Freaky Friday

I had something of a weird week, so I left work early today with the plan of getting a walk in. Foolish human that I am I followed Mapquest's suggestion and could not find the start point. Further yours truly forgot to stop at the bank so I had no money for parking, and I was not sure where there was a bank to get some. So instead I came home, cleared out some saved stuff from the aggregator, and finished up my Tremors marathon. I watched them in chronological order, so it was 4,1,2,3. There is rumors of a 5th movie, but I will believe it when I see it. This is not great cinema, but it is fun and mindless.

Tremors 2 did yield a quote that I like: "I feel I was denied critical, need to know information." This is how I am feeling many days anymore. Between work and home I see to have a lot floating through my head. Between my home computer, work computer, Palm, various web sites, and of course old fashioned paper sources things are just over flowing.

The problem is I don't see this situation changing much in my lifetime. The Palm (or similar device) helps to unload some of it and keep the infomration at hand but out of your brain. However it becomes a matter of size. Most handhelds do not have a bunch of memory, and usually cannot hold all that you need. Palm has recently released a device with a 4 gig HD, but lets face it, how much stuff do we have? Even 4 gig for some heavy users will not be enough. My 64 Meg is pretty comfy, but I have a couple of dozen contacts (3 dozen at the outside), minimal calander info and I do not synch any email or RSS feeds. Consolidating all of that, plus maybe some MP3s or photos would rapidly fill up my 64 meg, and the 4 gig will not hold up either.

For me personally I handle this by putting onlyt the crticial information at hand. My contacts, calander, to do (actually Next action list per Getting Things Done), Pocket Quicken, and that is about it. I have a few spreadsheets and a few other programs to track data where I need to do the data entry on the fly away from my computer.

My computer keeps the bulk of my information, and the filing cabinet in the lab keeps all the dead-tree stuff that I need to keep, such as copies of my taxes. I have a few websites that keep some things like Bloglines for my RSS feeds.

To me at least the trick is to follow the Getting Things Done (mentioned earlier) and to keep on top of things and not get behind on maintenance of your data system. If you do get behind you need to get up to date as soon as possible.