Betty's Blog

I am beyond excited!  Yesterday I found out that my younger sister is having her first baby!!  She's due mid-October, so I have to get busy...knitting the baby lots and lots of goodies!  My first project is a really easy one (I hope!) straight out of Melanie Falick's Knitting for Baby.  I had 10 skeins of a really gorgeous somewhat chartreuse-y green Debbie Bliss Merino DK, so I'm making the "Easy Eyelet Blanket" with that.  I think it may have been a discontinued yarn - I picked it up at a yarn store in Chicago for about $6 (total!) several years ago.  I was waiting to have an excuse to make a blanket or something similar with it, to make sure I used up most of it in the process.  I'm not much good with "scraps"!

My sister said her and her husband are going to let the gender be a surprise, so I'm keeping all the colours nice and neutral, nothing too lacy.  But I absolutely want to do something with cashmere, so I ordered some Knit One, Crochet Too "Ambrosia" in Fawn tonight, as well.  There's a lovely layette set in the same pattern book - a sweater, hat and throw.  Think super-soft with cables and ribs!  Classic and yummy...I'll update with pictures of the work in progress as I go along!  I can't wait for that yarn to come in...finally a project I have a deadline for...I'm terrible finishing ones without deadlines - I must have 10 or 15 knitting projects in various stages stashed all over the house.

Am I biting off more than I can chew here??  Maybe...(sigh)...

So here are the results of my GTD web app evaluations.  Just to recap a bit, my director was looking for a place to keep track of all the tasks for the management team.  He wanted it to be separate from the site we use for the department projects that the staff has access to.  Other than that, no other requirements.  I had a few requirements of my own, though.

• Must allow files to be uploaded
• Tasks may be shared or private
• Price somewhere between free and $15 per month

I also had a short list of "nice to have" features:

• Some type of chat or discussion forum; even just comments would do
• Contact management
• Shared calendar feature

And the winner is....

Wrike

Hands-down this was the best online app for our needs.  Even though it didn't have some of my "wants", I love the timeline it builds from the due dates assigned to tasks, as well as the ability to take any email from my Inbox that has a "to-do" in it and forward it to Wrike.  Best of all, it's free...!  I highly recommend checking it out.

So it's time for annual performance reviews, merit bonus checks and compensation talks at my company.  Since my staff is a bit depleted at the moment (but new guy starts Monday...FINALLY) I only had to give two performance reviews this year.  One positive, one negative.  I really thought the guy was going to flip out during the negative one, but I kept my cool and in the end, he did too.  Overall, not bad.

My director came out to give me my performance review yesterday.  I was a bit nervous considering he promoted me 8 months ago and I wasn't completely sure how he felt about all the decisions I've made as part of the management team, etc.  I really should stop being so paranoid...it was completely fine.

Then we started discussing the improvements he wanted to make.  In the interest of better communication, I am now to be the liaison between our team and the other team in the department.  All integrated projects will be managed by me.  Our relationship with the other team is completely in my hands.  I'm apparently his girl on this one.  Yikes!  Time for some collaboration, I guess.

The other improvement is in the area of increased productivity through a centralized GTD/task manager.  Now, when it comes to Web 2.0 apps...I've got it covered.  But I warned him that whatever we decided to go with we would have to be diligent about using it or we would be back to the "to-do-lists-on-cocktail-napkins" method of organization that we are currently using.  Not the most effective.  So here's the list of task management and collaborative tools that I am currently evaluating to determine which one is right for us:

• Wrike
• Basecamp
• Nozbe
• @Task
• voo2do
• Ta-Da List
• Vitalist
• CentralDesktop
• Taskbin
• Joint Contact
• comindwork

(Sigh)...I know there are a million more, but what I really want is a to do list with a great note-taking and file upload features so we can better share information.  Our shared drive area is a disaster...it's like some sort of black hole where files go in and never seem to be heard from again.  I'm a huge 37signals fan, so I'm hoping either Basecamp or TaDa List will work (especially excited about the possibility of using Campfire for chat), but I think since I would have to use a paid account it will be out of our price range (currently between free and $15 per month).

Wish me luck!

Well, today I'm the official "Googler" for a team participating in The Great Urban Race.  It's race day in Phoenix and I have to sit by the phone and my computer from around noon to approximately 4pm waiting for a phone call from my friend Amy as she tries to complete this insane urban scavenger hunt!  Apparently each team of two can enlist "Phone-a-Friends", preferably friends with expert Googling skills, to help them along in the race.  I'll post more later, insha'allah...

Good Luck Amy!!!

I'm blogging this!  Oh, and I'm blogging that, too!  And that!  And that!  And, oh wait, yeah, that too!  And this as well!  And that!  Yeah, and that!  And this!  And that, and that, and that!!  Oh, and this!  And that!  Sorry, did you say something?  Cool, have you blogged it yet?*

...ugh, don't you hate it when the annoying people discover Web 2.0???

* business card art from Hugh MacLeod at gapingvoid.com

What are 10 things you've done that other people probably haven't? 
Submitted by Janette.   

Compiled after surveying my co-workers: 

1. Artificially inseminated livestock as part of a college class.
2. Dropped out of law school with only 4 credit hours to go.
3. Lived in 3 different cities in 10 years.
4. Climbed an 80-foot Cal-Trans tower to install a traffic camera.
5. Played in a professional bagpipe band.
6. Converted to Islam at the age of 31.
7. Was detained for 2 hours in a Canadian airport for not declaring meat products in luggage.
8. Speak fluent Hebrew.
9. Truly believed Kingman used to be the capital of Arizona.
10. Audited the volume of corn and soybeans in grain elevators as first job out of college.

If you were suddenly granted the day off today, how would you go spend your free time?

Reading my overdue library book, so I can return it before they charge me replacement costs!

...but I can't read you right now.  I just finished The Professor and The Madman, the amazing story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.  I highly recommend it...definitely a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction read.  I started up a lending library at work and took in about 10 books to start.  Everyone seemed excited about it.  One of my co-workers actually took home my beat up copy of Macbeth!  Subhan'allah!  Will wonders never cease...

What are your rituals or traditions for starting off a new year?  

I always, always, always...clean out the refrigerator.  Anything that looks like it might be in danger of turning into a science experiment goes, all the shelves and drawers are washed and the fridge is re-stocked with healthier things.  A hopeful start before I revert to my usual junk food approximately one week later...(sigh).

I've been finding strange things in my books lately.  Post-it notes I don't remember writing.  A feather.  Pieces of ribbon.  I never seem to use an actual bookmark, nor do I seem to have ever had a habit of turning down page corners to mark my place!  The thing I'm asking is...why now?  Why am I now collecting these bits of ephemera that at some point I grabbed and used to mark my place in a book I never finished reading?  And who is this girl that never used a proper bookmark?!

Perhaps this is because I've decided to weed out the library a bit and have to touch each and every book to decide its fate.  This morning I found both Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf AND The Hours, Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize winning novel that interweaves Virginia Woolf's inner life with the inner lives of a 50s house frau and a modern age literati.  I thought I might read Mrs. Dalloway first and then The Hours, so I picked up Dalloway and noticed something stuck inside like a bookmark.  It was a piece of paper about the size of a postcard, folded in half twice.  This is what it said:

ATTENTION 19 AND 20 YEAR OLDS

ILLINOIS LAW PROHIBITS PURCHASE OR USE OF

ALCOHOL BY ANYONE UNDER 21 YEARS OF AGE.

FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THIS LAW

WILL RESULT IN ARREST AND PROSECUTION

NO EXCEPTIONS

The "NO EXCEPTIONS" part is bigger, bolder and centered, I suppose to understand these Illinois law enforcers mean business.  Well, that note settles it.  Mrs. Dalloway was definitely purchased for use in some undergraduate English Lit class.  And I no longer recognize the girl that would have had that piece of paper particularly handy.  I wonder if I will feel the same way about myself in another 10 years...

I'm embarking on a bit of a book challenge.  I obviously need to clean out my library (697 books, but who's counting?!?) and the sad part is I've collected quite a few more than I ever read.  So.  Time to get reading.  I recently finished the following:

• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
• The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
• Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

I'll keep this updated as I go...let's see how far I get by the time my husband visits in February, shall we?  I think he'll be relieved if I've made a dent and have been able to reduce the number of books lying around the place.  Ok, then...I'm off to do some reading!  I wouldn't want to keep Mrs. Dalloway waiting like this...