Michael Bierut wrote a wonderful blog entry sharing his 26 years of practical notebook use. What’s so impressive is his consistent use of simple, inexpensive notebooks, his lack of rigid adherence to a methodology, and the randomness of his note taking - even including photographs and drawings made by his children.

notebook covers 1982-2008

This is such a refreshing inspiration, and a strong antidote to the time wasting, office supply fetishism that dominates most online productivity conversations. If I let go of the (silly) notion that each notebook/journal entry needs to be a work of art, I’m much more likely to actually use a notebook to get things done - maybe even something nice.

reference

Beruit, Michael. “26 Years, 85 Notebooks.” http://designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=38831.

Wreck This Journal. http://www.wreckthisjournal.com/?page_id=2.

As I started to collect all my “stuff,” in preparation for my GTD rehabilitation, I noticed that I’m hanging on to a lot of old magazines. Tons of old magazines. They all went into the recycling bin, save a few articles I clipped and filed. Amazing how much space that freed up in my small home office. Took only a few minutes too.

A quick kill. Makes me wonder how much real junk is cluttering up my life.

Zen Habits is a good place to start for de-cluttering and simplifying ideas.

My inbox is overflowing. I’m making do at work, but in my personal life, I’ve fallen off of the Getting Things Done bandwagon. Our large suburban home is full of clutter. My website is stale. My personal development projects and writing are stagnant. I’m living in the middle of half a dozen incomplete home improvement projects, and I’m having trouble keeping up with which kid is doing what which night of the week. I’m always in a rush, reacting to things blowing up, rather than planning and being prepared.

In some sort of a not-getting-things-done addiction cycle, I skip one, and then another, weekly review. And, like junk mail, the stuff keeps piling up. By then it would take a big sweep to get started again, which I convince myself I can’t do until I tweak my GTD system some more. At which point I give up and waste my evenings mindlessly surfing the internet, watching youtube, avoiding the piles around me, and feeling depressed about all of the above.

This isn’t about feeling guilty for not worshiping at the alter of GTD, it’s about not accomplishing the things that matter in my life. So, over the next couple of weeks I’m going to crawl out of my self induced pile. I’m going to use a simple system, and force myself to change only what’s broken.

Less fiddling, more doing.

It’s no secret that WEP and WPA can be cracked, WEP in less than a minute. Security guru Bruce Schneier recently wrote that his own home wifi network is open - no password, no encryption. My packet filtering freeBSD server’s power supply started making a lot of noise and I decided to turn it off for good. Moreover, I turned off WEP at the wireless router.

My old Netgear router doesn’t support the new and more robust WPA standard, and WEP provides almost no security: there is nothing to be gained by enabling it. No more dealing with hex keys. It’s easy for friends and family to drop onto the network when they come over. Likewise, new machines are easy to configure.

What’s the worst that could happen? I live in the suburbs. The idea of someone sitting in a car, in the Colorado cold, stealing my connection isn’t a likely scenario. And if it they did, so what?

More likely, a neighbor would connect to my network - probably inadvertently - and steal band width from my connection. Unless my network is running slow, I’m not really worried about this.

But what about our family’s computers and data? We have several Linux/FreeBSD boxen, and two Macs. Our wireless router is no less secure than any of the free wireless hot spots I connect to: the airport, cafes, office park free wireless, etc. We simply take the same precautions at home we would take at a public wifi connection.

A few simple things should keep your data safe:

1. Keep your computers up to date.
2. Use a safer browser, like Firefox.
3. Don’t enter any data you care about - passwords, web forms, etc. - from a web page that is not being served over SSL (https in the url).
4. If you use an email client, make sure you use SSL to pop/imap your mail.
5. Encrypt any sensitive data on your machines.

Make sure you do the above when you use a public wifi connection.

I do a couple other things, that won’t stop anyone in the know from using my network, but will keep the neighbor kid from accidentally using my printer.

• You can use access by mac address to white list your computers. This can be easily spoofed, but will prevent anyone from ‘accidentally’ connecting to your network.
• Turn off (or disconnect) your printer when you’re not using it.
• You don’t have to broadcast your SSID.
• Check your wireless router’s log files.

References

Cracking WEP and WPA Wireless Networks

Bruce Schneier. My Open Wireless Network

Genki Sudo retired from mixed martial arts two Decembers ago, after seeing a sign in a urinal saying “one step forward.” Genki is not only a tremendously gifted fighter, but he’s one of the greatest entertainers in the fight business. Check out his amazing entrance in this video - compared to the standard thug like entry to some crappy rap-metal, complete with black hoodie and angry stare. Note how calm he remains fighting off his back, the respect he pays his opponent, and the trademark “We Are All One” flag he flies at the conclusion of every fight.

Good luck to Genki wherever the future takes him. As a fan, I’ll miss his ring antics and skill.