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All geeks have a todo.txt file. They use texteditors (Word, BBEd, Emacs, Notepad) not Outlook or whathaveyou.

“What we keep in our todo is the stuff we want to forget

“Geeks say they remember details well, but they forget their spouses’ birthdays and the dry-cleaning. Because it’s not interesting.

“It’s the 10-second rule: if you can’t file something in 10 seconds, you won’t do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the simplest interface we can imagine.”

“Power-users don’t trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can’t trust software unless you’ve written it – and then you’re just more forgiiving.”

“The private blog – a secret blog, using a tool:

“Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal: 8 entries every 10 min are private. Closed off from everyone.

“Announce stuff is moving into RSS – email announcements to something that syndicates over RSS

“Geeks write scripts to take apart dull, repetitive tasks. They’ll spend 10h writing a script that will save 11h – because writing scripts is interesting and doing dull stuff isn’t.

“Scripts are embarassingly coded, often forgotten.”

“People do lots of webscraping. Scrape stuff and turn it into RSS – make your own feeds. JWZ uses this to help him run his bar.

“Lots of people do this with banking services – to keep an eye on their accounts.

“People make utilities to make their stuff public. Not just blogs – but stuff like Eric Raymond’s “shipper” – package a code into an RPM, upload to SourceForge, announce, etc.

“Edd Dumbill: Ideas rot if you don’t do something with them. Don’t hoard them. I blog them or otherwise tell people.

“This is a way to look organized, “That guy has lots of ideas, what a genius.”

“You only have to be right once – people google for some idea and find your ramble about it and are impressed.

“Making stuff public is like having your parents come to stay – you clean everything up.”

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