So I’ve had the two PowerMates for a while, and I’m now putting them to good use. I won’t let the focus of this entry be how I’m using the PMs system-wide [another day, if you're interested], but suffice it to say that I’m using the PMs for awesome in Aperture.

Now, I’m biased by Fraser Speirs’s photo workflow; before I was ever serious about the concept, I had read what he was doing. I don’t do stack sorting—in fact, I just closed the tab so I won’t spend thirty minutes delving into same and stop writing this entry—but I do use the PowerMates to power through the weaning process. My ratings are much like Fraser’s—if it’s okay, going to get rated up to one start; if it’s crap, I reject it. Here’s where the PowerMates come in:

Left PowerMate: clockwise rates up, counterclockwise rates down.
Right PowerMate: clockwise advances in the set, counterclockwise goes back.

A wee twist of the wrist is all I need to rate something up or down, or to move back and forth. I think that adding in stacks will make this even more powerful for me, especially when I’m off of my current kick of sports photography and back into concert stuff, when taking eight or twelve exposures at a swath is about catching an expression or some light, not a pass or a shot or a hit. But it’s really quite quick for me: fire up Full Screen mode, position my hands, and make the snap decision.

I do my editing in passes, typically. I do the reject/promote run the first time through, culling the crap. The second pass, I’m looking for stuff that is two-star level: something about the frame catches my eye, and it’s either good as is or needs some cropping, tweaking, or other. And so-on until I get to at least three stars, sometimes four. Depends on the shoot and how much I’m looking to push out to Flickr—sometimes three stars is my bar, and sometimes it’s four. But with just a bare minimum of movement, I can fly through the editing.

What do I use other than the PowerMates? Well, besides Full Screen, I use the C shortcut to fire up the cropping tool and the ` to bring up the loupe. Between those two, plus using all of my 24″ of iMac real estate, I can power through stuff faster than I ever have—and I’m just getting started at doing this.

The beauty of the PowerMates is that you can program them to do lots of things—volume controls, keyboard shortcuts, scrolling. You’ve got global settings and program-specific ones. I’m just scratching the surface.

I’m hoping that having a new toy to play with is going to cause me to write more. I’m about ready to write about some of the things I haven’t been writing about lately, but I guess I need to hold off a bit more. Anyway… thanks to the WP guys. [And yes, I waited to post this until all the WP installs that I control on the box were upgraded. I think the count's now about 85. Yeesh.]

1. My working instance, with tabs for my Tasks install—soon to be a TasksPro instance, but anyway—along with a tab open to Facebook and GFMorris.net so I have access to all the stuff in my sidebar. If I’m directly working something else, I’ll have that work open in other tabs in that instance. [As I write, I have a tab open to my WP install here on IJSM.org.]
2. My feed-based instance, with tabs for whatever I’ve found interesting in NetNewsWire. This instance sometimes has no tabs open at all, and has an empty tab window, waiting for directions. Other times, it’s got 10-30 tabs open, depending on how aggressively I’ve clicked tabs that day.

This hasn’t made a ton of sense to me lately, mainly because I’ve gotten addicted to hiding programs that I’m not actively working in but want to keep running. Now, if I’m posting about something I just read, it’s got value: I happy Cmd-` between the browser instances. [Oh Cmd-`, how I love thee. I love thee more than I love Jeremy Casella's new album, and I love it very much.] But I could just as easily Cmd-Tab.

[Yes, yes, I've made a dreadfully long conclusion with a number of rabbit trails---but this is how I am, people. If this feels unfamiliar to you, clearly you and I have never had a conversation in person.]

Anyhow, with that advent of Camino 1.5 and Camino’s wicked awesome how-to on Firefox-to-Camino migration, I’m thinking about going to a work instance of Firefox and a feeds instance of Camino—and that way, when I don’t have feeds open, I can quit Camino and keep working. Call me weird, but I like having a Firefox instance that’s virtually the same across my Windows machine at work and my home machine—I want the same workspace for browser stuff. But in Camino, I’m just browsing, y’know? And feed-reading seems perfect for that, because I’m … just browsing.

One thing that some folks—namely Rae and Chris—have given me crap about is using a client-side reader again. It seems so 2004, no? But I find that feed-reading has nothing to do with what I do for work, so I don’t need to do it during work hours. [And if you've tried to catch me on IM during business hours, like Alex and Mark have, you've figured out that I'm terribly busy at work. ] So I leave it for at-home use, and that’s it. Admittedly, I should have NNW instances on both my mini and my iBook so I can sync up through Newsgator Online—I hear that groaning from the Front Range! —because there are times when I’m on the road and would like to have my feeds, and I would also like to not have to have NNW up 100% of the time [which I have to do to keep up with my ETree and DIME feeds]. Most days, I come home to 400+ feeds, but I’m hoping that NNW3 will help me pare the feeds that I really don’t do anything with.

Okay, that was terribly disjointed. But it’s IJSM.org, and you’re used to that. :post:

Suffice it to say that I’m still a very happy Tasks user. If I have a browser open, I have a tab open to Tasks. [Yes, Alex, you can use that as a testimonial pull-quote.]

The best thing about resolving not to Really Try and Read all this stuff? I missed almost all the early bitching about the iPhone. [Yes, based on what I saw in the Keynote, I'll buy one; I'm already a Cingular customer, so I'm used to their rates and it's not going to be a huge cost increase over my Treo 650. Plus, it'll be something other than my Treo 650, which is a good thing. I keep waiting for Unit #3 to die on me.]

[And yes, I say it organIzation, like I'm from Mississauga or something.]

That said, I have felt like doing not much of anything since getting home; after some sleep to knock down the pain/dizziness, I woke up sweaty—why the hell are we pushing 80F in the last week of November? Please explain—just in time for my next medication run. Woooo. The wick still annoys the hell out of me, but it’s getting better. Part of the issue right now is swelling [from irritation] in the area behind and under my ear, which I’m treating with heat. [I just looked it up on WebMD, and maybe I should be doing that with cold. Dammit. But it feels better.] I’ll stay awake until as close to midnight as I can, take the next round of drops, and crash. [I'm so in polyphasic sleep right now, heh.]

In other news, I’ve whittled my new-item backlog in NNW down to 3003. The reason that my migration is taking a long time is because I’m having to switch from FeedLounge’s superior tag-cloud-style filing system for feeds back to a tree-like structure. I will be very, very, very honest: not wanting to leave a tag-cloud system kept me on FL for the last … six-to-eight weeks. When I first found out that Alex was leaving FeedLounge—okay, actually before it was public, back when I was spending time talking to both Alex and Scott on the phone about it, agreeing with how both of them felt about the situation [probably much to their consternation, heh]—I made some preliminary looks to moving, and everything told me that I wanted to stay with what I’d been using.

But … well, at some point, the features of actually, oh, getting your feeds to actually aggregate trump everything else. Tonight, I found that one of my RMFO-Bloggers had 15 spammy comments that were just sitting there, all because FL hadn’t been aggregating his comment feed for me.

So anyway … the transition to a tag-style architecture to a tree is a slow one. Essentially, what I’ve done with every feed I’ve cleared so far is put it into a lowest-common-denominator group in NNW, which has typically been firstname_lastname. I will, at some point in the future, begin organically grouping these folks back into trees. [I've actually started with all the RMFO-Blogs feeds that I follow.] Essentially, I’ve gotten back to a flat structure, which I’ll then go back to treeing.

Good gracious, when are more people going to start supporting tag-style architectures? It may be a hard problem—I honestly don’t know—but it makes so, so, so much sense. Kottke.org’s remaindered links? I want those in “jason_kottke” and “linklog”, because sometimes I feel like perusing all the linklogs I follow, and sometimes, I want just Jason’s editorial voice. The same way with groups of my friends—I want Jonathan and Ashley in both “cabal” and “creekmores”, because sometimes I want to catch up with all my friends, and sometimes, I just want to know about what’s going on down the road from me. And best of all, I want my Bruins-related feeds from boston.com in “boston”, “bruins”, “hockey”, “nhl”, and “sports”, depending on what mood I’m in. [Why the bifurcation of "hockey" and "nhl"? Hell, I follow and eat/live/breathe college hockey, people.]

When one first encounters tag-style architectures, it seems a bit much, but so can treeing … you can get very, very specific with trees. Why do I prefer tag-style architectures? They slice horizontally and vertically.

So anyway, incoherent rambling over. I’m suck it up with going away from tag-style. I’m in mourning, but not enough to switch back. Right now, I’m fixing everything in NNW, essentially doing all my feed-reading at home [which is fine, because I'm busy at work], and then hoping to go to FeedDemon soon and have this setup all completely done so the OPML import into FD is a thing of simplicity when I’m ready for it.

Leave all the questions that I’m sure you’ll have in the comments. I’ll answer at-length soon. But in short, enough has proven to be enough.

Kudos as always, AK.

Email is conversational and collaborative, but ephemeral. Wikis can be somewhat disruptive to the flow of communication in a group, but are great at recording a first draft of institutional memory.

– Jeffrey Veen: “People use software they like”

Whoa. I now understand why I use TasksPro, in some ways, like a wiki.

I imagine that I’ll be to 20,000 tasks created by the end of February at this rate.

All this because of WordPress. WordPress is the marijuana of the personal productivity software marketplace.

There’s something strangely satisfying in that. And yes, I’m a geek.

Let me give you my first-day-using thoughts, of which there are three:

1. OMFG, THIS IS AWESOME!!!
2. I often forget that I am in a browser. Like, all the time. When tagging a feed, I am prone to mouse-over the feed in the left pane and right-click, like I expect that to do something. I’m doing this all the bloody time. Alex and Scott have done it—one of the highest class of Web applications where you forget you’re in a browser. It’s … crazy.
3. Feed on Feeds? What’s that again? About ten minutes after Alex pinged me yesterday to dump my OPML into FL and then start using it, I was ready to uninstall FoF. This is like going from a go-kart to a BMW.

More effusive praise (and screenshots!) later … I still have a lot of feeds to tag, items to mark read, and the like. If you IM me today, expect me to be very distracted as I lose myself in FL.

But having tools to track your progress? That’s awesome.

New versions of Tasks and TasksPro are in the offing. Don’t ask me how I know.

There are two ways of handling the behavior of the short-lived part:

1. Die after N. Let the user say, “I want to follow comments on this entry via this feed for N days; after that, unsubscribe from that feed.” Seems easily doable.
2. Die N $time after comments stop. Let the user say, “I want to follow comments on this feed for a couple of days after people stop replying to it; after N $time, the thread is clearly dead, so let’s stop polling it.” This way, you follow a comment feed as long as it’s active. You could even have the software do a rate-of-posting in comments to avoid the last-word types. [Not that I'm a last-worder or anything.]

Just thought I’d throw that bit of meat out there.

That’ll take a while to sort through, I’m sure.

I’ve been using Steve’s recommendation: /usr/local/bin/GET -C user:password http://domain.tld/path/to/fof/update-quiet.php

I’m now using: wget –quiet http://user:password@domain.tld/path/to/fof/update-quiet.php

The latter seems to work far faster, and wget is specifically designed to pull files via HTTP.

I probably would have done this all along if I’d realized how to do HTTP authentication in an URL. Duh.