In order to catch these valuable bits, I use a modified to-do list.  I keep an email draft in my Gmail inbox and a notepad document up on the screen which together contain anything interesting I’ve encountered and have yet to process.

Say I’m reading a post about books and there are links to a good author.  I haven’t finished the first post yet so jumping in a new direction or opening a new tab in the background would leave me scattered.  I add the author’s name and a link to the book to my ‘buffer’ and finish where I was at. When I’ve got time, I can work through things on this list which aren’t dreaded tasks.  I perceive them as anticipated points of interest.

The list grows and shrinks according to my level of busyness but higher-priority items get picked off first and those that in hindsight don’t really matter can get periodically bumped off and out of the way.  So far, it’s been fantastic way to reign in my easily distracted mind to actually finish things in some semblance of order.

For example:

Blog posts

-10,000 year clock

-Map guy

-Photosynth of inauguration

-Post portfolio pieces

-Prairie Home Companion Streaming

-Books

-Buffer

guitar hero songs

research jboss

contribute to mediawiki

open filer

FreeNAS

pfSense

try systemBoot Disk

Pound – http load balancer

Ruby on rails with Bear

Ruby on rails book

try clonezilla disc

shorting stock

technology singularity

PKAL work  - images as headers, image upload issue

Try out OpenMeetings

Try out CloudVPN

Windows – Backup to external hard drive: Backup Magic

Network Linux Box – Great article on network backups

Online options: Carbonite

Backup Magic automates and simplifies the process by allowing you to select certain folders to mirror on an external drive somewhere. I can set things up once and then periodically (or automatically on a cron job) run these backups. Just as easily, I can create another job to restore the backed up files/directories to their original location after a format (dead hard drive, sibling abuse, virus infestation, etc.).

Free to use. Pay if you really like it. Backup Magic

For example:

• how to make pad thai
• weather prediction
• barbeque
• the workings of nuclear power
• how plumbing works
• the art of the symphony
• early modes of transportation
• venture capital
• transatlantic ocean currents
• national parks of the us
• carrier-pidgeons

Often when I’m biking home from work, or falling asleep, or making dinner, etc. I think of things that would be worth knowing.  Sadly most of these thoughts are discarded and lost in the depths of my terrible terrible memory.

Try keeping a list – a leftover envelope, a notepad file, whatever – and take note of these things to look up later.  There’s the kind of knowledge we learn in classes where we memorize the names of elements in the periodic table, physics equations, dates of important events or classic novels.  Then there’s the kind of knowledge that really enriches the mind.

To fully digest something, it needs to be interesting enough to drive you to dig in and do move beyond memorization.  This list is my way of setting aside some time to set aside the stresses of life and immerse myself in things, random things, that enrich my view of the world.

What I need is a way to pull all of the physical files into one place from which I can organize and run backups on those files.  Accompanying those files, however, is a wealth of meta-information in the form of ratings, playlists, play counts and album information that I don’t want to lose.

Solution: iTunes now includes a “Consolidate Music” option under the “Advanced” tab.  Running this process will copy every file listed in your Music library to the home location (this setting: Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced tab).  In my case, I ran this process once, moving everything to an external hard drive, deleted the original copies of the music, and then running it a second time to copy everything back to a single folder on the local drive.

Update:  “Copying music failed. The file name was invalid or too long.”

• This is a result of filenames being too long, generally a result of artist and album information included directly within the file name.
• To get around this problem, open up the file My Documents/My Music/iTunes/Itunes Music Library.xml and search for the location of the directory you’re moving things from.  The first instance of this directory will be that associated with the file iTunes had trouble with.  Navigate to this file and shorten its name to something more appropriate.  Next, find the song in iTunes, double-click on it, choose “yes” and find the newly renamed file.  You can now resume the consolidation process, repeating these steps whenever iTunes has problems.
• The process may sound daunting but my collection includes ~6000 songs and encountered only 6 such errors.