LesserAbe

I'm interested in ways that people document, prioritize and execute items they need to do. What have you found useful?

For me: I don't particularly care about other Outlook functionality, but flagging emails and managing them in the sidebar has helped me a lot. I have it set to display only items due today, and then sorted into categories like "now," "soon," "pending." If I don't expect to get to an item today I change the due date to tomorrow or next week. Items don't have to be based on an email either, you can just type into the sidebar text field.

When I get emails I either immediately reply, flag it for later action, or ignore, and then I drop all emails into one giant folder. If I need to find something I do it all by search.

I've tried other systems like gmail's to do list, but it feels like way more friction to accomplish the same things, especially wanting to only view tasks due today, and categorizing tasks.

Likewise I've tried to-do-list apps, but not being able to instantly convert an email into a task, and not having documentation easily at hand when I go to perform the task makes them feel more burdensome.

Recently replaced the headlight bulbs for my car and saw the box indicated you shouldn't put them in the garbage because they contain mercury. I know that some retailers like home depot have a program to recycle florescent bulbs, but my understanding is that's specifically for residential bulbs (like the kind you might get at home depot). AutoZone will take back some parts but don't appear to have a program for bulbs. What's the easiest, responsible way to dispose of these?

In the US most students recite "the pledge of allegiance" every morning before school, which is kind of crazy. If you were in charge, what if anything would you replace it with?

I just saw a discussion among corporate event planners where one person was upset that event organizers don't give proper consideration to scheduling over top of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

I can appreciate the annoyance, when I was still a practicing Christian I would never think to schedule a work thing over Easter or Christmas. We should treat others with consideration, and should be mindful of what others view as important days. But I also don't know what each religion considers to be major, non negotiable holidays. Do you?

Another question, does it matter where the event is? (for example, in the US should less consideration be given to holidays of religions that have fewer adherents?)

I know people can wear two video cameras to recreate a first person experience in virtual reality. I also know they make those mannequin head stereo mic sets that create interesting spacial audio, supposedly because they mimic the head's shape and position of our ears.

Instead of the dummy head, does anyone make a mic set that you can wear, with the mics in approximately the position of our ears / ear shaped?

I was thinking you could do some interesting things with that, like recording a band in their practice space from the perspective of the band members. Or tracking lead vocals where the singer is singing to a person wearing the mic set.

Some animals sing (birds, whales) and plenty of animals make sounds together at roughly the same time (wolves howling, prairie dogs yelling at threats). Are there animals that harmonize? Or animals that make sound that's rhythmically coordinated, like has a time signature?

Guess I'm asking about more finely coordinated sounds. It's something that's pretty neat about human music.

Doesn't seem especially practical, but I thought folks here might be interested in this method. With the increasing scarcity of pay phones I suspect it might be equally as "easy" to get a burner cell phone with cash and register a signal account that way.

No, not talking about their own shit or vomit, har de har. I mean how dogs can't have chocolate, can't eat grapes. Are there things it's no big deal for them but would be toxic for us.

Just learned that Wikimedia has a project called Wikifunctions. I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and associated projects, and on its face sounds like a cool site. I do wonder how this would work in practical terms though, like how could it actually be used?

Prompted by another thread about conscription in Ukraine.

I wasn't aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.