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Norwegian crime author Jørgen Jæger wants to kill you in his next book. But only if you want to. And you’re getting paid. Here’s what he says on krimjager.com (in Norwegian):

Kjære krimvenn!
Jeg sitter i disse dager fordypet i skrivingen av neste års kriminalroman om lensmann Ole Vik. Handlingen tar til på Korsneset syd for Bergen, men vil forflytte seg til andre deler av Norge etter hvert som krimdramaet skrider frem, og selvfølgelig til mitt fiktive paradis, Fjellberghavn. En del av handlingen vil også finne sted i utlandet. Boken vil omhandle mennesker med ulik sosial bakgrunn, alder og yrke, noe som gir meg en herlig frihet i valg av skjebner. Dermed åpner det seg en unik mulighet for deg som leser: Kunne du tenke deg å bli drept i denne boken?

Med en snedig begrunnelse, en spennende historie eller en artig fortelling om deg selv, kan du bli skrevet inn i evigheten, bli berømt og få en flott nekrolog lenge før du selv dør. Det er ikke mange forunt!

De fleste boklesere ønsker å lese om spennende mennesker og deres skjebner. Din skjebne i boken er å bli drept. Kanskje skjer dette nettopp på grunn av en av dine helt spesielle sider? Skisser gjerne hva som er spesielt ved deg i svarskjemaet nedenfor.

My English translation (and do feel free to correct me, and make a better translation!)

Dear friend and crime lover!
These days I’m writing next year’s crime novel about police officer Ole Vik. The novel takes place at Korsneset south of Bergen [Norway's second biggest city], but I want to move parts of the plot to other parts of Norway as the drama thickens, and of course to my fictitious paradise, Fjellberghavn. Parts of the book will also take part abroad. The book will have people with different social backgrounds, ages and professions, something that give a wonderful freedom when picking destinies. Which opens an unique opportunity for you as a reader: Would you like to get killed in this book?

With a good reason, an exiting or fun story about yourself, you can be written into history, get famous and get a great necrology a long time before you die. Not something that happens to lots of people!

Most readers wish to read about exiting people and their faith. Your destiny in the book is to get killed. Maybe you’re killed because of one of your special behaviours? Tell me what’s special about yourself in the form below.

How about that? The winner will be killed in the book, and some runnerups will get book prices. He as already gotten over 200 entries, so be sure to enter before 1. May.

I’m not sure if you have to be Norwegian? I would guess so, even though the rules doesn’t say anything about it.

I just thought this was a wonderful way to get interesting content for a book. And what a great way to market your future book. Brilliant.

Graham is thinking about making a Nike + iPod application for OS X. Here are some of my initial thoughts:

• Graphs that show your progress over time, either with the same route, or how far you manage to run in (example) 60 minutes.
• Map integration. Let me put my runs on a map like on Nike+
• Route playlist planning. Don’t know if that would be useful, but I thought it would be cool if I could put up a map for my run, grab data from previous runs of the same route, mark different sections of the run with a marker (like part 1, part 2 etc), and then drag in songs from iTunes to fit the different parts. Like power songs in the hills, slower stuff when it’s flat etc.
• Some way to integrate the running with iCal. Bitch me if I’m lazy!

If you have any ideas, put them here or in the thread at Flickr. Ditto if you have any good suggestion for other Mac software that uses the data the Nike + iPod collects.

I just had to post these two. Wow. Envy, Håvard!

Photographer: Hallgrim Haug Halfilms
Skier: Howie Arnstad Howie

Bartek Bargiel is another one in the race for the best Mac GTD application. In good Apple style it’s called iGTD and has some very nice features (and some annoying shortcomings as well).

The two things I like the most: Syncing and Quicksilver integration. Syncing worked flawless on my Mac. I had a few tasks in iCal already, synced from another GTD app; Actiontastic, which went open source some days ago. When I synced iGTD, it got these tasks from iCal with no problem.

And this is a good lesson if you are developing a Mac GTD application: Syncing with iCal. One GTD application that doesn’t have this is Midnight Beep Inbox. So there’s no way to get my tasks over to another app. Bah.

I also like that I can use Quicksilver to enter tasks into iGTD. And a nice menubar item with direct access to the app.

The date entry (for entering due dates) is very old fashioned. There’s no pop-up calender to click dates, and you can’t type “today” or “next monday” as some of the other apps can. It doesn’t even recognize 20.3.2007 as 20 March 2007, but as 20 March 2020. Weird.

So the race for the best Mac GTD app is still on. In my heat of possible winners are now five:

Actiontastic
iGTD
OmniFocus (not out yet)
Ghost Action
Midnight Beep Inbox

Which one do you like the best so far? I have big hopes for OmniFocus, based on the quality of the other apps Omni make. Of the other four, I think Inbox looks beautiful, but it’s soooo slow. The other three are great apps, and all have syncing that works. It’s too early to pick a winner for me.

how I keep in touch with (some of) my friends?,
originally uploaded by geirarne.

Brilliant table by Geir Arne. How would your chart look? Put up 10 of your friends, and check them off for e-mail, phone, sms etc.

Urgency vs. Importance and the 5th system for scattered todos:

Mentally superimpose the above graph on your desktop (or if you really want, draw it as your background).

Drag the resources (URL locations, documents, graphics, audio files, forms, whatever you’re working with) to the appropriate quadrants on your desktop. URLs are the exact pages on a site with which you need to do whatever task it is. You can chunk a bunch of related items for a discreet task in a folder.

Now rename the filenames to “verb-noun” (ie. “handle tax returns” URL item links to the online filing page on the IRS.gov site)

I find Sean’s tip on using the desktop quite interesting. I drag stuff to the desktop all the time. I will try to organize them according to his tip for some time, and see if that make sense for me. And I think he is spot on when he says that…

Anytime you find yourself uncomfortable contorting your processes to match the latest and greatest productivity religion, I think that’s bad. Ultimately you should learn the fundamentals of various different productivity religions and pick and choose the elements that work for you and make your own.

But - and this is an important but - sometimes it’s better to just use a system someone has spend quite some time thinking about. And not start spending days and hours and months trying to tweak it into your the “perfect-productivity-system-for-you”.

Use Exposé

If you decide to use Sean’s tip, here’s a productivity tip to the productivity tip: Set up Exposé with the upper right corner of your screen to be “Desktop”. When surfing, just grab the link from the browser, move your cursor up in the upper right corner, and wham - all open apps and windows disappear. And you can put the url exactly where you want it on the desktop, on your new urgency/importance grid.

Now you can, as Jon Crosby has decided to make Actiontastic free and open source:

The free (as in “free beer”) part starts tonight. The code (as in “freely available source code”) will follow when the overhead of a new team won’t crush the project under its own weight. Those with experience getting to 1.0 will understand what I mean.

Opening up this project for community participation is the best possible thing that I can think of doing for its future. Great things are on the horizon for that sweet intersection of the web and the desktop. I would rather discuss them openly and collaborate with other like-minded people than hide any of the details just to make another $29 shareware sale. I am not opposed to the idea of shareware in general and have purchased quite a bit of it myself over the past year. It’s just that shareware isn’t the right path for Actiontastic.

It will be very interesting to see what this leads to. I like Actiontastic. It’s fast, clean and solid. Download the latest non-expiring version here.

Very good advice from Rosyna Keller at Unsanity:

When “Optimize System Performance” appears during the update process do not touch your computer and definitely do not launch any applications. Just back away from your computer box as if it were a swarm of bees.

I always do this, and if you’re setting up a new Mac, and instaling lots of apps: One at a time. And reboot between every install. Saves you lots of troubles up the road.

How about where your friends eat? You could ask them, make lots of notes, or just sign up to TrustedPlaces. A new web service where you recommend, tag and rate restaurants, cafés, pubs and bars.

Yoo get a Google map showing the location (and you can zoom out on the map to see other trusted places nearby). There’s a “People who liked this also liked…” function. You can add pictures and tags, put up your own review or send an invitation to friend to go to the restaurant with you.

It all works very nicely. The design is clean and simple, and speed is ok (I hope it scales with more users!)

The site mostly UK yet, but you can add other cities and even countries easily. One thing that doesn’t work outside UK, is the map function. You can enter the address of the restaurant, but TrustedPlaces only shows a UK Google map. I talked to Sue, one of the people behind TrustedPlaces about this:

…although the map function isn’t working correctly as yet for some locations outside the UK, people can still join up and load reviews and we will ensure that they are mapped correctly in the very near future.

Check out new features and other tidbits at the TrustedPlaces blog. One of the things you can read about is how TrustedPlaces members have started bumping into each other in bars.

If you know me, I’m Oyvind at TrustedPlaces. Feel free to invite me as your friend!

When the nice meal is finished, you’ve visited the trendy bar recommended, and you come back to hotel, do remember to hide a secret in the hotel room (yes, you can wait until the next day).

I have two four Joost invitations I would like to give to you.

Post a link to brilliantdays.com or one of my articles on your blog/site. And put the link to your site in the comments below. I’ll pick out two next week. Hint: One of them will be for best post…

Update

Click through to the comments to see the details on the invites!
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