The first time I used a computer was in 1962 when I was 11 years old. It was not convenient: my Dad had to take me to his office to use one of the early timesharing systems using a local teletype machine with punched tape for saving and reloading stuff. A few years later I took an extension course at a local UC campus, FORTRAN with punched cards with nice keypunch facilities: definitely a large improvement! In the 1980s life really got good: my own Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine and an Internet connection. In the decades starting in 1990 and 2000 there were continual improvements but progress was gradual: better Internet connections, the development of the Web, improvements in software tools like code repositories, IDEs, etc. Skipping ahead to the present time, I am trying to adjust my digital life, including my work and writing flows, to a more mobile lifestyle. Probably the biggest change for me is that I used to keep just about everything that I worked with and touched in a reposit...

We all have things that we are proud of professionally. For me this is largely being proud of process and some achievements. My process is one of focussing down on a (very) few things and getting them done efficiently and then spending time "playing" with new technologies and working on new ideas. These are two very different kinds of work and I approach them differently. I have read a lot of material on "getting stuff done" and I have used other people's productivity software. For to-do lists I like the simplicity of just using GMail's "Tasks" features. All other projects that I have tried have many features that I don't need or care about and miss some things that I need. Since I focus on just one or two things per (work) day, I want a system that helps me to manage just a few things. This will definitely be a "scratch my own itch" style project. It will take at least a month until I get a public beta ready, but I do have a placehol...

Jason Fried's and David Heinemeier Hansson's new book "REWORK" is great - a must read for web developers and entrepreneurs. Their basic message is to stay focused on what you really need to get done and eliminate as many distractions as possible. As a result of reading this book I have changed a few non-optimal habits: I made a big push to finish my current book so that I could concentrate on my current development project. For my current project of version two of my cookingspce.com web portal, I reverted to Ruby 1.8.7 to avoid a few small ongoing Ruby 1.9.1 problems, updated to a newer version of Rails to get some bug fixes, using Heroku and not deploying it myself, removing almost as many old features as the number of new features I am adding, adding mobile phone support for easy recipe access and a shopping list manager, and more "AI" in presenting data and auto-organizing shopping lists (scratching my own itch: working on the features that I want mysel...