My Getting Things Done Setup, Circa Early 2016

Almost six years ago I shared my (then) current Getting Things Done (GTD) setup, in which I described how I used various tools, techniques, and applications to try to maximize my productivity. I’d been toying with updating that post, but I wasn’t sure that anyone would find it useful. However, a recent e-mail from a reader indicated that there probably is some interest; with that in mind, then, here’s an update on my GTD-like setup, circa early 2016.

Before I dive into the details, a couple quick notes:

  • First, I call this a “GTD-like” setup because it doens’t necessarily strongly adhere to all the tenets of Getting Things Done. I’ve adapted the system to fit my particular role and responsibilities, which is something I strongly encourage every reader to also do.
  • Although I’ve previously discussed moving away from OS X (and this is something that I continue to evaluate and explore), this is—for now—a decidedly Mac-specific system. It’s probably possible to emulate a similar system on other platforms, but I leave that as an exercise for interested readers.

If you read the 2010 post, you may recall that I think of my workflow as having three “layers” of applications:

orhanergun.net 2015 review

I’m proud to be the owner of the best computer network design blog and get positive feedbacks from users all over the world. In recent times, I have observed that everybody has been reading this blog. Because of this, I owe all the readers of this blog my achievements. Indeed, your comments and post views have encouraged […]

The post orhanergun.net 2015 review appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Microsoft roundup: The Windows 7 threat, notifying nation-state targets, Bing censorhip

When checking around for what’s been happening with Microsoft, it seems like the company is following its normal pattern of gaining ground and then shooting itself in the foot. Here are a few examples:At the end of 2015, Microsoft announced that it will start notifying users if the company believes “your account has been targeted or compromised by an individual or group working on behalf of a nation state.” Scott Charney, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of Trustworthy Computing, added: We’re taking this additional step of specifically letting you know if we have evidence that the attacker may be “state-sponsored” because it is likely that the attack could be more sophisticated or more sustained than attacks from cybercriminals and others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Single Vs. Dual Carrier Design

Companies don’t always have high availability. What’s more, there is always a concern of budget and complexity with the high availability even though a number of factors need to be considered during network design. If the applications of the company do not require high availability, dual carrier or two links to the same carrier is not […]

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Doing 2016 Write

 

calendar

It’s the first day of 2016 and it’s time for me to look at what I wanted to do and what I plan to accomplish in the coming 366 days. We’ve got a busy year ahead with a leap day, the Olympics, and a US presidential election. And somewhere in the middle of all that there’s a lot of exciting things related to tech.

2015 In Rewind

Looking back at my 2015 goals, I think I did a fairly good job:

  • Writing in Markdown – Read about it all here
  • Blog themes – I really did look at quite a few themes and tried to find something that worked the way I wanted it to work without major modifications. What I finally settled on was a minor font change to make things more readable. For me, form has never been more important than function, so I spend less time worrying about how my blog looks and much more time focusing on how it reads.
  • Cisco Live Management – Didn’t quite get this one done. I wanted to put up the poll for the big picture at the end and I managed to miss it this year! The crew Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 1st, 2016

Hey, Happy New Year, it's HighScalability time:


River system? Vascular system? Nope. It's a map showing how all roads really lead to Rome.

 

If you like Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability then please consider supporting me on Patreon.
  • 71: mentions of innovation by the Chinese Communist Party; 60.5%: of all burglaries involve forcible entry; 280,000-squarefoot: Amazon's fulfillment center in India capable of shipping 2 million items; 11 billion: habitable earth like planets in the goldilocks zone in just our galaxy; 800: people working on the iPhone's camera (how about the app store?); 3.3 million: who knew there were so many Hello Kitty fans?; 26 petabytes: size of League of Legends' data warehouse; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • George Torwell: Tor is Peace / Prism is Slavery / Internet is Strength
    • @SciencePorn: Mr Claus will eat 150 BILLION calories and visit 5,556 houses per second this Christmas Eve.
    • @SciencePorn: Blue Whale's heart is so big, a small child can swim through the veins.
    • @BenedictEvans: There are close to 4bn people on earth with a phone (depending on your assumptions). Will go to at least 5bn. So these issues will grow.
    • @JoeSondow: "In real life you Continue reading

CCDE – Review Of CCDE Practical Workbook By Orhan Ergun

To kick off the new year, I will give you a review of the CCDE Practical Workbook by Orhan Ergun, CCIE #26567 and CCDE #2014:17.

Orhan is a friend and has provided the workbook to me for reviewing. I would like to make it clear that being a friend or providing a product for free does not give any leverage when I review a product. I always give my honest opinion when reviewing a product.

Orhan is a CCDE trainer running the website orhanergun.net and he writes and blogs a lot about network design. He has written a practical workbook to aid CCDE candidates in their studies for the CCDE practical.

As with any workbook for any exam, your expectations must be realistic before purchasing a product. You can only get as much out of a workbook as the effort you put into your studying. A workbook is not a complete solution that will be your only source of studying. You must do additional reading, and lots of it.

The CCDE practical workbook is divided into sections such as layer two, layer three, MPLS, BGP, multicast and so on. Each section starts with some introduction to each technology and Continue reading

2015 End of Year Blog Statistics

Happy New Year! As is my tradition, here are the 2015 blog statistics as compared to 2014.

I’m pretty excited that once again readership and overall reach of this blog has increased by double digits. I’m looking forward to growing these numbers and creating challenging and interesting new content in 2016.

Here are the overall statistics comparing Jan 1 – Dec 30 2015 (first number) to Jan 1 – Dec 30 2014 (second number):

2015 YoY
2015 YoY

The number of sessions and number of unique users clipped the 100,000 mark for the first time. Session duration fell off, but I think that is a funny metric. I’ve not bothered to investigate how Google Analytics measures that nor do I understand conceptually how it’s even possible to measure how long someone stays on a web page, so I’ve never put much stock in that metric.

New vs returning visitors are basically unchanged from last year:

2015 YoY Visitors
2015 YoY Visitors

The top five browsers hitting the site is precisely the same as last year:

2015 YoY Browsers
2015 YoY Browsers

What’s interesting here is that out of the ~138,000 sessions that hit the site in 2015, Chrome was the only browser that was used for a bigger Continue reading

1 … 3,175 3,176 3,177 3,178 3,179 … 3,819