SkillSlate uses Pivotal Tracker for task management. At this point I have used just about every task management tool under the sun. Bugzilla, Eventum, Trac, various offerings from 37 Signals… I even rolled my own using WordPress once. So far I can’t say that any one of them is my favorite. They each have their advantages and drawbacks.

Pivotal is interesting because it uses a model for estimating deadlines and organizing workloads that I haven’t seen elsewhere. You assign points to each task corresponding to how long you think it will take. The points are relative to each other, not time. So if you decide that changing the colors in the header is a one point task, you might decide that adding some validation to a form is a two point task, and totally rewriting the login system is a five point task.

Then, rather than assign tasks to releases or milestones, you create releases and arrange your various tasks as needing to happen either before or after said release. As you work and close out tasks Pivotal calculates how fast you work. Based on how fast you’re working and how much needs to be done, Pivotal will estimate when you’ll be finished (and whether you’ll hit your deadline if you’ve set one).

It’s an imperfect system, sure. First and foremost, every member of the team needs to be on the same page with their point estimations. Second, the UI is completely non-intuitive. I had to actually watch the help videos to understand what was going on. Each team likely has multiple projects, but switching between projects is a clunky process. And the various reports and charts seem scattered and hard to find.

After getting over the UI though, I love Pivotal Tracker. As someone who has an “amazing and somewhat alarming thirst for points” (Chris’s words), seeing my workload broken down visually is very handy. If you turn on the “charts” view you’ll get a graph of how many work units you need to plow through to release on time versus your current rate of work. It helps turn a mountain of endless tickets into something more organized and paced.

I’ll be interested to see how well the time estimates work. In order to provide useful estimates it needs at least a month worth of history, so it will be a little while before we get a really accurate reading for our team.

I will never be a minimalist. I come from a strong pack rat heritage (though my mother has made leaps and bounds in the past 5 years at unearthing the basement). But reading these lists has made me think perhaps I could stand to pare it down a little.

Rather than cut down to 100 things, I have decided to get rid of 100 things. Given the amount of stuff I have crammed into our 1000 square foot condo it’s unlikely that ditching 100 items would actually make a noticeable dent. But I feel it’s a worthy challenge.

I found the following items in my immediate vicinity which I really don’t need to hang on to:

1. A stuffed kiwi key chain (my keys are on a bottle opener that says “die in a fire” on it)
2. A miniature plastic “book” containing a notepad and tiny pen
3. A stuffed GIR key chain (don’t panic, I have another one)
4. A board game I have played only once
5. Three VHS cassettes (I contend these each count as one item) which are readily available on DVD. I haven’t owned a VHS player in years.
6. A bread machine
7. An extra kitchen timer
8. A TV-B-Gone (fun as it is, I don’t really go places with TVs I wish to turn off)
9. An envelope moistener I have never used
10. A pair of Chuck Taylors I bought in 2000. They are full of holes and uncomfortable to wear.
11. A pair of pants I have never worn which don’t fit. I lost the receipt, but they were only $5 so it’s not a big loss.
12. A pair of pants which have never fit me well. Also $5
13. A size 6 pair of jeans. I caved and rescued them. They’re expensive jeans!
14. Six books (four paperback, two hardcover). I thought about listing them on PaperBackSwap, but with my Nook I really have no desire for printed books. The books are Freakonomics, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Stranger in a Strange Land, Job: A Comedy of Justice, Anansi Boys and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

With the exception of the chucks, which I threw in the trash with just a bit of a dramatic pout, everything else is headed to Goodwill (or NYC Resistor where appropriate).

20 items down, 80 to go.

Now that I'm working full-time at an awesome startup downtown I've been packing bento lunches again. In addition to being better for me, it's substantially cheaper than buying lunch in midtown. A wrap or salad at the "usual" place ends up being about $9. Even considering the fact that Chris works from home a few days a week it adds up fast, to about $300 per month. A bento lunch generally comes in under $3.

Today's lunch consists of a baby spinach salad with peppers, carrots, and mushrooms, and a chicken sandwich with pepperoni. I use fat free cream cheese instead of mayonaise. Fat free cream cheese completely fails as anything I'd want to put on a bagel, but does well in sandwiches. I used "low carb" bread. Low carb bread has a weird spongy texture I really don't recommend. Stick with the real thing.

Unfortunately, Blizzard would have none of it:

On the plus side, at midnight when the game does go live, I’ll be playing Starcraft II instead of waiting in line at Gamestop.
Curiously, SCII comes with two “guest passes” for the game. Interested to find out the logistics of how those work.

Edit: or, I could just read the back of the card, duh. The “Guest Pass” is valid for 7 hours or 14 days, whichever comes first. This seems less useful than the “spawn” installations available with SCI, but since everyone I know has a copy of SCI, we never needed it anyway.

I’m excited to announce that starting in August I’ll be joining the team at SkillSlate.com, working with their development team to launch the next version of their site. SkillSlate is a company that focuses on connecting freelancers and independent contractors with clients. Having spent the last two years freelancing and running my own business, I’m excited to work with a team again. I’m also bursting with ideas about various ways the site could be expanded, though I will be careful to avoid the dreaded “you should” in conversations with the rest of the company. It’s a pretty small team right now, so there will be plenty of learning opportunities as it grows. I’m sure I’ll blog about it, at least as much as my NDA allows.

I’m also incredibly sad to be leaving my job at NearlyFreeSpeech.Net. For the past year and a half I’ve worked on their customer support team. This blog, along with most of my other websites, is hosted at NFSN, and has withstood being Slashdotted, BoingBoing’d, Farked, and god knows what other horrible slew of internet traffic. It has been an privilege to work there, and I will continue to be a happy customer of theirs. If you are a command line ninja who can talk to humans (via email), you might want to consider being my replacement. Drop me a line (kellbot at gmail dot com) with some background and I’ll pass on the details.

As for my own startup, it’s on the back burner for now. We had a catch-22 where we couldn’t get funding without building the site first, but as freelancers we never had time to build the site without money. I still think it’s a good idea, but it will be a few years before I’m able to devote resources to it. The good news that after a few years of getting paid a real salary I’ll be able to fund my own projects. The new job is a great opportunity, one that was essentially dropped in my lap. But I can’t move forward without a longing look towards all the things I’m leaving behind, particularly a great part-time job and the luxury of working in my PJs until noon.

To make it a little easier for folks to find the posts they care about, I’ve added a sidebar with the category information. I’ve even taken the time to put most posts in categories! If you’re a crafter, you might want to check out Business and Crafting. If you’re a hacker, try Tech.

Additionally, you can now choose which categories you want emailed to you if you sign up for new post emails.

As a side note: if you’re just commenting on the blog to get “link juice” to your URL, it won’t work. All comment links are marked for Google to more or less ignore them. For details, check out the Wikipedia article on nofollow.

This prediction invariably causes our bibliophile friends to clutch their dead trees close to their chest, screaming “no, that could never happen,” and retreat into the stacks of books. As though the digital book revolution might bring with it some sort of mass burning. But friends (Romans, countrymen), I’ve had my nook for just over four months now. I have seen the future and I welcome our new e-paper overlords with open arms.

Before I got my nook, I couldn’t tell you the last book I’d read that wasn’t an O’Reilly manual. Reading wasn’t something I really did for fun, and it certainly wasn’t something I’d take with me on a trip. I’ve read more books, fiction and nonfiction, in the last four months than I have in the previous four years. For those of you on the fence about getting an ebook reader, I present my list of reasons digital readers will reign supreme over paper.

Portability

My nook remains the same weight, no matter how thick the book I’m reading. I have a herniated disc in my neck, so carrying even a purse around for a day is a big deal. Anyone who has ever lugged a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince can appreciate having a smaller form factor.

On the same note, I live in a 1000 square foot condo which, while spacious for New York standards, is pretty much out of space to store books. My nook on the other hand still has plenty of space in its on-board memory. Not to mention expansion cards.

Flexibility

Carrying an entire library around in your bag is amazing. I’m in the middle of about 4 different books, and can switch between them as the mood strikes. A few weeks ago I got trapped on the subway for an hour, finished the book I was reading, and started right up with the sequel.

Privacy

With an ebook, your reading selections are your own dang business. If I want to read Twilight, I can do so without embarrassment.  Sure, in a perfect world no one would need to feel embarrassed about their reading material of choice. But frankly, no one wants to be caught reading a self-help book on finding your inner tree spirit when they run into their boss on the A-train.

Convenience

If I decide at 3am that I really, really want to read David Sedaris’s latest, I can have it downloaded and waiting for me on my nook in the time it would take me to find pants, let alone a 24 hour book store.

I should mention that in the coming revolution, we’re going to end up killing brick-and-mortar stores which sell intellectual property (books, music, programs). Large chain bookstores will slowly die. And small locally-owned bookstores will need to take a lesson from the record stores that are still around if they want to survive the transition. Every time I visit my parents I heave a sigh of relief that Hole in the Wall Books is still open. Many great bookstores won’t make it, and the loss will be no small tragedy.

Why not?

Still, despite everything I love about my nook, the current hardware and software available for digital book readers isn’t there yet. There are still format wars being fought, and not nearly enough books available in digital format. While I love the nook hardware, the software is pretty weak. And there are some types of books, like textbooks, which none of the current ebook readers handle particularly well. So lovers of dead trees have no fear, the end of printed books is still some time off.

In this case, it’s a DOS emulator for the Nintendo DS, the DSx86.

As if there weren’t enough options for extending the DS (homebrew, NES emulation), one man has taken it upon himself to write a DOS emulator for the DS. It will run most games that run on a 286/386, with some caveats. Not all the opcodes have been written in yet, and sound blaster support requires a little bit of finesse. But it’s under active development, which is exciting.

You load a game the same way you did back in the day… from the command line. Since the DS doesn’t have a keyboard, DSx86 includes one for you on the touch screen. It’s hilariously adorable.

Once the game is loaded you can either continue to use the “keyboard” or swap screens so that your game is shown in the touchscreen and you can use the stylus as a mouse. Holding down left/right on the d-pad to click took a bit of getting used to. There’s also a tap-to-click mode, but I found it difficult to use for gaming. It was a good illustration of how programs not designed for a touchscreen can be infuriating to use on one. Because most DOS games run at a slightly larger resolution than the DS, you have the option of either panning or resizing the screen. I found panning to be the most useful, and all it really cut off was the title/menu bar at the top.

Seeing the old Sierra logo along with the MIDI-tastic intro music on the DS was ridiculous and awesome. I’m just about finished my 20th or so lifetime play through of The Island of Dr. Brain. If you’re dying to take some of your old DOS games with you (you did save them all, right?) , check the compatibility list and give DSx86 a try.

I had to double check to make sure it wasn’t Sandra Bullock.

I looked into the various coworking spaces in the area, and found them to all be a bit more than I was willing to spend or a bit farther than I was willing to travel. Instead, I reorganized my office out of the living room and into the spare bedroom. Now in order to work, I have to leave my toys, and when I’m downstairs relaxing I can’t be trying to sneak work in.

But it’s still a bit depressing to go sit in the spare bedroom by myself all day every day. So today a friend of mine who is a fellow freelancer came by for some home-based coworking. And it was all in all a success. There are a couple things that I think helped contribute to the usefulness, and some things we probably should have done:

Get off the couch

Being able to work from the couch, or bed, or hammock, is one of the perks of being self-employed. And while it’s great for a change of scenery, it’s not the most productive setting for most people. You probably already have a desk, but make sure your guest coworker has a chair and a table on which to work.

Your coworker should not have to fight for space.

Clear a workspace for your friend

No one wants to work on the corner of your dining room table, sandwiched between your to-be-filed bills and that box of Christmas ornaments you keep forgetting to put away. Find a space you can clear off, where your friend can work comfortably without feeling cluttered. They should have enough room for their laptop and a mouse, and maybe even a real monitor if they so desire.

Have some snacks handy

Keeping some snacks and drinks on hand will reduce the temptation to go out for food, something companies like Google figured out long ago. Carrots, grapes, rice cakes, yogurt, and trail mix are all good to have around. Messy snacks like cheetos, oranges, and other things likely to get on your hands are less ideal. If you do decide to stock the fridge with snacks to share, let your friend know where they are, along with cups/plates, so they don’t have to bug you every time they want a glass of water.

Shut up

If you’re working with a good friend, it’s tempting to socialize instead of work. A few quick conversations is fine, but you really should let each other get things done. If the temptation to gossip is too strong, consider setting up your work stations so you don’t face each other.

Set a quitting time

Don’t let your friend be an enabler to bad work habits. And yes, working all night long is a bad habit. Your life needs some balance. Pick a time for your work day to end, at which point both of you should leave your office (or convert it back to the living room it was before). If you want to go out later for drinks or whatnot, letting your guest go home to have dinner, do a load of laundry, etc will keep their day from feeling super long.