I met with Councillor Kim Devine and Les Parsons from CADC this morning over coffee to talk about ways to mitigate the <a href=”http://ruk.ca/article/”3556”>jackhammering. Les agreed to have the contractor install plywood cladding on the parkade between the construction and our offices, and to forward us a copy of the construction schedule — when they’ll be make noise where — so that we can make alternative arrangements for the worst of it.

Returning to the office now, I find that today is a light day on the jackhammering front in any case, which is nice. However the [[84 Fitzroy St]] alarm system is making an incessant beeping. So I will never be satisfied.

The [[CBC]] has different websites for differnt kids. Their pre-school website is branded Kids’ CBC and their school-age website is branded cbc.ca/kids. Is it just me, or is this confusing?

One thing I’ve noticed since adopting the GTD lifestyle is that it’s important (and, fortunately, easier) to get my email inbox down to zero every day before I leave the office. An email that’s left un-handled one day is just going to scroll out of view the next morning, which is basically like entering a vortex of inattention. So I now take 15 or 20 minutes before going home and empty things out, deleting things that have been handled, and adding kGTD tasks for things that haven’t been.

A pleasant side-effect of all this (and maybe the real reason it’s so important) is that I leave the office feeling like things are in order, not as if there’s a monkey on my back.

I’ve only been using the new version of kGTD for a few hours now, but already I’m loving it. Favourite new features:

Sub-projects: any child without a context assigned becomes a sub-project of its parent. This feature is huge for me because it lets me nest sub-projects in a way that I’m used to:

Edit Anywhere: used to be that you could only edit the properties of an item in the Projects view — any changes that you made in the Actions view got thrown away. No longer: you can edit an item anywhere, and the changes bubble around to the right places as you think they should.

Delete Like Normal: the regular OmniOutliner Delete key method of deleting an item works; no longer need to use the special kGTD-specific button to delete things.

Auto-archiving: no more special Archive button — items archive themselves after a given (user-configurable) period of time.

Document-specific Toolbar: this is actually a feature of OmniOutliner 3.6, not something kGTD-specific. But it’s certainly handy for kGTD: now all my outlines don’t have to have the kGTD icons in the toolbar.

It looks sharp: the kGTD styles in OmniOutliner have been refined. Everything’s just a little bit clearer. Nice.

Remember a month ago when I pledged allegiance to Getting Things Done. Well, much to my surprise, it seems to have taken. I’ve been faithfully using kGTD, a Mac-based outliner add-on that lets me organize items on my “to do list” into nice compartments that seem to have some magical way, in this new environment, of prompting me to actually do them.

So I’ve had an extremely productive two weeks. I’ve also felt a lot less “confusing ill-defined sludge of tasks waiting to be completed”-related stress (which seems to be one of the big GTD selling points).

There’s a new version of kGTD out today, and it looks pretty sweet, rasping a lot of the rough edges off the old version. I’m installing as we speak.

Another restaurant has come and gone from the ill-fated space on University Ave. next door to [[Cedars]]. This time sees the demise of Forbidden Palace, a restaurant that advertised itself as having “the real Chinese taste of Toronto.” Something that always seemed a little odd, although I know what they were trying to get at.

We only ate at Forbidden Palace once, and it was a good meal. The space, however, couldn’t shake the “moldy cavernous warehouse” aesthetic, no matter how many plants they scattered around. And who wants to eat in a moldy cavern? There’s a Sheriff’s notice up on the door looking for $8000ish in back rent.

Word on the street is that the folks who ran the former restaurant in the space, Green Jade, picked up and relocated to Stratford where they’re raking in customers. Not hard to do, I suppose, when your only local competition is Subway and KFC.

The program for the 2006 City and Regional Magazine Association Conference has been released. I’m speaking in the “Production” track and my talk is described, somewhat open-endedly, as:

Web 2.0 - An introduction to current Web technologies that publishers can take advantage of now or in the near future. Discussion will include RSS, blogs, podcasting, social software, tags, Flickr, and Google Maps.

While my [[friends upstairs]] get all jiggly about the Web 2.0 meme, what I’m really interested in talking about is less “bubble 2.0” and more “how traditional print publishers can stop thinking of themselves as ‘print publications with an accidental website’ and more as ‘actors in a network’ ”. Which sounds, perhaps, equally pretentious. But it’s also where the “why doesn’t my magazine have an RSS feed?” conversation has to start.

The reboot 8.0 wiki has rumbled to life. Already 29 participants signed up. I’m looking forward to it.

In response to my suggestion that the venerable Charlottetown food store The Root Cellar “went all Leacock,” a reader comments:

What do you mean by “..went all Leacock”, Peter?

This was an obtuse reference to the Stephen Leacock short story The New Food, published in the 1910 collection Literary Lapses. The story begins:

I see from the current columns of the daily press that “Professor Plumb, of the University of Chicago, has just invented a highly concentrated form of food. All the essential nutritive elements are put together in the form of pellets, each of which contains from one to two hundred times as much nourishment as an ounce of an ordinary article of diet. These pellets, diluted with water, will form all that is necessary to support life. The professor looks forward confidently to revolutionizing the present food system.”

The punchline comes when baby eats eats the entire Christmas dinner:

“Oh, Henry, quick! Baby has snatched the pill!” It was too true. Dear little Gustavus Adolphus, the golden-haired baby boy, had grabbed the whole Christmas dinner off the poker chip and bolted it. Three hundred and fifty pounds of concentrated nourishment passed down the oesophagus of the unthinking child.

And finishes with:

And when they gathered the little corpse together, the baby lips were parted in a lingering smile that could only be worn by a child who had eaten thirteen Christmas dinners.

If you compare the modern day Root Cellar to its earlier incarnations you’ll find that its shelves are now indeed stocked with pellets and powders, and much of the “food” that used to grace its shelves has been removed.