Dave Caolo

Web-based checklist generator Printable Checklist is as simple as can be. In my experience, the best productivity applications mimic the simplicity of paper. Printable Checklist is as close as it gets.

[Via Swiss Miss]

Maybe it’s because I’m a frugal New England Yankee, or maybe it’s just because I’m a cheapskate, but I’ll be the guest on the Frugal Friday Show this Friday, February 13th at 6:30 PM Eastern. I’m really looking forward to it, and I hope you’ll join us.

Earlier today, Amazon released the next generation of the Kinde, their wireless eBook reader (Engadget offered live coverage). It’s a spiffy device from what I can see — thinner, longer batter life, sharper screen and greater storage capacity than its predecessor. But I’m not itching to buy one.

Most of the books I “read” (perhaps “consume” is a better term) I actually listen to via my iPod while in the car. While I consume several books per year, I don’t read any.

I haven’t seen a Kindle in person, of course, but it looks like a solid piece of hardware. Still, at $360 it’s a pricey unitasker.

I’ve got something tremendously wonderful in my life. I’m lucky to have it, and those who also have one will understand my enthusiasm. What is it?

An Italian grandmother.

Her parents — my Great Grandpa Samuel and Great Grandmother Antoinette — immigrated from Italy. Both of my Great Grandparents lived until I was in jr. high school, and visitng their house was always a treat. Who else had a fig tree growing in Scranton, Pennsylvania?

There are many wonderful things I could share about them (I could swear in Italain before I was 10), but today, I’ll focus on the food. Specifically, the broccoli.

I loved it. There aren’t many kids who will eagerly pound a bowlful of broccoli, but I was one of them. My Grandmother’s preparation is simple, fresh-tasting and delicious. In fact, it’s the only way my own kids will eat it. Here it is.

You’ll need

• Broccoli (as fresh as you can find)
• Extra virgin olive oil ( 2-3 of table spoons maybe).
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, chopped fine
• The juice of 2 lemons
• Salt and pepper (I like kosher salt and fresh cracked pepper)

Got it? Good. Here’s what to do.

1. Boil the broccoli for just a few minutes until it’s hot but still firm. Don’t boil the daylights out of it. It should still “snap” when bitten
2. Chop the garlic fine, maybe 2 or 3 cloves
3. Strain the cooked broccoli and place into a large bowl. Add the garlic, lemon juice, oil, salt and pepper. Cover and chill for at least 5-6 hours. Serve cold.

With every bite, you taste broccoli. I know that sounds silly, but think about it. How often have you eaten broccoli that tasted like butter, salt, cheese sauce or the remnants of a once-nutritious vegetable that has been boiled beyond recognition?

This tastes like green, woody broccoli. The acidic lemon cuts through the peppery, viscus oil and the bite of the raw garlic. Plus, sitting covered in the cold allows all of those strong flavors to meet and greet each other.

But that’s not the only reason my own family eats cold broccoli. We do so out of duty and responsibility. We eat cold broccoli to honor my mother, Grandmother and Great Grandmother; three women who prepared simple, inexpensive food on a tight budget to feed their families. We eat it because that’s where we come from. That dish is a physical connection to the generations of hard-working people who gave everything they had, lovingly, to care for the people who would create us. It’s an act of gratitude and remembrance.

If you try it, let me know what you think, and enjoy a little bit of Scranton/Italian goodness on your table.

Poolga is my favorite source of iPhone wallpaper. This week’s crop is representative of why.

Let me tell you about about my childhood.

There is a small, shoebox-shaped house in Scranton, Pennsylvania with faded vinyl siding and an under-performing rose bush in the front yard. Twenty years ago, it was occupied by my typical American family: middle class, happy enough, God-fearing and terribly disorganized.

Consider the kitchen. Open the cabinet to the right of the refrigerator, just above the pink laminate counter top, and you would have found my mother’s recipes. Unlike your mom’s collection, Carol’s never saw the inside of a cookbook. Instead, they hung from the back of the door with yellowing strips of tape.

A Hellman’s mayonnaise label with a potato salad recipe dangled next to my grandmother’s hand-written instructions for stuffed squid. There were pages ripped from Family Circle magazine, supermarket hand-outs, 3×5 index cards, torn business envelopes with their postmarked stamps intact … anything flat enough to write on and light enough to stick to a pine cupboard door  was used to capture a recipe.

Most bore stains acquired in the line of duty. A sheet of yellow legal paper held a recipe for lemon squares as well as greasy butter stains and a smudge of hardened baking flour about the size and shape of a postage stamp. “David, hand me that sheet of paper,” my mother would say, thrusting her egg-y fingers at me. Another Christmas, another batch of lemon squares and another crop of stains. Buy the time I was in high school, the recipe was nearly illegible.

While the “fly strip method” of recipe storage keeps everything accessible, it’s a poor filing system. Linguine with anchovy paste rubbed up against blueberry cheesecake, which is something that should never happen, not even in print.

Like most messes, my mother’s organizational style had the tendency to spread, like an invading army, or syphilis. The inside of my dad’s garage looked like a yard sale had vomited, and the state of the basement was something I won’t even mention.

What all this means is that I’ve got chaos in my blood. It didn’t become problematic until I started working for myself. Those painful moments of realization — “Oh, I really need to …” — were becoming more common, and always at the least opportune times. Remembering to tell the cable company that I’ve been issued a new debit card is of no use at 60 m.p.h. on Route 3.

Thankfully, I found David Allen’s Getting Things Done (or “GTD”) and it changed my life. When you’ve got a trusted system in place, your brain stops pestering you. When you’ve got your pending tasks sorted by context, you relax. What’s more, you get stuff done (I think that’s where he got the name).

One of the crucial aspects of a GTD system is the ubiquitous capture tool. Basically, Dave wants you to “capture” any thought, task, or “open loop” as he calls them for later processing — which is a fancy way of saying “write shit down.” It’s simple, low tech and very effective.

hPDA

It’s also the part of GTD that’s the most fun and the biggest pain. At least for a geek like me. One of the Seven Great Truths of Geekhood is that we’re always willing to try a new system if we think it’s better than what we’re currently using. Dave leaves his readers’ choice of ubiquitous capture tool completely up to them, and that’s where I got into trouble.

Initially, I went out and bought a snazzy Palm Tungsten E2. With a calendar, contacts app, notepad and software synchronization, I figured it would be the ultimate. A month later, I realized I was using it to store lists. A $200 PDA to hold lists. I sold it and created a Hipster PDA, or hPDA, as described by the great Merlin Mann (by the way, Merlin has the best hair on the Internet. He knows it, too).

The hPDA, for the uninitiated, is a bunch of 3×5 index cards held together with an office clip. That’s it. I brought mine to the next level with some color coding and the D*I*Y Planner templates. My hPDA was tidy, cheap, disposable, recyclable and simple. Occam’s Razor in  my pocket. With a tiny, write-anywhere Fisher Bullet Space Pen, my hPDA (which I nicknamed “Shirely,” just to give it a little more personality) was as awesome as a dozen index cards could be.

Mole Skinned

Then it happened. I was tempted by the legendary notebook of Hemingway and Picasso. My head swelled with my action lists whenever I produced my slick notebook and slid back the elastic binding strap, all the while scanning the room for anyone else in “the know.” Fellow notebook aficionados would nod approvingly at the guy writing important things in the same notebook used by one of the world’s most famous alcoholics and a psychotic, self-injurious painter.

I adopted an elaborate system of tags, numbering, incantations and logic puzzles to “hack” my Moleskine for GTD. When the voice inside my head told me, “This is kind of annoying,” I rebuked it. “Oh hush,” I’d say, “and help me remember why all of the odd pages are written in blue ink.”

The other hassle was that I couldn’t easily discard spent pages. When an index card ran out of white space, I tossed it. No clutter, no mess. The Moleskine didn’t allow for that.

Field Notes

Next, I bought a 3-pack of Field Notes brand notebooks. For me, these trump the Moleskines. While the Moleskine gives off a certain air, the Field Notes notebook is a utilitarian tool ready for duty. It says, “Let’s work,” not “Sketch that sunset.” Plus, it’s thinner and less bulky in the pocket.

Still, I was still subject to the same cumbersome system of analog tagging and linking. Ultimately, I’ve gone back to my original system — a dozen index cards in my pocket.

One of the great tennants of GTD is “Capture-Process-Organize-Do.” The other is “To each his (or her) own.” David’s bare-bones system is flexible enough to accomdate any work style or process. This is what works for me. Here’s hoping you found it useful.

My 5-year-old likes to grab my iPhone and take photos. Occasionally, she gets lucky.

Basecamp by 37signals is one of the applications I simply couldn’t work without. Today it turns 5. Here’s to 5 more.

Crackulous allows jailbroken iPhones to crack any application from the App Store and use it without paying for it. It other words, it steals money from developers and Apple.

If you’re so hard up for money that you must steal a $0.99 application, you shouldn’t own an iPhone.

For the first time, I didn’t love a team in the Superbowl, nor did I hate one. So, I was able to just sit back and watch the game, sans emotional inolvement. Thanks to the Cards for making a game of it, and to the Steelers for playing tremendous football.