Tungle is Awesome
Oct 23, 06:32 PM by Eric Allen
As a student, I have a lot of meetings. Class projects, clubs, stock market discussions with friends, etc. Setting up these meetings can be a pain, especially with more than two people. “Just send me when you’re available” breaks down pretty quickly, especially if you want to schedule something during the week.
That’s why I use Tungle. Meeting software is not new to me, and I was a fan of whenisgood.com and TimeBridge, but Tungle blows them out of the water. WhenIsGood is cool and all, but the lack of integration with my personal calendar made for a lot of double entry. TimeBridge stopped working when I upgraded to Snow Leopard, and it was too complicated for attendees, too. Not to mention TimeBridge restricted me to only five choices for meeting times.
Desktop integration, great web app, iPhone app, Tungle really has it all. Heck, schedule a meeting right now with me at http://tungle.me/epall. Slick, right? Tungle really is like having a secretary to schedule meetings for me, but it’s free! I love Web 2.0.
BubbleTimer
Sep 20, 08:49 AM by Eric Allen
Every fall, the Learning Assistants (LAs) at RPI teach the freshmen how to manage their time. The cornerstone of this program is the week schedule. Everybody gets an 8.5“x11” sheet of paper with a week schedule on it. Each day is a column, and each hour is a row. You’re supposed to sit down with colored pencils and plan out how every week for the entire semester will go by blocking out particular times in this calendar. As far as I know, nobody actually does this.
How, then, does one efficiently manage time? I’ve found that the time my various activities demand can vary greatly from week to week, so a static schedule is out the window. I’ve gotten good at using Tracks to manage what needs to get done, but I still need something to budget my time with and ensure I’m following that budget. Aggressive proactive scheduling doesn’t work (at least not for me), but I’ve found a better solution: BubbleTimer.
BubbleTimer is a simple web application that lets me enter in a set of activities and then retroactively fill in what I spent time on in 15-minute blocks. I fill in my BubbleTimer as the day goes, and by the end of the day I have a pretty good picture of how my productive time was spent. I don’t track everything (that would be crazy!), but I track pretty much all productive time, as well as time I spend “chilling,” or recuperating when I could potentially be productive. This tracking functionality isn’t all that great by itself, but that’s where Daily and Weekly Goals come in. After reviewing my BubbleTimer data from last semester, I know I have about 15 hours a week to spend on non-school productive activities. I parceled those hours out into my different tasks with Weekly Goals, often with a range of acceptable time spent. During the week, I can see at a glance how I’m doing with respect to my budget, and plan accordingly.
While it’s not free, BubbleTimer is certainly worth the price for me. Without it, I tend to spend too much time on fun coding projects and not enough time on my other activities. Thanks to BubbleTimer, I have a much more balanced set of activities, and I can keep my more fun activities (like investing) to a reasonable level. Yes, I can go ahead and violate my budget any time I want, but without self-control what solution would work? BubbleTimer’s simple, flexible approach to time management is a critical piece of my workflow.
CitizenTax: Epic Failure
Mar 4, 02:26 PM by Eric Allen
I really should have done my homework before picking a free tax preparation service through the IRS’s Free File site. After my ordeal with CitizenTax (or CitizenTaxFree.com, the version I used from the same people), $75 to a tax preparer seemed like no big deal.
I should have run at the first sight of trouble: every now and then as I walked through the process their site would return an error page. A simple refresh fixed it, usually, but that is a little worrisome for a site that’s supposed to be processing my taxes. I went ahead anyway, and after submitting my taxes (I must admit, the site was pretty easy to use) logged out and went on to do other things.
I came back the next day to check on the status of my return, and lo and behold I can’t log in! I double-check, triple-check my username and password with no success. I then sought out their support page, and after 10 minutes of digging got myself registered (yes, yet another account) with their issue tracking system. I filed a ticket, and the following day I got a completely unhelpful reply saying to enter my username and password to log in. I carefully explained that I was unable to log in with said username and password. After a good deal more back-and-forth, I came to discover a fun feature of their password hashing algorithm: they don’t support symbols in passwords. I had naïvely used my secure password generator (1Password) to generate a good password, and it had put in symbols! CitizenTax informed me that my account was impossible to access, they couldn’t reset my password, and I should just sign up again and restart my return. But I had already filed it!! I just wanted to check the status to make sure the IRS had accepted it. After calling the IRS I discovered that I was supposed to receive an email confirmation from them, which I never got, saying the IRS had processed my return. The only way I know it went through is that they took the money out of my checking account four days later!
Just to add to the ordeal, CitizenTax doesn’t inform you about standard deductions, so I ended up paying $400 too much. This I discovered from the CPA (who will be filing my taxes next year) I got to clean up the mess CitizenTax left.
Good job, CitizenTax. Way to handle people’s tax records in a completely incompetent and unfriendly way. Next time I’ll be more careful!
TipJoy Textpattern plugin
Feb 13, 04:08 PM by Eric Allen
Yesterday I quickly hacked TipJoy buttons into the articles on my site, but my solution was not very elegant or flexible. I have now gone back and put that code into a Textpattern plugin that can be downloaded here. All you have to do is install it like any other Textpattern plugin, and then drop a <txp:tj_button /> or <txp:tj_banner /> tag where you want them to show up.
