This family from the North Carolina seems to have spent half of their weekly budget on fast food. The photo features prominently their pizzas, soft drinks and snack foods and I suspect this isn’t too far from the ‘average’ American’s diet, where convenience and fast food are common. It also shows how much it costs to pay for the convenience of fast food. 

Compare this to say the photo of the family from Ecuador and the contrasts are startling. It seems obvious that as a nation we are spending more money on food that is less healthy than the food our “third world” neighbors are eating. Are we deluding ourselves when we think that America is the greatest and most advanced country in the world? Look at the photos; you be the judge.

The story begins with the Jarvis family living off the land and off-the-grid in West Virginia on 140 acres of land. The parents are children of the sixties, minimalists and raising their children to be the same. The middle of the story occurs right across the peninsula from where I was living in West River, MD—at the same time the Jarvis family was living “on the hard” (as boat folk like to say) at Backyard Boats in Shadyside, MD. This family was literally rock-throwing distance from where my office was located at Parish Creek Marina. The candid actualities with the parents and children provide some amazing insight into how their family survived and the effect it had on all of them. This may be the best individual ‘act’ I have listened to on This American Life:

Act One. The Family That Flees Together, Trees Together. The Jarvis family, a group of eight, goes on the run from the law — for seven years. They live on a boat, in a treehouse in a swamp. They escape capture time after time. And how do the kids turn out, living a life outside of society, as fugitives? Surprisingly great. (22 minutes)

So, I turned off my radio, turned on my computer, fired up iTunes and found some real radio programming. I fully understand that I am way behind the curve on this. Something as good as “This American Life“ cannot possibly be a secret to most people. I downloaded and have listened to three of these shows and will probably never again listen to Kornheiser or Czaban. The first thing that struck me about these programs is the quality of the program; the subject matter is often quirky but always approachable, the style of storytelling is totally engaging and the production values are really excellent. In short, they are a pleasure to listen to. The “Image Makers” program on the Michigan State library system’s re-branding effort is absolutely hysterical, clever, educational and one of the best things I’ve listened to in a long, long time. Farewell, Steve, vio con dios Tony and AMF. Do yourself a favor and check out This American Life on iTunes. For the cost of your Starbucks morning fill up, you can get some interesting, thought-provoking listening material. I can’t recommend TAL enough!

Web Worker Daily and John Gruber at Daring Fireball talk mobile technology:

• Mobile Web Browsers Have No Where To Go But Up «
• Daring Fireball: The Unsatisfying State of Twitter Web Clients for the iPhone

Expression Engine 2.0 due out this summer:

• EE Sneak Preview Video

Last week I twittered about the Harry Potter Lexicon hub-bub. These two posts look at big picture publishing issues:

• Industry Questions Raised by “Potter” Encyclopedia Suit
• Tim O’Reilly: Amazon Has Publishers in its Sights

Infosthetics, graphically examines the relationship of high-profile mukety-mucks to each other and Lost Remote talks about the growth of web-video:

• muckety interactive news graphs
• Web video views up 66%

If you happen to be in or near the D of C, Go to National Geographic Explorer’s Hall, drink Italian beer, have a dangerous encounter and pass out worrying about climate change. Sounds like my kind of day.

• Italian Beer Renaissance
• Dangerous Encounters
• National Geographic Reports: the Challenge of Climate Change

Last but not least: The folks in Jackson Hole wave goodbye to the Griz. We just don’t have that kind of connections to the wildlife here in DC, but then, it’s hard to get attached to rats.

• Photogenic grizzly family

I’m going to continue to evaluate iGTD for the remainder of the week. Right now, I’d say that I like the application, but I don’t love it. And, I’d have to say that either I’m not really grokking the point of the ‘contexts’ or there flat out not very helpful to me. I’m going to poke around the 43 Folders sight and the forums at iGTD and see if I can turn on the ‘ah-ha’ light. In the meantime, I found this review helpful.

Over the next several days, I am going to work with all three applications and see how they work with the way I currently organize my life; for my in-box I use a small Moleskin notebook, for multi-step projects I use Omni Outliner and I keep track of my schedule with iCal. I’m not currently tracking what “Getting Things Done“ gurus call “contexts” and I’m curious to see if I feel my productivity increases by doing this. ]]> tag:findingzero.com,2007:/1.33 2007-10-09T15:27:29Z 2008-11-24T19:41:30Z Jeff Jackson cjjackson@mindspring.com It’s taken a long time, but I think I’ve finally figured out what the most important things are in my life. When I sit back and look at it, it was amazing that it took me so long to figure out—or perhaps accept what I knew all along. Now the geek in me realizes that having found the components necessary for my happiness, they need organization and streamlined efficiency to make them happen as quickly as possible. In other words I need a schedule, process and workflow to accomplish these things. The decision making process of what is important has always stymied me. Once I’ve figured out what to do, the how to do has always come easier. There’s a process and a beginning, middle and end to everything, so my tasks over the next few weeks are to analyze the tasks associated with getting my important things done.

I’m looking at quite a lot of tools to help with my tasks. I am somewhat familiar with tools I’m auditioning, but a long ways from a power-user on any of them. My limited familarity, makes it difficult for me to determine which of these issues are self-inflicted wounds and which are true product limitations. From that perspective, here’s where I find the most shortcomings:

1. Singleness of purpose—monolithic feature set.
2. Inability to Interact with each other—real time data exchange.
3. Exchange meaningful data—export abilities.
4. Summarize the results—a combination of the prior three shortcomings.

Over the next few weeks,  I’m going to look at many ‘personal productivity’ applications, research applications, ‘brainstorming’ applications and present my findings. Eventually, I hope to put together my own personal productivity suite that allows me to create a seamless process and workflow for my new found life and priorities. Stay tuned.