Well, I actually made one of my goals for January. I not only got my email inbox down to 100, I got it to my secondary goal of 75!
A lot of what’s left are to-do items for my Flash website. (Some reminders I sent to myself, some info people sent me.) I should either find time to do them, or add them to my current to-do list and remove them from my inbox.
Next goal: Inbox 50 by the end of February.
I’ve deleted redundant or trivial items, split some digests by topic, tagged, categorized and titled the rest, fixed typos and expanded abbreviations, reformatted quotes, links and lists, imported photos, and more…all in an attempt to make the archive a little more useful.
After trying to unify some of the more eclectic mixes of unrelated one-line remarks and links, I’ve decided it’s time to stop automatically importing “tweets” to the blog. Sure, the digests maintain quantity, but I think it’ll be better to keep the quality up instead. What makes a good status update doesn’t always make a good blog entry, and I’d frequently find myself either staying up late to edit that day’s “Line Items” post or rewriting it the following day. (Plus I was always worried about a bug in Twitter Tools that would cause a duplicate post about 30-50% of the time.)
I think the blog will be better off if I copy, expand or skip stuff from Twitter at my own pace and put it in a more suitable format to begin with.
If Your Password is “123456”, Just Make it “HackMe” (New York Times). Security researchers examine a list of 32 million passwords stolen from RockYou, and the most common are…well…pathetic. Things like “123456” (the most common), “abc123”, “password” and even “rockyou” (seriously!)
There’s been some slight improvement in the past decade, when the most common password was “12345” (the kind of combination an idiot has on his luggage). Now it’s got a whole extra digit. (Whee.)
Hmm, I wonder where “Chuck Norris” appears on the list?
(via @dixonium)
My email inbox is now below 100 messages. It’s kind of sad that this is actually an accomplishment!
I’m down to about 10 items from the past month, another 20 or so to-do items I’ve sent myself, 8 back-issues of This Is True that I missed the first time around, and a bunch of older stuff related to my Flash website.
The hard part isn’t the length of the list. The hard part is deciding, with each message, whether to toss it, file it, or keep it around so that I can act on it — and then actually following through!
I’m sort of hoping I can get it below 75 by the end of the month.
I’m burning an actual CD-ROM for the first time in…a really long time. With USB, fast Internet & external drives, I hardly ever need to. Even when I do need to burn an install disk for Linux, it’s usually a re-writable disc — and now that Fedora offers live upgrades, I don’t even have to do that very often.
Yeah, “Real Life Comics” is aptly named!
1. SpamAssassin has been marking mail from 2010 as “grossly in the future.” It’s been fixed in the beta for months, but they issued an emergency update over the holiday. Of course, if they’d done the test by using math instead of pattern matching, it wouldn’t have been an issue in the first place. (via Pobox)
2. A 2010 bug has caused problems with German credit cards. It seems we got complacent after Y2K and stopped worrying about date changes.
So, Google has announced the Nexus One phone. Let’s see how it stacks up against what I want in my next phone:
Sounds great!
Only one problem: there’s no keyboard. Android’s on-screen keyboard is decent enough, but I’m not quite ready to give up that physical keyboard just yet. (OTOH, I don’t want the Droid. I played with the keyboard a little at Best Buy a couple of weeks ago, and really didn’t like it.)
I’ll have to practice with the virtual keyboard on the G1 some more. If I can get used to it, this might be worth the upgrade.
