Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Taking things for granted

On a lighter note, I just got a link from my friend Gene Kim (who sorta has a blog about Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, if one post qualifies).

The link is to a Conan O’Brien segment with the truly hilarious comedian Louis CK, who’s describing how everything in the world is awesome but nobody is satisfied.

You can watch the video below, or click this link to go to YouTube to watch.

This is must-see PC, believe me.  Enjoy!

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Pause and Resume

PauseDisabled You may have noticed that I’ve been a bit quieter than usual here of late.  You see, I’ve been dealing with the illness and death of my father-in-law, and I pressed the “Pause” button while traveling this past week for his funeral.  He was a wonderful man - we will miss him, and I will be forever shaped by the beautiful example of his life.

While I have your attention, I might as well give you an idea of what you can expect in the near future as I press Play again:

  • Playicon I’ll share my early experience with Amazon’s Kindle 2;
  • I’ll (of course) review a number of books, including one that provides a very intriguing alternative to GTD;
  • I’ll review a backup service that provides an interesting alternative to Mozy;
  • I’ll be sharing more about some interesting gadgets and travel tips;
  • And more.

Also, if you have feedback on what you like or don’t like here (more of x; less of y; etc.) drop me a line (Email Me).

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Trippin’ with TripIt

A while back, my friend Phil Gerbyshak (aka. The Make It Great guy) suggested tripit_logo_tagunder_250I check out a travel site  called TripIt.  The service allows you to “connect” with people you trust and share travel itineraries.  At the time, I was busy and wasn’t too sure about the idea of yet another social networking kind of thing.

In December, the siren’s call of TripIt pulled me in and I started using it. I’m now hooked.

So – what does TripIt do?  I’m greatly simplifying the power of TripIt, but I think of it as a database that tracks two things about you:  Where you are (or will be), and what you’re doing (or planning to do) while you’re traveling.  It compares your trips to those of other people you’re connected to (more on that in a minute) and lets you know when you’ll be near someone you know.  That makes it simple to plan ahead and arrange a get-together if you so desire.

Let me tell you a bit about how it works…

Getting your trips in

Letting TripIt know where you’ll be couldn’t be much simpler.  You have two choices:

  1. (the easiest) Forward a copy of your travel itinerary (or confirmation email) to plans@tripit.com.  They’ll process it and automagically add the trip to your account (they know who you are because you associate one or more email addresses with your account).
  2. (only slightly more difficult) Go to the TripIt site and click one of the “Add Trip” buttons.  You then manually provide a few pieces of information about your trip and it will be added to your account.

Pretty simple.  And if you have an oddly formatted itinerary that it can’t handle, you get an email notifying you there was a problem.

Making connections

whoscloseTripIt is strictly an “opt in” kind of service.  You need to invite others (or be invited by them) to connect and give permission to share trip information.   TripIt makes things easy here, too.  You can invite people manually, use their “find people using TripIt” wizard, or use TripIt’s application in LinkedIn (I’ve used a combination of all three).

TripIt analyzes all of trips you and your connections will be taking, which enables some cool things:

  • You are notified when friends are planning to visit your hometown (including telling you whether you’ll be in town that day or not)
  • You get a dashboard of what upcoming trips are happening the next few weeks in your network, which allows you to recommend things for them to do while traveling
  • You automatically create a history of your travel including a running total of your miles traveled
  • You get a pre-trip reminder that your trip is about to start, along with average temperatures for your destination
  • and more…

Oh, and TripIt is free.

My verdict

I like TripIt much more than I ever expected to.  I’ve already made some connections I wouldn’t have otherwise made during my travels even though I’ve only been using the service for about 2 months.  The two things that really made it easy for me are the ability to email itineraries for processing (that makes it so easy to use TripIt), and the integration with LinkedIn (one of the few social networks I use consistently).  Simplicity is key.

If you travel quite a bit (or know people who do – remember, it will tell you when they come to your town) I recommend you give TripIt a try.

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Twitter: What’s the deal?

Over the past month or so, I’ve found my sea legs on Twitter.  I went from thinking it was a goofy fountain of randomness to something that is actually helping me increase my “reach” in interacting with the world (both sharing what I’ve found and learning from more people).

Want to know more about Twitter?  Here is a great video that describes how it works (this is from an awesome series of videos from commoncraft – check it out).  If you don’t see the embedded video, you can go there with this link.

If you want to ‘follow’ me on Twitter, you can do so by going to my Twitter page and clicking the “Follow” button.  You’ll need to sign up if you don’t already belong to this crazy thing.

You can also just lurk (i.e. watch without participating), both on my Twitter page or by watching the Twitter widget in the right-hand navigation bar on my blog.

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Better laptop safety on the road

I’ve found a couple of good utilities that can help you improve the security and safety of your laptop while you’re on the road (and one of them will help around the office, too).

Hands off, bud

laptoplockThe first one isn’t free after the trial period, but it’s pretty useful.  It’s called Laptop Alarm, and it’s from Syfer in The Netherlands.  Once you’ve installed (sorry Mac – it’s Windows only) and activated it, Laptop Alarm sits there quietly until someone does something to change the state of your laptop, such as unplugging the power cable; removing the mouse or another USB peripheral; or shuts down the laptop.

When one of the offending events occurs, it make a loud noise to alert you that someone’s messing with your laptop.  This can be handy in an airport lounge, library, or other venue such as that where you may need to walk off for a few minutes to get something.  [BTW – a laptop cable lock might be a good idea if you do that a lot]

You can download a free, fully-functional trial version if you’d like.  The full version is 10 Euros.

Automatic locking

The next one is pretty cool.  BtProx Screen It’s called BtProx and it’s a free utility that can automatically lock your laptop (yep, Windows only again) when you walk away.  This is handy if you often forget to lock your computer when you walk away for a meeting (by the way, the shortcut <Windows Key>+L will do it quick if you remember).

How does BtProx do its magic?  Well, it uses Bluetooth (which means both your phone and your laptop must support Bluetooth for this to work).  When your computer loses contact with your phone via Bluetooth, BtProx locks the system for you after a preset time.  Pretty cool.

As an added bonus, you can configure BtProx to automatically launch a specified application when it locks the system.  That could be handy if you combined it with other security programs (such as Laptop Alarm) or wanted to trigger a backup or antivirus scan when you are away from your computer.

So, laptop users – check them out and let me know what you think.

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