Category: Uncategorized

Diablo-Style?

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I are having lunch at a restaurant that has real silverware. I’m purusing the menu and notice they have some sort of steak sandwich that has a notation that it can be prepared “Diablo style”.

Ignoring the small print explanation, I point this out to my wife and suggest that this might mean that we have to kill rats and imps and the food falls out onto the floor like magic.

Remembering how much time we both wasted on this sort of activity, we went with the chicken.

Presumably in another decade the same restaurant will offer its sandwich “World of Warcraft style.”

Agenda Fusion 7

Developer One has finally managed to release the initial version of Agenda Fusion 7 for the PocketPC. The PocketPC aftermarket organizer field is pretty much between Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant. Many longtime Agenda Fusion users, including myself, believed that AF had fallen behind Pocket Informant both in features and speed. I was close to switching, but the promise of a version 7 had me hold off and I’m glad.

The major improvement with the initial release of version 7 is a Projects view, which addresses the major complaint I had about Agenda Fusion, which was its lack of any sort of hierarchical system for organizing tasks, appointments, etc.

See, thanks to Conversant I already have the habit of tagging everything with ludicrous detail. Agenda Fusion fed that need in an organizer since it lets you create categories and assign multiple categories to tasks, appointments and contacts. I’ve got about 50 different categories.

It also has an excellent filtering system so I can create a filter, say Office Computer, which will show all of the tasks that I need to get done that can be done on my office computer. This sort of context-based task tracking is something I stole from Getting Things Done, and I love it. I also have categories and subcategories for my various websites and weblogs.

But dammit, sometimes I also needed a straightahead hierarchical view of my tasks. I got to the point where I was maintaining some tasks in both ListPro — a nice, advanced list/outline software — and in Agenda Fusion. The new Project view in Agenda Fusion takes care of that. I can create “projects” in an outliner and then assign existing tasks, appointments and contacts to them. So I can quickly switch between a project-based view of my tasks and appointments and a simple flat context-based view of my tasks and appointments (for a bit of context, I’m very anal and have about 700-1000 tasks at any given moment).

The UI for the Project view — especially adding tasks, etc. to it — still needs some work, but even in its early stages Agenda Fusion 7 really takes the software to that cliched “next level.”

Congressional Idiots on the Jeff Gannon Affair

I really couldn’t care less about the Jeff Gannon affair one way or the other, except to point out that this Fox News story underlies what idiots our elected officials are (and this idiot Conyers is, unfortunately, from Michigan — emphasis added),

[John] Conyers and [Louise] Slaughter note in their letter that in an October 2003 interview with Wilson, Guckert referenced a memo written by U.S. intelligence officials indicating the operative suggested Wilson could investigate reports that Iraq had sought uranium.

“In and of itself, this indicates that Mr. Guckert had access to classified information,” the two lawmakers wrote. And “it appears now that Mr. Guckert memorialized his experiences at the White House.”

As has been widely reported about the Gannon affair, Gannon mentioned the memo almost two weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported on it. There’s no evidence that Gannon did anything but read the WSJ story about the memo and ask an official about the memo. Certainly the fact that he knew about the memo was proof “in and of itself” that Gannon had access to the memo only if you accept the bizarre proposition that everyone who also read the Wall Street Journal’s report “had access to classified information.”

California Foie Gras Restaurant Targeted by Extremists Closes

Sonoma Saveurs, the foie gras store and restaurant owned by the partners behind Sonoma Foie Gras, recently closed after failing to generate enough business to stay open.

The restaurant was severely vandalized in 2003, but ultimately closed because of a simple lack of patronage.

Junny and Guilermo Gonzalez, who were partners in the restaurant and also own Sonoma Foie Gras, said they would turn their focus to their foie gras farm.

Source:

Sonoma Saveurs foie gras shop closes. GraceAnn Walden, San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 2005.