I spent the weekend inside or outside various neo-gothic landmark buildings in Christchurch with 150 other brave medieval re-enactors from around Australasia, all wearing the warmest woolen garb in our pre-17th Century wardrobe, and gosh did we need it at times. The event was the coronation of a new King and Queen or Lochac.
I belong to a worldwide group known as the “Society for Creative Anachronism“, which has something like 100,000 people involved globally. It’s the largest reenactment society in the world, probably because it’s very non-specific and inclusive - any attempt at pre-17th century costume is ok. Some people take it very seriously and dedicate a significant portion of any given week to going along to weekly meetings to discuss the finer points of 16th Century German Frocks, 14th century English turnshoe construction, or whatever currently interests them. Or, like me, some folks just turn up to a few events a year to catch up with everyone and try to forget about the real world for a bit.
There was a “Queens Champion” tournament on Sunday. As martial arts go, SCA combat is probably about the world’s most inconsistent, and yet somehow it all works out and has become quite popular. It’s all based on an honour system - you get walloped with a bit of rattan cane that somehow slipped past your defenses, and you have to figure out if, had that been a real weapon (sword, mace, spear, whatever), whether it would have maimed or killed you. If you lose a leg, you drop to your knees and keep on fighting. Loose an arm and you typically stop the action briefly to put the now useless limb behind your back, and in a tournament your opponent will give you time to change to your other hand if you just lost your swordarm.
The inconsistency comes because everyone has a slightly different idea of how hard is hard enough, is wearing differently constructed armour, using weapons of different sizes, shapes, and weight, and has a different repertoire of offensive and defensive technique - as opposed to most martial arts where the equipment is standardised, there are masters who teach novices the same set of techniques all around the world. In this shot, I’m the one in the foreground.
Well, nothing like launching a new product to discover how many things you were leaving “until after the launch”. And after the initial publicity burst (which I didn’t really do enough of anyway), they all assaulted me at once. But I’m beginning to get back on top of it. I even managed to tidy up my desk, which was covered in stuff sitting waiting to pounce on my valuable attention stream when I looked away from the screen.
So I piled it all up to process it, GTD style. Didn’t look too bad at first.
The problem was I found that my filing system had gotten in a bit of dissaray during the rush of the last few months, so that pile stayed about the same size for quite a while as I added stuff from my files to the top as fast as I was creating new ones to file stuff in.
But it’s done now. This is one of four drawers. Everything alphabetical within 5-6 major groupings. By the end of the process it was really easy to find the right folder for stuff again.
I also created a tickler file for the first time, which consists of 43 folders - one for each day for the next month, and one for each month. Business Pundit suggests using them for the purpose of prompting a reviewing of decisions, which is not a bad idea. Might try that.
It feels good to have gotten that bit out of the way, and I’ve got a much better idea of all the things that need to be done. I really need to get back on the publicity wagon! Been trying to drum up a few reviews from the Mozillazine crowd to get us out of the AMO Sandbox, that’s also a priority. On the whole they seem to really like it but not many of them have posted reviews yet. Will be posting about how to access the AMO Sandbox and post a review over at the Interclue Blog shortly.
Go check out the website.
Incredible thanks to both Karl and John for their long efforts, and everyone I’ve mentioned on the credits page for making Interclue possible.
I had a great chat with Jon Udell last night. I noticed on his blog that he was coming to Wellington and left a note for him to get in touch if he was coming to Christchurch. He emailed me to say he was heading over here that very day! Bizzarely, the first I ever heard of the GOVIS conference he was keynoting at was via his blog post, if I’d found out about it earlier I would have been there, brandishing Interclue. Looks like there were some really interesting presentations there.
Among other things, we talked about how the internet is transforming education, and I mentioned that I’d spotted a video with some fantastic stats a while back that was originally designed to help educators understand what they were up against, and that I’d blog about it. He’ll probably recognise it when he sees it. But as JP mentioned recently, there are still a lot of other people out there who haven’t seen this one, and they really should.
He mentioned the real thing scaring American Universities was that soon more parents were going to start auditing podcasts from their kid’s lecturers to see if this education they were paying for was actually worth $x/minute!
We also chatted about his new job a bit. He said he went to Microsoft with a mission to help more people get value from the power of technology - to spend some time helping out on the trailing edge after so many years on the bleeding edge. I told him I thought Microsoft was showing pleasing signs of trying to build more value from co-operation than competition - he said Microsoft was still competing plenty hard but they were continuing to move towards less destructive forms of competition.
Anyone who wants to check it out ahead of time, ping me for the password to the site if you haven’t got it already.
Interclue is a browser extension (for firefox currently, but for IE pretty soon) that helps you stay in flow while you’re surfing the net. It’s a great boon for knowledge workers, bloggers, and other heavy web users.
We’re probably not going to tell the world what it does before Wednesday, but:
It’s free. No signup required either.
It’s not spyware or adware.
It takes about a minute to install and although it has many options it works great “out of the box” for most users.
The learning curve is two minutes long. After that it starts saving you time.
