NOTE: This post has been sitting in draft for a long time, and I’m finally publishing it. I actually attended Tracker School in May 2010.

About 9 years ago, I picked up the movie The Hunted from an ex-rental discount bin. I hadn’t heard of it, and didn’t know what to expect, but it had Tommy Lee Jones and Benicio del Toro in it, so I figured it would be at least decent. Instead of being just decent, I loved it. Apart from becoming a favorite movie, it started me down the path of discovering Tom Brown (who was a technical consultant on the skills and knife used in the movie) and a field of interest that continues today.

We were hungry, but we were ready, so we decided to just go to the airport and eat there. Airplane food tends to be horrible, but airport food is normally at least bearable. On the train heading to SFO, an incredible example of a hipster geek presented itself. We counted the following “authority indicators” testifying to his most definite geekiness. The first 5 were immediately obvious, but then he just kept pulling things out during his 10-minute ride:

After posting to peterme.com about how I’d like to see more tools available for the IA community, I got an email from Lisa Chan from Stanford saying that she was also looking into creating a Search Log Analyser, and that if I was going to be working on one, why don’t we work together! This is really cool, I love how the Internet allows things like this to happen. I am here in Perth, WA, knowing all of 2 other IAs personally, and yet I will now be collaborating with another IA from one of the largest Universities in the US to build a tool to help all IAs.

Fortnightly articles/reports posted by Monsieur Guru Nielsen himself. Some of these are pretty good, personally I think some of them are just plain stupid.

An example of taking things too far: in the most recent alertbox, Nielsen extrapolates his calculated statement that the companies he studied which would “spend $3,042 per employee annually to cover time spent on the sixteen tasks we measured” to mean that if we improved intranets to the best ones they saw in their tests, we would “save the world economy $1.3 trillion per year”… come on dude, seriously. You so can’t make that assumption.

I have decided that in the spirit of the dot-bomb, I should outsource some of my normal, daily operations. I am not talking about business, I am talking about life.

What it really comes down to is that I don’t have time to do everything that I’d like to do, and there is even more that I would like to do, and in fact soon will be doing! To this end, I realised that it would be worth listing out everything that takes up time in a normal day/week of my life, and analysing what, of that list, can be outsourced to someone else (no doubt at a price).