Scott Hanselman

I was reading my boss's blog today, as he's a hard core GTD practitioner - more than I - and I'm trying to get better at it.

He recently went on an automation rampage kick around his home IT and wrote a pile of scripts. He also tends to email him self quick little reminders that are filed as todos, as do I, except he can just type

todo "Write a blog post on foo"

And it'll be mailed to him with an appropriate subject and tagged in his Gmail account.

He's using BLAT under Windows (using sendEmail under Linux). BLAT is a command-line util for sending email under Windows. It'll also post to USENET via NNTP if you like.

You can include all the settings on the command-line, or just "install" them in the registry, once, like this:

blat -install localhost whatever@yourdomain.com - - FromScott

Where "FromScott" is the name of a profile we'll use later. Then I can create a TODO.BAT (or TODO.PS1) and put this in it:

@echo off
blat -p FromScott -to whatever@yourdomain.com -subject %1 -body %1 > NUL

I like running BLAT with -debug, because I'm all about -verbose, don't you know.

NOTE: I'm using Vista and when I ran blat for the first time I was warned by the loader I didn't have MSVCR71.dll, so I ended up getting it and putting it in the same folder as BLAT then it was cool.

I ended up making todo.bat, worktodo.bat and hometodo.bat and they look like this:

start "TODO-ING" /MIN c:\pathto\blat.exe -p FromScott -to me@noneofyourcheese.com -subject %1 -body %1 -debug

So now,

c:>todo "Write a blog post about how my Home IT is automated"

Enjoy.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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