The practice of capturing inspiration in the moment is nothing new to artists and writers. After the Ojai Poetry Fest Fundraiser, I had a stimulating conversation with a fellow writer who also happens to be a journalist. As our chat got interesting, he whipped out a pad and paper, seemingly on reflex, and began to take notes. He was “off duty” in the sense that he wasn’t taking notes for a news story–but it got me thinking that if one is, indeed, a student of life, there is no “off duty.” And a good student takes good notes about subjects that fascinate. The difference GTD makes, of course, is that it presents a systematic approach for what to do with those notes–including tracking any resulting commitments to oneself or others, and executing appropriate action and regular review in order to make one’s dreams more than just a scribble on a notepad.

So, in case I haven’t said it lately, thank you, David, for bringing this methodology into my life, helping me to bring appropriate focus and attention to the many different worlds I inhabit. The gift of being more present in my life is truly precious.

This doesn’t just apply to technology, folks. Any poem I attempt that takes more than two minutes to write gets likewise round-filed. Clearly, haiku is about all I have time for, and usually without all that restrictive syllable-counting nonsense.

Speed poetry, like speed chess? Now there’s a perverse thought.

This post took 1:56.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

As such, it represents a culmination of many of the enterprise best practices for PHP, MySQL, and Linux that I have discussed over the years here on my blog, including: Design Patterns and object oriented code, Pear packages, a dash of Ajax, a lot of Security measures and some cryptography, lots of optimization, a powerful and scalable LAMP web server farm monitored by cacti, coding standards; all managed using a few extreme programming tactics, built around best-of-breed eCommerce packages, and with a robust mail queue mechanism delivering countless emails per day.

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory–we did it. And eager new members are already rolling in. Hats off to the team at David Allen Company. Good times ahead.

Yum:

tell application "iTunes"
	set thisTrack to current track
	set new_rating to (thisTrack's rating) + 20
	set thisTrack's rating to new_rating as integer
end tell

and Yuk:

tell application "iTunes"
	set thisTrack to current track
	set new_rating to (thisTrack's rating)--20
	set thisTrack's rating to new_rating as integer
	next track
end tell

compiled them as applications, and popped them in my Applications folder. After a Quicksilver refresh, I can now yum the songs I like, adding one star, and yuk the songs I don’t like, demoting them by one star and moving on to the next song. Eventually, this should help teach iTunes about what I want to hear when shuffling through large playlists. All without ever having to take iTunes out of background mode. How easy was that?

tell application "iTunes"
	next track
end tell

compiled them as an application called ‘skip’, and popped them in my Applications folder. After a catalog refresh, I can now invoke Quicksilver, type ‘sk’ (it auto-completes to ‘skip’), hit enter, and move to the next song. All without having to leave the application I live most of my life in … vi.

In fact, I used this framework to remedy something that was bothering me once I became better acquainted with Quicksilver: lack of browser-independent web searches. If you have been frustrated by not being able to use a browser other than Safari, OmniWeb, or Internet Explorer to display the results of Quicksilver Google searches, check out the AppleScript at the end of this article.
Quicksilver recommends creating a special bookmark to use as your method of displaying web searches. While Firefox users can download an additional plugin to catalog their Firefox bookmarks, using browser bookmarks to launch searches is still just a bit clunky, requiring three columns in Quicksilver to perform a search.

I decided it would be more elegant to let the user specify which browser to use at the operating system level, and found that in doing so I could simplify the process so that I only type four additional keystrokes (besides the invocation of Quicksilver and the search term itself) to get my search results displayed in the browser of my choice.

The resulting AppleScript should be placed in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions/ . If the “Actions” folder does not exist, create it. Then refresh the catalog using command-; then command-r (then command-w to close the preferences window).

From here, the sequence to get a Google search done is period (to enter static text mode), then the text to search, then tab, then ‘g’, then enter. Quick, painless Googling thanks to the flexible architecture of Quicksilver.

download qs_action_google.tar.gz