• Delicious: git – the simple guide – no deep stuff! Awesome easy and quick guide to the common things you need to do in git from the command line. Nice and succinct, and attractive to boot.

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• Delicious: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/the_disciplined_pursuit_of_less.html Ask yourself, "What am I deeply passionate about?" and "What taps my talent?" and "What meets a significant need in the world?" … We are looking for our absolute highest point of contribution.

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• Delicious: http://m.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2013/02/cars-and-robust-cities-are-fundamentally-incompatible/4651/, http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21569680-new-research-how-close-achievement-gap-stay-focused

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Goals should be specific and achievable, they should be SMART, and I’ve tried to apply such criteria as I’ve formulated these goals. Originally, I wrote down goals into the categories that I had defined in my previous post. However, I reorganized them into once a day/week/month categories, and it seemed to be much more clear, so I will present them as such here as well.

Once a Day:

• Scriptures: Continue reading my scriptures every day, but additionally make note of at least one observation each time.
• More time with family: Get on a regular sleep schedule so that I can do things in the AM before family wake up, to maximize time.
• More time with family: Limit information intake (less HN, Twitter, etc.; batching will be key).

Once a Week:

• Make more memories: Take pictures of people more often (and include me in them when possible).
• Get to $5k/mo side project: Dedicate two hours a week to the project.
• Write/study more for IO: One post a week about information overload on this blog.

Once a Month:

• Enterprise software: Talk with senior and C-level and executives more regularly. Take them out to lunch for “interviews” to learn more about this side of the business.
• Take, organize more photos: Try and go on a “photo outing” once a month, can take family.
• Cultivate service and selflessness: Do one service project a month with family, work, friends.
• Cultivate service and selflessness: Be a more active giver (Kiva, invite people into our home for meals, etc.).

One-Time Events:

• Get to $5k/mo side project: Brain dump everything that’s been bouncing around, then reject them all .
• Get to $5k/mo side project: Do idea extraction and then validate the ideas.
• More time with family: Work out a flex time arrangement with clients/employer.
• Take, organize more photos: Consolidate mine and Paige’s photo libraries.
• Take, organize more photos: Clean all my photo gear.

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• Delicious: AP IMPACT: Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs A fascinating look at how many middle class jobs have simply been removed from the economy due to evolving technology.

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Yesterday I wrote my 2012 year in review, and amazed myself by the incredible events, experiences, and blessings that I had last year. I have so much to be thankful for, and I want to make this year even better.

I’m going about this in two phases. First, I am defining broad waypoints or situational descriptions that I would like to see fulfilled by the 2013. Second, I will then define actual goals (measurable, attainable, etc.) that will facilitate achieving those grander visions. In this manner I hope to have both the end goal and the day to day objectives in mind, and actual translate them into reality.

Without further ado then, how I would like to position my life by the end of 2013, in broad terms:

• Last year I didn’t miss a single day reading in the scriptures. I want to continue this habit, but augment it by being able to say that I had a meaningful study every day, and not just a couple of verses because I was rushed.
• Make more memories. When you look back on a year, do you think about the interesting article you read that day, or the new word that your son learned and repeated to you in the cutest way 500 times? The word, of course. From small little things like that to the big vacations, I want to have more memories to look back on with my family and close friends.
• Really dive deep into enterprise software solutions, learning how they differ from consumer and freelancer projects, and what drives those differences. I want to know and understand this level of work so that I don’t misapply freelancer/consumer answers to enterprise problems, and visa versa. Truly understanding this level of work will hopefully make me a better business man all around, at every level. Luckily I am in a great position to do this in my day job, where I work on enterprise projects each day as a consultant.
• Work on side projects to generate $1,000/month in passive income in 6 months, and $5,000/month by the year’s end. I’ve been considering this one for several months now, and have even recently seen some very successful people setting the same types of goals, so I know I must be in good company. Why do this? Because I don’t think there is a reason I shouldn’t be able to accomplish it. Doing so will also set up a 2014 that has more important lifestyle changes that I desire.
• Have more time with my family. I’ve been working professionally for a whole eight months now (I’m a vet, I know), and I’ve come to realize already that things like commuting suck, because they suck valuable time out of your day. Other things as well, like too frequent news checking, seemingly important but truly unimportant side projects, etc., all take time away from the people that matter most, and the only “things” you get to take with you after this life. I am 25, and hopefully have a lot of life ahead of me, but that is not an excuse to skimp on time now simply because I’ll have more later. This life statement is also tied in with the immediately preceding one.
• Write about and study information overload more. Review apps, review academic papers, write about behavioral solutions and the most recent news. Why? Because I am passionate about it, I love it, and you always learn something better when you must explain it clearly to others.
• Take more pictures. Organize the ones I have. I used to walk down the road and would frame photographs and prints in my head–it’s been a while since I’ve done that. I have about 20 GB worth of photos that need sorting and editing, and the others are unorganized and difficult to access. These are some of the most precious memories and beautiful artwork I’ve done, and I’m just letting them gather digital dust. “Don’t bury your talents” comes to mind.
• Begin to cultivate more of a sense of service and selflessness. In America we hear about the 1%, but in reality, anyone in America that is well off enough to be aware of what the 1% issue is referring to is truly a 1% themselves in regards to the world at large. I’m definitely not in the American 1%, but given the opportunities and compensations that I have, I’m probably in the top 0.1% in the world, and I need to give more of that back. And not just to the extreme destitute in far flung countries, but even to my neighbor or passerby downtown. Have service and compassion be a true part of my being and personality.

I’m sure there are a few I may have forgotten, but I believe that covers all of the most critical aspects. I love my life and have been so blessed; truly everything I have and am is because my heavenly Father has accorded it to me.

Now is the moment to take this life and time that has been given me, and magnify it, turn it into the best life I can conceive, and make it wonderful.

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Information Overload and Email Overload

• It was just one year ago that I came upon the idea of “fixing email” for my masters capstone project, and wrote my first post about it, “Email is broken and it’s time to fix it.” I launched head first into the fascinating world of information overload, email overload, technostress, user interface experiments, and so much more.
• Interestingly, a few months later I wrote “Email is not broken, we are,” the most popular post on the blog that was carried to #3 on Hacker News and represents in a (very small) nutshell how my attitude toward email overload had changed.
• I attended Overloaded 2012, a conference focused on information overload hosted by the Information Overload Resource Group, and met so many great and interesting people there, all engaged in trying to help solve this problem. This was a huge launching point for me and has resulted in so many great connections, ideas, and relationships.
• In fact, I was very honored to be invited to participate on the steering committee of IORG, and am now helping to organize Overloaded 2013, set to take place February 9, 2013! It is going to be a banner conference, so come and attend!

Education

• After five solid years I graduated with both my masters and bachelor degrees in Information Systems, from Brigham Young University. Absolutely fantastic program (ranked #8 nationally) that gave me a very good mix of both business and technical skills. The BYU IS program is incredibly unique among MIS programs in the United States because of it’s elevated expectations and very strong technical emphasis. I graduated with a business degree from a top B-school, and also have technical skills higher than many, if not most, other IS graduates, and on par even with some CS students.
• Was in the top 10% of my class, and selected as the Outstanding Student of the masters program by the faculty. The credit, however, does not go to me—it goes to the professors who offered me exceptional opportunities and took special interest in helping me develop my talents and passions. It also goes to my God, who has given me everything, and to my wife, who was so amazingly supportive.
• Was able to participate in the planning and first stages of execution of a research project examining behavioral adjustments when justification is required. This was a very neat opportunity for me to put the skills I had learned taking pre-Ph.D. courses to work, and furthered my desire to eventually pursue doctoral work.

Personal Life and Career

• Our little boy went from barely being able to roll over on his stomach to a little guy who is running left and right in our house, only ever sits still for three seconds at a time, and has a speaking vocabulary that is expanding past 20 words! Holy cow! Carson, what an amazing 16 months it has been, watching you learn and grow.
• We are now expecting our second, a little girl, and we are so excited. I have no idea how to raise a little girl, and it scares me, but I’m going to do my best and love her so much.
• Started a great job as a technology consultant with Pariveda Solutions. It is amazing to be able to work with creme of the crop people every day, people who are smart but also care about helping out anyone in the firm who may need a hand. It is rare to find so many people of this sort all in one organization.
• Moved to Denver, had a great time, and now moving on to Houston. Wow, two major moves in less than a year, crazy! But all for the best, and great opportunities.
• Got to see my wife’s blog, The Game Gal, grow steadily over the year, and have her very first 10,000+ visitor day on the last day, New Years Eve. It is very interesting to see the people that she is able to help through her blog, especially ESL teachers and students, and those working with children. She has such great content, and she does all the art herself, I am so proud of her!
• I set a goal/New Years resolution last January 1st that I would read my scriptures every single day in 2012—and I did. Some days it was literally only a couple of verses, but many days it was a much deep and profound study session, and I gained so much from it. This has been wonderful, and I am continuing this in 2013.

And that is only a smattering of the incredible things that have happened in this past year. How blessed and lucky I am! I only hope that I can take all of these great experiences and use them to help out others as well, whether it be my own family or strangers on the Internet.

2012 was fantastic, and I am so excited about 2013. I already have a post formulating in my mind of what I want to accomplish in this coming year, and I will post that tomorrow. But needless to say, you only go faster and farther when you try harder and stronger. There is no plateauing in life, only forward or backward progress. May we all make forward progress in 2013, and may it be a wonderful year for everyone.

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This morning I opened my laptop and went to gmail.com to check my email, but was a little confused at first. The first email was from Amazon Local Deals, which I was pretty sure I had unsubscribed from a while ago, and furthermore it was from an area I used to live in, but have since moved from. Then I saw that two people that I did not know had circled me on Google+, not completely unusual but still unexpected. Then the kicker… my name was gone from the top right, and instead I was inside of Sarah Jenkins’ account (name changed).

At that point I shot back to the inbox, and sure enough, I was in a completely different person’s account. All the emails were completely foreign, the chat list was full of people I did not know, and the +You name in the top right was definitely +Sarah, not +Joshua. I quickly checked Chrome’s Web Inspector and looked at the cookies. Indeed, everything appeared as if I were her, almost as if it was a Firesheep session, but it most certainly was not.

I certainly got out of her account as quickly as I could, but did take a quick screenshot and saved the network data (and corresponding cookie information) strictly for evidence in hopefully helping the Gmail team should they need debugging evidence. I would never want to violate this other person’s privacy, just as I would not want mine violated.

And that is what scared me: this happened to me, being in someone else’s account. But what if a different person in the meantime has been in mine? Email is the gateway to everything online, and I would never want anyone in my account that shouldn’t be there. An incredibly bizarre and potentially dangerous situation.

Facts:

• I had not logged in, I had just opened Gmail in a new tab.
• I use multi-login, and am normally logged into two other accounts at the same time. Neither of these accounts were available, just the other individuals.
• I also use 2-step authentication (thankfully!), not sure if this would affect my account.
• The cookie looked completely like her identification, nothing to do with mine.

One of the oddest things is that the stranger was 90% random, but based on their apparent location and a few email subjects, I could have in theory at least formerly lived near this person.

My best hypothesis right now is that there was a networking-based error that occurred somewhere along the way, where traffic destined for me/her was switched somewhere along the lines. Otherwise the culprit would have to be in Gmail’s systems. Either scenario is scary; this should never happen. Being in someone else’s account is like having the key to their kingdom. I could have read all of her emails, looked at her Youtube subscriptions or posted something as her, reset other possible accounts that send email password reminders or reset links–everything short of actually changing her Gmail password (which thankfully would have required me to actually know her existing password). In general, Google authentication is quite secure, but what happened today made me very nervous about my own account’s safety, and about the infrastructure in general.

If you are on the Gmail team and can follow up on this, please contact me. I will try and examine the .HAR files I exported when I get a chance, and if I have any updates I’ll report back here.

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• Delicious: Textmate to VIM | Jack Kinsella – Rails Developer London Moving from Textmate (but really any typical GUI text editor) to VIM. Lots of shortcut equivalents and suggestions for plugins., The Web engineer’s online toolbox A collection of tons of little tools that would be helpful to web developers

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• Delicious: Vim Recipes: Table of Contents A great collection simple how-to’s for Vim., Shortcuts to move faster in Bash command line – teohm.dev

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Horvitz has produced an amazing body of work since starting at Microsoft in the 90s, and a good deal of it has dealt directly with information and email overload. For example, Iqbal and Horvitz’s 2007 article “Disruption and recovery of computing tasks: field study, analysis, and directions” is a great example of determining real-world costs to task switching.

Adding intelligence to email clients, especially in the form of identifying user behavior and trying to determine message value, would be a huge step forward. Also important is that this would be implemented in the client that many middle- and upper-managers are using—the people who experience the most overload.

Now of course we don’t have anything more specific yet, but this news is very exciting to those of us interested in email overload, and sounds very positive. Great to see Microsoft continuing to innovate in this sphere, and hopefully bringing some of the excellent ideas of the future into reality.

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Of course that means that I need to add all of my Schema.org microdata enhancements back in–I can’t go from having all of that embedded, machine readable data to having nothing! So I applied the same techniques as I did for the previously released Twenty Eleven Schema.org child to this year’s theme, and it is ready for public consumption.

What is Schema.org and microdata? In short, it is invisible, enhanced markup that lets search engines and other system agents read about your content, including authorship, dates, tags, content delineation, etc., in a way that they can understand. To quote from my previous post about the T11 child theme:

Adding microdata to your site has several benefits. First and foremost, you contribute to machine readable data everywhere. The Internet is a wonderful place for humans to browse, but we can make it more accessible and more consumable if we let the computer figure as much of it out as it can. Second, search engines can use this data to get a better understanding of each page that it indexes, and hopefully provide more relevant search results. (Notice that I am not saying you are going to get an SEO boost for doing this. You may, you may not, I have no idea. But if everyone included this data on their sites, the results would be better.) There are no downsides really to simply plugging the data in.

So if you are using the new Twenty Twelve theme and would like to add this microdata to your site, then feel free to download and install the T12 Schema.org child theme on your blog. You can find a download, as well as a link to the source on GitHub, on the Twenty Twelve Schema.org Child Theme dedicated page.

Enjoy, and let me know how you are using it!

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• Delicious: Learnable Programming

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If you have personal anecdotes, thoughts, or resources, I’d love to hear of them. In the meantime, I am going to be looking into what has been uncovered in this area, and pursue what we can discover going forward.

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• Delicious: Pattern Tap : Interface Collection for Design Inspiration Great collection of different web design elements.

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• Delicious: When can I use… Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc Very cool, easy to use tool to find out what advanced HTML5/CSS3 features can be used in what browsers.

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• Delicious: Git – Book The entire Pro Git book from Apress. A great guide to using Git in the real world, with good visual examples and an intelligent structure. Helped me a ton.

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• Delicious: Pricing experiments you might not know, but can learn from – ConversionXL

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• Delicious: How Good C# Habits can Encourage Bad JavaScript Habits: Part 1 | Enterprise jQuery Another really great tutorial on Javascript best practices, covering in detail using namespaces correctly so you don’t pollute the global window namespace.

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• Delicious: Flowchart: how to retinafy your website – Thomas Fuchs Sad that we need this, but a handy reference for determining a @2x strategy for your images/content.

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