What is risk, really? If you choose not to take advantage of an opportunity, you risk not accomplishing great things. If you go for it, you risk losing things that are important to you. You can’t escape risk. The only question, then, is, what are you willing to risk?

This is certainly not an original thought. Smarter, prettier people than I have explained this point much better and in much more detail. Right now, though, I need this reminder. I’m working on an amazing opportunity—putting together an event for World Usability Day.

It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this, and the task is daunting. But I see it as an opportunity to build a stronger local community of user experience practitioners. Should the event flop, though, I risk looking like a fool and losing credibility within the local community. What’s more: we’re late to the game. The event is little morethan 3 weeks away and we’re still in the planning stages, so the pressure is definitely on. And, as with all risk, (at least, all risk that I’ve encountered), the self-doubt is as great as the opportunity. But it’s just self-doubt, a side effect of risk. I can either have the courage to push forward with the event or give in to the self-doubt and throw in the towel. What am I doing? With the help of several friends, I’m going to organize an amazing event. And when my self-doubt hits me again, and it will, I’ll push through it. I’ll win.

I read Never Eat Alone a few months ago. It’s a great book that I strongly recommend. I’ve had a lunches with a lot of people over the past 6 months. I’m certainly no expert, but I did want to share some preparation tips that I’ve learned over the past few months:

• Confirm the lunch. Once everyone has agreed to the lunch, send out a final confirmation that includes the day, date, time, and location. If the person doesn’t know how to get to the place, send them a link to Google Maps or Mapquest. If there are several people attending, include a list of attendees.

• Exchange phone numbers. Get their office and mobile phone number and give them yours. If you’re running late (or, if they’re running late), you’ll need this to get in touch with them.

• Call before you leave. Call them before you head out. You’ll find out if they’re running late or need to cancel it at the last minute.

Been a long time since I’ve done one of these. Insert random excuse here. To my defense, though, it’s been a long time since I’ve consistently posted to my blog…

In the past three months, I’ve had quite a few ups and downs. First, I’ve actually started working with a trainer, so am exercising twice a week, now. I feel better and think straighter on the days I exercise. It’s amazing. My goal this week, though, is to exercise—some cardio—on Wednesday and Saturday. Eventually, I’d like to do some type of exercise every day of the week.

I’m still getting up relatively early, though it varies. Ranges from 6:00 to 7:00. My ultimate problem is still that I’m not going to bed early enough. So, my goal this week is be in bed by 10:00 and asleep by 11:00.

I’d also like to get an alarm clock that will wakes me up with light instead of sound. Take last night. I woke up twice. Once at 2:00 and once at 5:00. Both times I was wide awake. Of course, I went back to sleep. If I get up that early—even if my body is saying, “come on, get up, you lazy bastard!”, I’ll pay for it later. But when the alarm went off at 6:00, I could not get up. My body was saying: “What are you thinking?!” From what I’ve read, a light-based alarm clock will be a smoother transition from sleeping to waking, so I can actually get up when it goes off.

I just started a new job a few weeks ago. Nothing special about that, except that the company I now work for was started six years ago by two 17 year-olds. Now that’s both amazing and depressing.

Here I am, almost 30 and have not achieved anywhere near the business success that they have. Of course, I haven’t tried either. So, on the one hand, it’s violently depressing that 17 year-olds can be more successful at business in the first 17 years of their lives than I have been in my first 30. And on the other hand, it’s quite inspiring. If they can do it, I can do it, too.

I remember a high school teacher that once told my class that we had to be realistic in what we hoped to achieve out in the real world. He was trying to level-set our expectations—to strip out some of that adolescent idealism, but thinking back, his statement was counter-productive. Instead of focusing on what we could not achieve, he should have taught us how we could achieve great things.

And that’s where I’m at. I’ve finally learned how to accomplish great things because I have developed the discipline to accomplish many small things. This realization has been a long time coming, but I very much feel that I can accomplish any goal I set and with every goal I accomplish, the realm of possibility expands.

So, to answer my own question: I get inspiration from where I’ve been and where I’m going. Stories about successful people just remind me that anything, taken one step at a time, is possible.

I’m trying out Omea Pro and so far, I’m really frustrated. This application has so much potential, but using it is not as smooth as I had hoped it would be.

First off, the concept behind Omea is awesome. It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time. A long time. Basically, it’s an application that allows you to sort your files, email, news groups, feeds, bookmarks, contacts, and tasks as if they were the same thing. That’s right, you can tag a file, a bookmark, an email, and a feed and see them all in the same place, allowing you to see all the information associated with a project in one place. There is no artificial separation of these items. If you have a file associated with a project, you can find it in the same place as the 200 emails you’ve received about the project.

To date, I’ve been using ContentSaver to store my resources. It was the best application I could find of its kind, allowing me to assign a file to multiple categories, so that I could put my hand on it when I needed it. But it fell short of being powerful because it imported files into a database and it didn’t catalog email very well. I used it because it was better than storing things on the antiquated hierarchical file system (for the record, I’m using Windows XP).

Now Omea Pro. I had to jump on this application as soon as I heard about it. But, it’s like pulling teeth to get it to work.

1. First off, the Firefox plugin doesn’t always work. When it fails, I have to restart both Omea and Firefox. That’s probbaly going to be a pretty big nuisance once I get up and running (assuming I stick with it that long) as a lot of the information I want to catalog comes from the Web.

2. I can’t create new categories at every dialog that I can associate an object with a category. The idea of assignment and creation are, seemingly, two separate tasks. There are plenty of times (especially in the beginning) when I need to create a new category for the particular piece of content that I’m saving, but can’t because I’m in assignment mode, not in create mode. This isn’t always the case, but it is often enough to be extremely frustrating.

3. I can’t assign feeds to a category. I can assign posts from a feed to a category, but what if I want an entire feed in a category? This would be partiuclarly useful when I’m creating new workspaces.

4. There is no way to edit HTML files. This wouldn’t be a negative thing, except that it doesn’t always display HTML clippings in the best manner. In fact, sometimes it’s downright bad.

5. I can’t associate multiple files to a category. For normal operation, this is probably not necessary. Except that I’m transferring a fairly large collection of files from ContentSaver to Omea and it would save a lot of time.

Even with all these quirks, I’m willing to give this application a shot. It does everything I want it to do—everything I wish the OS did. Maybe Windows Vista will get it right next year, and maybe not. With any luck, though, Omea Pro, even with all its annoyances, will actually make my life a little easier. I’ll definitely report back on my progress. And I’ll even try to be a bit more positive than negative next time.