...And Back to OmniFocus
I recently wrote about switching from OmniFocus to Reminders and gave a lot of reasons why I thought that was a good plan. I was wrong and I’ve since moved back.
Apple has made Reminders into a solid app with a lot of nice features, but I realized I’ve been taking OmniFocus for granted. First, I sorely missed its “defer dates”. That is, I don’t need to be reminded to buy Halloween candy when it’s nearly Christmas time. I don’t even want to see that on my action list because it clutters up both my list and my thinking. Second, you can set OmniFocus to repeat an action a certain amount of time after that action’s completion date, not only its due date. “Pay the electric bill” needs to happen at the same time each month, but “make a haircut appointment” should happen a few weeks after my last haircut, whenever that was. Finally, OmniFocus’s project options like “complete with last action” are unmatched. Mix in many less crucial but nice-to-have features like nested tags, and per-tag location reminders, and it’s too good to walk away from.
I started moving my actions back out of Reminders and into OmniFocus and switched to using the OF 4 beta on my iPhone and iPad. That beta is turning into what I’d hoped OmniFocus would become: a stunning app that’s a pleasure to use. If it follows this current path, and OmniFocus 4 for Mac follows soon after, I think it’ll be amazing.
I’m glad I tried this experiment, and if nothing else it forced me to deeply review all of my actions before copying them from one system into another. Apple should be proud of Reminders and I bet it does everything most people need. It’s not (yet) enough for me, though. Until then, OmniFocus, I’m back.
Unusual shipping fail from Apple
I ordered a couple of Apple AirTags and keychain holders this weekend, and UPS dropped the package off on my doorstep a few minutes ago. The outer box had not been sealed in any way — no glue, tape, or anything:
The packages inside were bent on arrival, likely from the warehouse:
I hope this is an exception. If I were a new Apple customer, I’d be unimpressed with their vaunted first impression.
Uniquely bad identity branding
My company has an account with a certain identity provider so we can test that our single sign-on feature works. Today one of my coworkers asked for an account with the IdP before he started working on that part of our code. I tried to create his user but got an error that the “username must be unique”. Huh. I double-checked our user list to ensure we didn’t have an account for him. We didn’t. I tried again and got the same error. That’s when I reached out to their support. They quickly replied:
To resolve this issue, please navigate to Administration > Settings > Branding and toggle the custom branding switch to green. Then try to create a user and it should allow you!
What. This had nothing to do with branding, and the switch in question looks like this:
But alright, I figured I’d try their suggestion.
It worked.
I supposed what likely happened was that support quickly found and fixed and issue, then gave me a switch to flip to make it feel like I was fixing something. I replied to them:
So we couldn’t add that user (but could add other users) because we didn’t have custom branding enabled? That can’t be right.
Their response?
It could be possible that the same username could exist in another customer’s tenant. So, once you enable the custom branding it would only look for your tenant for a unique username. With branding currently being disabled, the system is considering all tenants.
In short, if you click a logo to use your own theme for their site, usernames only have to be unique within your organization. If you don’t customize the site’s theme, they have to be unique across the whole identity provider. Furthermore, that uniqueness check only happens when you create a new user. If you flip the branding/namespace switch on, create an account, then flip the switch back off, the account is still active and usable even though it’s not globally unique. Even if you think that tying branding to uniqueness is a good idea — and it’s not — it doesn’t even work.
That whole setup is nuts.
Can't hire? Pay more.
Many recent news stories feature companies having a hard time hiring workers. In capitalism, this means one thing: they’re not paying enough. Period. It’s that simple.
The law of supply and demand says that if demand for a resource outstrips its supply, then price for that resource increases. If a buyer wants to purchase that resource, they have to pay more to compete with the other people who want to buy it. That’s one of the defining features of a free market, and it’s unreasonable to complain that no one is selling at the price they’d like to pay.
There are things that increase the supply of people willing to work for a company, thus lowering the price it can expect to pay, such as offering excellent benefits or earning a reputation as a wonderful employer. Those are forms of compensation that potential employees can and will consider. Conversely, having a reputation as a bad employer decreases the supply. I could name companies that would have to pay me more than I’d be worth to them before I’d even think of working for for them.
Either way, the market — in this case, the other employers competing to hire workers — sets the price of the resource. If a company can’t hire, they need to pay more. The labor market has determined that their current combination of pay and benefits isn’t good enough to attract new employees.
In other words, stop complaining and crack open that wallet.
Wisdom of the ages
The iOS App Store recommended that I check out a meditation app named “Calm”, featuring “Wisdom from Shawn and Camila”. Shawn is 22 years old; Camila is 24.
With due respect, Apple, I’m not expecting a lot of wisdom from a couple younger than the sweater I’m wearing.
There are many wonderful things youth can bring. Experience of a life long-lived is not one of them. I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly, but they’re 22 and 24, and I expect they’ll have little to offer on mid-career thoughts, or watching one’s parents grow older, or coming to grips with mortality. Like, the guy’s been quarantined for the majority of the time it’s been legal for him to drink.
"At a Crucial Juncture, Trump's Legal Defense Is Largely a One-Man Operation"
At a Crucial Juncture, Trump’s Legal Defense Is Largely a One-Man Operation — The New York Times
Highlights:
Joseph diGenova, a longtime Washington lawyer who has pushed theories on Fox News that the F.B.I. made up evidence against Mr. Trump, left the team on Sunday. He had been hired last Monday, three days before the head of the president’s personal legal team, John Dowd, quit after determining that the president was not listening to his advice.”
Also:
“Mr. Dowd had concluded that there was no upside and that the president, who often does not tell the truth, could increase his legal exposure if his answers were not accurate.”
Jokes about “the best people” aside, it sounds like genuinely competent people want nothing to do with the fiasco in DC.
Traveling with OmniFocus and OmniOutliner
I don’t travel a lot, so when I do I invariably find that I’ve forgotten something important (9 PM the night before: “say, dear, where are we boarding the dogs?” “I thought you were doing that!”). I wrote an AppleScript to copy items from an OmniOutliner document to an OmniFocus project so that I never have to forget again.
I love OmniFocus. It runs my life. But it lacks any kind of a template systems to let you quickly churn out copies of a project. That’s exactly what I needed here, though. Fortunately OmniOutliner fills that gap and gives me a nice way to describe that project. Here’s how mine starts:
When I run the AppleScript and say “I want to travel on June 24”, it creates actions like “Call the vet to make pet boarding arrangements, with the Phone context, due on June 3 at 5PM”. I add everything to this list:
- USB gadgets to charge
- Toiletries to pack
- Things to remove from my messenger bag (so I don’t find myself in line at security and realize I’ve still got my pocket knife)
- People to notify, such as telling my credit union that I’ll be using my debit card in some exotic place like Topeka and please not to block it as fraud
A magic moment for me was hearing Merlin Mann’s suggestion to add an “update this list” action:
A couple of days into my trip, I get a reminder to add anything new I’d forgotten or wish I’d done differently. This turns my template into a living document of exactly my own personalized requirements.
Purge your Yahoo account (but don't delete it!)
There are about 1.5 billion reasons to want to cancel your Yahoo account. Don’t do that!
According to Yahoo’s account deletion page, they “may allow other users to sign up for and use your current Yahoo! ID and profile names after your account has been deleted”:
This is a terrible policy not shared by other service providers, and there are many scenarios where it’s a huge security problem for Yahoo’s users. For example:
- You register for Facebook with your me@yahoo.com email address.
- You forget about that, read about the newest Yahoo user database hack, and delete your Yahoo account.
- A month later, someone else signs up to get your me@yahoo.com email address. They use Facebook’s password reset mechanism to take control of your account, download your private photos, and say nasty things to your friends.
- Oh, and anyone you forgot to share your new address with is still sending personal communications to your old Yahoo address, and its new owner is reading them.
Here’s what you should do instead:
Purge your Yahoo account
It’s time to move on. Yahoo has a terrible security track record and shows no signs of improving.
First, understand what you’ll be doing here. You’ll be removing everything from your Yahoo account: your email, contacts, events, and so on. Permanently. There’s no changing your mind. It’s extreme, sure, but until you do it’s likely that hackers can:
- Read messages from your spouse or partner.
- See your calendar events to know when you’ll be away from the house.
- Take over your account and start resetting every password associated with it, like Facebook, Amazon, and your bank.
Don’t delete your account. Clean it out!
Secure it
Before doing anything else, change your Yahoo password! Hackers probably have your current one. I’m not exaggerating.
Once that’s done, turn on two-factor authentication (2FA). This can prevent hackers from accessing your account even if they get your password.
Once that’s done, make a note to yourself to turn on 2FA for every other account you have that supports it.
Make your new home
Before you start, you’ll want to create an email account with a new provider. Lots of people like Gmail but pick one that looks good to you. This will be your new home account on the Internet: the email address that you give out to friends and coworkers and that you use to log into websites.
Clear your email
- Log into your Yahoo mail.
- Click the little checkbox above your emails to select all of them.
- Click the Delete button to delete all email on that page. If you have lots of messages, you may have to repeat this several times.
- Hover over the Trash mailbox to make the trashcan icon appear. Click the trashcan.
- Confirm that you want to empty your trash.
Clear everything else
If you’re like most people, that’s probably 99% of your Yahoo data. You’re not quite done yet, though! Now click through each of the services in the little icons in the top left corner:
They all may have more information stored in them. Each works a little differently but you should be able to figure out how to clean out each one.
Set a vacation reminder
Other email providers make it easy to forward all of your incoming mail to a new account. Yahoo removed that feature recently so you can’t use that convenient approach. Instead, you’ll make a Vacation Response to tell people about your new address.
- Click the settings gear in the top right corner.
- Choose Settings, then Vacation Response.
- Check the box to “Enable automatic response”, and set the Until: year to as far in the future as it will let you.
- Enter a message like:
I may now be reached at me@example.com. Please update your address book. Thanks!
- Click Save.
Now anyone writing to you will get a message with your new address, but their email will still land in your Yahoo inbox.
Change your logins
Now go through your web accounts and change all of them where you log in with me@yahoo.com to use your new email address instead. If you use a password manager to keep track of your accounts, this will be easy. Time consuming — thanks, Yahoo! — but easy.
Check back
You’re going to miss a few accounts, and some friends or family will stubbornly insist on sending email to your old address. Set a reminder or mark your calendar to check your Yahoo mail a month from now to see who’s written to you. Update each of those people or accounts, then delete all of your new messages. Check again in another month and then another after that. Eventually this will slow to a trickle and you can forget about your old Yahoo account for many months at a time (or until the next news article about a giant Yahoo hack comes along, and then you can smile to yourself because it doesn’t affect you anymore).
Conclusion
Migrating off Yahoo is a pain in the neck. Google, in contrast, makes it easy to extract all your information and then securely close your account. Yahoo does not. It won’t be quick or painless, but I recommend that you start now.
Wet Shaving: A Year Later
I’m a sucker for the idea of ritual. When I learn about a traditional, labor-intensive practice like shining shoes, oiling boots, or a complicated car washing regimen, I’m always drawn to try it myself. I imagine having the same meditative experience as the person convincing me to try their routine: feeling a connection to my ancestors, appreciating the finer things, tasting the rewards of patience, and such. So when I read an article about wet shaving a year ago, I could hardly wait to get started.
In practice, though, I hate ritual. I’ll pay a few bucks to have someone else shine my shoes. San Francisco Bay Area climate isn’t very hard on boots, whether I’ve diligently oiled them or not. Automatic car washes are popular for a reason. Basically, I run out of patience for things that take too long just for the sake of taking too long.
One recent morning, I found myself wondering if I actually enjoyed wet shaving or if I’d be better off going back to a can of foam and an 8-bladed disposable razor. Millions of guys do it the new way, after all - should I rejoin them?
No. For me, wet shaving is clearly better for two specific reasons:
- It’s way cheaper. It’s like the laser printer business model of charging more up front but offering dirt cheap supplies. After the initial purchase, consumables cost less than $10 a year.
- I haven’t had a single ingrown hair since I started. Modern razors always leave me with a few bumps on my neck and cheekbones, but that problem has completely disappeared.
Yes, it takes longer than I’d like and still carries more trappings of ritual than I care to think about. Still, it’s a little luxury that’s measurably nicer and I don’t think I’ll give it up.
I use and happily recommend:
- Merkur 34C heavy duty razor
- Tweezerman shaving brush
- Art of Shaving classic stand
- Astra Super Platinum blades
- Art of Shaving pre shave oil
Update:
Garrick Dee wrote another nice introduction to the subject at the Grooming Essentials blog.
You Want How Many?
I used to work near a little restaurant called “Rasta Grill”. It was this weird fusion of Italian and Jamaican food, and everything was absolutely delicious. We’d walk down to Rasta at least once a week or so and have giant plates of spaghetti with jerk chicken in the wonderfully bizarre atmosphere.
Well, we always suspected that some of the employees perhaps took the Rasta theme a little far, and occasionally partook of Jamaica’s other famous export. Our suspicions grew one day:
Us, ordering: …and an order of garlic bread.
Cashier: [writes “GBR” on the ticket, but draws the “G” almost like a “6”]
Cook, taking ticket: OK…. hey, what’s “6 B R”?
Cashier: That’s a “G”. It’s garlic bread.
Cook: [long, confused pause] And they want 6 of ’em?
Yam No More
Back in my Amiga-using days, I had an email program called YAM. It was excellent and ubiquitous; almost everyone used it. It had three unique features:
- You could configure it to embed small bits of personal information in outgoing emails, such as your birthday.
- When it saw these bits in email that other people sent to you, it could add the information to your address book.
- It had an option to automatically send a “happy birthday” email to everyone in your address book on their birthday.
I was active on a lot of mailing lists, so my address book was pretty full with people I’d hardly met. I sent them happy birthday emails each year, and on my birthday, it was fun to get flooded with a few hundred little messages from well-wishers I didn’t know except maybe from some obscure discussion group.
I had the sad realization a few days ago that for the first time ever since I started using YAM, I didn’t receive a single email from it this year. Not one of my old friends still does this. While it’s not very big in the scheme of this, it still marks the sad end to a happy era.