I often get mails from recruitment people (I seem to be on everyone’s databases), urging me to get in touch because they’ve got lots of exciting jobs that I’d be just right for.

Then it turns out that the job involves something I know nothing about, would never want to do anyway, pays less than half of my current salary, and/or involves working for a company that I’d rather not touch with a barge pole. A very long barge pole. Operated remotely. From a different planet.

Frustrating though this inevitably becomes, it does occasionally prompt me to wonder what I would actually like my next job to be. Ok, not occasionally… all the time.

Not that you should read this as me saying “I want a new job” or “I’m leaving SI” (don’t forget, I left SI once already, and they still managed to drag me back! If you count freelance contracts, I’m actually on my fourth stint at SI).

What I’m describing below probably won’t happen for another ten years if at all, but just for the record all you recruitment types, this is what you’ll have to do to get me even vaguely interested:

1) Find me a way to work for myself, to my own deadlines, and sell my own software. This is most likely to be the next move I make anyway, but if someone can help me do it, then fine.

2) Find me a Mac or iPhone job. I still work on a Mac every day, but I don’t write proper Mac software any more, and I miss it. Failing that, funky technology is good. Funky languages are good. Yet more tedious legacy C++ is bad.

3) Find me a job on a very small team. I’m talking less than 10 people. All of my most enjoyable jobs have involved working closely with 2-5 people.

4) Find me a research focussed job where I don’t have to work to unrealistic deadlines. I don’t mind deadlines at all (despite what some people think!). The right deadlines are essential if anything is ever to get finished. I do mind it though when I can see what needs to be done, but don’t get given the chance to do it. Ever. Year on year. Job satisfaction does matter, and too many years spent making too many compromises inevitably lead to a loss of morale and motivation.

5) Find me a job with people I can learn from. There are some amazing people out there, but only a few of us are ever lucky enough to actually work day to day alongside great coders like Kent Beck, Scott Meyers, et al, or great managers like Fred Brooks or DeMarco and Lister. I’ve been programming for nearly thirty years but I’d gladly halve my salary and give up all responsibility or kudos to be apprenticed to one of those guys for a while.

6) Find me the right money/quality-of-life trade off. As I mentioned in (5), I’ve been doing this a while now, and consequently I earn a decent wage. I think I’m a good coder, but I also think I’m an ideas person, and sometimes these days I feel trapped in a world that doesn’t give me the chance to express any of those ideas. To a large extent that’s just the human condition, I know. That said, I have no children and no mortgage (but no house, mind you) - I’d be very happy to trade some of my salary for intellectual freedom.

So there you go. I don’t want much, do I?

And finally, if there is anyone from SI reading this who is determined to interpret what I’ve just said in a negative fashion or get all insecure about it (which is really not how its intended), then all I can say is this: I’ve just given you a great list for how to keep me happy! What you do with it is entirely up to you :)

It turns out that the synergy problem was caused by my Macs failure to register it’s name with the dns/dhcp server, which is good & bad. So I have synergy working fine with 10.5.5, but there may be other issues…

Ho hum.

I’ve never really tried the whole GTD thing formally, although I think I’ve been doing some of it for ages, and I have been looking for a good tool or combination of tools that will let me organise my copious work-related task lists for as long as I can remember.

Nothing quite seems to do it right, so a while ago I started working on my own solution. Unfortunately, since I tend to have about half an hour of free programming time per century these days, I haven’t got very far.

In the interim, I also ended up with a manual solution based around Confluence (the very excellent Wiki software we use). This is better than nothing, and in fact the rest of the team adopted my scheme as a way to manage their lists too, but to be honest I find it very cumbersome.

So recently I gave up on a large number of my requirements (for now at least) and decided to go back to basics and try an existing commercial tool.

I realised that these days at SI I tend to spend about 50% of my time dealing with, or recovering from, interruptions of a non-programming nature. As a direct consequence of this, I spend a lot of time thrashing. I concluded that it’s most important for me to just be able to enter small tasks quickly into some sort of vaguely ordered list. It has to be easy enough that I can force myself to do it (the entering of the task, that is), as a matter of course, as soon as something occurs to me - even if I’ve already started the task in question.

Getting into this habit is essential, since I often start a task then don’t get to finish it immediately because I get interrupted again; or I start something and that immediately prompts me to think of five other things that need doing.

The simple of act of entering tasks like this reassures me that eventually I’ll come back to them. Even if I do get interrupted and completely forget what I was doing, the task will be sitting there, somewhere quite high up the list (since I tend to enter them near the “top” to begin with).

The tool I’ve started using is Things, from Cultured Code - which so far I really like.

It doesn’t do everything I want, and it does a few things I don’t really need, but it has the great advantage of being simple, nice to look at, and easy to use. It is a native Mac application, and also has an iPhone version (not free, but only £6), which is a major bonus.

Of my “ideal” requirements, the main things it doesn’t do are hierarchical sub-tasks, and group-wide task sharing.

For the group-wide sharing, I’ve just given up for now. Yes it would be nice to have team task lists, but I decided it was more useful for me to be able to get my own house in order first, before worrying about everyone else.

For sub-tasks and hierarchies of tasks, Things seems to have a concept of Areas and Projects, but they don’t seem to be multi-level, and they appear to be exclusive - move a task into a project and you seem to move it out of an area. That wasn’t quite what I expected.

So instead I’ve just gone free-form and decided to use tags for everything. I tag a task with a category, a project, a vague area, and try not to worry too much about it. This may become unruly eventually, but for now it’s working fine. I’m not trying to strictly order or decompose tasks - most tasks seem to have from one to three tags, and related stuff gets tagged similarly and seems to cluster naturally. That’s the theory anyway, and so far, so good.

If you’re looking for some “To Do” list software, I’d suggest that you give Things a try.

There doesn’t seem to be an iPhone tool for blogging to Drupal, which is surprising since I can’t believe it’s that hard to do.

Until I got my iPhone, I tended to use Flock as my browser, and blog via that (not that I’ve blogged much in recent months anyway).

However, the utility of bookmark syncing with the iPhone was enough to force me back to Safari once I had one, and in any case Flock’s no use if I’m sitting on a train with just my phone.

Entering any amount of text is pretty painful on the iPhone at the best of times, but doing so in a web form via Safari is just too awful for words.

Which is annoying since I use my phone a lot now during my commuting, and it would be the ideal time for sharing the occasional random thought with this world - if only there was an easy way to get them down onto (digital) paper.

As I write this, I’ve just switched back to MarsEdit to give it a try. I used it all the time before switching to Flock, and might go back, especially since I gather that there’s an iPhone version in the works…

I’ve just installed 10.5.5 on my Mac here at work, and for some inexplicable reason Synergy seems to no longer be working.

I’d be interested to hear of anyone else who’s having this problem - especially if they can figure out a solution… <p style="font-size:10px;text-align:right;">Tags: synergy, macos</p>