Archive for Working Thoughts
Email Feature That Is Badly Needed
Sometimes as I go through my day, I stumble across things that seem so OBVIOUS to me that I have trouble understanding why it is even an issue.
Today’s version comes courtesy of every single email client I use, which includes most of the big names, and a couple of the small names. Now, every one of these clients includes an option to not display the images in an email by default. I applaud this and I think it is a great idea. It save me tons of time and bandwidth to not open images in a message that it turns out I have not interest in, so mission accomplished. Kudos to all developers on this score.
The giant whole in the system though is a way to have email from certain senders be opened with the images automatically downloading. For example, I get email from Borders rewards which often includes a coupon that I might like to use, so I always end up clicking the Download Images button or link.
That’s Not What an Address Book Is For
Now, I can add the automated please-dont-reply Borders email address to my address book in order to have the images open automatically, but that is about the dumbest thing I have ever heard. I have hundreds of names in my address book already. Yes, I can search it, but sometimes it seems faster to click the letter and then scroll. If I start adding Borders and others, that address book size will just get bigger.
Let’s break this down. The address book is for storing the contact information of people I might want to get in touch with. In other words, for people I want to send email TO. It is not the place to manage my whitelist for RECEIVING email! Is it really that hard to add a “Always Open Images From This Sender” option? How about a "Respected Sender” or “Trusted Sender” list with the ability to select varying degrees of trust: “Allow Images”, “Allow HTML” and so on. Has no one else thought of this? Is this a feature that everyone would love to have, but no developer knows people want it?
It bothers me enough, I’m seriously wondering if I should learn how to hack enough code to add it on my own to one of the emails that lets me do it. After I have 27 bajillion downloads of my plugin, maybe they’ll add it as a standard feature. Once one of them does it, the masses will clamor at the others until they add it, and then the problem will go away.
In the mean time, if you would like to beat me to it by adding it to your product, or writing the code for the add-on, I hereby grant you license to my idea in exchange for the price of letting me know about it so I can fix this nagging problem and go on about the already substantial task of managing all of my email and contacts.
The Glary Utilities Convergence
I’ve often wondered about when and where all of the websites out there get their information. I know that many bloggers talk about reading the news feeds and various other strategies that allow them to post quickly on relevant topics. As a professional freelance writer and business consultant, I can pretty much pack every 10 minute block of my day with some activity that directly or indirectly makes me money or grows my business. As such, I don’t find myself able to do the same kind of thing. No matter, of course. The world needs many types and flavors of information, and as it happens, those that I produce won’t be of the current events variety.
But, it was with some amusement that I read through my RSS feeds yesterday. I hadn’t gotten to them in a while and they had built up to around 300 posts. Now, some of you are scoffing because you get 300 posts an hour in your RSS feed, but as I mentioned above, I don’t keep that tight of pulse on the as it happens vein of the Internet. So, I’m usually content to wander back by my favorite sources and read what is available when I drop by, even if it is a month old. For some sites though, this proves to be inefficient, and for those sites I use RSS Feeds and the basic Google Newsreader. In all, I subscribe to less than 20 feeds, some of which are not updated more than weekly, so generally, I can keep up.
Glary Utilities is Amazing, Revolutionary, Life Altering!
I generally just read my feeds from the Home section of Google Newsreader which means they appear in reverse chronological order (most recent first) with no consideration for which site they came from. I like this because I’m looking for interesting content, not because I want to know what they are saying today over at Freelance Switch. So, about the time I read my fourth or fifth post regarding Glary Utilities I started to wonder what was going on.
For those of you who do not know about Glary Utilities, let me say this, you should have it. Glary Utilities is one of those software products that you try out because the fifty other similar products you have had on your computer system haven’t quite lived up to what you had hoped for when you installed them, so you are willing to try the other ones that sound good. Glary Utilities is also one of those products that once you install it, you stop trying the other ones because the one you have does what you want.
In this case, Glary Utilities is a set of system maintenance tools ranging from a disk cleaner (going further than deleting your recycle bin) to an uninstall manager (deleting everything, not just what the uninstall program was coded to get), a memory manger, and more. The best part of Glary Utilities is its Registry Cleaner. If your computer is sluggish or just seems to be doing random things all of the sudden, your first step should be to clean your registry. There are a million products that do this, but there is one product that I trust enough to click Scan, and then click Repair without bothering to verify what it has come up with because it has never once let me down, and that product is Glary Utilities.
Now, I’ve been using Glary Utilities since somewhere around mid-2007 and it has been around for a lot longer than that, so we aren’t talking about new and flashy. So, it was odd to see this:
Now, I get that there is bound to be some overlap in the universe of the Internet and blogs, but these sites are not exactly the dark corners of the Internet known only to a precious few. These are big sites that get read all over the place. So it begs the question, Do these sites all get their raw news from the same location, and if so, should I be reading that instead? Or, Do these sites crib off of each other a little bit, and if so, is there an originator site?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not implying anything here or accusing anyone of copying content, it just makes me wonder about the flow of information and where I, as a reader, fit in that flow. Just for information sake, I did a quick search. According to Google Blog Search, there were 458 blog postings with Glary Utilities between that post on 6-25-08 at Web Worker Daily to today (7-30-08). I guess it was a good month for the guys at Glary.
By the way, if you are wondering, I checked and there is no news during that time, except a 7-18-08 update to version 2.6 which might explain the Lifehacker and MakeUseOf posts.
Good Information Websites
Incidentally, if you are wondering, these websites are some of the best places for information on the Internet in their respective topics.
WebWorkerDaily is a resource for, well… people who work using the web. It’s great for freelancers and the work from home.
MakeUseOf is a resource for all the bagillions of services, utilities, and programs out there on the Internet. When I need something, I always check their directory to get sort of a a top 5 or top 10 list of sites I want to check out.
Lifehacker is a resource for “doing stuff” I will warn you that Lifehacker is a bit of an everything for everyone type place, so there will be a TON of stuff you don’t care about mixed in with the absolute gems that you do care about. They also have a big fat crush on the whole Getting Things Done paradigm. I recommend subscribing to their feed. That way, you can read the headline and just hit NEXT if it doesn’t apply to you. Then, click into the actual articles you want to read
Faking Urgency
Throughout most of my life, I have been a procrastinator. In some cases this has been very much to my detriment. However, often, my other abilities have been able to pull me through to success when it really counted. Still, to those around me the length of time it takes me to complete certain things is frustrating. Even more difficult, is the frenzy that over takes me when it becomes time to complete a two-week task in just a day or two because I have just now begun to undertake the task now that the deadline seems to loom large enough on the horizon for me to take seriously. It doesn’t take much analysis to see the folly of proceeding with one’s life in the this manner. It would be much better for me, and I would be a much happier person if I did not function in this way and instead were able to work even a small bit at a time far in advance of a deadline. But, for some reason, I can’t seem to “force” a change in this aspect of my person.
Tonight, something happened that made a piece (possibly only a small piece) of this puzzle a little clearer to me. For the better part of a week or more now, I have an Amazon order that I want to place. This order is for things I want and need and those things will bring both me and my family pleasure and happiness. Yet, the order has yet to be made. Largely, this is due to the non-deadline nature of the order. After all, we aren’t talking about anyone going hungry here. But, less than an hour ago, I ordered a new monitor (not from Amazon). The intention to make this order has existed for less than 4 hours. Although I have been following the prices of monitors and had chosen the kind of monitor and even the brand if it could be made to work, I haven’t ordered it because of the cost and the mistaken impression that my lovely wife would not approve at this time. Today, during the course of conversation this revealed itself to be a false assumption coinciding perfectly with an Internet posting showing that the exact monitor I have been looking at was on sale for a price well below the lowest price it had been seen for in the past. So, I ordered it.
This seemingly borrowed urgency came from a single source. Fear. With such a good price on exactly the right monitor there existed the possibility that my ability to get that price would disappear if the monitor was sold out or the price raised in response to demand. And so, the task was completed in record time. (The couple of hours of delay were the result of factors including my baby’s need to eat, a showing for our house, and so on.)
The obvious question is can this sense of urgency be faked? I can’t manufacture fear. My brain is too intelligent to be fooled by lying to myself (as I assume most people’s brains are) so there isn’t a way to pretend that the products that I need to order will disappear. Indeed, one could argue that by waiting I increase the odds of them going on sale before I make the order. False deadlines don’t work either. I’ve been trying that game for years with no success. Again, lying to yourself is seldom an effective tool. Instead, I find myself searching for a mechanism to mimic the fear. Is there a way to create a real non-lie synthetic version of fear? Something that compels one to action in the same way as a desire to avoid an imminent, unpleasant, probable outcome does, while missing one or more of those factors?
If I find it, I solve not only my own procrastination problem, but potentially that of many others. I hope it’s patentable.
