Toluu

The Newly Rich

4HWW, Family Style

Outsourced Wednesdays: Finding Published ArticlesMay 21

Finally! HavingThingsDone.com has begun doing tasks for readers of this blog who have shown interest. This post highlights the interaction between one of our assistants and one of you (Tara). The following task was completed this week.

Find Info On & Articles by Dr. Sema Kahn

Client

Time allotted for task: 60 minutes

Dr. Sema Kahn is a surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I have heard that she has written an article on doing mastectomies (removal of breast) in patients with metastatic (Stage IV) breast cancer.

Please do some web research (and academic library databases if you have access) to see if you can find this or other related (e.g., breast cancer, metastic breast cancer) articles and information about Dr. Sema Kahn.

Send me PDFs or links to articles and web pages as a summary.

Assistant

You can find all my research notes and references in this Google Notebook.

The first article, which I think is the one you are looking for is called “Does aggressive local therapy improve survival in metastatic breast cancer?” I was not able to find a copy of it through my university library. It is found in MEDLINE and the PMID is 12407345.

The second article, by

Simplify Before You OrganizeMay 9

As we prepare to move (yet again), we’re faced with the same question we always ask: what should we do with all our stuff? Despite paring down each time we move, we as human beings (or maybe more so as Americans) just tend to accumulate stuff. It comes in through your mailbox, in grocery and shopping bags, and via all those many packages from Amazon (hey, free shipping!).

I recently took an airplane-ride-skim of a little book called 30 Days to a Simpler Life. It’s about ten years old, but the advice was largely still relevant. One of my favorite takeaways was to

Simplify before you organize

It makes perfect sense when you read it, but it’s easy to work quite differently. Whether you’re looking at too many shoes in your closet, projects scattered around the office table, or even todos that are rolling around in your head, the tendency might be to think “okay, I need to put all this in a nicely structured system, and then I can decide what to do with it all.”

wrong.

Instead, whip through whatever mess you have and mercilessly delete things. Delete might mean throwing it in the garbage, recycling it, giving it away, or crossing it off your mental list before it ever sees the li

Outsourced Wednesdays: Wicked TicketsMay 7

Most of the time, outsourcing is well worth it. Occasionally, there will be a glitches of miscommunication that you chalk up to lessons learned. But every great once in a while, it all comes together; fate gives you a big toothy grin and the results are better than you ever expected…

Here was my original request:

I’d like to take my wife to either an evening or a matinee (daytime) show of Wicked in Chicago within the next two weeks. Please give me the basic prices and availability for buying direct from the theater. Also do a quick check on Craigslist for any decent offers.

And here was the response:

The prices vary based on the seat, and the day. If you go during the
week (tuesday through thursday) the prices range from $32 (per ticket)
for the upper balcony to $85 for the front row. If you go on a weekend
(friday through sunday) the prices range from $37 for the upper
balcony to $90 for the front row. I am not sure that these are the
right prices, however, because on craigslist wicked tickets are selling
for over $100, but those prices are taken directly from the Wicked,
Chicago website.

There are a

5 Tips for beginning bloggersMay 5

I never thought I’d write a post like this. The internet is already packed full of entire blogs devoted to blogging about how to be a good blogger. But increasingly I find myself repeating the same little tidbits of advice (usually in a grumpy, ranting tone) to all my friends that start new blogs.

I’m not even going to look at all the other great advice out there, let alone try and steal from it. The list below– whether helpful, useless, fresh, or seemingly-unoriginal, is just from my own little experience.

#1- Business or personal. Take your pick. Can’t decide? Create two blogs. It’s not hard. I’m cringing at the thought of approaching another election season here in the U.S., because it means I’ll have to wade through all the politically charged garbage from blogs that I usually look to for helpful Actionscript snippets. That doesn’t mean you can’t incorporate your personality and personal experiences into your site- that’s part of what makes for interesting reading! Just save the completely off-topic stuff for Twitter or Facebook.

#2- Draft and wait. This post was like a lot of others- it sat in my WordPress database as a bullet-point draft for a couple weeks. Then I came back and filled in the blanks, and let it sit for a few more days. It’s not that I’m trying to be a perfectionist. It’s just that the internet has made people forget the value of rough drafts and iterations. Thanks to search engines and archives like the

Stolen Fridays: Hey, That’s My Content!May 2

Finally, a personal outsourcing service that you can’t trust.

Looks like GetALife360 is yet another “we have an office in the U.S. but we’re really in the Phillipines” personal outsourcing service. On their homepage, they state:

honesty is our only existing policy

That’s why I was particularly surprised to see one of my most popular posts pasted on their site verbatim, with no attribution. Our lawyer made a call and in less than an hour it was removed.

You might be tempted to call it an honest mistake, but as of right now, they still have the post they stole from AllBusiness.com sitting on their home page. Apparently they’re considering these matters on a “case by case basis”

UPDATE: They’ve now taken down the AllBusiness article as well.

Have a great weekend everyone!