Today has been one of the most productive Mondays I’ve had at work in years. I don’t know if it’s because of the hike, and subsequently clearing of my head this past weekend, or if it’s because of the dream I had last night. The reasoning doesn’t matter. All I know is that this morning I made a list of the things I wanted to accomplish at work and I’ve been checking these items off one by one and it has given me a strong feeling of accomplishment.
Sometimes just having a checklist on a piece of paper that one can modify with a pen is the way to go.
I’ve mentioned before that I keep track of what I need to do via a loose interpretation of the “Getting Things Done” methodology. Everything goes in a bucket, I review the bucket, and then I figure out what I need to do with the things I’ve put in the bucket. It’s as simple as that. There are hundreds of applications out there that are suppose to make this all move in a very easy way by providing an infinite number of ways to slice and dice the information so you can figure out what you’re suppose to do. Many of these applications are quite nice but I get into “fiddly” mode instead of “productive” mode when I use them. So I just have my little text file with a list of everything I want to accomplish someday, and I review it, pick a few things to work on, and go from there. I do have some coding magic so that I can jump onto any of my computers and type the word “inspire” at a command prompt, and it’ll pick some things on the list that don’t have due dates associated with them. Coupling “inspire” with my regular review of my text file helps keep me productive and organized. Plus, it’s free.
Free is good.
Speaking of free… I’ve been working on cleaning up some audio lately and I was beyond stunned when I saw how much Adobe is charging for their sound editing application, Adobe Audition. I remember buying this application for the radio stations back in the late 1990s when it was called “Cool Edit” and it was a very cool application for its time, and more importantly, it was affordable. These days Adobe doesn’t allow you to buy their software, one can only rent it via a subscription model. I considered subscribing for Adobe Audition for a hot moment, until I learned that it was nearly $35 PER MONTH if I didn’t buy a year’s worth of entitlement at a time.
The heck with that.
This whole notion of renting software from a software company rubs me the wrong way, and that’s probably because I’m an old school geek that remembers the delight I felt when someone bought my shareware cash register program back in the late 1980s. I would never think of renting that software to a business. They bought it, they owned it, and if they asked I’d give them the code so they could do what they wanted with it.
So, no Adobe Audition for me.
There are plenty of fully paid or open source sound editors out there. Audacity comes to mind and it runs on just about anything. I’ll just stick with that.
