I started out reading on my Windows Mobile device and continue to do so because the one thing I have with me all the time is my phone. The e-reader software that I used back then was Peanut Press, which was later bought buy Palm, and then bought again by Barnes & Noble.

Lately, I have been testing a free program called Freda, which uses the increasingly more common and popular ePUB format [wikipedia]. With all the e-reader and tablet talk these days, there are a lot more options for accessing ebooks and ebook libraries as well as new hardware form factors.

For now, I’ve settled on managing my ebooks locally (rather than in a proprietary marketplace). I have found a couple tools that help make this easier. The first is a desktop e-reader application called Stanza which can also do some basic format conversion. They have since been bought by Amazon (you see the M&A theme going on in this marketspace) and development seems to have stalled since the Big A have their own Kindle platform to promote.

The other application that I have been making good use out of is Calibre which is a library management application. The real power of Calibre is its ability to convert ebook formats intelligently with pretty good results. It is also able to sync and manage all your ebooks, but I haven’t really gotten into those functions yet.

I was reading Bruce Sterling’s The Zenith Angle and at the very end came upon this quote that totally blew me away:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. [wikiquote]

This quote came from a book titled Disturbing the Peace written by the last President of Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel. The quote comes specifically from the chapter “The Politics of Hope”.

At first I struggled with what the quote was saying exactly. I grasped the first part about what hope was not, but where it said “the certainty that something makes sense”, I would try to substitute “the certainty that what I am doing is right”. This was definitely my own mind twisting the quote to meet my own personal assertions. After I realized and acknowledged my mistake, Havel’s intended meaning began to settle in my mind.

It is rather comforting to me that hope is based on rationality, since I am all about things making sense. The flip side that hope is not optimism is equally true and reassuring. Hope is not limited to the outcome but based on the certainty of reason.

While thinking about hope, I remembered a verse in the Bible at the beginning of “The Faith Chapter”:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. [Hebrews 11:1]

This verse makes the connection between faith and hope. At first it seems kind of circular in its certainty. But I guess this brings up the ultimate question as to what exactly am I placing my hope in. If hope is “the certainty that somethings makes sense”, then that something better be something that is going to last and that is worth living and dying for.

I am going to have to read Havel’s book to find out more of what he meant.

I can’t even remember when I first started to save and preserve my internet bookmarks from version to version, computer to computer, and even in the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox (I’m sure it didn’t go all the way back to my Netscape browsing days). Well, last week, I finally went through my old bookmarks that have been stagnating in my Firefox browser ignored and unused.

I used to spend a lot of time organizing and maintaining them, but in the last few years, I’ve slowly moved away from using them, having found more effective solutions online. Hence the title of this post, which is in reference to an increasingly popular concept, cloud computing. This is the notion that instead of storing information, in this example bookmarks, locally on my computer, I save them on the web, or “in the clouds”.

Here’s a list of web applications that I use in place of my old bookmarks folders and some descriptions of how I use them:

• del.icio.us: any interesting sites that I want to ‘bookmark’ go into this account, which I also publish as an RSS feed.
• Bloglines: RSS feed reader to keep up with news items published from websites that I follow.
• Google Maps: geographical tagging of locations which I frequent or would like to check out.
• Google Docs: organized notes of topics that I have researched online
• Google Web History: using the Google Toolbar I have an online accessible record of my browsing history which is also searchable in case I want to find a site that I visited before but forgot to record.
• Remember the Milk: task list of things to do, websites to visit, topics to research, etc.
• diigo: in conjunction with a Firefox add-on, I can annotate and highlight web documents.
• Amazon Wishlist: for products that I am interested in or want to keep track of.
• Review sites: keep track of those items which I have tried or would like to try.
  • Yelp: restaurants and stores
  • Flixster: movies
  • Goodreads: books

By definition, these applications are accessible from any computer or device that can go online. But that is also one of their downsides, since for the most part they cannot be accessed offline. That is until offline solutions like Google Gears are more widely implemented.

Another interesting thing that I noticed as I was putting together this post was that these web applications are more than just a repository for what I used to use as ‘bookmarks’. They provide a richer experience and collection of all the things that I do both online AND offline. I guess I should re-word the title, but ‘Stuff in the Clouds’ just didn’t sound right.

It’s been nearly five months since I last made any significant programming and design changes to philomyth.us. As before, there were some security and programming upgrades for the underlying wordpress site software. And also, since toying with Facebook, I found some features that I could share across platforms.

I also took the opportunity to overhaul the theme design since I never could get the previous theme to work properly in Internet Explorer [get firefox] and the previous theme was also somewhat cumbersome so that I couldn’t easily make changes without having to re-learn the entire setup. I ended up choosing a theme called Cleaker 2.1, which after some customizations and modifications, I am very happy with.

Lastly, I updated the plugins (or add-ons), “out with the old in with the new”. Here’s a list of the plugins that I am running currently:

• A Different Monthly Archive Script: posting calendar
• Akismet: comment spam
• Brian’s Latest Comments: comment listing
• flickrRSS: flickr photostream
• Samsarin PHP Widget: php coded widgets
• SparkStats: posting graph
• SRG Clean Archives: post archives
• Subscribe2: email subscriptions
• Subscribe To Comments: comment notification
• Time Zone: daylight savings time adjustment
• Ultimate Tag Warrior: post tags
• Wordbook: facebook crossposting
• WordPress.com Stats: site traffic
• WordPress Database Backup: automatic backups
• WordPress PDA: mobile-friendly site
• WP AJAX Edit Comments: comment editing

As I mentioned earlier, I replaced a couple of plugins with ones that could be shared with Facebook:

• Now Reading -> GoodReads
• Movie Ratings -> Flixster

With any major site revisions, if you see anything that isn’t working quite right, please let me know in the comments.

I recently finished a Bible reading schedule that we were going through in my men’s group, so now I was looking for something to keep up the discipline of reading the Bible on a daily basis.

Initially, I was looking for some way to create a customized reading schedule that I could receive automatically through an RSS feed, but unfortunately, that doesn’t exist just yet. an idea ahead of its time, possibly.

In the course of my search, I discovered that the International Bible Society, sends out a daily Bible passage called Daily Manna through an RSS feed, which I can get automatically. These are the guys who came up with the famous New International Version and their more contemporary translation, Today’s New International Version. This is great because it also gives me a chance to read through their new translation.

So, until something better or more definite comes along, I will try this out as part of my daily reading plan.

The last few months, I have been trying to get my head around all the different parts of managing our business. There are so many projects, people and events to keep track of that it’s really easy to start losing things in the shuffle. This on top of our oldest daughter starting Kindergarten along with a whole bunch of extracurricular activities, shifted our family’s collective focus and energy, and contributed to my need to get organized mentally.

I have been using Microsoft Outlook for quite a few years now to manage my tasks, e-mail, calendar and contacts, but I was starting to see the flood of information burying me to the point of ineffectiveness and even incapacitation. Outlook was no longer a tool, it was becoming a burden.

A couple of years ago, I saw someone use an outlining tool called MindManager. It was a way of organizing thoughts and ideas on the computer in the form of a mindmap. This seemed like the perfect solution, so I decided to give it a try. I started out using it to map out all the projects at work which I was a part of. I then used it to manage my daily work flow by referencing e-mails associated with each project and assigning tasks that needed to be accomplished. MindManager even had a function in which it could synchronize tasks with Outlook. And I also found a program which could access the mindmaps from my PDA called Pocket MindMap. Unfortunately, the more detail that I tried to capture in the mindmap, the further I got into micro-managing what needed to get done, and the less I found myself actually getting things done.

At around this time, I came upon a time management methodology based on a book titled, “Getting Things Done”, abbreviated as GTD. The approach was different in that it was designed to spend more time actually completing tasks rather than being bogged down in managing them. I decided to give it a try, but in doing so, I came to the realization that Outlook’s task management was unusable, and found an online task list application called Remember the Milk (abbreviated RTM). An added bonus was that RTM had a mobile web interface so that I could use it on my PDA phone as well. I first tried it out with my personal, family and church activities and have now expanded to using it for work as well. I also started using Gmail’s web interface as my primary e-mail tool, and figured out a way using flags, stars and drafts to manage my communication work flow.

I have found this method of managing tasks to be more efficient and effective. I think that at least for me, the approach is about getting away from command and control and more towards getting the simple tasks out of the way so that I could focus on those priorities that are truly important. Of course, this is still a work in progress, so we’ll have to re-evaluate after a couple of months to see how it is working.

In the process of getting organized mentally, I have streamlined my application tools by eliminating Outlook and using Gmail, Google Calendar and RTM. I didn’t start out trying to move towards web applications, it just happens that those are the best tools for the method, until desktop applications catch up or web applications develop offline capabilities. Also, web applications provide greater accessibility and availability of the complete tool set. As for MindManager, I think that this is still an effective brainstorming and strategy tool, just not so good, at least for me, as a day to day task management system.

Quite a few friends and even my Microeconomics professor recommended that I read this book. It turned out to be an easy and fairly quick read considering how long I take on some other books. The main thing that I really gained was a better understanding of what economics is all about and how it can be observed and even used in daily life:

Economics is, at root, the study of incentives…. An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation…. There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

The majority of the book is observations that the author uses to bring out the reality of economics in our daily lives. Through this, he identifies certain key points in which economics can actually help us to understand the world around us.

One point that he brought out and is particularly relevant to the Information Age we live in today:

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent, depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.

And the effect of the Internet:

The Internet has accomplished what no consumer advocate could: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.

Of course, the one illustration that the book is most famous for is the one about the decrease in crime being correlated to the legalization of abortion. The author does qualify his observation with a nod towards one of my favorite authors:

To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G.K. Chesterton: when there aren’t enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads…. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.

The author ends the book with an epilogue in which he repeats his assertion that economics is the observation of the real world, whereas morality is a representation of the ideal. As a personal reflection then, in learning to observe the real world, I am learning to reconcile those morals that I hold to be true with the actuality of how I act in, within and upon the real world.

I found a couple of online resources in order to follow along in the authors’ continuing development of his ideas:

• New York Times Magazine: Freakonomics Column
• Freakonomics Blog

Good thing she said “Yes!”. Because I don’t know what I would do if I had to go find another book to read before finishing this one .

I enjoyed reading through the Chronicles again and this time as an adult. I think I also had additional insight after having read The Narnian as to what Lewis had gone through in his life and what he was going through as he wrote the Chronicles. They really are great stories, and I can’t wait to introduce them to my daughters…that is once they learn how to read .

I had forgotten about Lewis’ reference to the ‘shadowlands’ and it is such a powerful visualization of the world that we are living in now in contrast to the JOY that God has in store for us. There’s even a movie by the name Shadowlands which is a biography of Lewis and how he came to meet his wife Joy (now that’s a curious and appropriate name). But I think I would want to read Lewis’ autobiography Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life before watching the movie. Unfortunately, Surprised by Joy only comes in an analog format, so it will require some extra effort on my part.

I had heard about this devotional from a couple of friends who had gone through it, and I figured that since I had been going through a spiritual dry spell at the time as well as some difficult work periods, this would be encouraging to read. I enjoyed the simple reading passages, which oftentimes were excerpts of songs, poems or writings from historical Christians who had gone through challenging times.

Actually, being the geek that I am, I read this devotional as an ebook on my ipaq with Laridian’s DailyReader program, which made it easy to keep track of which day I was on. But since it took me so long to finish, I had to reset or reinstall or replace my ipaq a couple of times over the course of reading, and this proved to be somewhat disruptive in the way the program keeps track of the days. But in the end, I was able to get it working (and of course, I would rather go through the challenge of making the software work, than carrying around a hardcopy version of the book).