The first time I read about minimizing e-mail checking, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Why didn’t I think of this before? And, this makes so much sense. But reading about a thing sometimes doesn’t have as much impact as hearing about it, which is why I was happy to run across Merlin Mann’s tech talk at Google on something he’s calling Inbox Zero.  Merlin (of 43 folders fame) is advocating getting your inbox to zero to the point where he’s writing a book on the subject! It’s based on GTD (Getting Things Done). Get the book if you haven’t.

My experience with processing e-mail in this manner and checking it less frequently has probably mirrored other GTDers. It made an immediate impact on my productivity (and sanity), and while I still struggle to stay on top of my e-mail, I think that’s more so because I get too much and need to cut that down. Keep in mind that getting too much e-mail may just be a symptom of a bigger problem you have, like you’re overbooked.

My other experience with it has been trying to convince my employers that not checking e-mail is a good thing. So many companies have come to rely on e-mail to the point where I think it makes most of them less productive, not more. It will probably be many more years before it becomes more commonly acceptable to be an e-mail minimalist, and/or to wear getting 100s of e-mails a day as a badge of honor. Until then, hopefully more Merlins come along to help us mend our ways.

Anyway, watch the talk. It’s only 30 minutes long, it goes by quickly, and you can stick around for the next 30 minutes to hear the Q&A with Googlers.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone really, but in a measure, we’ve created technology that over taxes the abilities of our primitive brains. This article at the NYTimes uses a particularly ‘plugged-in’ family to demonstrate how many of us now live as well as how it affects us.

I can’t help but fixate on the multitasking issue (previous blog entry):

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

Bottom line: try focusing on a single thing, multitask less and unplug from time to time.

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Mr. Lee has described the whole project on his website as well as provided software that he wrote for downloading. The page also describes other projects he has put together using Wiimotes. I wonder how long it took for Nintendo to come knocking on his door?

One of his other cool side projects was taking photos of bottles being smashed with a hammer and capturing a frozen split-second of the action in mid-smash. Click the picture for a blown up, clear photo.

Owen didn’t electronically/electrically modify the guitar itself (although he put a cool Eddie Van Halen design on it), but mapped out the signals from the various buttons and then wrote a computer program that would interpret the keys and send them through a synthesizer to produce the sounds.

Take a look at this video where Owen explains how he did it and demonstrates playing. Obviously, he’s expanded the capability of this seemingly simple device a lot. In this picture, he looks like he’s playing some hammer-on/hammer-off or other advanced guitar technique.

Oh yes, if you want to do this yourself, Owen has put up complete instructions on the Web and made the software (called FretBuzz) open source.

Onto our products… Last year, one of my friends (who knew I was spec’ing out a new box) asked me if I knew any good external RAID enclosures, but I was lazy and didn’t go looking. Recently, Jeremy [LiveDigitally] blogged about his next choice of storage – a ReadyNas NV+ from Infrant. This is a device that you stick on your network (it’s not directly connected to a single computer), and while they have multiple models, this one holds 4 SATA drives and uses RAID to ensure data redundancy. Infrant even has something unique they call X-RAID that claims to let you dynamically add disks as you need them.

Next up is the Drobo [via Gizmodo] which is connected to a single machine via USB 2.0. Watch the demo video – it’s pretty impressive. It automatically handles data redundancy (they don’t say how), and you can hot swap in any sized disks into any of the 4 slots. Drobo also monitors your drives for issues and moves data around automatically. At $700, it’s a little more pricey than just a RAID enclosure, but could be well worth it for the convenience factor. I’ll be really interested when they produce a networked version of this box.

Some of my favoriate stats: a week’s worth of the NY Times is estimated to contain more information than an 18th century person was likely to come across in their lifetime. It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10¹⁸) of information of unique information will be generated this year (an exabyte is 1000 million times a Gigabyte (GB)). That 1.5 exabytes is estimated to be more than in the past 5000 years.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/27/1641223.shtml