Reda’s Social-Network Independent Pages

As time goes by, my memory is getting worse and worse, my schedule is getting  busier and busier and being mobile has become an important requirement to be cost effective as well as time efficient… so I had to find a good strategy to cope with my daily life and this post summarise my activities as well as the tools I normally use.

SW or HW required

• Microsoft Outlook
• Nokia mobile, PC Suite and (optional) Handy Calendar
• Gmail Account + Google Calendar Sync

Calendar

The calendar is to me what the memory is to any normal individual… well, that’s possibly an overstatement nonetheless it’s unbelievable how much I am dependant on my outlook calendar. I use it to save flight tickets, hotel reservations, planned holidays, bank-holiday, train timetables, milestones in my study plans, end of any interest free balance transfer periods and of course appointments as well as anniversary… basically anything that has a time, a booking reference and/or a location is on my calendar… Everything is then synchronised with my mobile and my Gmail account using PC suite and Google Calendar Sync respectively.

My tips (i.e. what works for me ):

• Colour labels. Very effective when I look at monthly view in my outlook calendar
• I tend to paste all relevant emails in the description field of the appointment “form” and use Handy Calendar on my mobile to best view any appointments’ details.
• I always put my reference numbers in plain view (the location field is often the best location for reference numbers)
• Use my local time (UK) in all appointments because they will change when I change the time-zone. E.g., on a flight entry, if the arrival time is on a different time-zone, I set the end time in the calendar appointment as UK local arrival time not the destination local time.
• Hotels bookings, locations I need to be and days spent on holiday are always all-day events, everything else has a start and an end time
• I use Google Calendar Sync as well as my Gmail accounts to share my schedule with my girlfriend.
• I tend to avoid the use of Tasks as much as possible to reduce the admin I have to do unless there is something I want to be constantly reminded once the deadline is passed.

Emails

When I started working few years ago, I never imagined I would end up being constantly overwhelmed by tens (sometimes hundreds) of emails, so I came up with the following personal toolbar to manage all my emails (btw, the following strategy is also similar to the GTD method)

For each email I receive, I apply the following flags if necessary:

• Red Flag: Important emails which I need “to action” by the end of the day. Usually no more than 4-5 emails should be marked with this flag
• Blue Flag: Emails which need a response usually within 1 or 2 weeks. No limit to the number of emails that can be flagged, but the more emails I flag the more difficult it becomes to review all of them at the end of the week.
• Green Flag: Important emails, no action needed but I flag them anyway to find them amongst hundreds of emails.

Furthermore, if an email requires a specific action or is due by a specific time I add a reminder as shown in the picture below.

Together with the toolbar, I also use a “Search Folder”, to manage and find my emails.

Steps required to create the Toolbar and Search Folders

Toolbar:

• Click on “Customize…” from the “Tools” menu.
• Click on “Toolbars” tab
• Click on “New…” button and give a name to the toolbar (default should be Custom 1)

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I (as many other people in the blogosphere strangely enough) don’t have a lot of time to write a proper post, so I’ll just post some quick "notes".
I think the starting point is the fact that Nokia wants to keep having a fat profit in the near and long term future and can only do so by delivering internet services as well as selling mobile phones. [Read more →]

I decided to try the Out of Bounce effect and found a very nice picture from a trip I did to Paris in 2005 (one of the first pictures I uploaded to Flickr actually) and this is the result…

Picture in Flickr

It’s really easy to do. You can find a very nice tutorial here (www.logicscape.com/oob_tutorials/)

I’m sure some of you all read the NY Times article (In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop) but I wanted to add my two cents and that is… not only bloggers are the one affected by the "24/7 disorder"!!! It’s “every content producer” who ends up in some sort of system which is 24/7 and in a social-network everyone is a content producer! Internet addiction is almost an official mental illness now but the active participation in the tens of social services we have today (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…) makes Internet even more addictive and makes anyone who’s “exposed” more at risk to this "disorder"

I think the whole experience is very addictive because is basically a positive feedback loop (very engineering view, I know ) and you can potentially end up in an "unstable" mental and physical state so watch out . You know how "greed and fear" drive the economies around the world? Well, I’ve been trying to understand what are the factors that influence the social interaction and basically I think it’s all down to "narcissism and control (of your data)". Each one of them affects each other and both can drive you nuts!

Personally, [Read more →]

Recently I started playing with a small heart anti-stress toy and I found it quite nice. The only downside is that I don’t want to carry this toy with me all the time so I leave it at home most of the time. However, there’s one thing I carry with me all day long (in my hand actually) and quite incidentally :-) it also needs some sort of protection: my N95. So I started looking for a bag/protector for my mobile phone that is also an anti-stress toy…well, there isn’t one ! There are all sorts of cases, holders, bags, protectors (as shown at the end of the document)… everything you can wish for except mobile anti-stress bags for my mobile phone!!! How’s that possible? Arghh…

-Reda

 Following images are from http://www.ishoppe.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=n95

Just wanted to test Zemanta, so I needed an excuse to post. I looked for the first interesting topic from today news (Google sued for Street View privacy invasion) and tried to dress it up as a post… sorry, it’s just a test. [Read more →]

I’m sick as hell (I’ve got chicken pox or chicken porx since I’m a little overweight these days) and got time kill in bed. So I started spending more time in my latest hobby: photography. It’s strange how I used to take pictures just because of my photo obsessive-compulsive disorder and never realised I really like photography;  that is. the urge was primarily to remember the moment than to enjoy the picture - I blame Kodak  because it used to say remember to remember
Now, slowly, thanks to Internet, my N95 and in particular Flickr and its community, I’m looking at my pictures in a “different light”…

So, considering I had a huge selection of pictures and I could not go anywhere I started to look at my past pictures and started playing with them using Photoshop… Few things I learned so far:

1. You can take beatiful pictures even with a N95
2. You’ve got lower chances of taking nice pictures with the N95 so you should take as many as you can unless you want to take a proper camera with you. Thanks to Nokia (in a sarcastic way though) and the extremely high compression of its photographs (notice the high variation in size), you can take a lot of pictures before you fill your memory card…
3. Black and white conversion seems not give the best result with N95 pictures. There is always a lot of noise in the pictures and the image does not look crisp and clear as it should (compared for example to a 5 years digital camera)

Some examples:

N95 - day example. OK

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It’s strange how sometimes people are very aware of the battery consumption of some applications but put all concerns aside when it comes to applications that use the internal accelerometer. Is it because they are all nice or because the application does not really give the impression of running in the background all the time? Ok, not all applications are the same but I’m not just talking about GUI differences here, I’m talking about how the application was implemented and how the battery and performance is affected by the application.

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Whoooa, I was going to write about how compelling are becoming Web2.0 online applications compared to self-hosted solutions and another big player just beefed up their online solution: Adobe. The new service is Adobe Photoshop Express and can also be used to edit pictures (similar to Picnik in Flickr) but this is completely flash, so you can imagine quite well how good the interface is…

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Two issues not related to each other but just wanted to very quickly comment few things.

Regarding blogging I found this nice pic in a post from microblogging.it (in Italian). The red part is my modification…isn’t blogging the platform which covers all the quadrants and likely be the core idea in future communications platforms? My guess is yes. Sure it will take different forms: a blogging platform on a mobile phone, a cool application somewhere in the web or a new window in outlook… it won’t really matter. We will also blog more things more easily; show exactly where we went step by step, send links to a gallery full of videos and pictures… actually scrap that, we are already doing that … anyway hopefully we will soon make use of the other 3 senses (I don’t know which one is going to be first: touch or smell?) . Finally we will be able to specify our audience; no more one2one vs broadcast, we’ll just do a very clever multicast. I really wish someone (like Google) will add another dimension to this: originality or value of the topic… Anyway.. it was supposed to be a quick post…

Next one: photography. I was just playing around using some photos from last year and tried to apply the tilt-shift miniature fakes technique…have to say, it’s not easy (ok I was limited by the type of pictures I had from last year ). Anyway, surprisingly, the picture that I took with my N95 during a short stay in Munich came out really well (the others are from my digital camera)… Here’s the results.