jd yates

Here comes week 5 of Nick’s If… Project. I really enjoyed this weeks questions. Mainly because I’m still creeped out by the previous week’s “assassinate” question. Also, I keep meaning to get caught up (this post brings me up to 3 weeks behind. Awesome.). Ready, Set…

If you could inherit a comfortable home in any city in the world that you could use but not sell, where would you want it to be.

Some place with super low property taxes. Actually, this is sort of happening to me right now. Not so much the inherit part, but something similar. So I’m compelled to say here. Though there are places that I would ultimately rather have homes, I think they apply more to the next question under the knowledge that I’ll likely always want a home base here.

If you could inherit a vacation home anywhere in the world in which you could spend one month a year, but that you could never sell, where would it be?

Nevis. It’s kind of unknown, but absolutely gorgeous. It’s been on my vacation destination list for about 4 years. I’d love to have a vacation home there because it’s remote and somewhat isolated, but still pretty easily accessible from the real world. Living the island life without sacrificing the modern conveniences I’ve become dependent upon (BlackBerry, broadband, etc…) is critical.

If you could suddenly possess an extraordinary talent in one of the arts, what would you like to to be?

Anyone unfortunate enough to be in the car with me when a song I like comes on my iPod will likely agree with this. I’d like to be able to sing. My lack of talent rarely keeps me from doing it, but it would sure be nice to be confident in the knowledge that I was doing the songs I love justice.

If you could be instantly fluent in one other language that you currently do not read or speak, which would it be?

Mandarin Chinese. I’ve been vocal about my stigma regarding romance languages (though I’m sure I’ll get back into them at some point), and I’ve made it one of my goals for the summer to start learning Japanese. So it makes good sense, then, to add something a bit more practical to my repertoire, since the Japanese is mostly a cuz-I-wanna kind of project. My sources tell me that Chinese is particularly useful in the business world, though I’m sure that the phonetics would make it more of a party novelty than a useful tool.

Week 4 of Nick’s If… Project. This week’s questions are better than some of the others have been, and less repetitive. Though I’m not sure how comfortable I am with answering the second, but I’ll do it anyway for the sake of discussion…

If you could change one thing in the world right now, what would you alter?

I would remove all religious intolerance. Fighting wars in the name of God and Heaven was old in the 16th century, no one else should have to die over it. Oil, on the other hand, is a completely different story.

If you had to assassinate one famous person who is alive right now, who would it be, and how would you do it?

Kim Jong Il, the hyper-paranoid, propaganda driven, psuedo-communist leader of North Korea. His State controls all media in the country, as well as the economy, which has never been self-sustaining. He requires that all citizens of North Korea worship him and his father as deities. His foreign relations policies are dangerous, both to his people and the rest of the world, especially in regard to nuclear capability. And he’s been in power for 17 years and doesn’t hold elections, so will unfortunately remain so for the foreseeable future.

I think I’d have him hang himself, or something equally humiliating, so that the country would realize that he was never anything more than a man they allowed to control them.

If you could permanently alter one thing about your physical appearance, what would you change?

I have to side with Nick on this one. I’d definitely change my teeth. While they’re not bad, they’re certainly not perfect. The unfortunate bit is that I’m not a candidate for Invasalign, like he is. My fix involves oral surgery and years of braces, which is why it hasn’t been done.

If you could have stopped aging at any point in your life up to the present, how old would you want to remain?

22. Old enough to drink, young enough to enjoy being out, but still not completely adult. I remember this as the time when I most enjoyed my life, and was most comfortable with myself and my relationships with family and friends.

Going back to school this semester forced me to realize that I desperately needed a new method for keeping up with the abundance of information I’m expected to track on a daily basis. Work, school, calendars, social events, shopping lists, and my critical daily checklist is just too much to try and keep in my head. I tried using Entourage To-Do lists and flagging e-mail, but that’s virtually useless because Notes and Flags don’t sync with my BlackBerry because Microsoft likes to cripple it’s Mac apps (and I’m trying to come up with ways to not have to carry around this 17″ behemoth everywhere I go). For jotting quick notes I’d become accustomed to using Stickies, a nifty little app built into Mac OS (pictured below), which is fine when I need to take down a number and don’t have physical pen and paper, but clearly it got a little out of hand.

Also, anytime there is that much information involved it can take as much time to sift through it all to find what you want as it would to look it up again, or whatever the case may be. Ultimately I was left with no truly convenient way to store and organize my information. Until this week, when @jfritsche exposed me to Evernote. Best. Thing. Ever.

Now I can keep all my notes organized by topic, and access and edit them from anywhere, anytime across all my devices. And the best part is that it will index all the text (even words contained in images!!!) in my notes and make them searchable (in a very spotlight-esque way, I might add). There’s options for tagging and audio, as well. The one downside, and it’s only temporary, is that I can’t run the Mac client because it requires Leopard, and they haven’t written an app for BlackBerry yet, but once those issues are tackled I’ll be using it to catalogue absolutely everything. This is even one more reason that I can’t wait to get my BlackBerry 9000 so I can use it’s camera to upload pictures to my Evernote.

The next thing to try is the clipper which will pull content out of my browser, keeping the formatting and media intact, and transplant it into Evernote for future reference. I really can’t wait to see if they can figure out how to monetize all the data they’re collecting on, for instance, my affinity for John Mayer and my weekly grocery items. I’ll post on this again once I’ve used it for a few weeks and let you know if it meets my expectations of effectiveness. Fingers crossed.

Is it sad that I can’t wait to take pictures of every bottle of wine I consume so that I can reference my Evernote later when I can’t remember if I’ve had the bottle before? The service is still in beta (let me know if you’re interested in an invitation), and I haven’t gotten very deep into using it, but the potential applications are infinite! How will you use your Evernote? Or do you have something that works for you in the same capacity? Let me know in the comments!

***Update***: I just woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for a blog topic, popped into my Evernote “blog topics” notebook, and jotted it down. Done. Pretty sure it took less time than writing this update. Awesome-ness. Side note: some day some guy will hate me for keeping my BlackBerry on one nightstand and my laptop on the other, but that’s another blog. Night!

So I obviously picked the wrong time to start a month-long blog-athon. While I have to give myself a bit of credit for posting considerably more than I usually do (about as much in 2 weeks as I do in a year), it hasn’t been nearly as much as I’d been shooting for. This is primarily due to school owning me for the last 2 weeks, but with finals behind me now I’m happy to re-commit. One thing learned from the experience, though, is that daily posting is all but completely unrealistic. I have, however, come a long way to finding post-worthy things in my day-to-day, which was the deeper goal of the thing, beyond simply generating lots of content.

On to today’s actual post, before I hit to the pool, the continuation of “Nick’s If… Project“, week 3 (I’m a little behind, but I’ll be catching up this week):

If you could alter one physical characteristics of your mate, what would you change?

I don’t think I’m going to surprise anyone that knows my ex with this one, but I’m compelled to say height. It seems that everyone I date is shorter than I am, some significantly so. Not only would it make making-out easier, but it all but eliminates the possibility of what I’ll call, for lack of a better word, a Napoleon complex. It’s probably a confidence boost too, I would think. One less thing for someone to feel like they have to make up for. Though it’s a bit tough for me to relate.

If you could dine alone with anyone from any period in history, which person would it be?

Why do I feel like I already answered this one? Anyway, heads-of-state = boring, famous people = lame, scientists = showing my nerd card. How about DaVinci? He’s a little bit of everything, and probably a reasonably interesting conversationalist. The addition of the art and philosophy components rounds him out nicely, plus I could ask him about Mona Lisa’s true gender.

If you could, in retrospect, change one thing about your childhood, what would it be?

While the obvious answer for this question is something about my parent’s divorce, the more I consider the ramifications the less desirable it becomes. Truly, I’m convinced my childhood would have been wrought with turmoil one way or the other, so I doubt there’s any real fixing that. I would change my family’s ability (and desire) to travel. That’s not to say that I didn’t do my fair share of jet-setting around the country as a kid, but it was limited to the continental U.S., so it just wasn’t that exciting or educational. I’d really like to have even lived abroad as a child, perhaps learned another language or two, and made some friends in a few other countries. I especially wish these things had changed in time for my brother’s childhood, but alas, redneck it is.

If you could have any room in the world become your bedroom from now on, which room would you choose?

I fully expect everyone to crucify me for this answer, but I’m still stuck on the penthouse of the Mandarin-Oriental Dallas. It’s going to be an incredible view, have every conceivable amenity, and still be near my family and centrally located for all my travel needs. Plus *looks outside* the weather ain’t bad, most of the time.