Tao’s Blog

This morning’s train ride is bumpy. I got to the Avenue M station about 8 am, which is a little bit late than usual. According to my experience, if I leave home about 7:40 am, I would mostly likely obtain a seat. The chance decreases towards 8 am, then increases after 8:10. I think 8:00-8:05 am is the trough of the possibility to get a seat at my usual boarding location. 7:45 am is the optimal time for me to leave home in order to catch a train with a seat.

Then, at 59th street, I was forced to change a train because the train I was riding won’t stop at 68th street.

Finally, when I got to the office building, the elevator stopped at every floor between 1st and 10th floor. What a commute!

Today’s topic will be data organization. Last month, I re-organized my home, stashed away a lot things, to make the home comfortable for five persons. However, putting things into boxes is easy, finding them later could be a challenge. So, I first sort the things: i.e. all pens go to a box, all note pads go to another, then, I printed labels with my Brother PT-65 labeler, then stashed those boxes away, all the labels facing outside, so I can easily locate the thing in the future, in case I need to dig things up again. However, certain things are ambiguous, hard to classify and categorize. Say, this morning, I want to locate my iPod remote control. First, I looked in the Small Electronics box, failed to find it, then, I checked at the Audiobox. Bingo, I got it. However, this is still much easier than before, when things were not organized, classified, and boxed, I may well spend half a day desperately trying to locate the remote control. Of course classification is never easy, so many gray areas, you can write a text book discussing classification, that is called taxonomy. I can only try my best, but it is much better than total chaos.

Now, from the physical world, let’s enter the cyberspace. Since the files and data are not consuming any real physical space, it is easy to ignore organizing them. Out of sight, out of mind. The advent of super capacity hard drives aggravated this situation: you can totally forget to organize and back up your data, until it’s too late. Now, I just realized that I haven’t organized and backed up my data for a quite long time. Now I need to standardize the procedures to take care of the data on all my three computers.

First, my Pavilion Windows PC. There are two operating systems installed on that computer, Windows 98 and Windows 2000. However, that does not affect the directory structure I am going to use, they should be the same. Actually, I get my clue from the way Mac OS X organizes the user data. Here are my way to organize the files:

First level: for Windows, My Documents; for Macintosh, Home

Second level: Windows, Documents, Pictures, and Movies, the same for Macintosh.

Since the Documents folder contains the files most changed and updated, has relative small size, and is updated on multiple computers, it merits more consideration. Two sub-folders are created inside the Documents folder, Personal Writing and Reference Documents. Personal Writing contains all my blog entries, online notebook entries, and online forum postings. Actually, only this folder is saved on the USB Flash drive, and the copy on the USB drive is the master copy.

All other multimedia files are not updated often, will be easy to handle or archive.

Recently read a lot of gadget reviews. Finally, I realized I am not going to buy any of those fancy gadgets, reading those reviews is actually a vicarious experience as a replacement of playing with the real gadget, since it is impossible or impractical to have the all those fancy and expensive gadgets. Reading how others play with them is better than none. A way to satiate the hunger for those devices. The devices I read about: Nokia 9300 and 9500, Palm Treo, Tungsten T3, T5, LifeDrive, and Archos PMA 400, AV420, and Gmini 400. Once toyed around the idea of purchasing an Archos device, however, I vetoed this very idea a hundred times. Here is my reasoning:

First, I am not really into the digital video media devices, or audio devices, especially since I already owns two MiniDisc recorders, four Plam handhelds (Palm III, IIIx, Tungsten T2, and Tungsten E). Both Tungsten handhelds have gorgeous 320x320 transflective TFT screens, comfortable to read, especially good for reading ebooks. Of course, If I do not possess these devices, now I may go buy a 320x480 screen Palm devices, such as Tungsten T3, T5, or Palm LifeDrive. But since I already have these 320x320 screen devices, I am satisfied with my current gadgets. For my audio needs, I have an 10GB iPod, one MZ-R70 MiniDisc recorder, one NetMD 505, and many radios. I don’t think I need more.

The most important gadget for me is my Tungsten T2, I mainly use it to read offline web pages (with Plucker), ebooks (with Palm Reader), and write my journals and blog entries on my 3-hour long daily commute. It replaced my old faithful Palm IIIx, that venerable monochrome device served me well, but its lack of color, contrast, and a big memory for dictionary makes it less suitable as an ebook reader. This task has been taken by T2 with much grace. Now I guess I spend more time with my handheld than my desktop computers. So much for the handheld-is-merely-a-data-viewer philosophy.

I don’t like the default Graffiti 2 on my T2 and TE, so I installed the Graffiti 1 hack on both Tungsten handhelds.

Now I’m taking a break. From TV, replaytv. Ever since I put hands on my replaytv, I have been watching TV like crazy, 6 episodes of CSI everyday. That’s really crazy, I did not know that I can watch so much TV without collapsing. Now I know it.

The charm of replaytv is total control: I decide when I watch, how I watch, and skipping all those nasty commercials. With these features, watching TV began to become addictive. By the way, I am not a born couch potato, that is, before I got my replaytv unit.

For a lot of reasons, I must quit this habit. I need more time reading books, doing chores, and, more importantly, to prepare to take care of my future son. Thinking about my son makes me feel overwhelmed, first time experience, a lot to think about, to ruminate.

Autotext is a useful feature in Microsoft Word. Usually, in Windows version, you use Alt-F3 to create an autotext entry, and F3 to insert an autotext entry.

I mostly use the Windows version of the Microsoft Word. Today, I tried to use this feature on the Macintosh version, and it doesn’t work, and the keyboard shortcut is not documented in the online help file.

Searched on the Internet, finally, I got the answer:

to create an autotext entry in Macintosh Word, you use Option-F3, and to insert it, use Command-Option-V keyboard combination.

I think I will remember this.