• George Mason University Green Machine plays Rage
  

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• Flash Hockey Fans
  

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• Brands & a 5 year old
  

  Click here to view the embedded video.

• Launch Center for the iPhone
• Simpli Oats via Cool Hunting
• Clear for the iPhone
• Taking photos with your iPhone

★

★

★

Cheers.

Give it a try.

Here’s how:
- Navigate to the Image search on Google — http://images.google.com
- Drag an image from your desktop to the search field. I used this one:

- As you drag the image into the search bar it changes to indicate that you can drop the image into the search bar.

- Google uploads the image to the search engine and gives you it’s best guess as the search result.

Very cool.

Social media has changed the way we view and interact with the world around us. From Twitter to Facebook to micro-blogs we have shaped tools that allow us to get information more quickly, more succinctly, and more frequently. Unfortunately, these tools that we have shaped to “help” us are now shaping us…with consequences we have yet to fully know and understand.

There are those vices, those addictions, whose consequences are easy to recognize…especially after years of observation. The smoker faces any number of cancers and/or respiratory illnesses. The gambler faces loss of career, possessions, and even family in some cases. The drug addict faces…well, you get the point. But what about the person who, in a quest to know more, read more, and learn more through the tools that power social media, is spending copious amounts of time in front of his/her computer? What happens to, and in, the person that is addicted to Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Even now psychologists do not how to label this type of addiction, much less how to treat it. With smokers you take away the cigarettes, with gamblers you take away the ability to gamble, and with drug addicts you take away the drugs. But what do you do with social media/computer addicts? Can you take away the computer? What will the person do to communicate (email), to book travel reservations, to do research? I’m being a little facetious, but I think you understand where I’m going with this. The computer has become such an integral part of our lives that it is almost inconceivable to contemplate a life without one.

Several weeks ago I came to the conclusion that it was time to honestly evaluate my use of the computer, and more specifically my use of social media. I loved Twitter and the 500+ people I “followed”. I found it extremely useful to find out more about the city I live in, to track releases of software, to understand more about web design. I loved Facebook…the perfect tool for keeping in touch with friends and family around the world. Flickr, Gowalla, blogs, they all had their use and I was engaged with all of them. I knew that these “tools” were impacting me more than they should when I began to feel that I was going to miss something important if I wasn’t monitoring them. When I worked from home I had Tweetie (my Twitter client) up and running the whole time. I checked email and Facebook from my iPhone right before turning out the lights at night and as soon as I awoke in the morning. It all became too much. Honest evaluation led me to realize that my marriage was suffering, my parenting was suffering, my friendships (now that’s ironic) were suffering. A change had to be made.

Here is a sampling of the changes I’ve made:

• No computer before the kids leave for school, except to check the weather forecast.
• No computer from 3PM to 8PM (kids get home at 3PM, go to bed at 8PM).
• No computer on Sundays (it’s a day of rest and family).
• I check Facebook no more than 3 times a day (morning, lunch, and bedtime).
• I dropped the amount of people I’m following on Twitter from 570 (2 months ago) to 182 today. I will probably drop another 80 or so within the next couple of weeks.
• Dropped my RSS subscriptions (blogs, etc.) down to 68, from well over 100.
• I only sit down in front of the computer when I have a task to accomplish. Editing a photo, replying to email, filing an expense report, etc. No more pointless browsing and fiddling.

Is social media evil? No. Are these tools evil? No. I think great benefits can come from the use of these tools. But have we as a society jumped head first into something with little consideration for the long term consequences? Yes, I think so. And while my solutions for handling my time on the computer may be a bit extreme for some of you, I would still ask you to consider, honestly, are the tools shaping you, or are you using them effectively?

I use Things as my task management app. I love it. To-Do items can be tagged, assigned to Areas (that you define yourself), and can be assigned to Projects as well. For my workflow I have Areas such as Personal and CommunityOne. When I start a new CommunityOne project I create a new Project container that holds to-do items for that specific project. Non-project related tasks sit in the more general Area for CommunityOne. This seems to work well for me.

One of the other aspects of Things that I appreciate are the keyboard shortcuts. Anything that allows me to keep my hands on the keyboard without reaching for the mouse is a plus. Command-N creates a new task, Option-Space creates a quick entry task, Shift-Command-N creates a new project…you get the idea.

One specific shortcut is Control-Option-Spacebar which invokes the Quick Entry box, but with Autofill. In practice, say you’re reading an email with a list of things you need to do for a project. You can select/highlight that list in your email, hit Control-Option-Spacebar and the Quick Entry box will pop up with your highlighted selection pasted in the Notes section of the task, with a link to the original email. Pretty smart.

There are times, however, that I simply want to create a new Task based on an email. I don’t need to take the time to highlight a portion of the email. I just want a new task with the subject of the email as the name of the task, with a link to that email. As fate would have it, Things has Applescript support built in. And there are clever Things users that have created scripts to make Things even easier to use. One of the scripts allows Things users to do just was I was looking to do, create a new Task based on an email. There were a couple of small bits that I changed in the script. One, the script originally assigned a tag to the new Task using the senders name. I don’t need that. I just wanted a tag assigned called ‘email’. That way I can track all my to-do’s that just pertain to emails. Also, the new Task was created in the Inbox within Things. I hardly ever use the Inbox. But I do use Next quite a bit. So, I changed the script to put my new Task in Next, not the Inbox.

The last piece of the process is invoking the script within Mail to actually create the new Task in Things. To do that I use Mail Act-On. Mail Act-On is a plugin for Apple Mail that allows the user to create Rules and then invoke those rules using keyboard shortcuts. So if type Control-I it colours the email red, for Important. Or if a bill or invoice email arrives I use Control-M to colour the email green, for Money. To create a new Task in Things (with the Title being the email’s subject, and being tagged with ‘email’, and being placed in ‘Next’) I created a rule in Mail using Mail Act-On that invokes the Applescript I created anytime I use the shortcut Control-T.

All of this has made the process of reading through emails, deciding which ones required action, and then creating a to-do based on that email, much more streamlined and efficient. If you’re interested in the Applescript you can grab it here: MailToThings