After a relatively long hiatus, I’ve return to my blog!

My new year gift to you is……

Apps for the Masses!

A new (and free) community - driven guide reflects the new look and features present in Ubuntu 11.10:

If this is the future…I’m definitely afraid.  I truly feel the need for change, awareness and education about being ‘programmed’ is at a critical junction.

If you have kid – please take him or her outside to the park to play today. Don’t let them sit in front of a screen, they’ll be doing that for the majority of their lives – they don’t need that now.

Just for fun: A picture of me at the age of 2ish playing outside without the knowledge of Ipads or computers! Oh My! Shocking! I think I turned out alright though

I too suffer from RSI and unfortunately have experience the ‘bad’ side – extreme pain and loss of hand mobility. After going through ‘traditional’ methods to help alleviate the pain, I learned that common methods, like stretching would only deliver temporary relief and in the long run didn’t bring about improvements. So I set out to find the solution that would deliver positive results and actually improve your RSI.

Before we get ahead of our selves, I’ll include some explanation about RSI – Or you can skip this section and scroll down to the first of three tips!

What Can I Do to Reverse My RSI?

By reducing/improving/eliminating the risk factors we should be able to achieve some great results.

Force – I’m assuming you aren’t pounding excessively heavy on your keyboard. Merely lightly tapping the keys with enough force for the key to engage your command. Until we move to touch screens, voice control, eye movement control no really improvements can be made for this factor.

Repetition – A Big-y for sure the solution to follow

Duration – A another huge one and the solution to follow

Work Posture – I would say the majority of us don’t have our computer/desk setup to be optimal for us but I won’t get into lengthy detail on how to do this. If you are interested improving your work posture/set up then I check out this these links.

Computer Ergonomics

WikiHow

One thing I’ve noticed – as I do have my desk/computer set up to meet these requirements – is after a period of time lets say 1 hour your body starts to get ‘tired.’ I know you aren’t exerting excessive physical activity but to hold any position still for any length of time will tire the body. So what ends up happening is the moving, shifting, turning, slouching that inevitably happens from staying in one position for too long and thus the result is a less than optimal work posture even though your computer set up started out as ‘ideal.’

Local Contact Stress – I’m assuming your wrist or arm is not being directed impacted by a hard object. IE your wrist is not resting on the edge of desk. This would be considered local contact stress and can cause extreme pain. If this is the case for you – I would seriously consider going through all the steps above for work posture for computer/desk set up.

Tip# 1 – Direct and Immediate Results!

Implementation: Easy

Difficulty Level: Easy

Results: Instant

As stated above, one of the key factors to RSI is a lack of frequent, short, rest, breaks through out the day. Many of us will work for hours on end and this is one of the major contributing factors to RSI pain. But taking short breaks at regular intervals has proven to drastically improve RSI. Now how on earth am I going to remember to take a 5min break every 30mins? When I’m in my  work ‘zone’ all that will just go out the window.

The solution…. Work Rave!!

Bonus: If you are an Ubuntu user go to Software Center type in WorkRave and presto instant RSI relief!!

I have been using it for a few years now and have recommended to many friends who also enjoy it.

It’s small, it’s simple, it does the job!

A friend of mine uses the breaks to take mini meditation breaks, another friend uses it as a cue to stand and stretch and another uses it as a cue to take quick walks up and down the stairs.

Breaks are only the first step but before we get too ahead of ourselves – Just start with that.

My next 2 posts will show you some cool techniques that you can do during those breaks. Taking regular breaks is merely a maintenance program – you won’t get worse (finger’s crossed) but you won’t get significantly better either. For me that just wasn’t good enough, naturally I took it to the next level.

Teaser: No, it’s not stretching! Like 99% of the population, I hate stretching and I recently learned why most people hate it. They do it incorrectly thus ineffectively thus they don’t see any results. We all want to see results and improvements – who doesn’t? Stay tuned for the next post…and Tip #2

Astrological Age? Age of Aquarius? New Age? What?

I thought that happened in the ’60′s.

My friends gave me a quick simplified explanation which I won’t even attempt to re-explain. So here’s wiki to do it in a much better manner than I ever could.

An astrological age is a time period which astrology postulates parallels major changes in the development of Earth’s inhabitants, particularly relating to culture, society and politics. There are twelve astrological ages corresponding to the twelve zodiacal signs in western astrology. At the completion of one cycle of twelve astrological ages, the cycle repeats itself. Astrological ages occur because of a phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes. One complete period of this precession is called a Great Year or Platonic Year of about 25,920 years.

Each astrological age is approximately 2,150 years long, on average, but there are various methods of calculating this length that may yield longer or shorter time spans depending upon the technique used.

There are two broad approaches about the effects upon the world due to the astrological ages. Some astrologers believe the changes upon Earth are caused and marked by the influences of the given astrological sign, associated with the Age, while other astrologers do not follow the causative model and believe it is a matter of synchronicity.

Ok… so what does the Age of Aquarius hold for us?  Predictions of peace, enlightenment, doom or end of the world?

Now, I’m a ‘glass half full’ kind of a girl and lean towards the positive ideals that represent the Age of Aquarius:

The Age of Freedom, Technology, and the Water Bearer.

There is an expectation that the Aquarian age will usher in a period of group consciousness.

Traits of Aquarius such as being ‘humanitarian’ but at the same time ‘unemotional’ may indicate to the emergence of active intergovernmental organisations and global solidarity movements. Alternatively, it may indicate individual New Age spiritual awakening en masse, which although is not organized, spontaneously forms a worldwide ‘humanitarian’ yet ‘unemotional’ era of spiritual clarity and spontaneous friendship.

Wiki Source:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrological_age

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Aquarius

My last upgrade to 11.04 – has brought my acer netbook to a grinding halt. Literally, waiting minutes for it to load or process – painful! A fellow UVLC member heard of my pain and said why don’t you try Lubuntu 11.10 – it just might just do the trick. No harm in trying… in it went next to 11.04 – just in case…fingers crossed…

Three weeks later, I’m just lovin’ it! Yes it’s bare bones – no flashy unity or graphics but I’m more than willing to give all that up for speed.

The one thing that I don’t particulary like is the ‘lack there of’ – Software Centre. I don’t come from the days of synaptic package manager and so its quite foreign and more difficult for me. I guess I’ll get use to it but I do really like the simplicity and clean design of the software centre.

Whenever, I’m using software, I’m always thinking of my friends and family – Would they like this? Would it be easy for them? What things will they dislike? Is anything especially ‘annoying’? But of all the questions, the #1 thing they all want is that the software is reliable and consistent. When they turn their computer on, it does what its suppose to do time and time again without fail. In some ways, its kind of paradox that the first thing they say to me is that they’ll only try Ubuntu (or varying flavours) if its reilable and consistent when they currently live with Windows which couldn’t deliver less reliablility and consistency. It’s the familarity and ‘comfort’ of Windows – knowing that its only going to give them ‘X’ but at least they know they are going to get that. Trying to convince them otherwise is honestly a futile, tireless, waste of my energy. Now, I look for the ‘right people’ the ones that are:

• Teetering on the edge as their patience with their Windows system draws ever thinner
• Asking the question: Can I have something that is better than what I have now?
• Open and ready to learn about an alternative

Even if the person meets these 3 key criteria there is still a huge amount of fear and hesitation. It’s only natural – change is a scary place for people.

Now the next question is how do we take them from a scary place to a comfy place?

After a small haitus which included a short holiday, rest and recovery, I’m back to blogging. I was planning to post last week but just didn’t feel ‘inspired’ to write. However, this week, after a much needed 3 day weekend I’m back blogging and plan to be more regular at posting. It all sounds nice in theory….we’ll see how it goes.

Being away for so long, you probably thought I must be living blissfully in email heaven!

Well, I wish that was the case, one week after posting Part 2 – My Email Wish List I fell at the first hurdle. A few things were going awry. I had an old gmail account that I had decactived but Thunderbird kept using as the default and thus continued to harass me for a password that was always invalid. I had added in my new gmail account but needed to get rid of my old account. Not too difficult to resolve but not the most obvious to a person with limited technical knowledge. Then I tried to respond to a new email and found out I could receive but not send out emails. Another week was spent trying to resolve this basic sending and receiving problem. On the eve of my holiday I stumbled upon the solution.  But prior to that I was starting to become frustrated, agitated and angry. I was on the verge of writing a rant post about if basic functionality such as sending and receiving email from my gmail can not be resolved how on earth am I going to ‘sell’ the idea to get off web mail? It’s just not possible. The only reason I got it to work was because I have patience, perseverance and an genuine interest in solving the problem. I know the majority of end users (Ick! I hate that name – end user) do not have this and therefore I would have lost more than half of the potentially interested people at the very first hurdle.

But I’m happy to say, that from that day forward  - for about 2 weeks now – I’ve been using Thunderbird. My email inbox has exceed 55+ unread and nothing is organized but I now see a small glimmer of hope and light at the other end. On to the next step!

There are certainly days that I wish we could all go back to when email didn’t exist! However, email is here to stay – so let’s get it under control!

After sketching out my ideas and thoughts on paper – I was able to come up with my email wish list. Exactly what I would really love my email manager to do!

Now this is still the planning/wish list phase. The next step will be to try and find solutions to make my wish list a reality. Most likely some of the things I wish for don’t exist but at least now I know what I’m looking for and therefore may even find a partial solution.

My Email Wish List…

Folders – Less is Best

I’ve decided on naming my folders by category and a few of these folders will have specific sub-folders. I tried to not go crazy on the number of folders and sub-folders and really thought about which categories are the most important to me. In total I have about 10 folders. This will probably flux a bit once I start organizing and sorting my email. I’m in this minimalist phase where I’m trying to just have things that I use frequently – this includes email and folders.

No More Priority or General In Box

This is a bold move but I am going to set up my email so that new email will automatically move to a predetermined specified folder. Based on the Sender’s Name this will determine which folder the email will move to. This way if I get new email in both the Travel Folder and the Career Folder then I know that the email in Career Folder would be more important so I would attend to those emails first and possibly days later I would attend to the new emails in the Travel folder. The good thing about this system is that it takes out that extra step of me having to move my email to each folder every time mail comes in. It arrives already in the ‘right’ place.

In Gmail, one email could be given multiple labels – at first I thought this is cool and I’m quite sure Thunderbird would allow for one piece of email to have multiple tags or live in several folders. But over time the problem was I couldn’t ever really find my email. Sometimes I would label it by category for example Fitness. Then a few days later I may label a similar type of email by sender The Pilates Den. Then the day after I would label another email Pilates. This is how I ended up with such a mess of folders. I didn’t plan out how my email should be labelled I just did it quickly on a whim each day in hopes of just moving them out of my priority/inbox as quickly as possible. Yes I can of course do a general search but then I would have 50+ pilates/fitness/pilates den emails and of course I couldn’t remember exactly the content and so I’m clicking through all these emails, scrolling through the threads to try and find that one sentence about the details of Pilates Day event. Generally I would be lucky if I found the information – in most cases I would have given up as soon as I saw my search result turn up too many emails.

Which brings us to my next wish list item.

Searches that Return the ‘Right’ Information

Now I’m hoping by dumping all email into a Parent Category Folder – let’s continue with the Fitness Folder example and then have 3-4 sub folders labelled by specific Sender – 1) Pilates Den, 2) Divine Fitness 3) Surrey Pilates  I will be able to do searches on just the Pilates Den folder and hopefully find my information.

I think that if I keep to the system of only having parent folders titled as a category and sub-folders by specific sender name it will eliminate the confusion of having multiple labels, tags and folders associated to one piece of email. I may be wrong about this but I think we are just given too many ways to categorize our stuff and it just ends up making things overly complicated and in the end a frustrating experience.

I hear that minimalist voice coming out again

How Long Should My Email Live For

This is an interesting question that I never really thought about until recently. My work place initiated a software that has special folders and attached to these folders are retention schedules. Therefore any files placed in this folder (emails, docs, spreadsheets, pics etc) based on the date they are placed in the folder have a ‘life’ span. For example, a folder with a revenue classification would live for 10 years after that the file will be deleted. I know that emails don’t take up tonnes of space but if you look at all the different types of files you keep – how much of it do you really every look at or use again? I would say you only really use 25% of your stuff. And its probably all within the last year. Beyond that you rarely if ever look at it again.

Another example that is more tangible – go to your kitchen and open your cupboards – start with the bottom ones – in that cupboard when was the last time you used each item? Last week, last month, last year, can’t remember? Only count up the items you used in the last 6 months or less. How many items do you use frequently? Probably 25% is the average you will get. Again I’m all in favour of the less is more principle – I know some things need to be kept even if they aren’t being used but even these things after a certain amount of time when do they become so dated and irrelevant that you would not need to look at it again?

At this time I won’t be implementing a life span for my email but its some food for thought for the future.

That’s all I want for email organizing at this time. Doesn’t sound to grim now that I have sketched it out. But… we aren’t done yet.

Create To Do Lists

Rather than reading an email then flagging it with colors or even re-marking it as unread I want to find a way to consistently use a To Do List system. It would be nice if I could create a To Do List item and some where in the description area have it link to the exact email I need to respond to. This way I could attend to my action item and rather than having to try and sort through my email of flags or unread. I would just click a link/button and the email would appear. I would respond – send it – then check off that item on my To Do List. AH! That feels so good to check that item off!!

Calendar Link to To Do List Link to Email

I’m a calendar fanatic. I just have so many activities going on that if I don’t put it in my calendar then forget it, I probably won’t remember to do it. Today, just about all my appointments/meetings are scheduled by emails.

It would be so lovely to some how have the information from my email and to do list be integrated with my calendar. Then I could open up my daily calendar – see I have a meeting, open the item, quickly see the location and if needed I could click on the items (To Do List) and possibly the email(s) that were associated with that meeting. This way I would be able to refresh myself to what needs to be done/discussed etc.

The last two items are probably fictitious in nature but if I can even find a few solutions to address my To Do and Calendar fixation I would be much happier than I am now.

Now on to the guide to put my plan into action!!

I have found when its comes to situations like these the best solution is to turn off my computer, close the guide and clear I nice uncluttered space on my desk. Now, I’m not saying kick up your feet up and relax. No, there is still work that needs to be done, but it can be done with a simple pen and paper.

Right now I’m just focusing on the big picture. What email is really important to me and how do I want to ‘see’ it arrive each day?

I started by jotting down possible names of new file folders that I would want to organize my email as it comes in. You are probably thinking, but you already have 30 folders why not just use those?  Because I haven’t been using them to start with and I don’t need 30 that’s just excessive categorizing. I got that way by just making a new folder for each email in an attempt to organize my mail.

Next question, why don’t I keep Thunderbird open in front of me to see what kind of mail I get to help me build my new folders. You know what email is important to you – you don’t need to look at your email to list off the top of your head names or categories of those whom you communicate with regularly. If you have it open – you will be ‘confined’ and limited to the Thunderbird ‘structure.’

Right now all I’m doing is creating the process as to how I want to my email arrive in my mail box. Do I want it to automatically go to a specific folder? Do I want the emails to be sorted into folders by Name or Category? Should I have a parent folder and a few (3 or less) child folders? If I use a priority folder, what will be my process after reading that email?

I love to open emails and then mark them with flags/stars/colors/unread to remind me that action is still pending – kind of like a To Do List – but now even this type of system is becoming unmanageable. I would love to get away from this email To Do List and create a system where I would know what items I still need to attend to. I love my google calendar but would like to integrate a calendar and contacts all in Thunderbird so that everything is in one place.

WOW!!! That’s a pretty good wish list there. You can, of course, create and add anything you feel would make your email life better.

My next post I’ll layout my dream email life. Following that I attempt to bring my dream to reality.

As of today, 32 is the number of unread personal emails sitting in my gmail inbox. I am drowning in my email and soon it will become a daunting task that I won’t want to attend to. Why do I have so many unanswered emails?

Like most people, I have two primary emails accounts that I use daily. One for work and one for personal. At work, email is the primary means of communication and I can have upwards of 50+ emails a day. Obviously, they are time sensitive and require me to respond daily. By the time I get home and turn on my computer, the last thing I want to do after 8hrs of email is manage my personal email account. And thus the count for my personal email box is now pushing a dangerously high and unmanageable number.

Being the editor of the UVLC Thunderbird User Guide you would think I would be more proficient in Thunderbird and use it daily.  Yes, I read and tested the guide but shortly after the release of the guide I fell on and off Thunderbird email because a few things, just weren’t in my favour.

First, I was mainly checking email on a computer where I wasn’t allowed to install TB and thus just used defaulted to web mail.

Second, have you seen the length and depth of the UVLC TB Guide?!?! Its huge! Who wants to spend hours going through and reading all that?

Third, I have a personal HATE for email ever since it has become the primary mode of written communication. My favourite thing to do is to check the box next to the message and hit Delete. I don’t even open the email – Yes, I get a strange sense of enjoyment and pleasure out of it.

However, my circumstances have recently changed so I can finally get on TB permanently – Finally!

The upcoming posts will showcase how to join me in getting your email under control – maybe I’ll come up with a Top 10 ‘Bang for Your Buck’ Tips but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.

Ack! My unread emails just jumped to 38 while writing this! Let’s get started!

This will be my first time organizing a Software Freedom Day (SFD) awareness campaign. There are tonnes of events and festivities going on in the city and I’m trying to find one I can piggy back off of.  This would obviously amplify our efforts since larger crowds would prefer to come out for a large festival rather than just having a single booth in a random area.

After searching high and low – I found the perfect event! And its in high density primo location here in the city. Park (ing) Day 2011 in collaboration with Vancouver Public Space Network. I hope this all works out… a first time at anything tends to be ‘interesting’ – hahaha…

To all my Vancouver friends – Yes I see the  irony in this.

In addition, this will be our first year to try to get some media coverage either by local radio/tv/papers.

I’ve been reading the SFD start guide and it suggests to have a theme to help keep the promotions and marketing focused. I’ve got just the ‘right’ theme No not going to tell you yet. Just have to wait till September for the post.

Recently, I’ve been reading up on flash mobs. A kissing flash mob was done here just last Saturday and I was told a few years ago a pillow fight. I wonder if there was some way to create Ubuntu flash mob that would attract people?

Some food for thought.