Thursday, April 12, 2018

George may not be a very good pirate, but he's great at taking notes...

Okay, another handy tip...

I get told a lot of things that I need to remember, but I don't always have pen and paper handy or I can't quite get to that right now.

Of course, I could yell "SIRI, MAKE A NOTE OF BLAH BLAH BLAH" and there's no way in Hell that she'll get any of it right. Because Siri is a freaking idiot. ("Playing Walk The Moon..." "NOOOOOOOOOOO DAMN IT!")

I could put things in a Notecard, but you can't content-search Notecards in Second Life. Sure, you can give it a meaningful title. It'll stand out from all those New Notecards I have in a pile in my IMPORTANT SHIT! subfolder.

Searching through log files is a chore. I'm going to have to sort through five years of your jibber-jabber to find that one thing I need to know? Seriously?

Add it to the Notes section of that person's Profile? I never look at that crap. And it doesn't help when you're trying to remember who does something that you're needing right now... are you going to open up everybody's Notes sections? And, let's face it, if they're not on your friends list, or they defriended you, now you have to dig through Search or your Contact Sets list and find them and... oh, why bother?

So, I came up with an easier way.

Anything that's relevant and I need to remember, I tack on a few helpful hashtags to the text (#dance #storytelling #fiveislands #idiot #georgethepirate, etc.) and send it in an IM to my alt. I have quick access to my alt through the Partner field... bring up my profile, click my alt's name, and click IM. And my alt is pre-configured to forward everything to an email that auto-forwards to a secondary inbox in my primary email account. (Google "subaddessing")

The email arrives in Gmail, and I can add emails or phone numbers to my Contacts, URLs to my Chrome Bookmarks, important events to my Google Calendar, and so on. Then, I can drop the email in a sub-folder based on whatever the bit of information was about... storytelling, dance, etc. Or I move it to my primary Inbox so it's right there, screaming at me to get done NOW NOW NOW NOW. (Yes, I've used this for grocery lists. Go ahead. Judge me, but I put fewer post-it notes through the wash as of late.)

Unlike Notecards in SL, search in Gmail is content-searchable. And you can mark things with labels and such. Or shove the information into a folder in Google Drive. (Yes, it's called IMPORTANT SHIT! there too.)

What tips and tricks to you use with Second Life that you find helpful?