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These are my mottos / rules / slogans / mantras to help myself get things done:

If not now, when?

This is for those times when you have something that has to be done at some point, but you just don’t feel like doing it right now. The problem is that if you don’t feel like doing it now, chances are you won’t feel like doing it later either. Importantly, it’s not just a rhetorical device. If you have a good answer to the “when” part, then go right ahead and defer the task until that later time.

Spend the extra 30 seconds

You’ve moved something from the living room to the bedroom because that’s where it belongs. You dump it on the bed with the intention of putting it away later. Don’t do that. Spend the extra 30 seconds now and get it completely done, to get it off your mind and to save your future self the work.

Floss one tooth

This one is for when you have a big task in front of you that feels too daunting to start. Maybe a huge pile of dirty dishes to wash, or a whole closet to clear out. If the whole thing is too much, tell yourself you don’t have to do it all. Just do the one smallest possible amount of the work. Clean one bowl, read and archive one email, write one sentence of a blog post. Once you’ve started you may feel like doing a bit more, but you can stop at any time.

In the literal sense, once you’ve flossed one tooth you’re likely to floss them all. In the figurative sense, you won’t always get through the whole task, but you’ll have improved the situation and made it much more likely you’ll get through the remainder next time.

Depending on where you are in the world, it seems likely that any hangover you may have acquired in the service of ringing in the new year should have mostly subsided by now. I hope your year has started well and that it continues well. May your plans for the year survive first contact with the enemy.

Regular readers may know that I’m something of a fan of one Danny Wallace. Not just a fan, actually, but a subject—Danny is the king of his own micronation, The Kingdom of Lovely, of which I am a citizen. He’s also The Leader of my not-cult, Join Me (it’s not a cult; it’s a collective).

Danny has a new book out, called Friends Like These. It’s about a quest (oh yes! another one!) to track down a bunch of old friends Danny went to school with twenty years ago. To promote the book, the Danny Wallace Appreciation Society group on Facebook ran a competition in which people were asked to submit their stories of how one of Danny’s previous books—Yes Man—had affected them.

It seems I won. Nice one. I look forward to the copy of Friends Like These I won to join the other two I accidentally pre-ordered.

Ryan Norbauer, on the desire to achieve:

My lifelong preoccupation with accomplishment has always been not so much motivated by a desire for praise or reward as an anxiety about having some concrete achievements to which I can point and say, “look there, you cold and unfeeling universe: something I’ve done, something I’ve made, something I shall leave behind.” In this way, accomplishment has always been my answer to mortality.

I have a pile of stuff to post about, both things I want to link to and a few observations and more journal-like things that Id like t post about. Right now I don’t have the mental bandwidth to accommodate that volume of joined-up thought, so I’m falling back on the blogging stalwarts of ripping off other bloggers and compiling lists. Real content to follow. This post is more for my own interest in years to come.

With that gripping lede out of the way, here’s a list—inspired by (i.e., copied from) Jason Kottke—of the cities I’ve visited in 2007.

• Dublin (I actually moved here)
• London (four times, not counting passing through Heathrow)
• Nottingham
• San Francisco
• Mountain View
• Las Vegas
• San José
• Liverpool
• Paris
• Manchester
• Chester

My plans for 2008 already include all of these cities except Paris (though I wouldn’t be opposed), as well as Birmingham, New York, Zurich, Naples, Los Angeles, and Ankara. Doing my bit for climate change.

Esquire has a collection of semi-connected soundbite-sized chunks of wisdom from Michael J Fox. Some of it is pleasingly astute, and it’s totally free of the pretentiousness you often see when celebrities share their pet philosophies. Possibly because:

If you don’t have someone calling you on your shit, you’re lost.

Sometimes I feel like I have no reason to post about a subject because a story broke a few days ago and it’s been analysed by a crowd of eager bloggers since then. Other times I stumble on an article written over six years ago that grabs me enough to make me want to share it. Elmore Leonard writes on writing, covering his most important ten suggestions (or in today’s parlance “top ten tips”) for improving your writing by keeping it out of the way of what you’re trying to say.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…

…he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

If you watched the video of Randall Munroe at Google you might have heard him mention a site called Project Euler. It’s a cool collection of short but interesting mathematical problems that are intended to be solved with a computer. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from using good old practical mathematics.

The most solved puzzle on the site is this one:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Now, this didn’t look to me like a computer was required to solve it, so I nibbled the end of my pencil for a second and came up with the following solution:

There will be 333 numbers in that range which are divisible by three (every third number, so a third of the total). There will be 199 numbers in that range that are divisible by five (every fifth number, and a fifth of the total—it’s 199 rather than 200 because the top number, 1000, is excluded).

Now I don’t know offhand a way to calculate the sum of the first 333 numbers divisible by three. But I do know offhand a way to calculate the sum of the first 333 numbers. It’s 333 × 334 ÷ 2. Is that any help? It turns out it is. Consider the first five multiples of three: 3, 6, 9, 12, 15. The sum is 3 + 6 + 9 + 12 + 15 = (3 × 1) + (3 × 2) + (3 × 3) + (3 × 4) + (3 × 5) = 3 × (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5). That is, it’s three times the sum of the first five numbers. By the same reasoning, the sum of the first 333 multiples of three is equal to three times the sum of the numbers from one to 333, or 3 × 333 × 334 ÷ 2.

Applying the same reasoning again, the sum of the first 199 multiples of five is five times the sum of the first 199 numbers, or 5 × 199 × 200 ÷ 2.

There’s one more piece: in adding up all the multiples of three, and all the multiples of five, I’ve included some numbers twice. There are some numbers that are divisible by both three and five, i.e., those numbers divisible by fifteen. There are 66 of these, from 15 to 990 (again, by taking 1000 ÷ 15 and rounding down you get 66). So the total has to be reduced by 15 × 66 × 67 ÷ 2.

The final answer is: (3 × 333 × 334 ÷ 2) + (5 × 199 × 200 ÷ 2) – (15 × 66 × 67 ÷ 2) = 233168.

The easy way, of course, is:

$> python
>>> sum([i for i in range(1,1000) if i % 5 == 0 or i % 3 == 0])
233168

This post is copied and pasted. It started life as a response to an email from Ronan asking for my take on a New Scientist article on the creation of passports to transfer avatars from one online world (like Second Life) to another.

Seems to be representative of the upcoming (or current?) shift from centralised social hubs to open standards for social interaction. Thisis why I keep saying Facebook should sell. It’s going to be dead in a year or two if it keeps the current walled garden design. The walled garden didn’t work for Adam and Steve and it’s not going to work here either.

We’re not going to have a single repository of friends lists and personal details which we laboriously migrate from one old and busted service to the new hotness every six months. The next round will be open protocols that let you describe your relationships once and use that in any service that supports it, whether that’s photo sharing, music recommendations, event invitations or whatever.

It all starts with OpenID for decentralised identity verification, which is already gaining traction. Every AOL subscriber already has an OpenID, whether they know it or not. So does every Live Journal user. How long before Yahoo!, Google, and MSN follow suit? Conservatively, I predict that by the end of next year there’ll be at least one university, probably in America, that assigns students an OpenID alongwith their email address.

It only makes sense that the virtual worlds would follow the same path, and for the same reasons.

I do not know what’s up with the Dutch.