Graham English
Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Blogging Musician
Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Blogging Musician
A URL shortener service called Bit.ly launched today. It has some great features that convinced me to switch from using Metamark to shorten my URLs. Read on…
The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.
A Unix program called Remind is one of the greatest tools for keeping your goals and projects on track. Where calendars like iCal and Google Calendar come up short, Remind fills in the gaps.
If Less Is More, Then Nothing Is Everything.
There are lots of tools out there to expand your Google AdWords keywords by adding brackets (exact match) and quotes (phrase match) to your keyword list. Some of them are free, some are not, and even fewer options are available for Mac. But if you use TextMate a lot, like me, then you’ll enjoy this [...]
I’ve been hacking this auto-journal script for a while and I’ve recently settled on using a local install of WordPress combined with AppleScript and Quicksilver. It’s really pretty easy.
Follow MacZealots’ tutorial on Installing WordPress on Tiger. If you have any trouble along the way, you might need to check out Mac OS X Server 10.4.4: [...]
With a little help from Dave Taylor, author of a number of cool tech books, including the book that inspired this time-saving tip, Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, I was able to save myself a tremendous amount of time and energy. Time that I used to spend doing mind-numbing repetitive data entry can now be used [...]
For some people, Quicksilver doesn’t work as advertised. For example, I can’t get the ‘append to…’ action to work as a trigger. And since there’s one file that I’m continually appending, I wanted to customize my workflow. That’s why I created my own Quicksilver append action.
I’ve recently started using TextMate’s GTDAlt bundle for a number [...]
I’ve been AppleScripting my @blogging context workflow. At first, I created a simple script that launches TextMate, NetNewsWire, and Safari along with some URLs to help me get started. It basically launches my workspace for my @blogging context. But I wanted something a little more flexible that would accept some initial user input.
Now what I [...]
As bloggers, we tend to do the same repetitive tasks over and over again. We open the same URLs. We launch the same apps. We ftp, we search Technorati, we comment, we do this day in and day out. The 80/20 rule would tell us that creating content in the form of blog posts, [...]
Listen to me brag about how cool it is to automate a podcast with AppleScript using Audio Hijack Pro, Transmit, and WordPress. It really doesn’t get much cooler!
Here’s a cool little AppleScript that allows you to update Twitter using a Finder dialog. Click here to open the script in Script Editor. Change the username and password and hit run. A dialog will open asking, “What are you doing?” Type your update and hit Tweet. That’s it.
Put this script anywhere you can get [...]
I’ve been thinking more and more about focus. So much competes for my attention second by second (that’s you, Twitter and BlackBerry) that it’s never been more important to practice sustaining focus. The quality of my consciousness and the quality of my attention determine the quality of my life.
What needs to remain a touchstone in [...]
Most repetitive tasks are energy sucks. Opening the same web pages every day, clicking our way around the cybersphere, answering the same questions to our customers, all of these tasks are relatively low-value and cumulatively add up to a large chunk of our lives. The 80/20 rule tells us that 20% of the things we [...]
I got really tired of updating my online status on Skype and iChat every time I had to step away from my computer. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool if I could update all my instant message apps at once with a few keystrokes using Quicksilver?
My previous attempt at a time-tracking script worked well for a while. But I wanted something that was self-contained so I could share it with my friends and coworkers. I also wanted to cut down on key strokes.
Information takes energy to create. It takes energy to consume. And it takes energy to manage. Information is energy. I see great opportunity and challenge in this.
The challenge on a personal level is that you need a sustainable source of personal energy. No, I don’t mean a refrigerator stocked with Red Bull. But because information [...]
I’m into systems. I love figuring out how to get from point A to point B and then optimizing the process as efficiently as possible. Better yet, I love being able to turn a system on and not have to think about it again.
This is one of those systems. I’m an entrepreneur. I don’t have [...]
You’ve got a blog. You’ve got email, SMS, and IM. These are great tools for communication. Email and text messaging are two-way conversations. Blogging is mostly a one-to-many conversation. But what about something in-between? Twitter is part micro-blog, part instant message, and can fill the need for short public and personal broadcasts.
If you’ve been thinking [...]
This exercise builds your resources and congruence. Start by standing in a place where you can take 5 steps backwards.
Think of a situation in which your behavior is not representative of who you really are, or who you would like to be, and you would like to have more choices.
Standing in position one, a place [...]
about grahamI'm a songwriter and recording artist who sings, plays keyboards, and explores the vast world of sound hoping to find some magical moments along the way. I'm also a Mac geek.
Epic Jon Stewart: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-18-2010/conservative-libertarian 22 hrs ago
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