Terse Systems

I find it helpful to go over my projects as I finish them and think about possible improvements I could have made. Apart from the “don’t work so hard, you idiot” background music which I think is a constant to all consultants, regardless of what they do for a living, I’ve tried to put in systems that would mitigate if not ameliorate the stress of splitting my attention from working to, well, everything else.

That is, if something goes wrong, I want a backup system that catches it and makes nothing worse. For example… car insurance is paid every six months, with e-mail reminders. I have auto-pay on trash, cable, water, and power. All my financial records auto-balance themselves through Microsoft Money. I have a program called RSIGuard that stops me from wrecking my hands in a fit of absentmindedness. And then there’s the organizational system.

Why do I need all this stuff? Because I’m a flake. I cannot be relied upon to remember anything involving times and dates. I can tell you the plot of a Mr Men book from when I was six, but damned if I can remember when my brother got back from Europe. And of course, when I’m working insane hours I really don’t have a solid idea of time. I’ll try to phone customer service lines at 7 pm and eat dinner at midnight. And of course, I don’t have a lot of time free to fix things that go wrong, nor do I even have time (or brain) free to think about it.

Over the course of the last project, the following has happened:

Had my shoulder bag get ripped apart. These things come with a 10 year warranty, and it lasted five months until the strap gave way. Not the clip, the actual strap. That’s what I get for carrying a Sager around. People ask me if I work out, but no. I just don’t feel comfortable unless I’m wearing 30 pounds of computer equipment and books. I e-mailed Heritage and they sent me a new one a month later.

Missed a credit card payment. By one day, but I haven’t done that… ever. Ever ever ever. I always end up paying it in full during the month, and it works itself out. No more. I put in an auto-pay feature which will at least trickle money into the account if I haven’t paid in full. EDIT: Whoops, no I didn’t. I missed the closing date, not the payment date. Whew.

Saw some mind numbing, spirit crushing game shows. I couldn’t take reading (requires brain) or the Internet (ditto, also no built-in time limit) so that left TV. But at the hours I came home, there would be nothing on. I used to download Teen Titans episodes using Bittorrent, but between the codecs, corrupt downloads and disreputable teenagers it was time to give it a rest. I investigated the DVR and MythTV routes, and got a Tivo.

Lost my cellphone. I didn’t notice this until I tried to make a call and noticed it wasn’t there, and oh yeah, no-one had called me… recently. After a few days of searching for it, I accepted that I wasn’t going to find it again and had to get a new one. This turned out to be a huge pain: T-Mobile stopped selling the T610, and I wanted something bluetoothy so I could sync up my address book, and not a clamshell (because by the time I hear the phone and get it out of the bag, the damn thing goes to voicemail and a clamshell would only delay my response time). And you don’t get the phone free if you already have service… it costs you big time. My backup system for this was to get an equipment protection plan: insurance that says if you lose your phone, you get a new one.

Had the iQue go funny. The battery went from lasting days to lasting 30 minutes without a charger, and it frequently decided to freeze the display – something that requires hard reset to fix it. And one time even the hard reset didn’t work. Once, the entire thing reverted back to factory settings and gave me the heebee jeebies until I synced it back to the desktop and got my data back. It would have been better if it had simply died. The fact that it worked sometimes (and not even reliably) really threw me off. All my passwords were kept on the palm pilot. There was no provision for getting at passwords on a desktop machine. I record my hours on the iQue using Punch Time Clock, which has backups to the desktop and a desktop application, but still… really didn’t like the idea of recording my hours on it.

Had my laptop die. Again. The laptop died with an “Operating System Not Found” message. I switched to my personal desktop machine. The desktop died a week later.

Had no backups for a month. See laptop and desktop death. Backup configuration (cygwin rsync + config) was not in folders which were backed up. D’oh. Tasks to remind me to backup stuff not backed up. Backup really boring, forgettable activity involving loud, noisy external USB drive, needed on multiple computers. Got a Buffalo Linkstation and Second Copy.

The failure of the computers is what really threw me for a loop, and made recovering from everything else harder than it should have been. None of these things were fatal in themselves. Taken together, they really made a mess of my organization. I built the task system to be able to take one failure. I didn’t expect three. There was no provision for handling the lack of desktop, laptop AND palm pilot. It wasn’t that I couldn’t cobble something together, but more that I hadn’t had anything worked out beforehand. There was no backup plan in case these things failed.

I borrowed my father’s Palm Pilot for recording hours. I got the desktop functional again after a couple of days. With the laptop dead, I brought in the desktop into work and started coding on that as a short term measure. Sent back the laptop. This left me with no Windows boxes at home. I tried to get the iQue to sync with the Mac, but the damage was done. I had no clue what I was doing.

When I say I had no clue, I don’t mean I had a vague idea. I went from having a detailed list of every ball I was juggling to almost nothing. The recurring tasks that were fed into Ecco (backup computer every week, water plants) were not saved with the rest of the system, so I didn’t have little reminders queuing up in my list of things to do. I didn’t even have a single centralized place I could look.

And with the Powerbook, I was trying to come up with a system on the fly… and it wasn’t working. Even once you get past the problem of getting a Palm Pilot to communicate with the Powerbook, there weren’t any good desktop apps. It seems in any information organizer there are three basic operations that are just missed: search, sort and filter. I could find Mac applications with one or two, but never with all three.

So I fell back to Post-it notes and lists in spiral bound notebooks. This didn’t work so well. Didn’t capture calendar appointments (taxes, oil changes, etc) and didn’t give me adequate warning of the size of a feature (outliners scale a lot better than double spaced lines on paper – you can stick things in the middle and expand and contract them). And it was an unfamiliar system. If I had to do it again, I would have used the Hipster PDA system. Except that it didn’t notify me of events and appointments.

I can’t even tell you how many events and appointments I missed last month. It’s so bad I don’t even want to talk about it.

So I’m decompressing right now, and the people-blobs that go WAA-WAA-WAA like a Charlie Brown cartoon are turning back into people. I have a week to take care of things like laundry, taxes and why all my socks have holes in them, and then it’s on to the next project.