Constant Random Change

To mark the start of the new year, I’ll be posting simple suggestions to improve your life this year for each of the major categories in this blog.

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Install and set up My Weekly Browsing Schedule on Firefox.

(This, of course, assumes that your main browser is Firefox.)

My Weekly Browsing Schedule is a Firefox extension that automatically opens websites according to the schedule you provide it. Setting this up on your browser can boost your productivity in two ways:

1. It saves you the burden of manually going through your bookmarks.

People normally use bookmarks to open regularly visited websites at certain times in a day. They open mail, news, and social networking sites at the start of the day and at regular intervals throughout the day. Some sites like webcomics and stock market news only need to be visited once a day. Other sites require less visiting frequency, maybe just once or twice a week.

The problem with the bookmark approach is that your browsing efficiency is dependent on whether you’re disciplined enough to develop a good browsing habit e.g. you don’t visit certain sites too often (see the next reason below) and you don’t forget to go to the rarely visited sites.

My Weekly Browsing Schedule can help resolve that problem. You can define which sites open at startup. You can define which sites open at certain hours and the days of the week. You can even tell the extension to catch up with certain sites in case the browser wasn’t open when they were scheduled.

2. It helps cut down on distractions.

When you’re working and have internet access, it can be tempting to check your mail, your social networking sites, and news sites once in a while to keep up with things.

Studies show that this habit can kill your productivity. Don’t believe them? Install ManicTime and see for yourself how many hours a day you waste on those sites.

The most common suggestion to deal with this problem is to learn to “batch” these sites at certain times (I personally use 4 hour intervals). Now while I’ve written against batching previously, the scenario is different in this case because of the conversational nature of e-mail and social networking sites. The more you visit and participate in these sites, the more you’re compelled to post new stuff and initiate conversations.

When you limit yourself to certain times during the day, you get more work done while still keeping up with the updates in your social network (preventing you from becoming a soulless zombie/corporate slave). The extension can help you with this, though you’ll still have to learn to close the sites when you’re done to keep yourself from refreshing/checking on them.

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The downside to this extension is that the UI is clunky at the moment. Setting up a schedule will eat up a bit of your time, especially if you visit a lot of sites regularly.

Finally decided to take the StrengthsFinder quiz after months of buying the book. My top 5 strengths according to the site below the cut:

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Just some quick tips when to use JPEG and PNG files.

We’ll be using GIMP as our image editing software for this post.

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After reading various books and magazine articles on management, many clueless managers suddenly become prone to making grave mistakes based on a certain fallacy:

High morale leads to high productivity.

When these managers hear how successful companies manage their employees, sometimes even going to great lengths to provide morale boosting perks, they think that if they do all of that to their employees they’re going to see a drastic improvement in productivity.

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In the next few posts, I’ll be posting about other fundamentals that I have missed so that we could move on to better stuff (i.e. stuff that not everyone knows) by the time I reach the 100 post mark.

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The Pareto Principle (also known by many names e.g. Law of the Vital Few, 80/20 Principle, etc.) is a widely observed phenomenon wherein 80% of the effects come from only 20% of the causes.

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As a follow up to my previous post, here are the extensions installed in my Firefox installation. I’m not really a power user when it comes to browsing so a lot of mainstays (e.g. Greasemonkey) are missing from my browser. Anyway, without further ado, here’s my list (again in decreasing importance):

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Having to reinstall windows twice from scratch (first was when I migrated to Windows 7 last week, second was when my RAID setup failed when I transferred to a new motherboard two days ago), I’ve discovered which of my apps are absolutely essential for my computer. Here’s a list in a somewhat descending order of importance:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.5 – my main browser. It’s slower than the next browser, but it makes up for it by having extensions like the widescreen “killer extension” Tree Style Tab.
• Google Chrome 2 – Without the tree style tab, I can’t have as many tabs open in Chrome so it’s relegated as my secondary browser. I have two monitors in my rig and Chrome sits on the right monitor with Facebook on while Firefox sits on the center monitor (the left monitor slot is reserved for my laptop). I also use chrome for Google searching when my center screen is occupied.
• Yahoo! Messenger 9 – I rarely chat online but I still have Y!M on for the same reason why I still have a cellphone even though I rarely text or call: it’s just there to provide a (free) means of contacting me. The mail alerts are even more important – without Y!M mail alerts I probably would have migrated to GMail a long time ago.
• Launchy 2 – my program launcher. All my programs are just an Alt-Space away. And before you suggest the Windows 7 Search Bar, yes, I’ve tried that for a few days and I found out that it’s too slow in Windows 7 RC1 especially when compared to Launchy. The latter also doesn’t show up in the center of the screen, forcing my eyes to shift a few degrees to read the search list. Maybe when the search bar speeds up, or if there’s an option to show the search bar at the center of the screen, I might use the latter instead of Launchy.
• GIMP 2.6 – No pirated software means no Photoshop. Fortunately, GIMP is more than enough for daily photo editing tasks.
• Notepad++ 5 – my text-editor-that-can-parse-unix-newlines-properly. Useful for reading server logs or any random text file that I need to read.
• KeePass 1.16 – my password manager. All of my passwords hidden behind a strong 20 character password. I’m using version 1 so that its database could be used with my Linux laptop.
• Steam – I’ve been buying legal video games ever since I got a job that pays enough for me to consider not pirating games. Problem with legal games is that storing the boxes and the discs can be a hassle. With Steam games, I don’t have a storage problem (because the game is just downloaded off the net) nor do I have to keep discs around in order to get through the DRM (because Steam’s DRM is already integrated).
• 7-zip – for unzipping and un-rar-ing files. Also for archiving.
• Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Air, and JDK 6 – to allow Flash and Java programs to work on the browser and desktop. Note that .NET Framework 3.5 is already installed along with Windows 7. Also, Silverlight isn’t that popular yet to merit a download.
• WordWeb 5 – Ctrl-Alt-W for spell checking and synonym hunting is a habit I picked up from my previous work. I had to turn off the one-click lookup because it screws up with games (Ctrl-Right Click is crouch + zoom, a common move in shooting games).
• VLC and CCCP – for playing videos. CCCP gives me the option of using the lightweight Media Player Classic.
• PDF-XChange Viewer – my replacement for Adobe Reader. Decided to try it out after a recent Lifehacker poll.
• VirtualBox 3 – my development environment, virtualizing Ubuntu instances for both development and testing.
• PuTTy – my IDE. Seriously, though, I prefer connecting to my Ubuntu instances via PuTTy/SSH instead of using the virtual machines own terminal. It’s not faster, but it allows me to use the screen real estate of my main PC which is a big plus.
• Mozy – my backup scheme. All hard drives borked? Not a problem with Mozy.
• AVG Free 8.5 – free anti-virus software so that Windows would shut up about not having anti-virus software installed.
• FileZilla – for transferring files via FTP or SFTP. Used mostly for managing my website.
• OpenOffice.org 3.1 – for opening my game-related spreadsheets e.g. Mafia Wars ROI spreadsheet, TWEWY pin progress sheet, Persona persona sheets, etc. Also there to open random Word-documents-that-should’ve-been-PDF files.
• TweetDeck – like Y!M, allows me to forgo manual checking of my Twitter home page.
• JWPce – my Japanese wordprocessor + dictionary. Useful for translating unfamiliar kanji.
• JR Screen Ruler – for determining the exact pixel width when doing web development.

Excluded, of course, are the hardware drivers like ATI Catalyst and Creative Audio Control Panel, as well as the specific games on my Steam games list.

Yes, this is basically a repost of Lex’s latest post. But since over half of my readers aren’t Sugoi or AME peeps, I thought it would be a good idea to share it too.

Francis Kong has a very insightful (and very blunt) article entitled Stuck on Stupid on the Philippine Star.

Why do certain people go deeper into debt? Because they are stuck on stupid. They are not only acting their age, they are not acting their wage…! Buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have from people they don’t know to impress people they don’t like.

Why do certain people cannot get a steady job? Because they are stuck on stupid. Anywhere they go they feel like the world is against them. Poor people skills and the inability to respect authority. They are all wrapped up in themselves and they make a small package.

Why do certain people destroy their relationship with their families? Because they are stuck on stupid. Playing with fire all the time and not expecting to get burnt?

Why do certain people continue to work in a job they don’t like, live in a house they don’t want and live a life they hate living? Because they are stuck on stupid. They have not taken the initiative to stop doing what they are doing and to start working on themselves more than they do on their jobs.