Marketplace: Another crazy boss

Stanley Bing on what the crapflood of incoming data is doing to your boss's state of mind.

BING: Well, what that does is that feeds control freaks with a constant, steady stream of stuff that needs to be controlled. That's what's making people more crazy. And what happens is that everybody goes crazy in a different way. In other words, some people get extremely morose. Other people get very paranoid. You know, it's really like a graded scale of pathology. But it all comes from the same root source, which is, you know, basically personalities under too much duress.

I think one of the emerging leadership skills of the next five years will be learning how to do brilliant filtering -- either programatically or by delegating information-sorting to others. To ultimately become someone whose system accounts for incoming data in smart ways and who never has to make excuses about too much stuff.

Yeah, I know smart execs have delegated for centuries. But I can envision a world where sweating over your beepy electronic device starts looking about as "executive" and "pro-active" as sucking on a crack pipe in the break room.

David Pogue: Be Careful What You Joke About

David Pogue gets an informative response to an offhand remark he'd made about macros. Man, you really don't want to fool around with these EMACS people:

Various packages of “macros” were developed to provide speedier editing, and went by various names ending in “macs,” short for “macros.” TMACS and RMACS had also been popular, but the EMACS package seemed to have the most users. By 1979, EMACS was in version 135, and was maintained mostly by Richard Stallman with help from a few others.

Around 1981-1982, I added the M-$ keystroke bound to the macro “Check Word Spelling,” making EMACS perhaps the first text editor with an integrated spelling corrector.

In my brief time with EMACS, I felt like I was trying to play Rachmaninov with tiny, baby hands. But, brother, when I see what people like Ken and Nelson can do with it, my mind is blown. Makes me want bigger hands.

Rethinking Email

Good insight from Chairman Gruber, related to the email system he's started employing since moving to Mail.app

...I can classify all incoming personal email into three broad categories: (a) messages that are either very important or very interesting; (b) messages that are utterly non-interesting; and (c) those which fall somewhere in-between.

The vast majority of my email falls into the latter category. Under my previous “system”, I let them pile up in my inboxes, under the assumption that some day I’d get around to answering many of them. Under the new system, if I don’t respond immediately after reading them, they go right into my archive. Out of sight, out of mind.

For folks who haven't crossed the line to where this realization really clicks, I understand that this can sound harsh, even uncaring. But once you have gotten into the habit, you realize the amount of bullshit you had been shoveling to yourself -- hoping that all that stuff in your inbox, which you knew in your heart you'd never do anything about, would just...what?...grow wings and fly a response back to its sender? It's daft.

It's so tough to be honest with yourself about your real situation with email, but once you've made the admission, you're weirdly freed up to communicate more authentically, and, in my experience, with a renewed enthusiasm.

Most businesses and an increasing number of people (including me) are looking for friction-free ways for teams to deal with incoming public email accounts. Whether you're managing a home eBay company, fielding FAQs, or reviewing incoming resumes, it seems like there must be some good, lightweight web apps for teams to use and collaborate around.

Ron Richards just pointed me to Cerberus, and I've previously looked at DayLite, MailTank, and Sugar. I like the trouble-ticket approach in some ways, but I also wish it could be prettied up -- ideally including remote form submission from your own domains.

edit 2007-08-27 09:17:40: Shoulda mentioned: relevant self-links are okay on this one.

Perfect

I noticed a lot of people are favoriting this screen grab of the "Perfect" iTunes equalizer setting (I posted it to Flickr, so I won't keep forgetting it when I need it).

Ever since I saw this in that Mac OS X Hints article, I've used it as my default equalizer in iTunes -- it seems to give a nice pop to MP3 tracks in particular.

HOWTO and specific settings from the original article:

Open the equalizer, and from the pop-up menu, select "Make Preset." Call it "Perfect," because it is, and set the following levels, from left to right (skip the Preamp section):

db +3, +6, +9, +7, +6, +5, +7, +9, +11, +8 db