Paradigm shift
I pondered it for over a year now. Pro’s, con’s — I couldn’t decide whether it was worth the hassle or not.
Now, I did it and it feels great: I decided to dump the second electronic gadget I’d used for years now: My Palm. Useful and used companion over the years, but not an easy one: Bet every-time I really should’ve been able to check my diary, it refused to work because of low battery. And after all, it tended to loose it’s memory if left unattended for too long. Backup!, you might cry, and of course, I backed it up every time I synced and more but once the Palm fell into its coma, it took half a day at least to restore it to it’s previous state.
So, the last time it lost its memory, I put it aside — and happily lived without it for over 2 months now. Of course, there were moments where I’d wished my Palm were still working and that I had it with me, but these moments were surprisingly rare. Actually, it turned out that I used my Palm primarily for private purpose: Moments where my PC at work was not in reach, gatherings where suddenly, you should fix a meeting with somebody but couldn’t because you had no diary.
Alternatives
Obviously, during these two months without my Palm, I checked the alternatives. I know some people who are really happy with their Pocket PC, and some others that use Windows Mobile Phones successfully[1]. So replacing the Palm by a Pocket PC seemed an alternative, with all the hi-resolution devices popping up slowly but steadily. The other would be to invest into a new Palm, given that the old showed signs of strain and didn’t have Wi-Fi — something I absolutely wanted in a new device.
But it turned out that I was wrong with the assumption a new electronic diary would be the right choice: Pocket PC’s with a decent display, speed and memory configuration are simply much more expensive than comparable Palms — and then, buying a new Palm didn’t feel to be the right choice neither.
The choice
Last monday, I finally made the paradigm shift and decided to entirely dump any kind of electronic diary — the one I owned so far and the ones I pondered as replacement devices. And yesterday, I proudly became the owner of a brand-new, shiny 18 months Moleskine diary[2].
The first thing I observed when staring to fill in the meetings, appointments and recurring things was that I instantly had a better feeling of what happened in my life. Sometime, I was so stuck on the weekly and daily views of Outlook, I didn’t even think there might be a day or week after. With a paper diary, this is different: Browsing speed is unmatched and while flipping the pages, you get a feeling of what’s happening in your life.
Of course, today it’s too early to come to any meaningful conclusion of this paradigm shift, but given that the dump of my mobile phone made my life much easier and more relaxed, I’m pretty sure I won’t regret this.
And, after all, if I really come back to some form of electronic diary at some time in the future, the investment into the Moleskine diary was so small, I wouldn’t even bother about it.[3]
Addendum
Something I’m eagerly looking for is the Moleskine City Notebooks (See image on the right). Unfortunately, there’s no City Notebook for Switzerland on the list, but I hope they will correct this soon — and add lots of others City Notebooks in the future. 
Technorati Tags: agenda, habits, moleskine, planning
[1] An oxymoron, I agree, but it seems to be defeated by these people.
[2] The version I bought is the “Large” Weekly & Notebook one, because I think the extra space for notes might come in handy.
[3] Note to self: Start outlining blog posts in the “Beyond Bullet-Points” approach.
iPhotoToGallery Patch
Zach Wily provides the Gallery2 and iPhoto community with his wonderful iPhotoToGallery exporter for iPhoto.
With my new gallery and my iPhoto workflow, I am an eager user of that plugin. One small thing that can become a little bit embarrassing is a bug that introduces double slashes in the URL.
Because Zach provides the source code of this exporter, I was able to fix it and herewith provide a patched iPhotoToGallery 0.65.1 version of the exporter that does not have this problem. You can check the patch to get an idea what I changed in the code, but be told that it consisted of adding only a few lines of code.
Installation
You install the exporter manually:
- Download the iPhotoToGallery 0.65.1 ZIP file
- Unzip it, you will see a ‘iPhotoToGallery.iPhotoExporter’ folder
- Change to the iPhoto application in the /Application folder
- Open the “More info” (Or “Get info”) window and navigate to the “Plugins” section
- Click “Add” and select the “iPhotoToGallery.iPhotoExporter” folder created during unzip
- Allow the occasional overwrite (if you had the Plugin installed before)
- (Re-)start iPhoto
Et voilà. You’ll see the new version number in the export window and I also added my name to the copyright list, so you know who messed up Zach’s code. 
The “Donate” link still points to Zach. Credit where credit is due.
iWork ‘06: My personal bliss
I don’t use iWork often — although I’d love to — but from time to time, I give a presentation in Keynote or spill-out some pages in Pages.
One of my biggest gripes since Keynote 1 was the fact that the charts in Keynote (and nowadays Pages) could not contain “empty” cells. Wherever you put no value in a cell of a chart, you’d get a “0″ filled-in by the chart module. This was OK in most cases but as soon as you’d like to compare an actual data-set with a forecast, you’d end up having problems because there was no way of using an non-equal number of values per row. Even if you tried emptying the values in the XML[1], you would either end up with an empty chart or so, but definitely not with an non-equal number of values.
Today, I had the chance of trying iWork ‘06 and luckily they’ve changed this behaviour, as illustrated by the screen-shot. Yay! With the new Macs being Intel, there’s one more chance to convince our IT department that I need a Mac at work.
[1] Yes, I was that desperate at some time
