09.30.09

Out Of Focus

Posted in General at 12:49 pm by Steve

I have become convinced that technology has done more to hinder focus and excellence than it has done to help. Technology injects our lives with too much information at once and forces us to switch gears quickly and frequently. Neither of those things are known to be healthy or productive in our everyday existence. But, I can’t blame technology. It’s simply the tool. You can’t blame a hammer for your clumsiness when you miss a nail and hit your finger.

I recently took a step back and examined the way I use technology. I realized I was contributing to my own lack of focus by always trying to accomplish several tasks at once. Email, checking a website, writing some code, writing a score, updating social media sites, IM, twitter, et al. I was attempting extreme multitasking, and it really wasn’t working. As we all know, multitasking is a simply doing several things poorly rather doing one thing well. So, I had to ask myself why I was doing this to myself. Unfortunately I didn’t have an answer other than “because I can”.

I decided to end the madness. No longer to I leave my email client running all day. I check email when I have time to check it, read the messages waiting for me and then respond (or act accordingly) to the messages. I even turned off the scheduled email check on my iPhone. I no longer let a phone call interrupt my flow. If I can’t stop to take a call I let it go to voice mail and will call back when I can focus on the conversation. And being both technical and creative I have found that they are mutually exclusive brain modes. I no longer try to code while trying to design, write or compose. It simply doesn’t work. I set aside time for each and focus solely on that task.

In the 2 weeks I’ve been doing this I have found it to be very liberating. I am more present when I am doing any single task and I find that the organization that is imposed by a single task approach has made me more productive and has helped give me more time for myself.

Perhaps Albert Einstein was right when he commented that, “technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.“.

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09.12.09

Thoughts about 9/11

Posted in life at 1:13 pm by Steve

Even so many years later I still feel a strange dark hollowness surrounding the events of that day. That anyone or any group would place such little value on life is beyond my comprehension.

To all who lost what cannot ever be regained I can offer no soothing balm to heal those wounds, only a shared feeling of such deep sorrow and a feeling of such intense shame to be part of such a violent human family.

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09.06.09

More About iPhone and Calendars

Posted in technology at 2:49 pm by Steve

Not happy with my new iPhone not auto-syncing my Google Calendar I did some investigation, and here’s what I discovered. If you let your iPhone sync calendars with your Mac, they are considered “desktop” accounts and not synced over wireless or 3g. And this is true even if the calendar account is a CalDAV calendar like Google calendar that should auto-sync over the network.

The fix, for those of us who want to sync a Google Calendar (or any CalDAV based calendar) on our iPhone and have it auto sync over the network regardless of how the calendar is edited, is this:

• Turn off calendar sync for any CalDAV calendars in iTunes
• Sync your iPhone
• Goto your iPhone preferences > accounts > add account
• Choose “Other” and then on the next screen choose “Add CalDAV Account”
• Enter the account info.
• Save the account and let it verify the credentials.

For those wanting to sync a Google Calendar the credentials are:

• server: www.google.com
• username: your Google username (e.g. )
• password: your Google account password
• description: whatever you want to call your calendar

That’s it. You now have a fully functional 2-way syncing calendar. Note: this will only sync the master Google calendar. If you want to sync any sub-calendars you need to replace the URL in the ‘Advanced Settings’ screen with the specific URL of the Calendar ID for those calendars. You can get the Calendar ID in the Calendar settings section of your Google Calendar account. Simply follow the above steps and then once setup, edit the advanced options to add the sub-calendar URL.

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