hoping …
Kim and I and the boys and a friend from work went about 45 minutes north of Atlanta to Allatoona Pass. This weekend was the anniversary of the Battle of Allatoona. We didn’t know that when we planned to head up and inadvertently walked through somewhat of a reenactment. Guns, tents and people in Civil War uniforms. Pictures are here: http://photos.forgo.net/p119256509
I have two ideas.
The first is that the busier and more overwhelmed you feel and more stressed you are the more important it is to take a break. It just feels natural to try to get more work done. “Have to work harder. Have to work faster. Must get all of this work done! It’s piling up! I’m going crazy!” I say take a break. Just stop. You’re not being effective. Go somewhere and relax. Let your brain cool down and maybe even have a new idea or interesting thought while it’s at it. Then come back to work with a more level head and healthy state of mind and effectively complete your work. And who knows, maybe you’ll find that a lot of that worked that seemed important before really isn’t that important.
Which leads to the second idea. I bet there’s a large percentage of work that everyone does every day that just doesn’t need to be done. Work that will just naturally resolve itself without any intervention. You know the kind. Someone asks for something and then five or ten minutes later they say, “Never mind, I found it.” How much less work would you have if you just ignored people asking you for stuff and your less important tasks for a day to see if they resolve themselves? There’s a fine line to carefully tread between prudence and negligence, but I suspect there’s a not insignificant amount of time to be saved by just not doing stuff right away. Just keep an eye out for it.
So stop working and go relax when it feels like you have too much to do and should be working harder. Maybe you’ll come back with less to do and a smarter way of doing what you need to do. And with that said, I should disclaim that while the first idea is something I actively practice, the second idea is still baking in the oven, and I haven’t tried it much.
So… we moved to Atlanta. Farewell Colorado (for now). We didn’t get to know you well enough. But all good things end. We’ll miss you.
I’ve lately been thinking about the best way to keep track of the beers I drink. It wasn’t as much of a problem a couple of years ago because I drank the same dozen beers or so and didn’t have as much selection in Michigan. However, since coming to Colorado, I’m confronted with a daunting selection of beer. With dozens of options in just the IPA category, it gets tough to decide which to get and remember if I like them or not.
My plan was to get a few selections from a certain category of beer and just write down what I thought of each and which I like the best. Then I could compare the winners of each round with each other to get my favorites from each category. Then when I’m in the mood for a certain type of beer, I just get my favorite selections of that type. I think I’m going to do that still, but I’m going to use ratebeer.com instead of just writing something down.
I don’t have a lot of confidence in my ability to follow through, but we’ll see!
This post is as much for my reference as anything. On the last two Dell computers that I’ve unpacked (both running Vista), I get an Internet Explorer pop up window after startup. The title of the window is “Google Toolbar”. The contents just say: “page cannot be displayed” (or possibly “cannot display webpage”). There is no close button on the window — you can hit Alt-F4 to close the window, but the people I’m setting the computers up for don’t know that. So, they’re just stuck with a window on the screen that won’t go away, they can’t close and comes back after every startup.
Instructions to fix this can be found here and are listed below for your convenience:
1. Launch the Registry Editor
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
\CurrentVersion\Run
3. Look for a key labeled ECenter. It should have “C:\Dell\E-Center
\EULALauncher.exe” in the data field
4. Delete this key
5. Restart your computer
I also created a .reg file that will do this. You should be able to download the file and execute it to delete the appropriate registry value. I BARELY KNOW WHAT I’M DOING SO USE THIS FILE AT YOUR OWN RISK. Download the file here.
I hope this helps someone (and me in the future when I run into the problem again).
I <3 my Centro + EVDO + PocketTunes + AudioGateway + a Jabra BT8010 + QuickNews + a good selection of podcasts. It’s like wireless streaming podcast heaven.
I came here tonight to post cute pictures of my dog sleeping in awkward positions. As I scrolled down the page to get to the link to write the post, the 2008 obesity map from a post back in July came on the screen. Something about it caught my eye. I stared at the map as my brain slowly clicked the pieces together.
I’ve spent more of my energy reading about and paying attention to the 2008 election than any previous one. One part of that is watching the polls every day and looking at maps where shades of blue and red become lighter and darker. As I looked at the obesity map, it struck me that it doesn’t look too different than the current 2008 electoral map. Let’s take a look.
Here’s the obesity map:
And here’s the 2008 electoral map prediction from Pollster.com as of October 20, 2008:
Now, I know it’s not perfect, but there definitely is some correlation:
I don’t purport to imply that the correlation means anything, but it’s fun to think about.
Two months plus and counting. I apparently prefer 140 character tweets to blog posts.
My cousin swung back through Denver at the end of his two week trip. We went for a hike on Chief Mountain. The hike starts around 10.7k feet and ends around 11.7k feet. The fact that we were higher than nearly everything around us combined with scattered thunderstorms all around us made for some fantastic views. A chubby chipmunk at the top of the hike made for some fun as well. The hike was short and the drive relatively far, but it was gorgeous.
The rest of the pictures are here.
My cousin was driving through town on his way to Yellowstone and stopped by for a couple of days. He’s really into rock climbing (we climbed with him in Kentucky if you remember) and wanted to do some climbing while he was here. He knew of some climbing in Clear Creek and took me a long with him. It was some great climbing and a lot of fun.
These were our second and third climbs:
Here’s me making a sweet move on the second climb:
The rest of the pictures are here.
Atlanta
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vs | Denver
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vs | Flint
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