Jake Ludington’s Digital Lifestyle

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In the midst of the U.S. housing crisis, just over three years into living in Seattle, we decided it was time to put down more permanent roots and buy a house in the Pacific Northwest. While much of the initial search was focused on houses in the city of Seattle, we ended up buying a house on Bainbridge Island, which is in many ways like a small town connected to the city via a ferry. While I’ve been warned that I will regret living on an island as a slave to the ferry schedule, I find myself reminding the nay-sayers that I currently only leave my house for work-related commitments once a week, so I’m not really on a “normal” schedule.

Although I didn’t use their services for the transaction portion of the house search, I can’t imagine shopping for a house without the assistance of technology like Redfin. The site makes shopping for a house an absolute dream – you get great data on MLS listings with what I believe to be close to the same speed as agents get access to the information. Some big real estate company should buy them for their technology because I don’t think the idea of Redfin as real estate agent will hold up over time. I never once considered not using a real person as a real estate agent (we lucked out – Patrick Johnson from Century 21 was outstanding) because I wanted a real person I knew I could call on with questions. I didn’t feel like I’d get that same level of comfort using something like Redfin as my agent.

The other tech component of this recent real estate shopping experience I have mixed feelings about is LendingTree.com. They certainly deliver on getting a bunch of mortgage providers to contact you, but I get the feeling that they also sell your name to other services as well. Since using LendingTree.com, I’ve had a huge influx of what I consider junk mail in finance-related categories. I don’t have proof that Lending Tree played any role in this, but the coincidence is eerie. I did wind up going through a local lender as a result, which was also a great experience, so if I can figure out how to avoid forwarding the junk mail I think the net result will be well worth it.
If I’m a bit slow in answering email this week, it’s likely because I’m either painting or packing. Please be patient, I can assure you I’d rather be doing almost anything than either of those two projects.

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Important question – are you obsessed with finding ways to do things faster just because it’s faster, or is there an underlying meaning to your optimization?

Gina Trapani’s spearheading of the Lifehacker movement is a massive brain dump of solutions for optimizing every aspect of your life. As she emphasizes in her ETech talk, it’s important to look beyond being faster for the sake of being faster and actually look at how optimizations are truly making your life better. During the talk Gina runs down a list of what she calls the 7 habits of effective lifehackers (with apologies to Stephen Covey). Here’s the list of her seven items in bold, with my interpretation of each item following:

Have a system – Figure out what works for you to accomplish what you need to get done. This could be a system for processing your email daily or something simple like coming up with a surefire way to never forget your cellphone before you leave the house.

Get Things Out of Your Head – When you’re lying awake at night thinking about stuff, get up and write it down. Along the same lines if you see something outside during your day that you want to remember, write it down or use your camera phone so you don’t have to keep it in your head.

Put Stuff into Your System – You don’t need the perfect system, you simply need a system and you need to put stuff in that system. If your system is electronic, you can recover virtually anything later with search.

Parking on a Downward Slope – When you’re switching tasks, make it easy to switch back to the previous task. This is especially important at the end of the day – write a note to remember what the first thing you need to do tomorrow.

Build Strong Filters – implement filters to get rid of the stuff you don’t need. Whether it’s spam filtering or automated sorting, figure out ways to filter down to the stuff you actually need.

Clearing the Clutter – Get rid of the stuff you don’t need, only keep the stuff you need. If you have clutter that builds up, put it in a box in your closet or basement; if you don’t open that box 6 months later, throw it out or put the stuff on eBay.

Set Doable To Do Lists – Set goals that you can accomplish. Be very specific. Break down goals into subgoals so that you can accomplish parts and feel like you’ve accomplished something when you’re done.

Gina also recommends some great tools during her ETech talk. TextExpander for Mac users does auto replace of text (if you’re a Windows users, get ActiveWords for this function). QuickSilver automates a bunch of other stuff for Mac users (and ActiveWords can handle those tasks too). KeePassX (cross platform) is an encrypted solution for managing passwords (I like Roboform better, but also a great tool). And of course you can get a daily dose of great solutions at Lifehacker.com.

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For you Web app to be successful, you need to have interest from people who want to use it for porn, posting pictures of cats, and digital activism. If there’s no porn the tool likely doesn’t work. If it isn’t being used by activists, there’s likely some major failing with your app as well. And of course, all Web 2.0 apps are all about posting cute pictures of cats. To keep activism alive and unblocked online, raising the stakes by tying activism to something people really want (cute cats) goes along way to keeping the flow of information open. Or as Ethan Zuckerman put’s it in his Etech talk on activism, “When you block activist video adorable cats are collateral damage.” Silly notion or the reality of what people really care about? it’s hard to censor stuff on a per-URL basis. It’s far easier to block entire sites. If you block a popular site that is largely filled with cute cats and happens to have activism as well, you run the risk of making the users angry. For activists, the trick is driving up the cost of governments shutting down the medium of communication.

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Merci Hammon and Justin Hall are talking about surveillance gaming at Etech 2008. If you’ve played Xbox 360 games, one component of this is being able to see what games your friends are playing, comparing your achievement points to friends, and contact friends who you know are currently online. I know that I’m more motivated to complete a game I’m not really into if my friends currently have a higher gamer score as a result of the game. There’s something about “leveling up” by getting more achievement points than your friends. But what if you could get points for things in your daily life. 10 points for cleaning the toilet. 5 points for paying the power bill. Would you be more inclined to do things you don’t enjoy if there was a leveling up involved in doing it?

Justin and Merci are taking this concept to the Web with their PMOG game, rewarding you for visiting sites, offering interesting surprises for finding things on sites (kinda like geocaching for the Web without knowing the cache is there) combined with the randomness of StumbleUpon.

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“What happens when the random drug test is checking to make sure you’re taking the drugs you’re supposed to be?” – David Pescovitz. I’m sitting in the ETech Mind Hacks session listening to a bunch of smart people talking about the future of mind hacking, which sounds like a future of pill popping and analysis. This after I find out from a Jack FM commercial that I can piss test my kid for drugs with the $20 First Test Home Drug Test kit from CVS Pharmacy. David’s question raises an interesting observation about the types of performance enhancement we may be required to use in the future. A home drug test raises questions about what kind of relationships people in the United States have with their kids? Or possibly it suggests parents will better prepare their kids for the real world by training them to learn how to beat drug tests at a younger age.

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I fly under the blogging radar most of the time. I don’t share every tip on professional blogging the way Darren over at Problogger does (I have a personal goal of sharing much more this year). I don’t want my life under a microscope the way Robert Scoble gets scrutinized for every post (I criticize myself enough that I don’t need any help from trolls). I’m certainly not doing anything to push the collective blogging art forward the way Dave Winer regularly does. And while I make a great living blogging, I’m not raking in the bucks like Mike over at TechCrunch.So what have I got that they don’t? An endorsement from a Playboy model:

Will this mean I can expect to be on the invite list for Hef’s next party? Probably not, but if you’re looking for an attractive woman to appear in your online video show, I can pass the word along.

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Most magazine and newspaper articles waste our time. They start off with meat and gradually work their way to fluff, before wrapping everything up by summarizing what you just read. Instead of wading through the fluff, try reading the 100 word summaries available at Brijit.com. It’s like a Reader’s Digest for information overload. Summaries are tight. You get a good sense for what’s going on in the world without needing every word from the real article. If you want to know more, you can always click past Brijit and read the full article. Think of Brijit as a free personal assistant providing a daily summary of important topical events. Summaries include The Economist, Time, The New Yorker, Fortune, Wired, and a host of more general high level topics so you can track your favorite niche.

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As a parent, I’m regularly offering carrots in exchange for the things I want my son to do. If you put your toys in your toy box first, you can watch your favorite show; if you read me this book first, I’ll play that game with you, etc. In most cases, this is a great way to get the results you want without having to butt heads in the process.

This same methodology also works for self-motivation, if you’re willing to stick to the requirements you set for yourself. While I love what I’m doing most of the time, there are days where my projects seem somewhat tedious. To get past it I set similar rewards for myself. Finish editing that how to video and you can play Xbox games for the 30 minutes it will be encoding is a common one. For bigger projects, like the ebook I’m currently working on, I break the project down into smaller chunks and reward myself for completing a new chunk.

A more famous example of this is the Martini Method used by A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess. Burgess was a prolific writer, supposedly penning 1000 words a day every day of the year. Upon finishing his daily word count, Burgess rewarded himself with a Martini (or three) and relaxed for the rest of the day. While I’m not advocating being a functioning alcoholic, there’s method to this madness in getting what you need accomplished while still enjoying the things you love. Shane over at Academic Productivity talks about the Martini Method in more detail, along with several other ways to tackle large projects. He frames it in the context of completing your PhD, but you could easily apply the process to any large project in your life.

If you’ve got your own methods for completing tasks, feel free to share them in the comments.

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Pink Palm Centro

Originally uploaded by jakeludington

Smartphone owners with fashion sense may applauding this new color addition to the Palm Centro. Traditionally, Palm phones have come in manly colors like silver, blue and black, with the notable exception of the red Centro. While I’m not really into the color, I’d love it if Palm would bring the Centro and it’s awesome turn-by-turn direction support to ATT )or better yet, unlock the Centro) where I’ve currently got a contract that expires sometime after my grand children’s grandchildren pass to the next plane of existence. In the meantime, the Treo 750 remains my best choice for keeping my world in sync and learning Mandarin with a stylus.

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It Wont Stay in Vegas CES Blogger Party
Originally uploaded by b_d_solis

I’m wrapping up everything I need to do to prepare for CES 2008, including finalizing all my plans for post-show hours. One place I’ll be for sure is the 2008 Blogger Party at CES. It’s happening on Tuesday January 8 from 5:30-8pm @ the Atomic Testing Museum, with shuttle service powered by Intel. The blogger party is a good place to catch up with other people attending the show to compare notes on what’s hot at the show and talk about stuff that may have nothing to do with the latest “iPod Killer”. Over 100 people are currently RSVP’d to attend, including Andru Edwards of Gear Live, Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords, Steve Rosenbaum of Magnify.net, Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central, and Robert Scoble.

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