Digital declutter

Every so often, I go through a decluttering phase that sees me attempt to purge some of the stuff I have accumulated. It usually happens after I reach a tipping point of sorts - something that is hard to define but I always know once I'm there. I feel like I'm currently at a digital tipping point. Something has to happen.

Much like cleaning up your home, there are lots of tips available for digital decluttering. However, I think they pretty much involve the same strategy: do it slowly but surely - and be firm.

A couple of years ago I unsubscribed to a whole pile of daily deal sites and it felt great! However, they have slowly but surely crept up again and the daily assault on my junk mail inbox was starting to spiral out of control. 17 emails with unmissable deals by lunch time, most of which I instantly delete? No thanks! So, during the past week or so I've started unsubscribing and removing myself from mailing lists all over the place. A few are precariously hanging in there until I make a final decision about whether or not they can stay. Some are proving harder to remove than others; they send me "are you sure?" messages then confirmations that they have received my confirmation. Enough, already!

My Feedly blogroll has also been included in this digital declutter. Sorry to all those who haven't updated their blogs in more than a year, but you're most likely off my list now! I am less brutal than I'd like to be with Twitter and Facebook, though. Every attempt at unfollowing or defriending usually nets just a few casualties at a time, coupled with more guilty pangs than any grown up should realistically be feeling. Digital zen is harder to achieve than it looks.

Conversation starters

Some people are gifted in the art of conversation. No topic is too big or small with them and it doesn't matter whether they know the person they're talking to; a conversation started by a few keen questions is never too far away.

Some of us are a bit shy. However, I have discovered that I possess a sure-fire conversation starter: my Kindle. Rather than becoming the solo pursuit it appears to be, my Kindle has been the subject of fascination by so many people, old and young, who are curious to know all about it.

The conversation usually goes something like this: "Is that a Kindle? Wow, it looks really light. Can I hold it/see how heavy it is? Oh, even in a case this is really light and easy to hold! That's such a cute case! Where did you get it from? How much did it cost? Do you like reading off it? Does the light go brighter? Wow, that's really clear! How do you turn the page? ..." And so on.

A while ago, there was an elderly couple sitting next to me on the plane. The gentleman noticed my Kindle and proudly declared, "I know what that is. I email my grandson." A quick look around my Kindle bookshelf helped clarify things. I followed it up with a demo on how you can make the font bigger and saw his eyes light up. You see, he and his wife have been making the trip from Gisborne to Christchurch for several months while he had cochlear implants surgically inserted then repeatedly adjusted. His hearing loss has meant that reading is one of the pleasures he can still enjoy until the implants are full functioning. The three of us chatted all the way through our flight. What a lovely couple they were.

Then there was the woman sitting next to me while we were waiting to be called for jury service. You see, she has arthritis and struggles to comfortably hold the novels she loves to read. Isn't it amazing how lightweight a Kindle is? And you can turn the page just by tapping on it? She went home and ordered one from Amazon that night.

I finally realised the power of the Kindle as a conversation started on a flight this evening. The person sitting next to me was reading from her iPad. We had the usual Kindle conversation and she admitted that she hasn't quite worked out the settings on her iPad to stop the power saver from kicking in, dulling the screen or turning off unless she moves something (or skips a page). We got talking and she told me she is really excited about to be beginning a journey of two years' postgraduate study ... we traded some war stories about the benefits and perils of study and other things. She said she realised she wouldn't have much time to read for pleasure any more, then showed me what she was currently trying to finish before her study began: a huge tome called Les Misérables. I showed her that I had Les Mis on my Kindle, ready to read (for free!). And so we talked about musicals, theatre, production, study, writing, publishing ... I didn't even notice that we'd landed. As we left to go our separate ways at the airport, she assured me she was going home to look up Kindle deliveries before leaving for overseas. Seriously, Amazon should pay me a commission as I’m sure I’ve ‘sold’ several Kindles this year alone.

For those book snobs who accuse me of selling out: get over it. I've heard it all: "It's not the same. I like the feel of a real book/curling up with a book in bed/the smell of paper blah blah." I can assure you from personal experience that you can curl up just as easily with a Kindle as any other book. Then there's the cost factor. Buying a best seller for ~$37 or ~$10? I know what I'd rather pay, and there are so many free or really cheap books that are instantly available. They're especially practical when you're travelling or commuting. And why carry one book with you to read when you can have 1000 in your bag all the time?

Are you an ebook convert? Or do you still prefer tree books? I should point out that I still regularly borrow books from the library and love browsing through bookshops, but am totally, unashamedly in love with my Kindle. And its super powers as a conversation starter are a bonus.

MapMyWalk

It is three months until Round the Bays hits Wellington and I am putting a team of walkers and runners together to enter this event. As a walker, I really enjoy the scenery around our coastline and look forward to three months of summer walks, so long as the weather behaves!

I have been playing around with MapMyWalk and went for my first walk with it today. MapMyWalk is a free multi-platform mobile app that uses a GPS tracker to stalk you while you are out walking. In return, it provides you with statistics about your workout, including the distance travelled, your speed, how long you have been walking, minutes per kilometre, as well as records of other stuff like food and nutrition, calories burned etc. Your stats are recorded within the app and you can also access them online, keeping a cumulative record of each workout or editing them to build up a picture over time. You can link your account to automatically brag about your workouts on Facebook or Twitter (I haven't) and even create a walking club to compete with your friends, if you are that way inclined. (I'm not.)

Although this morning's walk was not particularly remarkable, I enjoyed keeping track of my walking distance and statistics as the blue line tracked me down the road and back home again. Let's see what my account looks like in three months' time!

New toys

I have bought a couple of new toys lately. The first is the laptop that I'm writing this post on. It's a Compaq Presario CQ60-212, a cute little notebook to tide me over until I can afford and justify the expense of a gorgeous MacBook Pro. It's basic and functional; we're bonding slowly.

My second toy purchase excites me more. I am now the proud owner of my very first 'real' cake mixer - a Kenwood KM270W Patisser (sounds impressive, doesn't it?)! After much research, and despite lusting over a purple KitchenAid, this is the model I settled on. People tell me that they bought a Kenwood years and years ago and it's still going strong; I'm hoping this will last me a lifetime of baking. It makes me feel very grown up!

So, I needed to test my brand new Kenwood. Yesterday, I made black forest cake for my brother's birthday. It was the first time I'd tried making one and I looked around for recipes and variations. I settled on baking a normal chocolate cake and filling it with layers of chopped black doris plums and whipped cream. I diluted the syrup mix by boiling the plum juice with a splash of brandy. I topped it with whipped cream and grated dark chocolate over the top. The coloured lettering on top of white chocolate melts didn't exactly look classy but was another experiment. Anyway, it was the taste that mattered.

Black Forest birthday cake

I have just taken a yummy banana loaf out of the oven. I plan to give my new mixer plenty of practice!

My iPod touch apps

Ever since discovering Free App A Day a while ago, my iPod touch has really come to life. I have only bought a few fully-paid applications but have downloaded lots of freebies. Free App A Day offers one free app for iPhone/iPod/iPad each day. I enjoy playing games, but am not too keen on action games or ones that eat my battery life before my eyes.

Here are some of the apps I'm enjoying at the moment. There are others, but these are the ones I use most frequently.

Classics
I've blogged about this before. The Classics app allows me to have 27 classic novels on hand everywhere I go. This is great if you are a bibliophile like me, or are caught waiting somewhere without a book to read or anything to do.

Build-A-Lot
There is something strangely addictive about building and rebuilding a community from scratch. Build-A Lot is not as complex as Sim City, making the challenges easier to dip in an out of when time is tight.

Fuzzle
Fuzzle is a fun game to play in short bursts, for example, when waiting in the queue for my morning coffee. It is a simple, untimed game which doesn't restart every time you open the application - it continues your saved game. Basically, you move the balls around the board to create lines of five balls of the same color. Every time you finish a row, the balls are removed. But after every other move you make, more balls are added.

Sudoku 2
I hadn't had much experience with solving sudoku puzzles before, but Sudoku 2 is great and has taught me lots. There are several different levels and the updates released have made the board and numbers even clearer to see.

Moonlight Mahjong
Use the touch screen to adjust the angle you view the game board or the size of the puzzle. Moonlight Mahjong has several different tile styles, and even one which uses numbers if you're having trouble finding matches. I randomly select puzzles to solve and they range from being relatively simple to quite complex.

Chicks
I have finally found a Lemmings-style game for my iPod touch. Chicks takes me right back to the 80s/90s when we first met little creatures who would fall off cliffs and bash their way through walls at our command.

Cooking Dash
I have spent far longer than I care to think about trying to master Cooking Dash. Flo dashes about trying to cook up meal orders for her customers, who are each only prepared to wait for varying lengths of time. The kitchen gets busy and the heat turns up a notch. The biggest frustration with Cooking Dash (and Diner Dash below) is that it doesn't save the game when you close the application - you need to start again from scratch.

Diner Dash
As above. Be warned: Diner Dash is also really addictive.

Do you have any recommendations of your own?

An offline wilderness

I am terrible at spending gift vouchers. Actually, I'm not a great shopper at all, but I can easily spend months pondering what to spend a gift voucher on and more often than not redeem them close to their expiry date. I have been carrying around $170 of Farmers vouchers for about six months now, a couple of $10 Westfield vouchers, and $20 credit at the iTunes Store. I finally used $60 in last week's Farmers sale (still more to go - actually, some of that came from trading in airpoints that were about to expire, lol), but the Westfield vouchers remain in my wallet.

While I generally like the idea of vouchers as gifts, either giving or receiving, it takes me more time than almost anyone else to research all my possible spending options before finally redeeming them, usually during some kind of sale or when I'm in desperate need of an item. I've always been like that; I'm not sure why spending is so hard for me when others seem to love it!

Next week, we are going away to a place with no cell phone coverage, no Internet access (I don't credit 13 KB dial-up as being 'Internet'), and very cautious use of electricity and water. Some would call that bliss; I call it cold turkey. I'll surgically remove my laptop from my side and switch off my cell phone before we leave, but have already collected a supply of books to read and a backup: my trusty iPod touch. Up until now, this prize has been an occasional toy; next week it will be my lifeline in a non-digital world! (Am I exaggerating? Not sure ...)

I have spent some time today preparing my iPod touch. My 60GB iPod holds my entire music collection but will be left behind; 16GB is a struggle for me, especially when sharing the available space with other applications, so I have put together some basic playlists to see me through the week. I also went shopping at the iTunes Store and almost spent all of my $20 voucher. Almost.

What did I buy? A few games that I've been playing the lite versions of, some more expensive than I would have bought myself (well, all of them really - I've only played freebies so far):

• Diner Dash - I would consider this a living nightmare in real life, but I've just signed up for 50 virtual levels and can't wait!
  
• Cooking Dash - ditto
• Fling - it's fun flinging things around on an iPod touch
  
• Fuzzle - strangely addictive
• Moonlight Mahjong - I've only ever played mahjong online and this is quite a cool version
• SimCity - I used to love playing this on my PC, so I'll see if I can achieve the same results on a 3.5" screen.

So, I'm nearly ready for my big week offline without email, Facebook, Twitter, blogging (although I might be able to prepare posts on my touch). Anyone would think I was heading for the depths of a jungle wilderness! I am looking forward to going away, really!

The system is down

I was at Warehouse Stationery this afternoon looking to buy a diary for 2010. A few people were already waiting at the counter so I browsed for a while before hearing those dreaded words: "your card has been declined". An embarrassed customer asked to try again with another card and promptly received the same response from the machine. Another customer tried to use their card - same thing. The queues lengthened, then the ubiquitous verdict was declared by two counter staff: "The system is down".

The tension started to rise. One customer left her purchases behind, another decided to wait for a while and try again. It didn't help things that a staff member at another counter declared loudly that her EFTPOS terminal was working just fine and perhaps they had just done something wrong when processing the sale, or should have hit F7, or something. She was promptly hushed when her system also started declining transactions.

Having only intended to buy a diary with a 25% discount, I offered to pay cash. I was immediately ushered to the front of the queue and my $4.50 transaction was processed by a relieved cashier: a successful sale! But almost everyone else was cashless. I walked out, diary in hand, and pondered the growing mayhem inside.

A couple of weeks ago, a similar thing happened at my local doctor's surgery when I went to pick up a prescription. The queue at reception grew. When asked by a receptionist, "who's waiting?", about four people replied, "we all are!". Oh no: the system was down! Invoices were promised and manual transactions attempted. I offered to pay cash and was told by the now-flustered receptionist, "no, sorry, you can't: our system is down". It took her a moment to relax a bit after I laughingly pointed out that things must be really bad if she couldn't accept a $10 note. There were giggles all round as I left everyone to sort out their payments.

As we increasingly move towards becoming a cashless society, I can't help but wonder what is Plan B for when the system is down and people no longer carry even small amounts of cash?

eDay 2008

Saturday is NZ's annual eDay, when you can recycle your old PC or mobile phone at locations all around the country. It's free, and the junk in the bottom of your cupboard will supposedly be either recycled or disposed of in an environmentally-friendly way. There is a whole range of hardware you can hand in, and surely that's got to beat having it collect dust at home, or paying a fortune to dump it yourself.

I'm wondering if I can hand over my dying laptop? (I suppose not, as it's technically not mine, nor legally dead yet, although I'm incredibly tempted. The good news is that I'm getting a shiny new Macbook Pro next Friday - yay!). My sweetie has a computer monitor and a few other bits and bobs from work to get rid of. I'd like to think I can "do the right thing" and dispose of lots of junk thoughtfully, but I don't really have that much that fits the bill in the first place.

But, anyway, there's my tiny bit of green.

An iPhone for me?

Exciting news at work this morning. This was emailed to everyone by our IT manager:

"At this stage we have decided to purchase just two iPhones for evaluation purposes ... We will probably take 3 - 6 months to do a full evaluation ... We will then be in a better position to make some decisions on the possibility/viability of any wider use of iPhones within the company."

The excitement grew, along with the flurry of email replies. Who would be evaluating the phone? Is it me? Are you sure it's not? It could be ... are you really really sure? Oh, you are. Don't we need someone from Christchurch/Tauranga/Wellington/Auckland/Dunedin to test one and see what it's like in this region? Apparently the capital city needs more iPhones (according to the few of us staff who live here, and one of them is my project director, so no arguing with her!). No?

I can convince you that I need one - just look at the educational and organisational benefits!

I'll take good care of it and promise never to do this to it:



So, you can imagine my disappointment when we were informed that Winnie the Pooh, from our Christchurch office, was the lucky evaluator. Apparently he was selected because "if a bear of little brain and no fingers can cope with it then we figure it will be safe for wider staff use". Well, fair enough, especially when you use that logic.

Winnie the Pooh, from our Christchurch office
Officially the luckiest bear in the world

My new toy

I have a new toy. I've now got a Nokia 6234 as my work phone. I'm not majorly into phone features and gadgets. In all honesty, I was just thrilled to get a phone that I didn't have to charge twice a day, and one that has buttons which work when I push them (and not all the ones around that button either). This means that I won't need to spend 5 minutes writing a 50-character txt! Sounds too fussy? Maybe I'm hard to please. But I'm happy now. :-)

I've found a cool site which allows you to download heaps of free wallpapers, screensavers, ringtones, themes, and games for this mobile. But where to start? There are some pretty cool wallpapers, but I'll get to them later. I've been picking ringtones. So far I've got one for the whanau, one for dance buddies, one for my sweetie ... still looking for work and friends songs. Now, tell me why I'm not just sleeping in on a wet Saturday morning after a looooong week?