After all that wondering about confessional stuff last night, today I am moved to post about something a little less personal – but actually, no word of a lie, close to my heart in its own way. I am here to tell you about Freshbooks.

Freshbooks is a Toronto company, offering an incredibly useful service to people like me. For a couple of years (why, why didn't anyone tell me it could be so much easier) I used to do all my time tracking and invoicing using a painful system of silly Word documents and Excel spreadsheets on my hard drive. The pain of using Microsoft office tools was made worse by the inefficiency of my system, not to mention the total lack of style. I hope you can understand why a non-designer like me never did bother to make my Word invoice template look pretty.

But that all changed about six weeks ago, when I discovered Freshbooks.

The first thing I did was to create an invoice for work I had already done – it took about 2 minutes, I emailed it away to the client, it looked marvelous, and I was hooked.

The next week, I decided to try out their Timesheet function. How glorious! It does everything I was doing in Excel, only it does it way better. You enter your client, you enter the project, you enter the task. You enter your hours. Then later, you generate an invoice based on those hours. Of course!

Just a little promo for a workshop I am organizing here in beautiful summery Toronto... Coming up July 24-25, 2007.

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Have you heard the buzz about Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and other popular social web tools, and wondered whether they could be useful to your organization... but not known where to start, or how to sort the good stuff from the hype? Come and learn from two of Canada's top experts on web strategy and participation design for the not-for-profit sector!

The latest generation of Web 2.0 (or "social web") strategies and tools offer powerful opportunities for organizations to improve the way they work, communicate their messages, empower others, and serve the public. In this workshop you will learn how the latest tools for online collaboration and community building can make your organization smarter and more effective.

WHO:

Are you on the edge of your seat? Well, here it is:

When working in a text field to be submitted (blog post, Basecamp entry, Writeboard version, long blog comment, whatever)...

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS select all text and then copy it to your clipboard, before you hit submit. On a Mac, this means hitting apple-a, and then apple-c, before you hit submit. On a PC, ctrl-a, then ctrl-c.

There are no exceptions to this rule. It must become habit. If you do not make it habit, then you will become complacent, and one day, you will have fine-tuned all your brilliant words into perfection, and you will hit submit, and you will learn the harsh lesson of the 2.0 overlords. You will lose it all. Either your wifi will crap out, or some server somewhere will be down, or something else will f#@$ you up. Do not take this lesson lightly.

For added security, I highly recommend installing a multi-clipboard program on your computer. I use iClip and I love it. That way, I have access to the last 10 things I've copied and pasted, and it has saved my ass many times.

That is all. Carry on with your day, now, and may the protection offered by this rule shine upon your work.

I just read an article at the Wall Street Journal that made me feel pretty depressed. It's called "Blackberry Orphans" and describes a generation of parents who can't/won't/don't give their full attention to their children and partners, so addicted are they to their handheld devices. Gina at Lifehacker rightly points out that the article is somewhat sensational, and that the problem isn't so much the technology itself as it is how we engage with it. I certainly agree. It's a complicated issue, though.

I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't as guilty as the people profiled in the article. I don't own a Blackberry, but I'm pretty darn attached to my cell phone and it's SMS messages (primarily from one particular someone). I think it's best that I don't get email to my phone, as I have shown myself to have pretty limited capacity when it comes to drawing boundaries around the thing.

What this issue really speaks to, in my opinion, is our difficulty in actually being present. I think our hyper-wired culture exacerbates this problem, but I don't think it causes it. I know that I'm prone to "checking out" of real-life moments, in favour of getting lost in the ether, but I also know that my challenge is to learn appropriate boundaries, and appropriate respect for the time and attention of the people who I'm with. To hone my ability actually just *be* wherever I am, instead of compulsively needing input from other sources at the same time.

The most offensive line of the whole WSJ article? Tough call, but in my mind, it was Jim Balsillie, the chairman of Research In Motion (the company that makes the Blackberry). He says children should ask themselves, "Would you rather have your parents 20% not there or 100% not there?" What a ludicrous choice. Personally, I would suggest that those kids would be best off with parents who are 100% there when they are there. If you *have* to deal with some work, then leave your 100% present partner (if you're lucky enough to have one) with your children and go deal with it, or explain to them that you need to take care of something, but you'll be back as soon as you can. Mean it. Don't kid yourself into thinking that your kids aren't going to be deeply affected by the feeling that they never get your undivided attention.

I read an article recently about "definitive cell phone no-nos", and it was a bit of a kick in the ass for me. Nothing I didn't already know, but since then I have been much more intentional about leaving my phone out of sight and earshot during dinners out, or while spending time with friends.

Where things get blurry is at home. I live with three friends, and so "home time" (where I should in theory be able to do whatever I want to do, and be a slave to my cell phone and computer if I choose to, as a childless 20-something) often blurs into "social time," and also "work time", since I often work from home. We have a "no phone (cell or otherwise) at dinner" rule, and I try to be conscious about turning my attention over to a person when they are talking to me, particularly when they are telling me a personal story about their day. I've learned the hard way that people don't appreciate feeling like they have half of your attention. I'm certainly far from flawless in this department, and I know that all three of my housemates have been annoyed with me on occasion. Sorry guys. :(

But... what happens if I'm in the middle of an IM conversation when they start talking to me? Aren't they then interrupting an existing exchange? I suppose people who are standing right there in front of you should get more attention than those far away... but even then there are even exceptions. Like I would probably decide that a friend in total crisis on IM deserved my attention more than an idle kitchen chat with a housemate. Really, it all gets very complicated, and I think these are issues that anyone who is interested in having authentic and meaningful relationships in their life needs to consider.

All this is a good reminder to myself that I'm lucky to be working on becoming more conscious about these addictions now, before I have children. And all this is  exactly the stuff that I am most fascinated with when it comes to technology. I suspect that if I waited a day on this post, I'd edit it further, but I think I'll post it fresh and raw. Here goes.

Proof positive: An announcement every night at the main stage of the Folk Festival that "The Festival now has a Flickr site!", followed by a decent attempt to explain what exactly that meant to the 10,000 people gathered.

Looks like there are 40 members in the group so far, and 712 photos, 24 hours after the festival closed, so I'd say it's been a success already. 40 members out of those 10,000 people might not sound like a lot, but frankly I shudder to think what it would be like to wade through every single photo taken on every single digital camera at the festival. Noooooooo!

I gotta say I'm fascinated and impressed by how quickly Flickr is taking the world by storm. Last fall when I was in the UK, none of my cousins had heard of it, and all thought I was weird for obsessively posting pictures from my trip. They're all signed up now... as are many of my non-geeky friends. Testament indeed.

My worst fears confirmed: I know enough about my computer to be dangerous, and not enough to protect myself from fuck-ups.

When my dear brother bought me this laptop for Christmas, he bought it with the standard 40GB hard drive, which has proven patently inadequate for me and my purposes. So I have an external drive, to which I periodically back up my user folder. I was always kind of leery of trusting that process, though, so I didn't delete much from my main hard drive.... until it just got WAY too full to avoid it anymore.

So last week I carefully backed up my user folder, making sure that all the photos I've taken recently, and all my beloved photos from the past, were saved. And I started deleting things from my laptop hard drive. I deleted all photos from prior to 2006, and managed to buy myself a bit of space. But then today my hard drive was once again so full that it actually couldn't even open new programs, so I decided to do another backup (better safe than sorry) and start being even more vicious with my deleting of stuff.

But something went wrong, and after my backup this morning, what I am left with is a carbon copy of my CURRENT user folder... and nothing else. In other words, everything that I have deleted in the past week (LOTS of old photos, mostly) is gone. Just gone.

OMG WTF. BBQ, even. I'm distressed! I mean, I won't die – I do have enough perspective to know that it's not the END of the world – but it sure sucks. I only really started using Flickr last September, so anything that pre-dates that, or that I didn't post to Flickr (save a few things I do have saved on CD) is gone. Which sucks.

Makes me wonder yet again about the long-term problems of data storage. If I'm overwhelmed by it now, only a couple of years into owning a digital camera, then I'm not quite sure where I'll be in 20 years? Drowning in data, if I don't figure this stuff out. And in the meantime, I'm reliant on my increasingly poor memory to remind me of my colourful past.

Lessons in non-attachment. Dammit.

This just in:

If you were getting concerned that your cell phone didn't have enough fancy features, don't worry. Now there is one that can tell if you're drunk. Seriously!

Here's how it works: Users blow into a small spot on the phone, and if they've had too much to drink the phone issues a warning and shows a weaving car hitting traffic cones.

So you'll never drunk dial again, right? Right. (Thanks to the Huffington Post for that hilarious observation.)