Some Useful and Interesting Updates

Readers

First of all, I’m finally over 1000 readers on Feedburner. That’s in addition to the 500-700 readers that just check the site every day.

The “missing area” is when I stopped using Feedburner for around a year. I didn’t really have a complete grasp on how RSS worked back then. The second tiny gap was when I made some changes to the site (linking words in my bio and putting summaries on the front page). I forgot to put the Feedburner stuff back on for a few days, but notice how after that the slope increased? Pretty cool.

I used to always worry about getting more readers, but after seeing my graph and realizing that I’m on a slow and steady uptick, I don’t worry about it anymore.

The one other improvement I really need to make is to fix the categories on the site. They are terrible and outdated. If you’d like to help me do that, send me an e-mail (e-mail address is under contact at the top of the site). I’ll need some volunteers to take sections of posts and recategorize and tag them.

Also if anyone has a ton of time and is interested in helping me interlink posts to each other, that would be amazing too.

Blood Test

In order to get frozen I had to get insurance. When you get insurance they take blood and urine samples and you can request a copy of your results.

Since I’m always harping about eating healthy and all that, I thought I’d post my results publicly. I don’t know much about all of these indicators, but they all seem really good except Alkalized Phosphate. A friend who is in charge of research at a hospital says not to worry about it, but if anyone knows more, I’d love to hear about it.

Lab Results (51k)

Useful Programs

I use two productivity programs on my computer that I think might be useful to you.

The first is called Thinking Rock 2. It’s free and is the easiest way to do GTD. What I like about it is that I can just leave it open, and can just click “collect thoughts” whenever I come up with something I need to do or look into. Then later steps refine those thoughts into todo lists. I’ve tried a lot of software like Thinking Rock, and it’s the only one that I’ve stuck with.

I’d rather have a todo list on my phone, but I find that the slower typing speed is enough to keep me from being really diligent about it. I’m on my computer all the time, though, so this is almost as good.

The next program is something that I’m just now getting into. Mystery recommended it to me a year ago, but I never looked into it until recently.

It’s called PersonalBrain. At first (okay, always) it looks really cheesy. The interface is unnecessarily space-futuristic. Once you get over that, it’s very useful. It’s a place to store your thoughts

Here’s a screenshot of part of mine:

You can see that I have a parenting section. I’ll have kids some day and I want to be the best parent possible, so whenever I read something about kids or parenting that I want to remember, I put it there.

Under Life Nomadic are a few subthoughts. In those I have ideas for things to do once I get to those places, including people who live in them and have offered to show me around or put me up. I would otherwise forget these things (and have in the past, unfortunately), but in the future I won’t.

The hierarchy of the whole thing is really flexible, it has a great search utility, and you can also link to files (like an image or PDF or spreadsheet).

Give it a try and let me know if you find any great uses for it.

A Question for You

I was watching the The Choice, a PBS documentary on the 2008 candidates (which actually made me respect McCain a lot more than I had before), and one of McCain’s advisors was talking about strategy.

One of the things he said that really struck me was (paraphrased), “We needed to figure out what John McCain represented to voters.”

That summed up exactly what I need to find out about myself. I even wrote it down in my Brain. What I am isn’t important—it’s what I represent to other people that matters. That’s what enables me to connect with people and write things that matter to them.

I’m working on a new project, and it would be immensely helpful to be able to focus a little better in it. So I ask you, in one sentence or so, what do I represent to you?