Jol 2.0 no comments
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.
My Productivity Monkey no comments
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.
Smell My Pants, Please. no comments
[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....]Â
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.
Comic Books on DVD no comments
I love comic books. I don’t have the energy or motivation to collect anymore, I just want to read them.
Marvel has started selling archives of their popular comics on DVD. Here, in order of my desire, are the DVDs I would love to own:
Mountainsmith Messenger - Small no comments
Thanks to Eric, I have this bag all ready for the Nats season.
My Honeypot no comments
Recently, I unearthed video tapes from my time in the Navy. This sent me off to google a number of old friends, with one success story. Then I began to think about how people would find me via google and that lead me to this post.
Read without context, the following seems self-indulgent (a blog self-indulgent? Never!). But I figure if I list out where I lived, where I worked and other key events from my life on a single page, people searching for me online would have an easier time at it.
My name is Joel “Jol” Padgett and I was born March 10, 1969. Growing up, my friends and family called me Crickett (Cricket in case they can’t spell it my way).
I was born and spent my first few years in Galax Virginia (more specifically Hillsville and Woodlawn). I attended Kindergarten at Woodlawn Elementary, at least mostly. During that year I contracted Encephalitis and spent a few months at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
I moved to Bassett Virginia and started 1st grade at Stanleytown Elementary, in Mrs. King’s class. I stayed at that school until 6th grade and had the following teachers (2nd - 5th grades respectively): Mrs. Shockley, Miss Erin Mccallister (my favorite ever), Mrs. Shackleford and Mrs. Payne. My father briefly lived in Blackstone Virginia and I visited him there a few summers.
I moved to Rocky Mount Virginia for 6th grade and half of 7th, attending Rocky Mount Elementary and then Rocky Mount Middle School. I had Mrs. Frith for 6th grade, but 7th is when I had multiple teachers like a big boy.
I moved back to Bassett and finished 7th grade and then 8th grade at Bassett Middle School. Ninth grade brought me to Bassett High School where I stayed until the end of 10th grade.
Then I moved to Richmond Virginia and attended Marshall-Walker High School for half a year; dropping out in the middle of 11th grade (stupidly after mid-term exams, haha). During that time, I started working at DrugFair. After leaving school, I took a second job–this one at Hardees on the overnight shift. I quit Hardees because 2 full time jobs was too much to handle.
I got fired from DrugFair and went to work across the parking lot at the A&P supermarket. I quit there after a year or so and ended up working at Friendly’s until the end of 1987. During my time in Richmond, I mostly hung out at Video Circus on southside. Also, I was really into the BBS scene, under the handle of Kamikaze King mostly.
I joined the US Navy in February 1988, turning 19 during boot camp in San Diego California. I was in Company 908 under EMC Gregorio. After 8 weeks there, I spent the next month across the river receiving training at the Data Processing Technicians A School.
After a month home, I went to my first duty station, NSGA Misawa Japan, on Misawa Air Force Base. I worked in 50IS division and lived in barracks 544 until I left Japan at the end of 1992.
Moving to Arlington Virginia off of Columbia Pike, I started working at BTG in early 1993. Summer of that year I moved to the Del Rey section of Alexandria Virgina. I met my husband (”Le” “Lee” Hong Van Le) then, on October 29th 1993. It was only because I knew people that he knew in Asians and Friends Washington that we even spoke the first time.
I lived there for 7 years until the beginning of 2001, when we moved to Courtland Towers in the Courthouse area of Arlington. I also left BTG to work at Sandbox.com from November 2000 until November 2001. During my time at BTG, I worked at NMIC in Suiteland Maryland and at Bell Atlantic/Verizon in Arlington among other places.
I returned to BTG, which had been bought by Titan Corporation during my time away. I worked onsite for OCTO as part of the DC City Government and then joined a team developing web applications for the Administrative Offices of the US Courts where I still work. Titan was bought by L-3 Communications.
We recently bought a condo in the Ballston area of Arlington.
Zooba again 1 comment
After we bought our condo in October 2005, I canceled all of my book club memberships. I thought that living a block from the library would be enough and it was sure to save money overall. I have borrowed a handful of books in the last year but I am not sure I can continue this process.
I checked out two books in December, one a baseball statistics book and the other a mindless thriller from James Patterson. The Patterson book, The 5th Horseman, was in bad shape. Inside, the spine was visibly broken.
Today, I returned that book and checked out two more mindless thrillers, another Patterson book and one by David Baldacci. The Baldacci book is missing the first 22 pages and a huge chunk of the final pages are detached so I have to keep track so they will not be lost.
I could mark this down as a problem with borrowing from both the New Books and Best Selling Thrillers sections combined. These books probably get the most reader traffic, and probably readers who aren’t as careful as others. The books I have checked out that were in their permanent home and with a little age usually do not exhibit this level of wear.
Regardless, I have signed up for an account on Zooba.com again. This is a service run by the Book of the Month Club where you create a queue of books from a large list and they automatically send the top choice available to you monthly for $9.95–that includes shipping. Also, if one book a month isn’t enough, you can Buy Now any at the same price.
I added 63 titles to my list, but I need to go through a lot of the broader categories to find more. Each month new titles are added. It seems as if BOMC uses this to get rid of books that fail to sell to expectations from their line of book clubs. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t find good or popular books here.
I will use Zooba to get my fix of newer or popular books and the library for older titles. And the library will benefit because they will get my bought books once read.
mmmm empire no comments
I have always wanted to own an empire. Now, for the small price of a decent hosting package, I claim the title of Emperor of Jol’s World.
This world includes:
- NatsAtBat.com - My blog about the Washington Nationals and Major League Baseball
- TVWatcher.net - My blog about Television
- JolMedia.com - My blog about development and technology
- JolPadgett.com - this blog, just about me.