Category Archives: Life

Traveling with an iPad

My low-information, low-focus diet

Nicholas Carr wrote a great article in WIRED about how the web may be destroying our focus and rewiring our brains to consume information quickly and superficially. Thus, leaving little room for deep knowledge and understanding. In fact, this paragraph may already be too long and you’ve already moved on.

No matter. While I know that what he describes (the bad part) is very true for me and the way I interact with the web, I still want to do my best to continue to grow my long-term memory outside of it. I’ve always thought a low-information diet from a select number of sources would be way to achieve this and save some time. Tim Ferriss started me on this when he mentioned the concept in The 4 Hour Work Week.

In short, I want to stick to a few key sources and avoid a whole slew of others. Just like any other diet, I aim for less carbs, more protein. Below I review my current information “diet” and evaluate the sources against Carr’s article.

Where I regularly gain knowledge

National and international news

I read The Week Magazine every weekend (it comes in the mail by Saturday) and feel like I have a fairly comprehensive and balanced look at the most important happenings. The articles are concise and numerous which may not be conducive to long-term memory storage. I’m not sure how to gain a better depth while maintaining the breadth I enjoy.

Fail

Science and technology periodical

I’ve held on to over 11 years of WIRED magazines because it’s, well, the best. From the in-depth analysis of the Microsoft anti-trust case to Chris Anderson’s “long tail”, this magazine has been my must-read for as long as I can remember.

Pass

Technology news

There’s so much every day and very little of it matters. Despite disconnecting for three solid weeks when I was vacationing in Kenya, I missed near-to-nothing of substance. So, I stick to a handful key feeds like Daring Fireball and Techmeme for entertainment and conversational pieces, eg: what can I chat with my friends and colleagues about. But I really stick to them for the longer, in-depth pieces that occasionally come along. Plus, I never consciously click through to Gawker or TechCrunch.

Pass

Local news

I don’t care. I just talk to people around me, I suppose.

Pass

Non-fiction books

I read roughly one book per month which is probably more than the average person. It’s safe to say I prefer the book experience for information consumption, but read them less than I’d like (hence Carr’s article). Most books I read are related to business, technology, or sociology. I’m not very well rounded in this regard; I leave that to my better half. In short, I should read more books.

PassVideo podcast

I love watching TED Talks more than anything. They give me something to strive for and broaden my understanding of the world. But, they’re short and leave more to be desired. The really good ones do a great job entertaining and getting a point across, but the take-away is usually only surface-level. Perhaps more follow-up (books to read?) is in store here.

Fail

Audio podcast

I listen to This American Life on my walk to/from work every morning for about 25 minutes. The hour-long stories around a single theme are an excellent way to gain deep understanding.

Pass

Twitter and Facebook

Twitter is like a chatroom collided with a stream of links. I try to look at Twitter only a handful of times a day. But, the content itself is nearly useless (informationally) and the only value I’ve found is social connectedness. Facebook is, well, Facebook.

Fail (but nobody can win)

Conclusion

I need to work on my information diet just as much as I do my nutrition diet. Though I’ve consciously kept the quantity of sources low, the quality could be improved. First step: more books.

Does anyone here still like reading books and hearing about others’ thoughts on them? Any source suggestions for any of the above areas?

You should read Sh*t My Dad Says

No. I will not fan you, your brand, or your blog

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No. I will not fan you, your brand, or your blog. I find it funny that quasi-famous bloggers feel the need to create a Facebook ‘Fan’ page for themselves. Sure, many people are well-respected, followed by hundreds of thousands of individuals, and want to interact with them all (Matt Mullenweg and Gary V), but the majority of you do not; a few hundred or few thousand ‘fans’ are worthless (prove me wrong?). Jeff may disagree, but I see no purpose in becoming a ‘fan’ of a friend’s blog, or their brand, or their product, or whatever on Facebook. That only serves that individual’s own ego and their desire to grow some metric that rarely translates to value (monetary, goodwill, etc.). Social media: don’t just do it because everyone else is. (I realize this is not new thinking, but I wanted to publish it so my stance is clear. Feel free to point your friends here when you get a ‘Fan’ request.)

How I backup my computer

Rethinking food and farms: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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I finished reading an eye-opening book: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I feel it's a must-read for every American. Barbara and her family moved to her farm and lived entirely on the local production for a full year.

You may not agree with them, you may not understand them, you may not appreciate them. I put myself in all three buckets before reading this book. But being exposed to the ideas presented is worth everyone's time. I'm a believer.

We've all heard about how farming has changed (moving to big corporations) and how they destroy the environment (gas emissions from farm animals, lack of crop rotation destroying soil). But what is less appreciated is how we can change things by eating and growing food closer to home.

Though awareness is growing, this book has helped make it clear why we should change our habits:

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That’s not gallons, but barrels. Small changes in buying habits can make big difference

Also gaining awareness is the fact that we rely so much on just a handful of crops. Corn is in nearly every item we buy at the grocery store. From the sugar in soft drinks, to the feed that fattened up our chickens. History has shown this isn't a good way to live:

History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens.

I find it interesting that the more 'affluent' society becomes, the less good food we eat. We shift from water to soft drinks. We go from eating local fruit to munching on kiwi and banana year-round…

Because of this book I'm looking forward to trying new, local, organic fruits and vegetables. I'm excited about a shift in my diet and a new appreciation for food. Again, I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone.

Some useful resources:

Posted via email from Devin Reams

Weird “meow” voicemail left for me

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From the “I can’t make this stuff up” file:

I received a call from what appears to be a shady telemarketing phone number (603-606-4912). I always Google a phone number area code when an unrecognizable number is calling me (“Do I know anyone in Georgia that would call me?”) and then Google the full phone number to see if it’s even worth worrying about.

Anyway, the funniest point was getting the voicemail. Have a listen:

(click through if you’re in an RSS reader)

I figured I’d write about this so when people search the web for “meow voicemail message” they’ll realize they’re not alone. Oh, and because embedding voicemail is the wave of the future.

Recent graduates: how to find work you love

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My friend Charlie Hoehn just released a free ebook: Recession-Proof Graduate and it encompasses a lot of ideals that I’ve learned over the last few years.

Rethinking the typical “job hunt”

Charlie has done a great job capturing a lot of the secrets to finding meaningful work out of college. They include:

Steer clear of the beaten path: don’t send resumes everywhere, don’t do what you think you should do. Go find the people and companies you want to work with. Do this even before you graduate from college.
Offer to do a project for free: it’s a scary notion, but doing a side project before working for someone is far better than sending a resume and interviewing with them. This is how you set yourself apart, learn along the way, and do things on your terms.
Forget about the money: expecting to earn a big salary out-of-the-gate is a silly way to filter the world around you. Be realistic and realize you don’t get a “trophy just for showing up.”

Is free work a good idea?

I want to expand on Charlie’s point about performing free work. From both the employee and employers perspectives (I’ve been on both sides) free work can be beneficial to everyone:

The individual finds something to do. You pick what you want to do, you learn as you go, make mistakes, have more flexibility, take more risks. This is ideal for the self-starters, self-motivated individuals looking for great opportunities (ie: you create them).
The company can learn about you. From my few experiences, it’s becoming clearer that interviews are mostly wasteful and hardly indicative of how a prospect will perform. But, if you someone offered to do work upfront, I’m at no loss, I can become comfortable with your results, and I can bring you on to do many more excellent projects. Note: this is not solicited spec work.

Useful advice for graduates

Charlie then dives into some great advice on how to create the lifestyle and find the work that you want (not the job that everyone else is aiming for). To paraphrase Tim Ferriss: it’s lonely at the top, aim high because the rest of the world is competing for mediocrity. Sidestep the familiar routes and try some of these different approaches:

Find the people and companies you want to work with, not the ones that match your college degree
Start to define your desired lifestyle and aim for jobs that are aligned with it
Cut your losses and realize everything up to now is a sunk cost, stop basing future decisions on your previously invested time
Go learn something and bring some real skills to the table (not ‘Microsoft Office’ and ‘Communication’ skills)

This is exactly what I did

I’ve been on both sides of the fence and Charlie is spot-on with this book. I went through college trying new opportunities, working remotely on fun projects like helping organize a conference, I even met with David Cohen to talk about TechStars. But, I watched what everyone else around me was doing and I left college with a job lined up at a Big 4 accounting firm (the job matched my degree). I wrote about my lessons as soon as I left to go work for Crowd Favorite and haven’t looked back.

I recommend you check out Recession-Proof Graduate and subscribe to Charlie’s blog.

PS: Charlie asked me to contribute to the book so I wrote about building momentum through your online presence. Find me on page 22.

How to: merge existing GMail accounts

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If you’re like me you have a GMail account (something like [email protected]). But, one day, Google Apps came along and offered the opportunity for Google to host and act as your domains’ email provider. I immediately forwarded all my incoming gmail.com email to devinreams.com and set up the domain on Google Apps. Then a year later, I decided to change my domain to reams.me, so I set up another Google Apps instance and started forwarding email there.

Now I had three GMail accounts, all with different email saved in them. Oh, and suddenly, Google Voice and Contacts appered on the scene. I realized I wanted go go back to my gmail.com account. I had email all over the place.

I had Google email stored in three difference places

I wanted to consolidate the email from my two Google Apps accounts (devinreams.com, reams.me) and have my thousands of emails stored all in one place (gmail.com). “No sweat”, I thought. But, this process is harder than may appear on the surface. Below I outline a multi-step process where I

physically copy email to one account to another, and
setup rules so that new mail (incoming and outgoing) is coming to/from the right places.

Step 1: Setup Mail.app using IMAP

The biggest endeavor is moving the mail which is a process of: configuring multiple IMAP accounts in Apple’s Mail (I assume you can do the same in any IMAP-compatible email client), and physically copying the messages between the two servers. A few notes before we get setup:

Labels: Using IMAP, GMail labels will appear as ‘folders’. This means that one email with a label applied can appear in at least two places (All Mail, Label 1, Label 2). For simplicity’s sake, I decided to abandon the two-dozen-or-so unique labels that I had across the three accounts. There was no easy way to reconcile the different wording or usage I had evolved over the three years of different accounts. So, I stuck to simply moving ‘All Mail’ to ‘All Mail’ across accounts.
Connectivity: In order to make this (potentially HUGE) move, your network connection (upstream) will be in use the entire time. Basically, the email client is constantly sending commands such as “Copy Message A from Account A to Account B.” Needless to say, this will take a while and will require some bandwidth.
Timeouts means batching: In my experience, Google had a hard time keeping a connection open if I simply tried to copy 12,000 emails at once. I couldn’t tell if it was idling out (idle commands were queued to be sent after the copy commands…) or just choking on the request. I found I could easily queue a month (about 1,000) emails without Google disconnecting.
Duplicates: Despite my initial connection failures, IMAP and Google were smart enough not to copy duplicate messages. In other words, if I copied Message A already, and tried it again, it didn’t. So, if you lose your place when batching, don’t worry about it.
Crashes: Mail will crash when you first try to open your ‘All Mail’ folder (or any large IMAP folder for that matter). Just relaunch a few times and it’ll get there eventually. Trust me, it may take a few tries. This is where the ‘Activity Window’ can help tell you what’s going on.

With all that said, here’s the process:

Go into your Gmail accounts and enable IMAP (Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP).
Open Mail.app and set up your first GMail account (do not check ‘Automatically set up account’) following these IMAP instructions. DO NOT check ‘Take account online’.
In the ‘Accounts’ screen, select your first account and disable all the ‘Mailbox Behaviors’ (not necessary, but prevents server-side things from happening).
Switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab and change the ‘Keep copies of messages..’ setting to: ‘Don’t keep copies of any messages’.
Repeat this process to set up your other account(s) that you’re moving to/from.
Close the ‘Accounts’ screen and save your changes.
Open the ‘Activity Window’ (command + 0) so you can watch what’s going on in the background.
Now you can ‘Take All Accounts Online’ from the Mailbox menu.

At this point, you now have a Mail client setup so that your emails can simply copy across accounts without locally downloading each message. Now the fun part.

Step 2: Copy all your email from one account to the other

Browse to the account you want to move email from and open the ‘[Gmail] All Mail’ folder (this is where the crashing is likely to happen, relaunch, watch your ‘Activity Window’, repeat).
Start wherever suits you and select a good batch of emails (I would do one month at a time, approximately 1,000 emails per month). Do not try to copy all of them at once. If it works, congrats, if it doesn’t, you’ll have no idea how far it got before crashing or timing out.
Right click your selection and select ‘Copy To’. Browse to the ‘[Gmail] All Mail’ folder of your other account. (notes: you can also drag/drop or ‘Copy and Paste’, you can also repeat this process using your labels instead of ‘All Mail’).
Sit back and watch the bits and bytes fly through the internet in the Activity Window.
Go ahead and queue the next batch of emails (eg: February). Repeat as much as you’d like. You can see these batches saved in the Activity Window and monitor progress.

Over the course of 3 days I was able to move about 30,000 emails in the background (set this up before you go to sleep and use an application like Caffeine to keep your computer awake). Trust me, this is much faster than the ‘POP import’ process that GMail has built-in (don’t even look it up).

Once you’ve arrived here you’ve successfully copied all your email from at least one account to another. You can confirm by browsing to your account online and doing some math. Now, I want to make sure all my future email goes to and comes from the right place.

Step 3: Setup forwarding from the old account

Very simply, all you need to do now is visit the old accounts and browse to ‘Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP’. Configure your old address to forward to your new address. Perfect… moving on.

Step 4: Setup your new account to send ‘from’ your old account

You’re likely aware that GMail can send email “on behalf of” other email addresses. Set your primary email account to send from your old ones (if so desired):

Browse to ‘Settings > Accounts’
Under “Send mail as” click the ‘Add another email address you own’ link
Follow the instructions, your old address will be sent a confirmation (it should appear in your new account if you followed Step 3)
If you want to use an old address as your primary outgoing address (eg: all email comes to gmail.com but I want to still send as if I’m at reams.me), then click ‘Default’ next to that address and check the “When receiving a message:” options below.

Now you can send email from your primary account as if you were still at your old ones. Learn more about custom ‘From’ addresses.

The consolidated life

Great, now I have all my email accounts flowing into my gmail.com account. My GMail contacts and Google Voice contacts are all synchronized (in addition to my iPhone contacts and Apple Address Book contacts).

Plus, I have over 4 years of email all in one place. I can find receipts from 2004 without having to login to my old accounts!

I tell you, I’m living the dream…

If you have any questions, be sure to post them in the comments.

Cataloging reviews and bookmarks

1 Reply

In a prior effort to minimize my online activity I removed myself from using a lot of websites. Two of which I’ve come back to: Yelp and Delicious.

I find a lot of interesting sites and articles online and I’ve continually found myself thinking “shoot, what was that site name?” or “where did I read that article about ____?” I’ve come back to Delicious to help catalog these sites.

I’m also interested in sharing my thoughts on restaurants and bars I’ve visited. Yelp has been an invaluable source for finding good places to eat. I love being snarky and sharing my opinion, so, I’m also back on Yelp posting reviews.

An interesting side-note: I’ve stopped actively using Brightkite. In the numerous interactions, I’ve found little-to-no value in cataloging and constantly keeping track of my location. It is fun to engage in conversations at conferences and get togethers.. but certainly nothing that Twitter can’t achieve.