I have a lot of ideas for new projects. I find that I only execute a small number of these ideas however. The past month that I haven’t blogged? It hasn’t been writer’s block. I have a lot of ideas for drafts, I just never write them.

I always think that I don’t have time to start something new. The idea of a brand new project, a clean slate, a blank canvas—it makes me think I need substantial time to dedicate to it at first. If I have a project already started, I can spend an hour on it and quit without worry. So what is it about starting something new that is so hard to get past?

I’ve found that things I thought would take a long time often resolve quite quickly. Then it’s done, out of my brain, I stop worrying, and my eye doesn’t start to twitch (a sure sign I’ve got too many ideas in limbo.)

This blog post is a perfect example. This is, in reality, a response to something ze Frank said today about self-motivation. That reminded me of the episode of The Show that I use for personal motivation. It was 6pm and I wanted to go home. “I don’t have time now,” I told myself, “I’ll write it later.” But my iPod was syncing and I thought “I’ll just start it.” Turns out I’m already done, and it didn’t take that long. One less idea in my head, waiting to be acted on.

I’m a fan of the email signature. It’s a great way to supply the people you talk to with your contact info, and once you set it you can forget it. One of my favorite things about desktop email programs (like Entourage) is the ability to have multiple signatures that you can select for the appropriate message. For example, the long signature with all your contact details isn’t necessary for inter-office mail. I even picked up the habit from my old employer to automatically add “Feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns” to the signature used to interact with clients.

I use Gmail as my primary email tool and love everything about it. My favorite feature is the integration of multiple email accounts. The drawback has always been that Gmail only supports a single signature. This is a problem. My default email signature looks like this:

–
————————————————
Justin Dickinson // jmdickinson@gmail.com
visit AllMyLiesAreWishes, my personal blog:
http://allmyliesarewishes.com

That’s all well and good for the majority of my emails. But I also have the How I Met Your Mother blog and an email address associated with that. When I email those readers I don’t want to link back here to AMLAW and I want to have the correct info. The only thing to do is remember to delete the default sig before hitting send. For a long time this was how I did it. I’d occasionally forget and in general it seemed like there should be a better way.

I installed Greasemonkey this morning. When looking through the available scripts I found the Gmail HTML Signatures plugin. This script adds the exact functionality to Gmail that I’d been missing. Now when I write to friends or readers from Have You Met Ted it automatically adds the appropriate signature. It even works on replies and forwards. Awesome!

I don’t take advantage of the HTML part because I think that big, colorful, or image-ful signatures are almost always obnoxious. It is just nice that Gmail is finally smart enough to append the appropriate sig based on what account I’m emailing from. Check out the script, and for that matter Greasemonkey, today.

While we’re on the topic, any recommendations for other must-have Greasemonkey scripts?

Ink hit paper Friday and now I finally have an apartment in New York City. I’ve been here for a few months and have looked, and looked for an apartment. It’s not an easy task. There were trials and tribulations along the way, but I finally found a place I really like. It’s in Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, which was my first choice due to the proximity to a) the Subway b) my friends c) the great neighborhood near by.

It’s a one bedroom, not huge but not tiny either, and I have a small office where I can keep my computer. I move in May 1st (after it gets new paint, doors, windows, etc) at which point I’ll post up some pictures. After I’m in, expect blog posts to become much more frequent.

Here’s an animated 360° Google Maps street view of my block:

Hoefler & Frere-Jones posted a great tip for Leopard users. In case you didn’t realize, you can preview any file quickly by selecting it in the finder and hitting SPACE. This works for images, documents and, it seems, also for fonts. The coolest part of this trick is that if you select a family of fonts, you can view them all at once. There’s even a slick animation.

Shown above is Diavlo, a great, free typeface from Jos Buivenga. Check out his site, there’s quite a few great, free fonts available.

This is a very NSFW video, but it’s one I also find to be quite awesome.

My favorites:

• Sarah Chalke (in German)
• Judy Reyes (sounding saucy)
• Zach Braff (sounding completely unthreatening)
• Rachel Bilson (sounding adorable, even when swearing, as per usual)
• Jamie Oliver (the British people don’t sound as taboo when swearing. why?)
• Derren Brown (in a laundromat?)
• Peter Krause (sounding awesome, as always)