Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

The want for easy as sharing of photos, documents and what not between your computer, your relatives computer, and your friends computer, is now answered through the words Live Mesh.
It is rather brilliant, very useful, and so easy to understand and use.

My favourite best friend and I often have spent long periods of time uploading photos using photo swap on msn, and I am pleased to say those days are over. All I have to do is create a Live Mesh folder, invite her to join it, and once she accepts she can view and use any photos or files I put in that folder, and she can put any of her things in that folder for me to use as well. It’s all about easy sharing.

My home computer, my work computer, my best friends computer, and her laptop, can all be synchronized in the same folder allowing easy access for whatever files we want to share. And, my home computer, my work computer, and my bosses computer, can all be synchronized in another folder, easy as sharing.

Here’s a rough step by step of the getting started process. It’s easier done than said :)

Joel Spolsky, one of the worlds leading authorities on software development, has launched a new questions and answer website called StackOverflow.

Here is his rationale behind the decision to do so.

You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I’m talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back:

• A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
• A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
• An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore,
• And something in Japanese.

If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is paying off for me.

I have an unfortunate name. Tim Miller is a pretty common name. So when you do a Google search for me you cant find this Tim Miller, instead you find a whole bunch of other people. This is part of the reason I have promoted my blog as SpyJournal. Its a unique name and its the name I use for most of my social websites and so on. Our business names also of Jethro Management and Jethro Consultants are pretty unique.

  So when I do a Google search for SpyJournal, every single entry on the first page is me. Jethro Management is the same, and Jethro Consultants has the second last one only as not me. 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 results is pretty good. I think I have a pretty good chance of getting found with my company name. By the way I would be interested if readers in other countries could try the same thing and let me know in the comments what you find. Feel free to use other search engines, though Google is of course the main one. I cant remember the time I needed  to try a different one!

The next step for me is to keep working on my keywords, specifically Drupal and Excel and Excel VBA.

I have received numerous jobs recently through from people who found us with Google searches here in Australia. More in the last 6 months than in the rest of our business history so far.

Sometimes work gets in the way of life – or do I mean it the other way around?

Today I got so distracted i was unable to focus so I did a Doug and went to bed for 2 hours this afternoon.

Right now I am writing code on deadlines for a client and i have had to put my headphones on to reduce the distractions – and asked family members not to interrupt me.

Joel Spolsky has written my reason for me – please understand family!

Here's the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.