Tying in The World of A Story with Modern Shipping

3:51 AM
June 29, 2008
I just recieved an RCA cable (a special tv part I needed) that sold for $6.47 on ebay (including shipping) and it was shipped from Hong Kong!

Why is that cool? Well, for one it's a hella long way to ship something so cheaply. Reflecting upon ancient roman roads which spanned an awe-inspiring 53,819 miles in 450 bc with the laws of Twelve Tables regulating road length and message telegrams, this is amazing. I remember tracking my sweet iPhone as it was shipped from Hong Kong (where it's manufactured) to Alaska and finally to California. Then I got another package from a neighbor on Van Nuys, roughly 20 miles away from me! The Hong Kong package traveled roughly 7,254 miles. The other package traveled about 20 miles. Both were less than $5 shipping fees. I mention this because 1)shipping is truly astonishing and 2)it has current relevance in literature.

The Hong Kong package even had a customs certificate!

Additionally, I'm in the midst of reading Jules Verne's epic "Around the World in 80 Days, and around Chapter 20 Fogg, Auoda (the Indian babe Fogg heroically rescued) and Passepartout, the wiry little frenchman arrive in the very same city of Hong Kong after voyaging from Calcutta, India on the "Rangoon", only to discover that they've missed the "Carnatic" ship and hire a small-time boater to make it to Yokohama in time. So this has some of that "world as a story" flavor to it. Reading about Hong Kong in a fictional classic and then coincidentally receiving a package from the same city (and the fact that cost less than $5 shipping) and the book is free just kind of sets the stage for a nice, little literary-relevance-making-the-world-smaller-but-more-magical ambiance to this serendipity. Just the fact the part was so cheap and the distance it traveled was so great has congruence with Phillias Fogg's character, and Verne's book is free on project Gutenberg, it's just kind of some everyday magic that arises for very cheap, without massive expenses, or with zero expenses.

Call me "easy to please" but these little serendipitous gems of reading a classic novel that travels the world and then receiving a package that has nearly traveled the same route as the characters in that novel?!! Well, that's just cool bizarro country 2000.

8700 Emails on Gmail! S#$tballs!

ON MY GMAIL ACCOUNT I HAVE exactly 8700 messages, including "sent". Nearly 9000 messages! Nine Thousand!!!! That's unfathomable. Could you imagine just reading 1000 emails? Yeah, now multiple that by nine! I also have a couple thousand on my local hd of mail.app. Email is a MASSIVE undertaking which is precisely why I've freaked out about adding the most efficient and productive application for processing it and doing it efficiently.   I'm interested in not living in the inbox, but also not having this byzantine network of reference folders.  I currently have 34 (thirty-four!) archive folders IMAPed, from "Income" to "Finances-Reciepts", to "Kittens" to "Travel" to "Friends" and 29 more, it's gotten ridiculous.  I'm going minimal and switching to one bulk archive folder.  If I want sub-folders I can wire it nicely with mail.app smartfolders.

Hopefully mail.app will shine with add-ons like mailtags, textexpander, and mail-acton. God, am I glad to be out of gmail web-email! That was total utter hell waiting for the loading, the ads. God that was hell. Mail.app with apple is bringing back the home team (apple) with email. Throw in rules and built-in smart mailboxes and things are flying. Best news is I'm completely done with writing 2000+word emails to people for free. I did that out of the kindness of my heart, but all my time went to emails. If some people are so that they won't get any 2000+word emails from me anymore, they can suck it big time. So this is an exciting era for me. Maximum 5 sentence responses, even to loved ones. I'm WAY in the "IOUs" for receiving lengthy thoughtful heart-felt messages in the first place.

What will ceasing all of me free eloquent, and articulate and widely acclaimed emailing habit do for me?

1. It will allow me to route my energies towards writing lengthy heartfelt blogs.
2. It will open up time to actually earn money.
3. It will prevent me from being a tool who gets used by people who just want a lengthy, heartfelt message.
4. It will enable me to not fear my email inbox, because I'm not obligated to spend 5 hours writing each email response and can just keep the ball rolling and dash off a quick 2-sentence response.
   
5. Exonerate me from email servitude and obsequiousness where I felt literally enslaved to anyone I knew well who sent me an email.
6. Best of all it will provide the freedom to redirect my well-liked eloquence and literary articulation towards actually bringing in capital (capital!), and creating greater piece of mind.

Yeah, in short, limiting my email responses to five sentences is a pretty damn good idea!

By the way, I have a great curiosity to know....how many total emails to you have saved in your archives?  

Productivity Heros

This details the list of all productivity heros of which I can conjure

• David Allen -- The "Father" of modern productivity. His GTD is referenced in myriad productivity apps, resources, and books. The uber-productivity trend-setter, David coined words like "mind like water productivity" "blackbelt GTD" and other Zen-like terms. He has a martial arts background, lives in Ojai (sweet, a neighbor!), and has to have some kind of computer programming background with his references to LIFO, FIFO, and the entire "closed" loop GTD system is set up like a computer program with if-then statements. If anyone wants to know about productivity, they've got to understand or at least get the gist of Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Do. Here's David giving a stellar speech to Google:
  I suggest you subscribe to some of his RSS Feeds and checkout the DavidCo Forum.


• Merlinn Mann -- If anyone knows GTD high-tech style, it's Merlin Mann. In a way he's like David Allen 2.0. He invented an amazing program called Quicksilver for the mac. With that handy gem you can load most any program or document with the keyboard, making it an essential for keyboard jockeys. Using words like "byzantine", "email bankruptcy", and "attrition" all in the same paragraph, he really cracks me up and reminds me of a high-tech jim Carrey infused with hyper-intelligence. Check out his hyserical mockery FlockedUp site debut.
  or the more traditional presentation of his essential productivity material "Inbox Zero" with this video presentation at google or at the main Merlin Mann hub. The guy has numerous pages, blogs, and sites, so it's hard to pinpoint a central hub, but if one existed it would be 43folders.com.

• Cameron Johnson -- This may be transforming into a "leaders of business" by listing Cameron, but I had to include this guy. Cameron wouldn't typically make the productivity list because his expertise is entrepreneurialism, not productivity. But, come on...if you started 12 business by the age of 21, how could you call that NOT productive! Here's a rundown of his startups:
  TrueLoot.com 2004
  CertificateSwap 2004
  KazaaGator 2003
  AimBuddy 2003
  ChooseYourPrize.com 2002
  Zablo.com 2001
  SearchOmega 2001
  VoteStation.com 2001
  SurfingXChange 2001
  SurfingPrizes.com 2000
  EmazingSites 1999
  MyEZShop.com 1999
  MyEZMail.com 1998
  Cheers and Tears/
  Beanie Wholesale 1997
  Cheers and Tears
  Printing Co.
  His book is well-written, well-organized, and massively helpful for anyone eager to launch their own business. The best part? Cameron writes from my (Generation Y) generation, so instead of hearing some garbage about 1980s reveries at Harvard or how "back in the day we didn't have computers", you just get waves of solid, clean, lucid business advice...plus the guy's just massively intelligent. Additionally, he wrote "You Call the Shots" like an autobiography, giving it the "true novel" flavor to the prose.

Blog Update!

Restructured the blog.  This about the 4th revision since I started this blog 5 years ago 2003 in a galaxy far far away (aka London during my studies at the London School of Economics).  We're going high-tech, baby!  Ajax right-hand menu bar.  New color design. Simpler, more intuitive interface.  Best of all, more in-post links, video embeds, higher utilization of "article tags", and embedded photos for more dynamic and "colorful" posts.