can’t list more than a couple here really shows what the problem is. There is nothing to innovate.
I feel like I use a calendar in a couple ways; I put events up such as “Meeting with Bill” or “Connor’s Lacrosse Game”. I put up blocks of time, “Work on proposal for the Queen”. I put up out of office notifications, “Vacation in Hawaii”. The problem with calendars as they are used today, is they all treat those three ways of measuring something the same. Start time, end time, notification. Then we throw up some blocks like a Kanban board and try and find time to get it all done.
I feel like an optimal calendar would be the opposite. Rather than have a blank board to put things on, you should be carving out time to work on things that matter to you. My best work is done in the white space of a calendar and rarely gets recorded (unless I’m charging time to a client).
I probably don’t need a new app to do this. I could obviously start putting time in the calendar to capture these moments of focus. I wonder if the dynamic of thinking of a digital calendar as an old fashioned paper calendar is where we should be. As I said, shame this space hasn’t been explored as well as todo and email apps.
Spring Cleaning During Spring Training
GeoJSON-Ballparks is my favorite data project I’ve been part of. Probably because not only is it the best sport ever, but it is great keeping track of all the changes at ballparks through the years. MLB teams have mostly stopped building new ball parks so the changes are generally just updates to their names. This year the only new name was Truist Park. Oakland Coliseum reverted back from RingCentral which it never was able to become because of shenanigans. We do bring on a new ballpark in Arlington which is named almost the same as the old ballpark (Globe Life Field vs the old Globe Life Park in Arlington). Apparently the old stadium has been renovated to XFL standards so we should probably not call it a ballpark anymore. I just removed the old one since it is no longer a baseball stadium. I did the same thing with Turner Field.
I plan to review all the Spring Training Facilities of the Cactus League and the Grapefruit League and then review the AAA stadiums. We’ll have to see what happens with the MLB/MiLB negotiations. While it doesn’t affect the actual stadium points (at least in the short term, some of the fields could go away because of lack of support), the alignment of teams in leagues could be changed. So stay tuned and if you want to help out with the AAA stadiums, just create a pull request, would be greatly appreciated!
Where I Have my First Surgery…
So Friday I had my first operation ever. I had never even had an IV put in me. But eventually life catches up with you. I’m going to be 48 this year which is still young but of that age when things start breaking. All those years spraining my ankles playing sports resulted in bone spurs in my ankle that caused me to not only not be able to do may daily running, but stop bowling and even walking without pain. The lucky part was that this was caught early enough that they were able to try some less invasive surgery called Right Gastrocnemius Recession. My non-doctoral explanation is that elongate the tendons on the back of my calf which in turn lesson pressure on my Achilles which should stop rubbing against the bone which would then mean I can run again.
My foot in a cast
At least I can “step” outside and enjoy the weather.
We’ll have to see if this is actually going to happen, I really hope so because the other surgery (the one what removes the bone) is very intensive and recovery is long. I’m just hopeful that I can start running again, and get back into shape. There are many reasons in 2020 that I need to get back on track.
Google Maps at 15 Years
So hearing that Google Maps is now 15, you have one of two thoughts. “Boy that’s a long time” or “Boy, that’s a long time”. It really is a long time, this blog isn’t 15 years old yet (but we’re getting close). I thought it would be fun to look back at my first mention of Google Maps:
… ESRI does include metadata with their ArcWeb Services datasets. Take a look at the U.S Street Map Service metadata page. This information is available for every ArcMap service. But it isn’t just ESRI. Geodata.gov has extensive metadata as well as other providers of data (when you get satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe, they give it to you).
About Google Maps hackers just don’t get it — “It’s all moot”
So of course my first mention of Google Maps had everything that made 2005 amazing.
- Mention of Esri - yea I used to be “the Esri blogger”
- Mention of ArcWeb - boy I think I was the only one who tried to use that madness
- Metadata - what argument in 2005 didn’t have some amazing metadata reference
The funny thing about this is nobody cares about metadata in Google Maps anymore. It was a fake issue back then, but in the end anyone who needs detailed metadata about imagery, uses a service that has that information in it. The rest of us, just use Google Maps.
Cageyjames & Geobabbler on Elasticsearch
Bill and I finally were able to sit down and record another podcast. This one was our white whale, we probably have tried to do this episode since early last summer. But it is done and I think it is a great introduction to Elastic for those who are interested in learning more.
Revisiting Twitter Lists
Back in May I tore up my Twitter and put everything in neat lists. When all was said and done, I had 10 lists with everyone in a neat little bucket. It was beautiful, I could turn to any list and have that twitter hose just give me what I was looking for. But 6 months later I have immense regrets, but not for the reason I though there might be.
When I did this, my big fear was losing connections with people and topics. I moved all my college sports accounts into one list and then I noticed I wasn’t always up on top of the news because there wasn’t any cross-pollination. That is, I would swipe between lists but there were days sometimes where I didn’t review a list and I would miss important things. It was clear, segregation was a bad idea because I no longer had a feed that just rolled everything I was interested in. A weird thing happened during this experiment, my want to be free of the noise meant I wasn’t exposed to any noise. A quiet room is comforting until you realize you are not part of the conversation.
Now the big thing that got me thinking of a new direction was Coleman’s “bestof” list. This best of is perfect because I can bring the best people into a list and let it quickly keep be abreast of the topics I care about. Then I can of course still drop into my baseball or BIM lists if I feel like I need a deeper dive. So while I was traveling back to Spatial Networks HQ on the airplane I created my “what matters” list which basically does exactly what Coleman did. I still have my niche lists but now I have what I was missing and for all the reasons why Coleman liked it too.
But I also realized there was something else I was missing. I got my Twitter follow accounts down below 100. Initially I liked this, meant that I was only following those that I really felt mattered and the rest got put in lists based on their topics (or even in the “what matters” list). BUT, this basically broke a part of Twitter that I didn’t think I cared about. The part of twitter that forces you content was in a way something that I actually used from time to time to find new voices. By giving the beast nothing to churn on, it in turn gave me junk back. So I went head and followed 500 people and what do you know, things are back to normal. While I’m not using the main feed as my way to read Twitter, I can always go there or the “For You” section and see things that I might have missed.
In the end, the change was simple, new best of list and follow the people that matter back. I’ve enjoyed working with twitter again, and I still can limit any list I wish when I don’t want noise. I may unfollow some people, add some more but this seems to be the best compromise. I’m no longer bankrupt was I was with Twitter in May 2019, but I also am not on my own island. Time will tell if this was a good idea…