Technology ramblings from a dilettante of all things digital

I'm a big Remember the Milk (RTM) fan.  I love the power of the lists, tagging, locations, etc.  I believe it has a lot more potential as an easy to use, powerful, tasklist.  There are still several annoyances and limitations to it, however.  One of the biggest is the level of effort required to get a task into RTM.  We all have those AHA moments, "ooh!  I need to..x", and one of the main tenants of Getting Things Done is to "empty your head".  The harder that is to do, though, the less likely anyone is to jot down an idea when they think of it.  That's why I carry a voice recorder in my car and why there are various products to help us facilitate this perpetual mind dump.  So, along those lines, I would like to share a solution I've found to submit a task to RTM in under 5 seconds, depending on how fast you type.  If your typing isn't quite up to snuff, well....that's between you and Mavis Beacon. 

For this project, you will need

• a computer
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Slickrun (micro command line on crack)
• a Remember the Milk account
• some hot coco (optional)

Okay, soooo, the idea here is that RTM users have an email address that they can send messages to and those will show up in their RTM inboxen.  Add to that, that RTM has a smartadd syntax so you can assign the list, tags, location, due date, etc in one pass.  So the idea here is that you have a command line statement that will send an email to your RTM account, using the supplied argument as your subject.  So for this I am using Slickrun because it so fast and easy, to trigger Thunderbird to create an email and send it to RTM for me.

Let's get prepped:

1. Install Thunderbird and slickrun
2. Pick your favorite shortcut key combo to bring focus to slickrun.  I think the default is WinKey+Q or WinKey+W.  I prefer WinKey+A.
3. Hit your key combo or use your mouse if you prefer the scenic route.
4. type "add" (without the quotes) and hit enter.  A new magic word form will popup.
5. Fill out the form with the following arguments, using your actual RTM email

Filename or URL

MagicWord (use whatever you want here, I like rtm)

rtm

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird"

Parameters: (copy that text verbatim, including the quotes)

-compose "to='dan.xyz@rmilk.com',subject='

Okay, let's skip ahead to using this little gem:

Simply hit your slickrun key combo, type your magic word, then enter your RTM task using smartadd syntax and make sure to add a closing quote and the end of it (to match the opening quote in the command argument)

Hit Enter

TBird will open a new window.  Hit send and go about your day.  It may take a few seconds for the window to disappear.  Feel free to minimize it (or stare at it if you're easily entertained).

This will also work for other systems that have email addresses you can send to, such as evernote.  Here's an example of the command line for evernote.  Make sure to grab your actual email address out of evernote settings of course.

-compose "to='dan.abc@m.evernote.com',subject='

Enjoy!  Let me know if you found this helpful or not.

I definitely fell off the wagon a bit.  I was doing pretty well through June.  I had a personal record 5K time  and I got down 214 lbs.  In July I somehow fell out of my groove.  I put all my weight back on and my cardio has definitely regressed.  I think taking a vacation in late June combined with a few other factors messed me up.  Mostly, I wasn’t sleeping enough so I couldn’t make my morning working.  I still wanted to work out, but I wasn’t keen on strolling into work at 11:00am.   That’s enough stalling, now onto my numbers:

Current State of Affairs:

Height: 5’11”
weight: 227

P90X Fit Test

As you can see, I made slight strength and cardio gains.  If I hadn’t fallen off the wagon 2/3 the way through, I’d have slight weightloss gains to match.

It’s a journey, not a one time photo shoot.  So I’m going to pick myself up and get back in it.  I did a full P90X workout day for the first time in a few weeks.  I’m gonna do another P90X/Insanity round for the next 30 days, combined with clean eating, then its on to Asylum for me.

I just survived a huge ordeal with setting up MVC 3 to play nicely on IIS 6, so I thought I’d blog about it to make sure nobody else endures this mess.  I’ll go through these steps in order so you can roll through this issue as fast as possible.  I’ll save my long winded drivel til the end.

1. I assume you’ve got VS 2010 SP1 on your dev box, MSBuild and .NET 4.0 on your build box.
2. Install MVC 3 on your dev web server, whether that’s local or remote or use one that has it if you’re paying for hosting.
3. If you cannot install MVC 3 on your target web server, you can do a bin deployment as Scott Hanselmen explains, but that is really only useful for small projects when you’re deploying from your local dev machine.  Some people posted examples of how to setup MSBuild with a task CollectFilesFrom_binDeployableAssemblies, but the examples were either incomplete or I was too incompetent to figure them out, so I setup a simple copy step to make this happen (note – you’ll have to make msbuild variables for values like BinDeployableSource):

<Copy SourceFiles="@(BinDeployableSource)"
        DestinationFolder="$(SourcePath)\$(WebProjectBin)"
        SkipUnchangedFiles="true" />

4. Now here’s the kicker and what was really killing me.  You need the web.config from inside the Views folder!  My robocopy deployment scripts wasn’t setup to include web.config’s from inside the Views folder.  I have to credit Andrew Barber with figuring this out.

My setup:  I’ve got VS2010 on a dev box.  We’re using SVN and its kicking off a CI build on our build server, which then uses robocopy to deploy our web assets out to the dev web server.  If you’re having any issues fixing this, please comment on here or contact me and I’ll try to help you out.

I skipped stretch today with all the Easter activities and I only did half of Saturday’s and Monday’s workout.  My diet during the week was good but over the weekend it took a downhill slide with all the holiday food.  Nowhere to go but up, back on the wagon.  I got my body pretty sore this week.  I’ve been watching the Insanity Asylum videos while I run.  I love what I see so far, but I also know I am not ready for that yet.  The vertical plyo workout looks like a killer.  I guess I need to learn how to use a jump rope.