Courtesy of Dave Peck, I’m wearing a pair of Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones. Dave scored a pair on eBay after the <a href=”http://ruk.ca/article/”3556”>jackhammers started and brought them down for me to try out.

Today is a light day for the parkade construction sounds, so there are really just basic office sounds here in the office. There’s a switch on the side of the headphones that allows you to turn them off and on; turning them on, but not plugging them into an audio source otherwise, is a good way to judge how much noise they’re actually cancelling.

As it turns out, there’s quite a lot of background “rumble” here in the office that I wasn’t otherwise aware of. Here, I’ll switch them off now. Okay, they’re off. Suddenly I hear the fan inside my iMac, the rumble of the air conditioner and servers coming through the floor from the server room upstairs, the occasional footfall, and the low diesel sound of a bus driving by. The sound of my own typing (on an admittedly noisy Microsoft keyboard) is much sharper sounding.

Switching them back on: it’s not “total silence,” but all the bass-end rumble is gone, replaced by a faint white-noise hum. My typing sound is dulled (although still very noticeable). I can still hear Johnny typing in the office next door; when he says something, I can still hear it, although it sounds like he’s two or three rooms over.

Obviously a lot of the utility of the QuietComfort’s is intended for airplane use, and it seems, from the noise they’re cancelling out here in the office — the sort of throaty, engine-like low-end sound — that they would indeed be very good in that environment. Every time I put in a pair of regular foam earplugs on an airplane I’m reminded just how much stressful sound there actually is there.

Alternating back and forth between headphones on and headphones off, I am struck, even here in the office, with how much calmer it seems with them switched on. Would that play out over the long term? Is the benefit they provide worth $300, $400, $500? I’d better give them back to Dave before I’m tempted to find out.

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.