As a student, my plate is always full. There are so many things I could be doing at any given time of the day. I fully believe that for the first part of my doctoral program I let that get the better of me. Since there was no way I would ever be finished with all the things I had to do, I often felt a reluctance to do much of anything. I met my deadlines, finished my homework, and even published a few conference papers. But with so much going on around me, and such an unlimited amount of potential work to complete, I was nailed down by analysis paralysis.

I love Evernote. And I love Launchy. But it turns out that combining the two was more difficult than I expected. All I wanted was a way to add a new note to Evernote from Launchy without having to open up Evernote's whole interface and do all sorts of clicking and such. After a bunch of digging, and a little bit of scripting, I finally created a way to do it.

Take the evernoteadd.bat script and place it anywhere you want. Replace my "_INBOX" with whatever default folder you want these notes to go to. Then simply create a Launchy action in Runner with this batch file as the program, and "$$" "$$" as the arguments. To create a new note from Launchy, type the name of the action you created, hit TAB, type the title of the note TAB text of the note RETURN.

Download the script

UPDATE: Thanks to StackOverflow, I figured out a way to make the script work without a temp file. I've updated the script accordingly

I spend a lot of time at my computer. As a student, I write papers and do programming assignments. As a researcher, I read papers, write more, and try to keep on top of what’s going on in the world and especially in my field. As a nerd, I play League of Legends. For all of those besides the last one, I often need to be able to block out distractions and focus on the work at hand. And working either at home with two kids or in an office with 12 other guys can be distracting.

I'm not a frequent blogger. I've given blogging a go several times in the past five or so years, and it's never really stuck with me. Or rather, I've never really stuck with it. I've done self-hosted Wordpress, Drupal, and Jekyll. I also have a Tumblr blog I used for a few months, and an old Wordpress.com hosted blog that I've abandoned. Most recently I tried out blogging on Google+ following the advice of G+ addict +Mike Elgan.

Not so very long ago, I used an iPad for a lot of things. One of those things was listen to podcasts. Now, the Apple podcast app came out about that time, and it was a train wreck. Nothing started, there was no way to manage a playlist, and half the time it would just quit. So I moved to Downcast and was a happy camper.