Thursday, November 15, 2007
THE MASTERLIST IS MY BRAIN
The MasterList is a relational database I invented in 1998. For 10 years the idea and the reality of it have been my constant working companion. For 3 or 4 years, my wife Jo-Anne and I successfully sold hundreds of licenses annually to end-users to manage their lives and careers. Because I can't live or breathe without threading my thoughts, ideas, and actions through it, my fondest dream was to make The MasterList web-based and as portable and ubiquitous as my cellular phone. At that I have failed. So, Jo-Anne has been been winding the business of The MasterList down, while I have gone back to work for the past several years as a trial attorney. And, at the end of this year (2007) we will shutter the business operation of the operating company, Sumac Consulting Group, LLC. Now, Jo-Anne is preparing to resume an outside career to take advantage of her MBA.
That being said, The MasterList will live on as freeware for anybody who wants a license. For an unlimited free license, just email me, billnbrt@yahoo.com, after you download the trial copy.
The good news is that the custom crafted .dll file for the original Visual Fox Pro database has gotten better with age. With today's super fast, high-ram computers, the program functions at whizzing speed. That's a factor of it's simple, uncomplicated functionality, which is not burdened by trying to do too much and not having had to "live up to" the creative and graphical opportunities presented by today's desktop PC power and speed. And, because PC's are so quick today, with 1 gig ram now being standard as opposed to 32 MB when The MasterList came out, the one original flaw in the Visual Fox Pro database format, the occasional database corruption, never occurs anymore. Across thousands of users, we have not had a report in at least 4 years of any database corruption with the program.
Even better news is that the program was advanced enough in its coding, that it functions completely in all Microsoft operating systems, including Vista, which to our relief and surprise accommodates The MasterList with complete backwards compatibility. The possible weak link in future use is the connectivity of successor Microsoft Outlook email, assuming that MS program continues to evolve through future iterations faster than the Vista operating system. On the other hand, I am seeing a consumer gravitation away from MS email, at least on the personal side. And, if I were running a small to medium business, I would buy into Yahoo or g-mail accounts for my employees, and would migrate to Mozilla FireFox rather than Internet Explorer as my browser.
Part of the plan of our web-based version was to integrate web-based email into the program hopefully in partnership with Yahoo, Google, or even Microsoft. Either our naive business instincts or our capital dry-up, or both, led us to a considered rejection from Google at the CEO level, and an inability to penetrate the "institutional firewalls" to communicate meaningfully with Yahoo and Microsoft.
So, to the point. Why is The MasterList My Brain? Because I integrate almost all that I am through this database as if it was my most precious tool. I use it. How? Too many ways to count. So, let me go through an arbitrary exercise of listing some things we do in life, and how I do them with and through the MasterList. So, to implement this ad hoc promotion, I have first run a Google search on the following terms: ""things we do in life" list". By the way, The MasterList is a list of things I do in life. I have a MasterList program loaded at work. And, another at home. If I had a web-based version, I could connect these and even connect in other users to create ad hoc teams ala My Space. Alas, I do not.
So, to continue the exercise on the theme of The MasterList is My Brain.
First site I come to is gapingvoid.com. The author has a cartoon. He says he has drawn over 5000 cartoons on the back of business cards. This one has the caption: "Glob of chaos that follows me around like a dog." This intrigues me. For years, I have drawn very practical diagrams, maybe hundreds of them, to outline tactical situations. And, in my MasterList databases I have thousands of entries relating to the various projects, threads, action horizons, call-them-what-you will's of my life. A MasterList task as defined by me is a word cartoon of something that is following me around like a dog. And, I need to do something about it. So,I write it up as a "task". I give that task a home in a project. Then, I relate it, to taste, to knowledge through notes and linking. Anytime I want, I can penetrate the chaos and follow a simple thread right through one end of the chaos and out the other, without ever missing a molecule of relevant data on that thread.
Second site I come to is soriano-ph.com. The title of the relevant blog page is "The Way Our Priorities Should Be". The author writes: "We live in a very complicated world under a myriad of human activities that we have to take care of a lot of things. ... Understandably, no one else would be able to define what our priorities in life are, except ourselves." What can I say. This author understands the problem. For me, The MasterList, which is a system applied through a relational database, is a way to define and act on my priorities, but it is so much more. It is a vehicle to traverse and penetrate through the complex myriad the author speaks of and to find simple, malleable focus that is action-directed, or not, depending. And, as for those dependent conditions, to even provide an architecture for handling the definition and bigger "questions" of how to deal with those.
Third link, and then I will put this essay to rest for the evening. It's a Christian blog called Happy Mama. The Motto of her site is a quote: “We MUST have an unconditional readiness to change in order to be transformed in Christ.” — Dietrich von Hildebrand. OK. The MasterList is my readiness tool for change, be it conditional or unconditional. It is the Field of Play in which I deal with the issue of life change. I can filter Christ out of the equation on this and say that Happy Mama understands. She writes: "I like to categorize. I began grouping together my goals and ended up with 6 different areas of study, which I prioritized according to general importance. Under each of the 6 areas were a set of specific goals to achieve and then a set of sample topics. Sure, as the years go by, I’ll end up re-wording, tweaking, and adding things. ... Maybe because I’m a “list” person and a visual learner I needed to see these goals drawn out. Maybe you ...don’t need such a list, because most of the things are obvious. What the list did for me, however, was: 1. It put into perspective the length of time I have ... 2. It gave me a visual hierarchy of importance among the areas of study." I don't need to go on. Happy Mama does not have The MasterList, but she is living a MasterList.
I find it curious that by just running the search term: ""things we do in life" list", I came up with these 3 sites authored by fulfilled people each tackling the chaos, the myriad, and the changeableness of life in similar ways.
The MasterList was designed to tap into this way of seeing and doing things. It still works and because I work through it in an iconic, sacramental way, it works for me and helps me work my way through my life.
Amen.
The MasterList is a relational database I invented in 1998. For 10 years the idea and the reality of it have been my constant working companion. For 3 or 4 years, my wife Jo-Anne and I successfully sold hundreds of licenses annually to end-users to manage their lives and careers. Because I can't live or breathe without threading my thoughts, ideas, and actions through it, my fondest dream was to make The MasterList web-based and as portable and ubiquitous as my cellular phone. At that I have failed. So, Jo-Anne has been been winding the business of The MasterList down, while I have gone back to work for the past several years as a trial attorney. And, at the end of this year (2007) we will shutter the business operation of the operating company, Sumac Consulting Group, LLC. Now, Jo-Anne is preparing to resume an outside career to take advantage of her MBA.
That being said, The MasterList will live on as freeware for anybody who wants a license. For an unlimited free license, just email me, billnbrt@yahoo.com, after you download the trial copy.
The good news is that the custom crafted .dll file for the original Visual Fox Pro database has gotten better with age. With today's super fast, high-ram computers, the program functions at whizzing speed. That's a factor of it's simple, uncomplicated functionality, which is not burdened by trying to do too much and not having had to "live up to" the creative and graphical opportunities presented by today's desktop PC power and speed. And, because PC's are so quick today, with 1 gig ram now being standard as opposed to 32 MB when The MasterList came out, the one original flaw in the Visual Fox Pro database format, the occasional database corruption, never occurs anymore. Across thousands of users, we have not had a report in at least 4 years of any database corruption with the program.
Even better news is that the program was advanced enough in its coding, that it functions completely in all Microsoft operating systems, including Vista, which to our relief and surprise accommodates The MasterList with complete backwards compatibility. The possible weak link in future use is the connectivity of successor Microsoft Outlook email, assuming that MS program continues to evolve through future iterations faster than the Vista operating system. On the other hand, I am seeing a consumer gravitation away from MS email, at least on the personal side. And, if I were running a small to medium business, I would buy into Yahoo or g-mail accounts for my employees, and would migrate to Mozilla FireFox rather than Internet Explorer as my browser.
Part of the plan of our web-based version was to integrate web-based email into the program hopefully in partnership with Yahoo, Google, or even Microsoft. Either our naive business instincts or our capital dry-up, or both, led us to a considered rejection from Google at the CEO level, and an inability to penetrate the "institutional firewalls" to communicate meaningfully with Yahoo and Microsoft.
So, to the point. Why is The MasterList My Brain? Because I integrate almost all that I am through this database as if it was my most precious tool. I use it. How? Too many ways to count. So, let me go through an arbitrary exercise of listing some things we do in life, and how I do them with and through the MasterList. So, to implement this ad hoc promotion, I have first run a Google search on the following terms: ""things we do in life" list". By the way, The MasterList is a list of things I do in life. I have a MasterList program loaded at work. And, another at home. If I had a web-based version, I could connect these and even connect in other users to create ad hoc teams ala My Space. Alas, I do not.
So, to continue the exercise on the theme of The MasterList is My Brain.
First site I come to is gapingvoid.com. The author has a cartoon. He says he has drawn over 5000 cartoons on the back of business cards. This one has the caption: "Glob of chaos that follows me around like a dog." This intrigues me. For years, I have drawn very practical diagrams, maybe hundreds of them, to outline tactical situations. And, in my MasterList databases I have thousands of entries relating to the various projects, threads, action horizons, call-them-what-you will's of my life. A MasterList task as defined by me is a word cartoon of something that is following me around like a dog. And, I need to do something about it. So,I write it up as a "task". I give that task a home in a project. Then, I relate it, to taste, to knowledge through notes and linking. Anytime I want, I can penetrate the chaos and follow a simple thread right through one end of the chaos and out the other, without ever missing a molecule of relevant data on that thread.
Second site I come to is soriano-ph.com. The title of the relevant blog page is "The Way Our Priorities Should Be". The author writes: "We live in a very complicated world under a myriad of human activities that we have to take care of a lot of things. ... Understandably, no one else would be able to define what our priorities in life are, except ourselves." What can I say. This author understands the problem. For me, The MasterList, which is a system applied through a relational database, is a way to define and act on my priorities, but it is so much more. It is a vehicle to traverse and penetrate through the complex myriad the author speaks of and to find simple, malleable focus that is action-directed, or not, depending. And, as for those dependent conditions, to even provide an architecture for handling the definition and bigger "questions" of how to deal with those.
Third link, and then I will put this essay to rest for the evening. It's a Christian blog called Happy Mama. The Motto of her site is a quote: “We MUST have an unconditional readiness to change in order to be transformed in Christ.” — Dietrich von Hildebrand. OK. The MasterList is my readiness tool for change, be it conditional or unconditional. It is the Field of Play in which I deal with the issue of life change. I can filter Christ out of the equation on this and say that Happy Mama understands. She writes: "I like to categorize. I began grouping together my goals and ended up with 6 different areas of study, which I prioritized according to general importance. Under each of the 6 areas were a set of specific goals to achieve and then a set of sample topics. Sure, as the years go by, I’ll end up re-wording, tweaking, and adding things. ... Maybe because I’m a “list” person and a visual learner I needed to see these goals drawn out. Maybe you ...don’t need such a list, because most of the things are obvious. What the list did for me, however, was: 1. It put into perspective the length of time I have ... 2. It gave me a visual hierarchy of importance among the areas of study." I don't need to go on. Happy Mama does not have The MasterList, but she is living a MasterList.
I find it curious that by just running the search term: ""things we do in life" list", I came up with these 3 sites authored by fulfilled people each tackling the chaos, the myriad, and the changeableness of life in similar ways.
The MasterList was designed to tap into this way of seeing and doing things. It still works and because I work through it in an iconic, sacramental way, it works for me and helps me work my way through my life.
Amen.
