April 2011 – Page 2 – Tech in the Trenches

The environment you live in directly affects how you feel. I am not talking necessarily about the world outside your physical address but the space within. Recently, my wife and I moved from a too-small-for-us, cluttered apartment to a nearly 1,00 square foot condo unit we’re renting. The change has been a breath of fresh air.

Instead of an overflowing kitchen with a book shelf and a dresser needed to hold all our pots and pans, we now have a spacious kitchen with drawers and cabinets to spare. Instead of an apartment lacking real closets, with Target and IKEA acquired shelving units suffocating our dining area, we have a series of huge closets.

The list goes on but the point is made. The new place is much more open and as a result, there is less clutter everywhere. There are less piles. The entire place feels more open, airy and inviting. As a result, my mood has been uplifted. I no longer feel dread about coming home. I feel happiness. I look forward to it everyday.

I feel freer. I feel more alike and awake. I am inspired to wind down on our couch and write late into the night about whatever comes to my mind. I feel as a gust of fresh air was blown into my life and into my new home.

I am excited for the change and the creative opportunities this new space will hold.

I don’t take the New Year as my opportunity to rethink my habits and resolutions. I take the moving to a new place as the start of a new page of my life. The year is just a number on a calendar. But a new place to live offers up such a bounty of exciting and endless possibilities. The layout and decoration of the space. How the space will be utilized.

The simple fact that we now have freedom to devote portions of our living area to projects where before we never had the space to devote anything to any one task.

You need to back up. Everyone says it but most people don’t. There is no excuse not to back up your data. If it is important enough to write down and save, it is important enough to back up.

Here’s an example. The head of a large media company is composing the eulogy for a friend of over two decades. He has written four pages of heartfelt prose. He pours out his thought sand feelings to be read to a crowded room of friends and family about his dearly departed friend. Upon completing his missive, he presses send on his mail client and sends the important document to his assistant for proofreading and editing before it becomes the final document to be practiced and delivered.

Or so he thought. Upon arriving at the office to meet with his assistant and go over the eulogy, she had nothing. She has never received the document. He went to look for it in via sent items. Nothing. He checked the deleted items. Nil. He checked the drafts folder. Perhaps he had forgotten to send the document and there it was!

Out of his four written pages, less than one remained. Sitting in the Drafts folder mockingly offering him a copy. A poor copy for sure. His words were lost.

Does this sound familiar?

How many times have you written a brilliant blog post, long, well-reasoned comment, or essay for class in a browser window or email client? How many times have you lost an important note? Did you take it down in a text file but never saved and your computer rebooted or crashed? I did not ask if you lost data because I know you have.

Enter Simplenote. The idea is so simple you’d wish you have thought of it first. In Simplenote for each note you start, it not only lives right then and there in the moment you wrote it. It will also push a copy to the “cloud” for safe keeping. So now your information lives in two places. Congratulations! You have now backed up. Wasn’t that hard? But what if you delete your note you ask? Well first off, you did something to delete it. It wasn’t a computer error or something out of your control. But we’re all human. We all make mistakes.

Enter versioning. This big scary looking word just means “more than one copy” of your document. What if you make a change to your document, delete a large portion without meaning to, or at the very worst delete the entire thing? Click a button or drag a slider and your hard work is restored just like that.

Simplenote is perfection of textual nirvana. Write words and don’t press save. Write more words and they’re all safe. Write your words and never worry about whether they’ll be there when you need them. It’s something we all take for granted, until it fails us.

Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Month: April 2011

Comfortable Surroundings

SimpleNote is textual nirvana