Tom's Journal

• End with the phone number, nothing else. I once was told that if you end a message by saying your phone number followed by "goodbye" or any other words, it's more difficult for the person to remember your number. The last words interrupt the person's memory-recording process. Therefore I always end with the phone number, even if it means saying, "I look forward to hearing from you. xxx-yyy-zzzz " It only sounds odd the first 1,000 times you do it.
  
• Record the phone number early in the message. Most voicemail systems make it difficult to surf around the message, and even users of the systems that don't have this problem usually don't have the training to know that the feature exists or what buttons to push. However, re-playing the message from the start is easy. I hate having to listen to a 3 minute message to catch a number at the end. (Ever notice that the longer the message, the more likely someone will try to interrupt you right when the critical bit of information FINALLY plays again?). Therefore I usually start with, "Hi! This is xxx at xxx-yyy-zzzz."
  
• Avoid phone-tag by saying why you called, or by asking for something. If phone tag means your goal won't be reached until the 4th iteration of calls, save yourself one iteration by saying what you want in the message. I often record a message like, "I have a feeling that we're going to play phone-tag, so to save one iteration let me say that I need xyz." Now the person can call me back prepared.
  
• Keep is short. I find that over-sharing on a message bites me in the future, or I end up leaving message after message with updates. It's difficult to find the ballance between leaving too much info and too little. If I'm going to ask for something that needs a lot of explanation, something complicated, don't try to do it in a non-interactive medium like a recorded message. However do say what you are calling about. "I have question about the xyz. I need to get your advice about who the right person to talk with is. Can we talk?"
  
• Always leave a message, even a no-op message. In business, I'm often caught in the situation of claiming, "but I called and you weren't there!" with no audit trail to back me up. So, instead, I always leave a message. However, if I'm leaving a message just to prove that I called, I just leave a no-op message: "Hi! This is xxxxxx, please call me at xxx-yyy-zzzz." Otherwise, I may over-share and get in trouble. It's really just a timestamp, so just leave a timestamp. "Hi. It's Tom trying to reach you at hh:mm."
  

Darik's Boot 'n' Nuke is a mini-Linux distro (image for Floppy and CD-ROM). You boot on it, it erases every disk on the computer. You get one chance to say, "No, I didn't mean to do it."

I tried a package called "Autoclave" but this was much faster and betterer.

Plus, "Boot 'N Nuke" is a much better name.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/dban/

• Rule 1: If I watch all the way to the end of the program, I have to delete it. Don't give me any of that "oh, I'll want to watch that again" bullshit. You don't have enough time to watch everything that gets recorded, let alone watch it a second time.
• Rule 2: No marking things as "keep forever" except the 4-5 programs that I currently care about. "24", South Park, The West Wing, Sunday night's Adult Swim (just the first half), and any episodes of HBO's Sunday night lineup.
  • Sub-Rule: If you add anything to the list of programs, you have to delete something of equal length.
• Rule 3: If it's about to get old enough to be automatically deleted, let it be deleted. No extending the date. Archiving it to tape "because I really want to see it" (see rule 1 about how much free time you have). Dude, ya just gotta learn to "let it go".