A Curmudgeon TechnologistGet off my lawn!

In September my wife and I finally moved gyms to one that would be on the way home from work. This saved us from driving about a half hour in the wrong direction.

Our billing date was September 15th and I canceled on the 12th and was told that I wouldn’t get charged. Of course I was charged but I had everything written down in my Moleskine.

It rescued me because on the notebook half I had written down in detail who I had talked to and what they said, at what time and obviously the date. I’ve had too much trouble before with sort of thing so I’ve learned my lesson.

I wrote the gym a letter detailing my transactions with all these people plus including a copy of the cancellation letter and the fax receipt saying they received it. The next day I got a calling saying they would refund my money and sorry for the trouble. It’s very hard to argue when you can present a detailed time line.

Here’s a list of other things to write down:

• Canceling anything, write down who you talked to and the time and your cancellation number (This saved me when I canceled DSL and they continued to charge me and didn’t refund the previous month of service, even though it didn’t work)
• Ordering a major item or service
• Bills paid and when you mailed them
• Any inquiries you make about services – write down who told you, what they said and the price quote

If you think of any others, leave them in the comments.

[tags]moleskine, gtd,  record keeping, saving money, money[/tags]

New Features:

Google made some major updates to Google Reader which makes it really usable. Before it was a bit awkward and didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Now it looks great and functions exactly how you think it should, here are the features I really like:

• You can access it anywhere
• Good HTML Support (you’d think this would be obvious but then you must not have used embedded IE)
• Embedded mp3 Support – I have a lot of podcasts in my feeds, this makes it really handy to listen to the short ones as I process my articles
• Keyboard shortcuts – this is probably the best feature – my hands don’t leave the keyboard

My Workflow:

Here’s how I work. I process first, I just determine whether the article is interesting and open it, I read later:

• Shift + N -> Move to the next feed
• Shift + O -> Open that feed
• Spacebar -> page through the feed (Possibly doing a Shift + A to mark all read if it bores me)
• v -> opens that articles link in a new tab (with Firefox obviously)

Summary:

Google Reader has replaced SharpReader which was my desktop feed reader for years (Rant: To mark all read in SharpReader its Ctrl+Shift+R – human hands weren’t meant to contort like that!) It’s a very efficient way of managing my current RSS feeds and has saved me quite a bit of time. Google always amazes me. I thought Reader was a very mediocre product but they really redeemed themselves and pulled off an excellent transformation with this release.

[tags]google, google reader, rss, sharpreader, gtd, feeds[/tags]