Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
Not quite 3-2-1 Backup at the time however I have resilient copies of DVD backups from 1999. Both still work. I did become fully 3-2-1 backup compliant years later when I made an ISO on a hard drive and then backed that drive up.
I can’t bring myself to part with one of these. And on top of that I have the same double backups for every year throughout the 2000’s on DVD.
No I do not have a good answer why I didn’t purge this before I moved to another continent.
Some would say i am a pretty organized person. I sometimes it doesn’t feel like that, however most of the time I would say i am generally pretty organized compared to most people I know. My problem has sometimes been my tracking of what i need to do has gotten too complex.
For several years I had been trying (and sometimes succeeding) at following the Getting Things Done approach to taking care of my actions. I had been using a web service called Remember The Milk to do that. I have written about it a few times in the past. RTM has iPhone and iPad apps that made it easy to take my actions lists with me and edit them offline. I was content using it for several years but sometimes I dabbled with other systems trying to find something better. I never really found anything and always ended up back with RTM.
Back in 2014 I started implementing a kanban approach to some procedures we do at work. Reading up on kanban has gotten me to think adopt some of the concepts to my personal life. That line of thinking got me to branch out from RTM. A big part of kanban is visualizing your work. RTM just generates basic lists. I tried having several lists to denote different steps on a personal kanban system but it was lacking a lot of the visual element when i couldn’t see all the steps at the same time. I also had challenges with sorting projects in RTM. I could create them but that required a smart list for each project. That caused me to have a ton of different smart lists that i had to look at in order to see my tasks. RTM also had a limitation in that they didn’t offer sub tasks for a task so in order to group several actions together i had to create a project even if it was small and could be represented by one “card” and several sub tasks.
In searching for several different options I came across Trello. After testing and playing around with several similar applications I settled on moving my work and personal task management to Trello. Since the summer of 2014 my use of Trello has exploded. Not only do I use it for personal and work boards. I track meeting agendas in it. At one point we had a training schedule at work using it. For personal projects such as planning for vacation we use it. I have a board for places we want to try or like to go to for lunch at work. The board I like to show as an example of how to use it when people ask is my Mixology board. There I clipped from the web recipes of mixed drinks that I want to learn or have already mastered creating. I try to share a few family boards with my wife however she is not as big on task organization as I am.
The biggest drawback to Trello originally was the fact that there mobile applications didn’t really handle off-line synchronization. In the past year however they’ve added that functionality so while I’m on the subway I am able to update a board or individual cards and they sync up to the cloud when I get network signal. There are some small limitations to this however not something that has prevented me from using it. Things like checklists don’t load when you open the card without network signal.
I’ve been happy to pay the five dollars or so a month in their Trello Gold subscription. I almost want to pay for the full $15 a month professional plan however no one else I interact with does that so functionality would be limited.
In the several years that I’ve been using Trello (I didn’t realize it has been over 3 already) I have tried to look for alternatives. Not because I’m unhappy, just because I’m always looking for the next great option. Folks at work have used the GIT task board. I have played with Microsoft office 365’s task boards and neither of them come close to ease-of-use or functionality. So for now Trello it is. Until at least Atlassian messes it up now that they own it. Here’s to hoping they don’t.
Prior to my big move while I was on the topic of writing about target and NFC payments regarding Target I had to go to CVS and pick up something. While I was waiting to check out I was reminded that CVS has the shiny new point-of-sale terminals with the big logo for tap to pay that doesn’t work. If I remember correctly they used to allow it and then when Apple Pay came out they turned it off. It was because they were a partner of CurrentC and didn’t want their competitor to work.
Whatever happened to companies going sure I will take any form of your money so you can buy our stuff? It reminds me that I wanted to create a web series about “Please Take My Money”. It started with Macy’s. I wrote about it a few years ago: If I wrote more about it, I would chronicle all the challenges I’ve experienced with companies not simply letting me buy their stuff or give them money when it should be really easy. In CVS’s case it’s they want to save money on the transaction fee they pay credit cards. To do that they turned off all cordless payment systems that competed with CurrentC. Thankfully that service that was only good for the retailers and not the consumers failed. Apple Pay still not working at least at my local CVS.