making sense out of life, one by one

October 20th, 2009 Comments Off on making sense out of life, one by one

Spider web early in the morning
Image via Wikipedia

It’s been ages since I last wrote a blog post, but the good news is, the list of ideas is constantly growing and I hope I’ll be able to focus on them eventually. It’s all a matter of organizing one’s life and being on top of the everyday chaos of details and little disturbances.

I’ve learned to love the web 2.0 (is this name starting to sound really old, or is it just me?) in this respect. In the last few months, I’ve successfully organized some of the more funky parts of my life. I’ll just list them for now, and write posts describing each of the steps specifically later.

First there was Dopplr, that finally made it easy to track _all_ my travels. So easy in fact, that I went and filled in every trip I’ve made in the last 5 years. I now know exactly where I was since high school. And what good is that you ask? Well, for one, I’ve learned that in December 2004, I was in Barcelona, at the same time as the girl who is now my wife was, even though we didn’t know that then. Interesting, and previously undiscoverable.

Then there is Ancestry.com, where I finally made sense out of all the stories my parents have to say about our family history. Now I have a chart outlining _all_ knowledge that is available to me about my ancestors. And through smart algorhythms, I’m discovering links with people around the world.

But for more serious stuff, everybody has a bank account or two. Or several. Luckily, we also have Wesabe, a great online tool that enabled me to structure _all_ my personal banking history. Every transaction I have ever made is now indexed by Wesabe (with a lot of help from my coding skills, but still), which really made me feel more at ease. And enabled me to discover a credit card fraud in two days rather than next month!

Then I switched my phone again and realized, that not only is my contacts list split amongst two phones now, there are also contacts lists in every social network I am part of, but I have no access to them where I need them – in the cellphone’s address book. After much of research, I decided that the best thing to do was to use Gmail Contacts to store  the combined list of everybody I know from my existing address books, Facebook friends and Linkedin contacts. Imagine the power of communication after having all that info everytime with you!

… so much for the appetizer. more details and examples shall follow… 🙂

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