Technology
The Consumerist, a website dedicated to helping consumers, posted an article titled 22 Confessions Of A Former Dell Sales Manager which is basically a bunch of tips from a former manager of a Dell kiosk about how to go about purchasing a new computer from Dell. Apparently, someone from Dell got whiff of this article and asked the site to remove it. Of course, the request was refused, and instead, The Consumerist posted the email thread as well.

Personal Health and Productivity

For the Parents out there, Men’s Health Magazine has a list of 23 tools for life to pass on to your kids. It;s a pretty interesting list. Some of the items are fairly obvious, but it’s a good read nonetheless… and makes for good reference.

If you are looking to cut a few lbs(like me), personal productivity site – LifeHack.org – has 10 Diet Hacks to Keep You Slim and Trim.

Along with Lifehack, another one of my daily reads is Zen Habits. I have spoken before about how I was interested in the “Getting Things Done” methodology, and how I was trying to implement it in my daily life. If you are overwhelmed and interested in possibly using GTD to be more productive, Zen Habits has posted a GTD FAQ to help you get started. If you read the FAQ, and are interested, they have also proclaimed Tuesday GTD Tips Day.

Miscellaneous Fun and Entertainment

Ever since I was a little boy, I was a Sci-Fi/Fantasy fan. I have read Lord of the Rings too many times to count, I introduced my kids to the Star Wars Saga, ant to this day, if I find an episode of any of the Star Trek iterations on TV, that channel stays locked in. Now I wouldn’t call myself a full fledged ‘Trekkie’ (or Trekker as some prefer), but I am a big fan of most all of the series.

Wil Wheaton, the actor who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, author, blogger, poker player, and a very active member of the internet community – recently posted an article on why this year is A Good Year to be a Trekkie. He also posted a personal 2-part column on Suicide Girls about his latest visit to Paramount Studios and his eventual coaster ride down memory lane. You can read the story yourself Here(Part1) and Here(Part2). Warning: While the linked articles are tame, the site it is hosted on is not – and definitely has some sections that are NSFW! Make sure you are at home and away from the kids… just to be safe.

Ain’t It Cool News has a inside look at Batman’s new suit for the upcoming movie, The Dark Knight.

GigaOM has a list of the 10 Most Popular Massively Multiplayer Online Worlds. I personally have not taken the jump into MMOs, but those who I know that have – have jumped far… and deep. I guess that I’m just old school… the thought of buying software and then paying a subscription to play is just unnerving. Maybe that is the reason why RuneScape and Guild Wars are on the list. The online play is free…

And last – but possibly the best:
The San Fransisco Chronicle posted an article today on how a victim of identity theft found, and eventually caught the thief. Kudos to Ms. Lodrick for her determination, and maybe a warning to the customer service dept for Wells Fargo bank.

Whew… That’s probably the most content I’ve posted in a while!! I bet you now have a ton of tabs open in your browser! (you do know about tabbed browsing, don’t you? If not, do yourself a favor and get a decent web browser like firefox or opera.)
[tags]link-day, id-theft, dell, MMO, gaming, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Wil-Wheaton, gtd[/tags]

MindMeister is a new mind mapping webapp that lets you share your mind maps with others on the web. It also lets you import and export mind maps to and from Freemind – which I currently use, and Mind Manager.

Thinking Rock is a great piece of software strictly for GTD. I have demoed this before, and liked it, but I felt I needed to use the same system for both Home and Work. The problem is that at work, I use a Gentoo Linux workstation, and at home – until I buy my new PC, I’m still using windows. Luckily, someone in the Gentoo community decided to create an ebuild for Thinking Rock. I will be installing it at work this week and testing it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

On another Note, WordPress now has an official repository for plugins that can be used with their wonderful blogging software. If you have a wordpress blog, you will want to add this to your bookmarks.
[tags]gtd, wordpress[/tags]

Amy had to take Will5.7 to the doctor yesterday. Turns out that he has strep now. Hopefully with the antibiotics, he will be well enough to return to school on Monday. Still – no matter how many children you have, nothing frightens a parent like a child with a 104 degree temp.

I think Bill Harris summed it up quite well on his blog last night.

Anyways, I’d like to thank Terry and Jay for the well wishes. We’re toughing it out and I think that we are on the last legs of this latest round.

Now for some more stuff…

GTD
I have been having trouble getting some reading time, but just implementing what I have read has already shown a tremendous difference! My work desk is clean and uncluttered, and my projects seem to be flowing much more smoothly.

I found a real nice starting point from Zen Habits called Beginner’s Guide to GTD which is basically a compilation of web links for those of us just starting out with GTD.

So far, the only software tools I’ve been using are Outlook, Remember the Milk and Freemind. I may end up changing my setup within Remember the Milk by using both contexts and projects as tags and then creating “smart lists” via the tags.

Family

Both Mom and Dad are now back from their annual trip to the Philippines. Every year, they take a spend a month or two back in their home country to go on a Medical Mission and spend some time with family. A Medical Mission is where a small group of doctors and medical staff travel across certain regions of a country and give medical care to those in need.

I got some time to look at some of the pictures Dad had taken while he was there and I have to say, I truly admire both Mom and Dad for the work they do there. The amount of people in need – and the amount of care needed over there is just overwhelming.

Normally, when Mom and Dad get home from one of these trips, I don’t see or hear from them for a couple days. They usually need time to recover from the jet-lag. This time however, they got straight back on the road to drive to Knoxville to pick up my Tita(Aunt) Fely and then drove back the next day, and then today are flying to New Jersey to attend my Cousin Apollo’s wedding. What a busy pair! I think that they are more active now than they were before they retired!

Anniversary
My wife and I quietly celebrated our 9th anniversary this past Monday. Actually, the celebration consisted of, “Happy Anniversary!”… right before we both went to sleep. Hopefully we can get some time this weekend to go out and celebrate properly.
[tags]gtd, medical-mission, Philippines[/tags]

Getting Things Done: If you have followed this blog, you know that recently, I have been trying to get more organized and be more productive. This has been a slow process, but lately, I discovered a method called Getting Things Done. I just bought the book this weekend after going from store to store and finding it sold out. Thank the Lord for Barnes and Noble! I had come extremely close to resigning the fact that it was nowhere local and I’d have to order it from Amazon.com and wait for it to arrive.

Anyways, while researching GTD, I ran into a great little article from geektronica.com that introduced me to this great little webapp called Remember the Milk. By following the geektronica article, I have begun my voyage into GTD by integrating RtM with my Google Calendar, and also set it up to remind me of upcoming tasks via email. While I haven’t finished the book, this has been a great first step, and I am already seeing some positive results. I’m actually very excited about delving deeper into GTD and getting past this chaos and moving towards less stress.

Invasion of the Sharpie Snatchers: My Brother-in-law has put up a great little story that starts here and continues on with this post and finishes off with a funny slideshow of the aftermath. This is truly great stuff!

The Palomares Bunch: Lastly, I had promised a dedicated post on the “big” goings-on here at the Palomares homefront. Instead, I thought it would be better if I skip the gory details and just say that we now have two new children in our household. No – Amy and I aren’t THAT fast! Due to some rather unfortunate series of events, my niece and nephew, Keri and Zackary, will be staying with us for at least about a month or so… with the “or so” being the operative words. Needless to say, this past week has been an adjustment period for all of us. We have all worked hard to adjust with 7-8(and sometimes more) people always in the house and it is finally paying off. The new children are starting to get used to their new routines, and we are getting used to having two new young’uns here. Heh…Terry – if you think 2 boys are a handful, try three… ages 5, 7, and 9! Now imagine them all in the same room and trying to get them all to go to sleep!

I have also had to take a quick refresher course on the substitution method when solving linear equations.

Man I hadn’t touched that stuff in a looong time!

As I mentioned, after March 15th we should know a little more as to what the kids’ future living status will be. Either way, we are very happy to be helping these kids in their time of need and will gladly do so for as long as it takes. I have spoken many times before on the importance of family, and this is just a small example of what I mean.
[tags]GTD, rememberthemilk, cousins, terry, planet3rry[/tags]

Well for the past few months, that’s exactly how I’ve been feeling. I haven’t wanted to go to work, and when I was at work, I wasn’t very productive. When I got home, all I wanted to do was veg in front of the TV or surf the net. In doing so, both my family and career have suffered in the past few months. To add on to that, All the weight that I had lost from July to October(I had lost almost 20lbs.) has come back. I’m not going to waste my time trying to pinpoint the cause of this problem. I’m not going to blame it on laziness or depression or anything like that. The fact of the matter is that I’m in this hole, and I need to dig my way our of it.

I think that what I need is more structure -a more efficient schedule, if you will. My life is chaotic. I mean, I have a daily routine – I get up, go to work, come home, eat dinner, stay up later than I should, go to sleep… rinse and repeat. Over time, my life has gotten busier, and I haven’t gotten any more productive. Now, I have a ton of things on my plate and not enough time to accomplish much of anything. There are still a ton of things that need to be done to my house and my projects at work are piling up on me.

I’m overwhelmed… and this is affecting me in every way possible.

In an effort to find my way back to the light, I have been researching ways to get better organized. In my research, I came across a “method” called Getting Things Done. Now GTD is something that interests me, and seems to be pretty popular. So today, I went to the local bookstore in search for David Allen’s book. Unfortunately, both Books-a-Million and Waldenbooks didn’t have it in stock, so I opted for his other book, “Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life“.

I start reading tonight.

I’m not saying that this is the Holy Grail for getting my life in order, but I think it is a start. I need to do this… for my family’s sake at the very least. They suffer the most from all of this and if there’s one thing I won’t stand for, is letting my family suffer if I can change it….

Heh, maybe I found my motivation after all…