It’s been a good run with LiveJournal. However I will no longer be posting here. Please see my new blog/homepage at http://charlesnw.blogspot.com

Thanks to LiveJournal for the outstanding service. I will still keep my account here and participate in the various community blogs that are unique to LiveJournal.

I thought I would take some time and define my daily process and some of my productivity tips. I have always been pretty efficient, but am always looking for ways to improve.

I start my day by catching up on e-mail. I subscribe to some RedHat Emerging Technology Project lists (such as FreeIPA and et-mgmt-tools). I generally will skim those messages first as they relate to the InfrasBox project. I then move my spam into the junk folder.

My next step is to open Flock and skim my RSS feeds. I click on the articles that interest me and read them. I generally don’t follow the links in the articles as that consumes quite a bit of time. If I don’t know what something is I’ll search and skim the WikiPedia article and/or info page. I will often bookmark something that is of interest.

Both my e-mail and bookmarks are in a somewhat obsessive/extreme folder structure and I am able to locate just about any e-mail or bookmark in less then 30 seconds. I have found that I have a very category/hierarchy oriented mindset.

Another e-mail tip I have is that I almost never save messages from a list. They are all archived (at least the ones I subscribe to). A lot of information I will never refer to again anyway. For example bug reports/triage etc. Its very interesting and topical for a short period of time, then becomes old news. I don’t really have any hard and fast criteria for saving list messages, as I do it so rarely.

So that covers e-mail/rss (new information).

The above process usually takes me about 2 hours on a daily basis. The e-mail portion is generally completed while I commute (I take mass transit).

Any e-mails which require action I add to a task list.

I then work through those tasks. If I am interrupted I will either complete the task (if its less then 10 minutes) or will add it to my task list.

I am reviewing the GTD approach and looking at my current process and seeing how I stack up. So far I have the collect and organize steps down quite well. I am also able to accomplish a lot efficiently enough that my customers haven’t complained about lack of progress.

Hopefully this post will help you become more productive.

I have resigned from my position with Siderean Software as of 10:00 am this morning. I am currently looking for a system engineering position. My resume can be found online at http://thewybles.com/~charles/me/resume/charles-wyble-resume-2008.pdf

I would like to give props to my network for coming through with quite a few interviews and opportunities. You guys rock!

If you would like to follow my job hunt see my twitter page which will have up to the minute information on my daily activities. Obviously my highest priority now will be finding a job. If you know of anything that I could be a fit for please let me know!

Weblogs are fun. I don’t mean blogs (though those are fun too). I am referring to Apache logs. Some entries of interest from today:

24.199.1.218 – - [14/Feb/2008:13:30:53 -0800] “GET /~charles/me/resume/resume.html HTTP/1.1″ 200 12687

“http://www.altavista.com/web/results?itag=ody&kgs=1&k
ls=0&q=%28intitle%3Aresume+OR+inurl%3Aresume%29+-jobs+-post+-careers+-submit+%28engineer+OR+developer%29+%28818+OR+310+OR+323+OR+626+OR+213%29Web+Java+j2ee&s
tq=30″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; SU 3.011; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”

220.225.234.204 – - [14/Feb/2008:12:09:55 -0800]
“GET /~charles/me/resume/resume.pdf HTTP/1.1″ 200 8211

“http://www.google.com/custom?q=UNIX+,+MYSQL+ADMIN+-+
CA+more:resume_search_-_pdf_file&hl=en&client=google-coop-np&

cof=AH:left%3BCX:Passive%2520Recruiting%2520Search%2520Engine

%3BL:http://www.google.com/coop/intl/en/images/custom_search_sm.gif%3BLH:65%3BLP:1%3BLC:%23000099%3BVLC:%23663399%3BGALT:%23009900%3BDIV:%23000000%3B&cx=000807618478942348746:78fen_f3moe&adkw=
AELymgUkG39NIRUEeKJSIMYjeLVqLigGvuBpQN_nok2XOLNxGynCqLHyCklPTPDuKr4A4DkzCACfDYKqTYk5wa6PzAZNs9knfc3Wodu2ENbb9op3cjOXPCA&start=40&sa=N” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;
 U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0″

First the good points.

The organizers did an outstanding job as always. The venue was perfect. The talks I attended had plenty of capacity. I didn’t use the wireless or wired network at all. However everyone I talked to that used it had no issues. So the various core parts of the conference have vastly improved and matured.

Now the bad points.

I was thoroughly unimpressed this year. I attended two talks (one on virtualization/openvz and one on Untangle).  The Untangle talk was outstanding. The OpenVZ talk I wasn’t really impressed with. They gave an incredibly high level overview and a demo. Nothing really all that exciting.

Other talks that I was potentially interested in, I have already seen the subject matter covered at various LUGs in Southern California. I did see some new vendors this year (in particular Talend). However I didn’t discover anything new at SCALE, which is generally my primary reason for going. I guess its a sign of maturity in the overall community and my experience with Linux.  I actually didn’t even attend the conference on Sunday.

So SCALE6 gets a score of 7 out of ten.