There was a great confluence of GTD energy washing over me today. First, I listened to the latest Inside the Net wherein Amber and Leo interview Merlin Mann of 43 Folders. Then, following up on a mention of Kinkless GTD, I upgrade my OmniOutliner to “pro” and installed the set of add-ons known as kGTD. Finally, I spent about 3 hours emptying my email in-box, either deleting, archiving, or moving items into my snazzy new GTDly outline. And so now, for the first time in many months, I’ve achieved:

And:

I’m the last one to adopt new “organizational systems” like Getting Things Done; I’m just too suspicious. But the coincidence of overwhelmingness, an organizational system, and a cool Mac OS X tool that can help has pushed me over into the deep end.

I’ll let you know if it works.

Next time you’re making a salad, take a flour tortilla, roll it up, and then slice it up so that you’re left with stringy tortilla ribbons. Put under the broiler until crisp, and sprinkle on top of salad. Mmmm. (stolen from Nigella Lawson)

Need a quick dessert? Buy a bag of Lindt chocolate squares and serve with ginger snaps: you can’t beat the taste sensation of the combination.

Now that I’ve been schooled in the ways of ‘I’ vs. ‘me’ (not that I’ve completely reformed), I feel that I need some help on the “which” vs. “that” front. I’ve a vague feeling that I’m forever using the wrong one of these in the wrong place. Please help.

I was talking on the phone with a friend in Montreal this morning. The subject of a mutual acquaintance here in Charlottetown came up, and my friend’s lamenting comment about him was “He’s a great guy, he just forgot to ever leave Charlottetown.”

We’re into the last week of free access to the digital channels in our cable package — you know, those ones like “National Geographic Channel” and “Game Show Network” that have tiny subscriber bases and very, very narrowly focused programming.

With the exception of English Teachers: Taiwan, which I’ve become addicted to, and the occasionally novel BBC Kids, I can’t say as though I’ve found much that I couldn’t do without. In fact it seems that most of the programming on most of the digital channels most of the time is either Frontiers of Construction or Opening Soon.

But I did record Die Hard II last night on Scream, a channel that plays nothing but horror movies. Wow: people don’t swear like they used to in movies back in the 90s; what happened?

For the record, I am 11 years younger than Steve Jobs, and the same age as Kiefer Sutherland.

Ever since I saw my first spotlights, I’ve been a huge fan of the genre. I remember being able to go right up to the big spotlight trucks at the Canadian National Exhibition back in the 1970s: it was like looking into the eyes of God. Which is why it’s so exciting that, due to the presence of the East Coast Music Awards here in Charlottetown this week, we have spotlights of our very own:

For my next trip down to visit my colleagues at Yankee, I’m taking a new route: Charlottetown - Montreal - Hartford, this after years of flying into Boston, either via Halifax or via Montreal.

Besides the novelty, my rationale for the switch is Air Canada’s schedule: travel time to Hartford is only 4-1/2 hours from Charlottetown, whereas most routings through to Boston take 6 or 7 hours once you factor in all the time in various airports (to say nothing of the airline’s increasing tendency to route Montreal - Boston flights through Ottawa).

Flying to Hartford also lets me leave Charlottetown later and get back earlier: I leave PEI at 5:20 p.m. and get to Hartford at 9:00 p.m., and on the return flight I leave Hartford at 5:40 p.m. and I’m back on the Island at 11:00 p.m. In both cases my layover in Montreal is about an hour. By comparison, to get back from Boston to Charlottetown in one day usually requires leaving Logan by 2:00 p.m.

There are only two downsides that I can see: the plane from Montreal to Bradley Airport in Connecticut is a Beech 1900D, a truly microscopic airplane. And it appears as though it’s going to take about 45 minutes longer to drive up into New Hampshire from Hartford than it does from Boston (although if you factor in Friday Boston traffic, I might still come out ahead).

Oh, and the Hartford routing was $150 cheaper than any Boston flight I could find for the same dates.

If you’ve any pointers or advice regarding Bradley Airport in Hartford (or the drive north into New Hampshire), I’d welcome it.

From Online Travel Review:

Good news for travelers in Portland, Maine: With Independence Air going the way of the dodo bird, you’ve been left without low fare service. Those days are numbered. JetBlue announced 4 times daily service to JFK beginning in May. The good news? Fares start at $59 each way, rather than the current $149 each way, with top fares only hitting $149.

This is the closest that JetBlue has come to Prince Edward Island yet. Okay, so it’s an eleven hour drive from Charlottetown. But it’s a good sign.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been running the Reinvented bookkeeping through Quicken for Home and Business. This is a enhanced version of Quicken with some basic small business features — invoices, accounts receivable, etc. — added on. It’s easy to use, and although I get no respect from my accountant, it served my purposes well.

When I made the switch from PC to Mac several years ago, I was in mid-financial-year, so I bought a copy of Virtual PC for my Mac; this lets me continue to run Quicken for Home and Business, albeit in a somewhat glacial fashion, as Virtual PC has to constantly pretend to be a PC, which makes it quite slow.

In recent years my aforementioned accountant has been pressing me to move to a more adult bookkeeping solution, mostly because when I hand over the Quicken data dump at the end of each year they have to expend considerable manual efforts slurping the data into their Big Accounting System. There is also some apparent discomfort with the lack of “double entry” features, which I believe is related more to addiction than to real practicality, but I’ll play along.

And so, yet again, I’m looking for some basic accounting software for Mac OS X. That works in Canada. And imports digital data from my credit union. And that I can save files from that my account can import.

And those four features seem not to exist in any software I’ve been able to find.

QuickBooks was an early favourite. There’s no specific Canadian version, but they claim that the U.S. version supports unique Canadian features like the GST. But then I read the reviews. And made a couple of calls to Intuit (the company that makes QuickBooks) and found (a) that the U.S. version for the Mac I would be forced to use won’t output data that can be imported into the Canadian PC version my accountant would be using and (b) that the U.S. version doesn’t support import of Canadian financial institution data and (c) that “support” for GST isn’t exactly elegant.

So now I’m trawling for recommendations from others: are you keeping your accounts on a Mac in Canada? Are you happy? If so, what software are you using?