It actually went really smooth and I actually like Wordpress so far. No unnecessary complications. Movable Type started acting up on me, not letting me edit post titles. I upgraded and then it wouldn’t let me edit post entries anymore. Or post anything new… So I decided to give Wordpress a shot. So far, I like it. :)

Nano loves this toy, we play with it on a daily basis. She learned to catch it in the air (sometimes) and gets really excited when I take it out to play.

After some searching I managed to find my little booklet. I got out my pens and started drawing. I had a hard time drawing my keys. My dog kept on interrupting me because she didn’t like that I had more attention for my silly pen and some paper than for her. She tried chewing on my pen while I drew and I finally managed to distract her long enough with some treats.

I’ve had this backpack for I while, but had never drawn it before. During a cleaning-spree I found little Kenny-the-keychain and hung him on my backpack. He frequently suffers attack from my dog and other dogs, that love to check him out, leaving me screaming “OH MY GOD, DON’T KILL KENNY!!”. I don’t scream too often though.

Very happy with how the backpack turned out.

After that, check out the third follow-up to create a macro that lets you select a word and create a reference link (cause no doubt, you sometimes read back and think ‘Damn, I should link that!’).

So, you get the idea, and you want more! Checkout the next follow-up on how to create a reference link by selecting a word and letting your little macro do a ‘I feel lucky!’ google-lookup.

I love computers.

Getting back on my feet from my little RA-blow takes a bit longer than expected. I have received medication that works (fabulously) and all seemed to go well again, until this itsy bitsy thing with a low amount of white blood-cells popped up, which made the doctors stop the medication. My white count went up again, so last week I restarted treatment, yaay. I have put up a blog about the trial and my RA, with some nifty home-made photos (mmm dandelions).

I have not completely abandoned my creative projects either, I have made some nice photos and I started the painting in the picture (stuck with it now, though). I also have bought a sewing machine and managed to sew up a skirt, a dress and a top. It just goes a bit slow.

(if I feel like it I might post the amount of junk I removed from it later on)

Hearing I have rheumatoid arthritis did come as a bit of shock, even if I knew I had something (the frequent pains and morning stiffness certainly didn’t fit my age (fyi: 27)). We started treatment straight away and I now take 15mg of methotrexate weekly. Methotrexate started out as a treatment for cancer (and falls under ‘chemo’) and works well against auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Though different people have different experiences, by default, doctors start with methotrexate to stop the disease in its tracks and prevent (further) damage. It has worked but the effect seems to have started to wear off. Nothing to panic about, I have more doctors appointments next week.

I read up a little about rheumatoid arthritis and found that currently, doctors want to treat it as soon as possible because they want to prevent damage to the joints, which apparently can and does occur in the first two years of the disease. I also found out that rheumatoid arthritis does not only affect the joints, it can also cause complications in the eyes and mouth and several other parts of the human body. Due to its nature, it also cause general problems such as fatigue, concentration problems, forgetfulness, sleeping problems, change of appetite. The side-effects of the medications for the disease can also cause and/or worsen these problems.

Ofcourse I found a few sites with stories of people with rheumatoid arthritis and most of them I honestly found very depressing. I strongly believe that your mindset with a chronic illness/condition can help you a lot. It can also sabotage you should you have lost hope and consider your condition a ‘delayed death-sentence’. Some days you feel bad, some days you feel good. I believe the focus should lie on the good days.

Yes, I have cried and felt really bad. Yes, I have had terrible pain one of which made me end up in the ER at Christmas. Later we discovered it had nothing to do with the rheumatoid arthritis, and it could have happened to anyone. The frustration the pain and the limited movability brings has brought me to tears and in a very sad mood. And I refuse to let it become more than that. I will not let it go beyond ‘a very sad mood’. I will not stay home and soak in my own tears and not work and feel bad. I get out of bed every morning, sometimes it just takes very long.

In the end, the result counts. The ‘how’ only counts if I found a really cool and creative way to do a seemingly easy task. Anything I used to do, I can still do. It may take longer, but I can still do. And that, I’ll never give up.

As for the title of this post: if in a year or two or twenty, my legs got damaged, and I started to limp, if my eyes got affected and I can’t really see, if my hair falls out from the medication, I’ll buy a bandana, and wear an eye-patch. I’ll limp through live either with or without a wooden leg. I’ll buy a parrot, and go sail the warm seas.

I’ll become a pirate.

I wanted to put more things I made on my web-site, so I searched my hard-drive for images I had previously made. I stumbled into this one, I like it a lot.

Hiveminder.com has also started to support repeating tasks which I very much appreciate. I hadn’t figured out a good way to do that on my command-line and now I can never forget to take my pills on Monday, woohoo.

What I appreciate a lot (maybe even most) about hiveminder: the ability to make tasks dependant on each-other and the fact that the depending task does not appear unless you’ve done the main task. I will not see ‘fold laundry’ before I have actually checked off ‘wash clothes’. Yaay for that!

Drawings of Istanbul, day 3.

Shot to show the size of booklet I draw in. First one I made to try out this paper. I think it’ll bleed through a bit (with watercolours) but I like it so far for drawing.

My first watercoloured drawing in my large Moleskine. Also my first drawing in a long time.

As part of reorganising my life (about time, nearly 27!) I reorganised my warddrobe. I thought it would take lots of time, but it went fairly quick. I tossed over 3 garbage bags of clothes (most of it going to some charity that can use it).

And I still think I have too many clothes.

The new approach means I throw away anything that doesn’t fit (and ‘oh, but I only have to loose x pounds and then it’ll fit again!’ doesn’t count for more than one set of clothing), that doesn’t make me look good (I should look good, any time of the day, ha) or that I don’t even like but keep for emotional reasons (my mom made it). Sorry mom, out it goes.

I have not used a digital or non-digital tickler system before (I tried the mail.app IMAP version, but it just didn’t stick).

First, you need to add the following line to .todo: TICKLER_DIR="/Users/yourname/GTD/Tickler"

or whichever folder you’d like to use.

Then, create a foldertree like:

Tickler days 01 02 …. 30 31 months 01 02 … 10 11 12 today

You can use a short bash-script for that.

Next, download tickler.sh and place it somewhere you can find it (right next to todo.sh, I’d say)

Next, patch todo.sh with the .diff: patch todo.sh < todotickler.diff

Setup all done!

So how do you use this?

Pretty simple: tickler.sh checks the date, and then checks the appropriate days and months folder for the presence of a .txt file with the same name. For todays date, it would check ‘/Users/yourname/GTD/Tickler/days/20/20.txt’ and ‘/Users/yourname/GTD/Tickler/months/07/07.txt’. The script will take the contents of them and appends it to todo.txt .

It doesn’t stop there!

It also checks the entire directory and moves all files to the ‘/Users/yourname/GTD/Tickler/today’ folder and makes a todo stating ‘check /Users/yourname/GTD/Tickler/today/$filename’

So how do you get things into the .txt files?

Easy, the patch adds a ‘tickle’ option to ‘todo.sh’.

Say your todo-list looks like: 04 (A) get rich 05 (A) take over the world p:world domination 03 buy DVD 06 fold laundry 07 wash dog 02 vacuum p:household 01 x 2006-07-14 do dishes p:household

Type the following command: todo tickle 7

The script will then ask you if you want to put it in a day or a month folder (press ‘d’ or ‘m’) and which number and then proceed with moving the task to the .txt file. You can skip the questions by typing: todo tickle 7 d25

This moves task 7 to /Users/yourname/GTD/Tickler/days/25/25.txt

For month-folder use something like: todo tickle 7 m8

Leading zero’s get added when needed.

The script goes from this output:

to:

I very much like the perl-bundle and the other programming bundles. Those make the cake. The icing, however, consists of the blogging bundle, the fact that while typing an e-mail I can press ^⌘E and the entire text goes into textmate where I can edit it, the fact that I can use snippets to easily create replies to e-mails without having to type the same paragraphs over and over (yes, I know about mailtemplate, it just doesn’t do it for me), and that I can learn about handy little macros on other blogs.

Now, only mission left for today, making manager/todo.sh not display colours for done items.

I wrote previously that I edited the script to work as my own text-file manager. I updated the script and created a new .diff

Same changes apply.

• 1 banana
  
• handfull of raspberries
  
• about 300 ml of soy-juice
  
  Blend untill smooth. Yum.
  
  (I love my new blender)
  

With digital stuff, I tend to sort based on category:

• friends & family
• work
• party/holiday/birthday
• vacation
• dog
• fun stuff

I have more categories in some other areas of my life, these basically apply to nearly all areas, nearly all the time. If I don’t use it, I’ll just not use it.

The problem with digital photos: I have many, I want them sorted in various way, cause I want to use the digital aspect, I want photos sorted into birthday and family and dog at the same time. With my computer I should be able to find a photo easily if I type ’sister birthday’. That searchstring should just give me all the birthdayphotos of all my sisters.

Except it doesn’t, because until recently ‘tagging’ didn’t really happen on my computer. Not that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t find a way to do it in a way that came natural to me.

Yesterday, I realized my good old print system would work quite well for my basic digital sorting, as a start.

I created a tree-structure looking like this:

• 2005
• 02_zoo
• 03_momsbirthday
• 06_eurotrip
• 2006
• 03_puppy
• 05_Rome

Basically, I go for $year, and then for $month_$event. The files inside the directories I have renamed to $mm_$dd_$event_$number.jpg (month and date based on EXIF data).

I then created the basic category, along side the yearfolders, but also with years as subfolders, so I get this:

• friends & family
• 2005
• 2006
• work
• 2005
• 2006
• party/holiday/birthday
• vacation
• 2005
• 2006
• dog
• 2005
• 2006
• fun stuff
• 2005
• 2006
• 2005
• 2006

Any image of an event I bump into that falls into one of the categories (99% of the photos covered), I’ll put in these folder by creating an alias (symlink) of the original photo and move it to the sub-yearfolder. This way, one photo can go in multiple categories and I’ll never have to do funky stuff to open it, opening the link leads to opening of the file.

I do like to know when the sun rises and sets, but somehow I couldn’t get it to work straight away for Amsterdam, NL. The times were completely off. After putting a - in front of the longtitude it turned out fine.

Duh.

I put this in my ~/.reminders:

; show sunrise/sunset SET $LongDeg -4 SET $LongMin -55 SET $LongSec -6 SET $LatDeg 52 SET $LatMin 23 SET $LatSec 26 MSG sunrise at [sunrise(trigdate())], MSG sunset at [sunset(trigdate())], MSG next full moon at [moontime(2)] on [moondate(2)]%”%”%

This made me think of a setup where I’d send a message to my mailserver (txt message that gets forwarded to e-mail), requesting my shoppinglist. With all the new phones around a special phone e-mailaddress would also work.

First I activated the address by putting list@mydomain.com list in /etc/postfix/virtual and /etc/postfix/virtual-mailbox-maps

then I postmapped both: postmap /etc/postfix/virtual and postmap /etc/postfix/virtual-mailbox-maps (this step can wait till after the next one, but as it didn’t really matter, why not straight away)

In the file /etc/postfix/aliases, I added: list: |/Users/tannie/bin/list.sh

This points the user ‘list’ to a script (the | puts it through) in my ~/bin directory called ‘list.sh’ View the content of that script

Anything else than ‘list’ will ofcourse work as an alias, you’d just have to set it up like that.

If I send a message to ‘list+shop@mydomain.com’ with the subject ‘list @supermarket’ it’ll send back a message with the body:

potatoes @supermarket milk @supermarket @farmer eggs @supermarket

The script will only allow listing, it does pretend to ‘do’ things if you make the subject ‘do 3′ or something like that, but due to rights it won’t actually do it. I don’t mind, I just need it for listing anyway.

The project has since moved to and I joined the mailinglist. My version has a few additions the current official version doesn’t have and I’ve uploaded the .diff.

The most important changes I made:

- Removed the need for a temporary file - Items marked as ‘done’ get ‘x:done ‘ in front of them. I prefer x:done over just plain x, x:done immediately means ‘marked done’ in my brain - The x:done part gets stripped when archiving / reporting. - The reportfile has a year attached, so it looks like report2006.txt - The donefile gets created per week, looking like 2006-25.txt - Creating multiple lists by using symlinks. I use ‘manager’ as a name for the script, and created symlinks to keep a shoppinglist and a todolist seperately (ln -s manager todo). The archive directory and the lists use the linkname to create the names, running ‘todo’ means it checks ‘listtodo.txt’, running ’shop’ means it checks ‘listshop.txt’ - The script does not yet create the archive directory, this needs a ‘mkdir archives/shop’ (or todo or whatever) - Pretty outlining:

 1 do laundry
10 wash windows
5 hoover

It all should ‘just work’ but be sure to backup your existing copy of your todo-list and your todo.sh.