I think Ed's approach is not necessarily incompatible with GTD. All he is saying is that he uses only one context is his next-actions list (@now?), which usually contains only one item. Everything else is in a someday/maybe list...

I particularly enjoy the GTDish technique of emptying one's mind and all inboxes, but I have also been trapped in too many "what-if" scenarios and in non-important tasks. Thus, I really think that Ed is making a valid point here.

BTW, filing taxes should be only a reminder in your calendar or tickler system.

"The most important piece of knowledge I took from 4HB and haven't seen anywhere else is to eat a protein rich breakfast (I do 4 fried eggs) within 30 minutes of waking up. This was very hard for me to keep up with so I have sample data from weeks where I was very consistent and weeks where I didn't even make it out of the shower in 30 minutes. For me, eating that breakfast within 30 minutes of first waking up more than doubles my weekly weight loss. I still don't fully understand why this works, but it does, at least for me. It's one of those things you read and don't believe until you actually do it to yourself and measure often."

Anyone interested on this bit should have a look at Jack Kruse's leptin reset diet (http://www.jackkruse.com/my-leptin-prescription/). His posts are incredibly difficult to read, but as a dentist and neurosurgeon who has lost tons of weight himself, he really seems to know what he is talking about.

Being a bit of a fat ass, I also used to delude myself into thinking that the "fat-lazy" relationship was a myth. But when I started carrying around my 2 year old girl (who weights ~25libs), I noticed how tired and slow I got after some minutes.

Then I realized that I carry around at least 2x that same weight around my waist all day long...

Jailbreak, install XBMC and use your iPhone/iPad as a remote. You can thank me later.

So, for a very long time, I had an XBMC box setup on my projector, got a AppleTV, pretty quickly stopped using the XBMC machine, and now I've since repurposed the machine as a Steam Big Picture box, (Which sadly won't run on an XBMC Apple TV)

Out of curiosity, what functionality in XBMC do you find particularly worthwhile?

Wider format compatibility - ATV doesn't support AVI, and won't play direct from either UPNP or SMB.

That's a fine reason.

mkv?

I have always been fascinated by "sous vide" cooking, but could simply not put up with the idea of eating food that has been in contact with plastics for hours in a hot environment.

Most plastics do leach some very nasty compounds, not to mention the whole estrogen controversy (which has been known by the FDA since the 30s). Besides, I am sure it is very eco-unfriendly to use them to routinely cook foods since all those plastic bags will end up somewhere in the ocean for the next hundred years...

Therefore, does anyone know of any hacks for cooking in low temps and vacuum WITHOUT the damned plastics bags?

A combi oven does what you want: it creates a temperature-controlled humid environment, but uses steam instead of a circulating water bath. Unfortunately, they're extremely expensive.

You don't have to bag the food, for whatever it's worth. You don't even have to use water as your cooking medium; people have circulated butter for lobster. But the bag prevents the flavor from the product from leaching out into the cooking liquid and being diluted away.

I wonder if you could take a stock rice cooker and fit a constantly running evacuation pump to the steam vent hole in the glass lid. It could partially evacuate the chamber and hold it there while you cooked. The pot and lid are obviously not designed for the stress of vacuum so you wouldn't want to go past, say, a quarter atmosphere.

I am very intrigued by your approach, could you please share more of it or maybe point some books that go deeper on this?

I can point you in the direction of an open source project that does the same thing in a different way: http://www.python.org/about/success/cog/

That should get you going, be sure to read the introduction.

In the past I've used this trick for many different purposes (for instance, writing driver code for a large variety of graphic cards with various memory lay-outs and port setups, greatly reducing the amount of code to maintain, for performance reasons you don't want that code to be too generic), but lately it has come into its own in a project that I'm working on where the large majority of the code is generated.

Unfortunately I can't share any code (it's written under contract).

Well, not that I don't think you have a valid point but some very smart people have done otherwise...

"When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff.""

(http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

I am almost afraid to ask you this, but here it goes.

On the last few weeks/months before starting Viaweb, did you consider yourself a failure for being almost 30, well-educated but out of the formal career track, "poor" and unmarried? If so, was that the fuel behind your many amazing achievements later on?

No, not really. I'd written the two Lisp books, and people liked those. Not a lot of people, but they were people whose opinions I cared about. Actually Viaweb felt like more of a compromise than the way I'd been living before, because it was something I was doing mostly for money.

So, you finally had your first taste of startup success at age 34. And you started Y Combinator at 41.

Think your story, along with many others in the Valley (e.g. Jim Clark), goes to show that this is a long-term game, and it only gets better with age and experience.

If you think that founding a start-up is tough, wait until you have children. Raising them (properly) is the toughest and most rewarding job that one can have...

Marriage is just a way that society found to keep both parties more committed into it.

If you want something like this, but more generic than Wikipedia-only, have a look at PersonalBrain (http://www.thebrain.com/, no iPad version?). To be honest, I could never make it work for my main intended use (academic papers & citations), but I really think it is a cool app with lots of potential.