When I was a kid my parents taught me to always have a plan and to always aim high. As a result, I have a master plan for life that I execute against. Things like losing weight, being a dedicated husband and father, coding nightly, retiring young, even this blog.
Like any kind of plan or project it must be flexible enough to change given new priorities or requirements. It also must have frequent results which can be measured (lbs lost, time spent, lines of code, posts and readership).
I’m probably not alone in this thinking, but I naturally apply agile methods to my life, just like I tend to apply them to software development. When some external problem comes up or I just get the urge to-do something new here’s my thought process:
Does this change affect my other goals?
How does this affect the priority of these goals?
What goals can I postpone or drop to deal with this change?
The current economic situation has forced me to change some of my goals and priorities but having an agile approach to life, I believe, gives me the tools to handle it better.
Just a quick note to show how to use Wordpress to post at a certain time. Once finished writing your post, expand the “Post Timestamp” and “Post Status” option. Check “Edit Timestamp” and set the date/time you want to post. Also set the status to “Published”. That’s it!
Here in the states it is still pretty hard to get GPS on your phone. Fortunately, Google recently released a new feature which takes the cell tower records phone companies are required to register if they are of a certain height and uses them to help locate your rough location when you use their mobile google maps application. Navizon also offers mobile software that does this.
But what about urban areas where they have tons of tiny towers on rooftops, these aren’t registered with the government. The phone companies are very protective of this data because they use it for E911 and have paid a lot to get it into place, rather than offer up their info and make it simple for 3rd parties to build off of this network information they horde it because they can charge their users for premium services.
Either Google had to do some major deal-making to get tower info in urban areas like New York City and San Francisco from providers or they had to drive every street in these areas and map the towers to the street… view… wait! StreetView
Google has already driven with cameras and gps units all around the country and are now driving in other countries… Why not also map the tower data?
This is something I’ve done in the past. It’s pretty easy for GSM phones and pretty tricky for CDMA.
Below is a never before seen video from a few years ago where a friend and I mapped manhattan. You can see the convex hull of each tower develop in real-time.
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