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I have taken the first step toward uncharted territory, fully embracing having my data out there instead of in here. I feel so young!

Last week I decided to switch to Gmail as my primary email client from Thunderbird. I spent some time using it from work and started to enjoy its look, feel and features. Specifically its conversation threading, its ability to mute ongoing mailing list topics that I don’t care about, and its ability to just be out of my way.

It could use, however, a few improvements. The filtering is painful to set up. A few more options there would be nice. And the ability to delete a message and go to the next message with one keystroke. That I miss most of all.

I will set up a special email address and forward any messages I have to have local copies of, using Thunderbird to suck them down.

After a few days using Gmail, I gave Google Reader a try too. My three primary applications are Firefox, Thunderbird and GreatNews, my RSS feed reader. I imported all my feeds into Google Reader and it took about a day before I was comfortable with the keystrokes and process necessary to quickly read my feeds. Reader now supports Google Gears, so I can download content to browse locally offline with a single click.

The clincher, the point where I said this is the way to go for me, was when I looked down at my Windows taskbar and found it nearly bare. There was iTunes and Firefox. Nothing else. I had removed two desktop applications and replaced them with two separate tabs in Firefox.

I bought Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen the first year it was published and read it about once a year, every time I get the notion to be more organized and productive. My friend Eric calls the GTD followers a cult and looking around the Net, I can see his point. However, I bought my copy well before it became an Internet Sensation, so I have to get some credit for not just following sheeple.

Last week I decided yet again to become more organized and productive so I revisited GTD on the Net. I have always had a problem keeping it going, but that was a combination of lack of willpower on my part and failure to find a suitable implementation. I have tried many different methods, both online and offline, both paper and electronic, but none ever felt perfect or even good enough.

I think I finally found my perfect implementation: MonkeyGTD. MonkeyGTD is a standalone application built on TiddlyWiki which is a personal wiki written entirely in client-side Javascript. MonkeyGTD fits my needs because it is simple, yet tailored to GTD (get the 2.1 Alpha version). It runs locally, in any browser I use but it can be pushed to a server so I can synch up from various locations (work, home, where ever). Plus it is logical and well-structured–nothing feels terribly kludgy.

Right now I have been mailing the HTML file back and forth from work to home, but soon I will hookup a simple PHP page that will allow me to save to a server with a click.

If you are interested in GTD and like using a Wiki, give MonkeyGTD a try. If you are looking for a personal wiki to dump your brain into, give TiddlyWiki a try too.

[this post has been sitting around in draft for a couple of months.  If they only sold a dryer sheet that tackled static cling and laziness....] 

As I get older, the importance of pants can’t be ignored.  The wrong pair of pants, tragically protrayed by a former coworker, will highlight your poor choice of socks with each step.  Worse, his pants were dubbed “Junk Showing Pants” or JSPs.  Never has so many been so nauseated by so little.

At $3.75 a pair, dry cleaning the 30 or so pairs of work/dress pants was becoming too much to handle on a regular basis.  Assuming 8 pairs of dress pants a week between Le and me, that would be $120 a month.  Yikes.

I noticed Dryel in TV ads and at the supermarkets but discounted its worth because if it worked as advertised, wouldn’t there be more competition in the market?  If you could realistically dry clean your clothes at home cheaply, why is there only one product out there?

Still, as our dry cleaning bill rose, the risk of throwing $11 away for the Dryel starter kit seemed like a reasonable experiment.  The kit includes instructions, a reusable bag, a stain removing kit and 4 Dryel dryer sheets.  Each sheet handles 3-4 pieces of clothes.  Replacement kits, with just 6 dryer sheets and none of that other stuff runs about $10.

The instructions tell you to examine the clothes for spots first and if you find any, place the absorbent pad from the spot kit behind and rub their generic spot cleaner on the stain.  My one attempt at this was a moderate success.  The spot went away, but the spot remover formed a faint stain of its own–like a wet spot but dry.  For now, any stains will go straight to the dry cleaners.

After the spot inspection, place the clothes in the bag–up to 4 pieces.  Add one Dryel dryer sheet, zip up the bag and put it in the dryer.  Tumble dry on medium heat for 30 minutes.

When you remove the clothes, they are damp and fresh smelling.  The scent isn’t overpowering.  You must immediately hang up the clothes to reduce wrinkling and allow the pants to breathe a little while drying.  For dress pants, a quick bit of touch-up ironing is necessary.

Are the pants clean??  I think so.  Taking into account that you treat spots separately, either using the included spot kit or sending spotted clothes directly to the dry cleaner, that leaves mainly sweat and general dirt.  The steaming action, along with the refreshing scent, does a great job of giving the impression that the clothes are clean.

I recommend Dryel for anyone looking to extend time between trips to the dry cleaners.  Your clothes will look and smell clean.  We decided to use Dryel for 3 wearings before returning the clothes to the cleaners and so far that works well.  That alone saves us $170.