So I know this is totally old news – but I just found out about Ubuntu’s Open Week. And may I say, even though I didn’t participate in this release cycle’s week, just the logs made me FALL IN LOVE. Yes, all caps. I learned so much! For a while I had wanted to get involved with the Ubuntu community but didn’t know how. After stumbling across the Open Week logs, I now know the basics of getting involved with Documentation and Bug Triage, both excellent options for users without a lot [or any] of programming experience. I also found a lot of links that give more information about both Doc Team and Bug Squad [operators of documentation and bug triage].

But the fun didn’t stop there. One of the first sessions was about the new features in Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. That makes sense, seeing as Open Week is held very soon after a new release [it started April 27 for 9.04]. Other sessions that interested me were: official Ubuntu training, community learning efforts, the Ubuntu Women initiative, and LoCo resources. However, those were by no means the full range of IRC sessions offered.

But let me back up. How does Open Week work? Well each of the sessions is held on an IRC channel. You log on an the person in charge “speaks” over the channel. You might think there would be constant interruptions, but, while there were a few, for the most part people were very respectful. The logs of the chat are posted afterward on the Ubuntu Wiki. You can find the full list of sessions and logs here for Jaunty Jackalope. As you can see, there are links to past releases too.

Open Week has a lot of merit in that community members are presenting from a point of view that is very beneficial to the interested user that just doesn’t know where to get started. I noticed in a couple of the logs that the speaker was a non-native English speaker [the chats are all in English though], but I could generally get the gist of what they were trying to say.

I think Open Week is a fantastic event. I will definitely try to catch some sessions for the Karmic release in October.

And if you aren’t using Ubuntu – what are you waiting for? Check it out here. I will always use and recommend Ubuntu because of the fantastic support community and the easy to use interface – it makes the learning curve very short. But that’s a topic for another day.

Wikipedia, that font of knowledge, says that a meme is:

Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

While a Meme is:

The term Internet meme is a neologism used to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet.

So in the spirit of learning and laughing at the internet, here’s some xkcd:

IN UR REALITY

Yay! I perpetuated a Meme!

2. The Big G

I gotta give a shout-out to Google. I love them/it. I love the convenienve of everything being connected, despite the vulnerability present with relying on their servers. But ever since my brother gave me a Gmail invite, I’ve been hooked. I love Gmail, Gcal, and the integrated todo list they have now. I love it all, despite what the naysayers, well, say.

3. Ubuntu Linux

Let’s face it – I am one of the ultimate linux n00bs there is. And the *buntu support communities are just FANTASTIC. It’s a way for me to learn without turning my laptop into a dinner plate (and they’ve saved me from that in the past).

I’m also big on the open source philosophy – I think software should be able to be tweaked and played with till it can tweak nor play no more.

4. My iPod

Not exactly compatible with the whole “open source” thing, but I do love it so. Love love love. I have one of the 160 GB Classics and it can hold all my media and its brother [I don't have very much media fyi] But I have gotten it to work with Ubuntu and am therefor a very happy camper.

5. Twitter.

I just think it’s cool.

Todoist Input

So the box that says “History” followed by secret code is the main box you work out of.  “History” would be the task name while @hw is the context (familiar for all you GTDers out there). !p1 indicated the task is priority one, the highest on a scale of 1-4. In the date box we have “ev day @23″. Todoist runs on a 24 hour clock or a 12 hour clock with appropriate AM or PM. I simply find it easier to translate into what my family calls “army time” to save myself extra key strokes. Anyway, the “ev day” part indicates this task is due every day and the “@23″ shows that the due time is 23:00, or 11:00 pm. The arrows on the right side of the main box are used for indenting the tasks; nesting tasks is something that Todoist does extremely well.

Here’s a shot of how the task shows up once created [pardon the 2 different style - the first screen shot is a rather old one taken on Firefox 2 in Vista while this one is a Firefox 3 screenshot in Ubuntu using the Mac4Lin theme.

Created Task

As you can see, the context “hw” turns green, the priority one turns the task name red, and the task is due tomorrow at 11:00pm (I took the screenshot after 11 otherwise it would say today at 11:00pm) The circling arrows on the due date indicate a repeating task.

Additionally, Todoist can feature many projects:

Projects Menu

You can color code them and nest them and reorder them to your liking. The number of tasks is shown in the box next to the project name for a quick assessment.

This bar:

Query Bar

I call the “Query Bar”. You can enter search terms, in this case tasks due in the next 7 days or overdue. You can also see the number of tasks due today, with the red box indicating overdue tasks.

That’s all for today folks, but I’ll leave you with this:

I found Todoist to be remarkably intuitive. There are a number of keyboard shortcuts nicely detailed in the pages “Todoist Help” section, along with some other neatness. If you want a no frills, straightforward task manager with some happy surprises thrown in, check out Todoist.