L's Site

My Macbook sleeps tonight
I left the power cable at work
And I think of Jesus
dead in the tomb
three days
drained and poured out
exhausted for the sins of men.

He lies on the cold rock, painfully still
silent
a man without a shadow
a useless God bereft of power.

Satan laughs

For my sis. :)

I remember sticking a note on Ming's mirror at Jalan Hitam Manis which said "Monster in the mirror". Heh. I love this video.

... made by Ming! :)

My dad has been stuck at home with a weird combination of shingles + allergic rash.  At least that is what we think it is.  The senior doctor doesn't know what it is and says "it is a mystery", and has taken a lump of flesh from my dad's chest and stitched it up with two stitches.  Two stitches!  For a biopsy!

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that the other day, my dad told me that he wanted some ah-pek cotton pyjamas pants. You know those light blue stripey pyjamas that ah-peks wear?  I think it is because it has been raining non-stop and it is a little cold and his legs are all itchy.  So I decided to be a good daughter and get him a pair of Byford cotton pyjamas from NTUC for $13.90.  And I got a pair for myself as well.  His is stripey blue (size medium); mine is dark grey (size small). I LOVE THEM.

I've been wanting ah-pek cotton pyjamas for quite a long time now.  They are awesome: perfect in this rainy, cold weather!  Perfect for lounging around in at home.  For some reason, I like wearing pants at home 'cos I like "getting dressed" in the morning after my shower.  Now I can be dressed without having to put on real pants. :)

So, if any one of ya'll wanna get me a Christmas present, Byford pyjama pants (size small) from NTUC would be cool.  Just don't get the stripey dark blue ones.  I really don't want to wear matching pyjamas with my dad.

P.S.  Did I mention that it has pockets? :D

As proof that I have not disappeared into the cybermuda triangle, as my dear sister so creatively puts it, here is another multiply post.

Except that I don't know what to post about.

I'm still in school.  I'm still meeting friends to play squash, have lunch, chit chat, gripe, listen, eat ice cream, eat chocolate cake, play in the sand, have coffee, drink cranberry juice, run, watch movies, etc.

This post is so redundant!

has an absolutely fantabulous chocolate tart.  It is the first item of the menu. Don't look for anything fancy.  It is just called "Chocolate".  Gosh what a wonderful evocative name!  In smaller print underneath, it says "chocolate tart, wild nettle, salted caramel, blood orange sorbet". 

It costs $14.  If I were to describe the explosion of tastes on that exquisite platter, I will have to transport myself there now for another bite.

So I'll leave it to your imagination.

Call me.  I'll trade its address, plus inside information about the owner, for a chocolate. ;)

This series of posts is for Lit.  It primarily pertains to how I organise my work flow and calendar, and how I use my Mac to do it.  But non-Mac users may find some of the ideas useful as well 'cos the principles work across the board.

Using iCal to organise your work flow has one big disadvantage.  It doesn't let you organise by project and context concurrently.

Is it a little confusing? Let me explain it a little better. For example I have two projects: to clean my room and a course that I need to pass. If I organise it by project, this is how it looks.

1. Clean room
• Buy mop (Next action)
  
• Research best way to remove coffee stain
  
• Clear out top shelf
  
2. Pass course
• Buy textbook (Next action)
  
• Read online notes for class
• Read textbook

If I were to organise it by context, this is how it would look like.

1. @town
• Buy mop
• Buy textbook
2. @home
• Read textbook
• Clear out top of shelf
3. @computer
• Research best way to remove coffee stain
• Read online notes for class
  

My iCal is organised by contexts and it is very easy to lose sight of the big picture when you're inundated with tasks.  It is also very hard to plan your projects.  This is where Actiontastic comes in.

Actiontastic is based on David Allen's Getting Things Done. This sleek, simple and elegant app allows you to collect data quickly, organise your tasks by project, as well as set contexts for each task. Best of all, it syncs with iCal and is compatible with Quicksilver. It even syncs with the iPod.

I actually don't think this will be interesting to anyone who comes by here, so I won't go into details...

All I want to do is to be able to highlight my PDFs so that I don't have to print it and underline it manually.

Skim does this, and more. Not only does it let you highlight text, it also lists all your highlights in a column on the right. (See screenshot.) It lets you insert notes, both sticky-style and inline.

The inbuilt search engine is sweet too. You can search the text of the PDF (search bar on the top of the left panel), or you can search through just your highlights and notes (search bar on the top of right panel).

Combined with Yep, a drop-dead gorgeous-looking application that tags and organises your PDFs, you are good to go. Yep costs US$34. I may buy it if I get a scanner, but knowing me, I probably won't, just because I'll rather wait for a freeware version to turn up. :)

Skim and Yep are Mac-only apps.

This series of posts is for Lit.  It primarily pertains to how I organise my work flow and calendar, and how I use my Mac to do it.  But non-Mac users may find some of the ideas useful as well 'cos the principles work across the board.

The primary thing I use to organise my work flow and calendar is iCal.  I use other things too, which I will demonstrate in a later post. 

On the left is my list of calendars.  The top half refer to calendar items — where I need to be at what time — and the bottom half to task items.  My calendar items are categorised into Class (timetable), Work appointments (important meetings), Personal appointments (tea with a friend), KIV: Events (events in the future that I want to keep note of), and Birthdays (which is synced directly from my Address Book).

Tasks are organised into contexts.  Contexts refer to where I need to be to get that particular task done.  For example, I will put "Buy Ed Psych textbook" into "@work" 'cos I need to get it from the school bookshop.  "Change bedsheets" will be "@home". "Read impt EL article" will be "@desk".  "Pick up milk" will be "@errand".  You get the idea.  "@library" holds a list of books that I want to check out when I'm at the library.  I try to include the reference no. so all I need to do at the library is to whip out my phone and I know what I want and where to find it.

The benefit of organising in this way is that it helps to unclutter your to-do list.  When I'm in school, I don't need to be worrying about changing my bedsheets, so I can just un-tick the "@home" category and the tasks from that category will be hidden.

If you look at my calendar today, you will know that it is Melissa's birthday (Happy birthday Mel!!!!), and that I'm supposed to be studying grammar.  I don't usually have tasks slotted into my calendar (the yellow, green and duller blue), but last night, I put some in, just so that I can remind myself to be productive in the morning. :)

My task list is very long right now, so I won't show  it to your guys.  It is the column on the right in this screenshot. Items are colour-coded according to their context.

Okay.  I had better go study some grammar now! :)

This series of posts is for Lit.  It primarily pertains to how I organise my work flow and calendar, and how I use my Mac to do it.  But non-Mac users may find some of the ideas useful as well 'cos the principles work across the board.

First, what is Getting Things Done (GTD)?
Getting Things Done is a book by David Allen that I read back in March this year.  When I first read it, I wasn't terribly impressed.  Many of the suggestions seemed common-sense to me.  But over the last four months, I've implemented some of its suggestions, and to my pleasant surprise, they work quite well.  Let me explain the primary idea.

Everyday, all of us are bombarded with a lot of little things to do. We need to pick up milk, send photos to friends, call the travel agent, give money to parents, etc.  And then there are the bigger projects, like projects from work, writing a book, or whatever.  Sometimes we find it hard to remember all the little things we need to do; sometimes we are paralysed into inaction when the project is too big.  So what do we do?

David Allen suggests a system to deal with all of this. 

1.  Collect
You need a system to collection information, all the little to-dos and stuff that need your attention. 

2.  Process
Tasks that are part of a bigger project need to be grouped together.  You need to decide which is the "next action" for the project, that is, the easiest, most tangible thing you can do to get the project going.  If you want to buy a house, maybe the "next action" is as simple as "Buy newspapers".  This helps with  the inertia we can't help feeling with big projects.

3.  Calendar
There is a difference between the calendar and the to-do list.  The calendar tells you what you die-die have to do or be at every day.  Your to-do list slots into your calendar when there is room.

I'm probably not doing a very good job explaining, but I'll try to show you what I mean in the next post.

 

Some of you know that I'm a student again, at the happy age of 30.  I'm not sure whether I've finally cultivated the habit of lifelong learning *cough* or whether I'm just being plain 'ole kiasu, but I find myself being genuinely interested in the content of this course, to the point of going to the library and borrowing the textbooks to flip through before class starts.  TO FLIP THROUGH BEFORE CLASS STARTS?!?  What in the world has possessed me?

I even borrowed a book so that I could study for a grammar exemption test, since I've not studied a lick of grammar in my life, AND I even did mind maps of all the sentence parts.  I'm glad I did all that 'cos the grammar test was really difficult, and I may fail, but at least I didn't feel like I was doing tikam-tikam during the test.

At least I found some really cool grammar videos along the way. :)

:)

This one's for my sis. It has an aardvark in it. Heh.

Unpack your adjectives!

"Lolly lolly lolly" is by far the most addictive tune. I can't get it out of my head!

This is fun. It is missing one thing from its definition of a noun though: s noun is a person, place, thing, or IDEA.