SimonWaldman.net

In relationship terms, I think it’s pretty fair to say that GTD and I could best be described as fuckbuddies. We get together every so often and have a great time, then for no apparent reason it all falls apart and we go our separate ways - but the next time I’m feeling a bit confused/ messed up I know I can always count on her it.

Obviously we’ve tried all sorts of aids in our relationship - but none of them seem to last. So, I’m not going to get too excited about the latest: Tracks, which I’ve been using now on and off for a few months.

It’s a very neat Webapp, that lets you clock all your actions by Project and Context. It’s a little too purist GTD for my liking (no sorting by date - or project for that matter), but I can forgive that.

The problem for not particularly technical little old me, is that it’s a ruby app. Now, the options are either that you install it on your hard drive on a server, which as any fule kno is already there with Mac OSX - but you need to use the command line (uh oh!). I looked at the instructions, and was lost within about half a second.

So, I got someone at Textdrive to install it here on simonwaldman.net - which was money well spent. But then I started commuting, which meant I couldn’t use it in my critical ‘doing stuff’ time. So I ditched it, and went to a tweaked list on OmniOutliner (yes, I know about Kinkless, but I only have 10.3.9 on here). Good - but not special enough.

Anyway, one night when I should have been paying more attention to my duties as husband and father, I stumbled across a solution - that meant you could install Tracks on your hard drive without any command line action, thanks to a programme called Locomotive.

So I did it, and it didn’t work. And just as I was about to jack it all in, I upgraded to the latest version of Locomotive (2.0.7) , and guess what, it only went and bleeding worked! Cor lummy, governor…these days I’m running Ruby apps on my local server. And it’s all running off a flash drive! If only my old friends could see me now!